Beaten Down By Blood Read online

  Soldiers outside the Australian Comforts Fund Store for the 2nd Division, Cappy, 5 September 1918. (AWM EO3221)

  Even with this work to sustain the war effort, the bottom line was: fewer than 40% of those men who were eligible to enlist to fight in the Great War did so, which means that over 60% did not. Some were engaged in other types of war work; some refused to give up well-paid jobs to earn six shillings a day; others were put off by the casualty figures and the numbers of disabled and maimed soldiers becoming increasingly visible in Australia. What the AIF needed in 1917 and 1918 above all else was reinforcements. Where it was really crucial, Australia did not support her men in France and, as Frank Roberts remarked, casualties were suffered as a consequence. Australia had no hope of replenishing her tired and under-strength divisions, even with all the ‘comforts’ in the world, and it is obvious that, had the war extended into 1919, she would not have been able to maintain five divisions in the field.

  It was like deserting the dead

  On the Western Front, the only serious ‘mutinies’ in the BEF during the war occurred in the Australian Corps in September 1918, with another in the 3rd Division artillery at the end of the year. In this most democratic of formations the men were not prepared to countenance what they saw as injustice and they were also absolutely exhausted. At 11.00 pm on 4 September, during the last stages of the battle for the final objectives beyond Péronne, the 59th Battalion of the 15th Brigade came out of the line believing that it would now have a well-deserved rest. However, at 3.30 am on 5 September, the men were woken, given breakfast, and told to be prepared to go back into the line at 4.30 am. Some 60 men from B Company refused to go forward. They nursed a number of grievances, the most significant that they felt unfit to carry on — they were filthy, beyond exhaustion and exploited for the benefit of English units which could not do the job.

  Lieutenant Colonel Jack Scanlan, the fine battalion commander from the Péronne ‘stunt’, offered his resignation — which Elliott would not accept. The brigadier went forward to speak to the men, prepared to listen to their grievances while deploring their action. Combat refusal, or mutiny, was a serious crime punishable by death. It also reflected on the battalion and the brigade. Elliott further appealed to the men on the grounds of standing by their comrades who would be going into action without them. He argued that every man was needed to keep the enemy on the run and disorganise his retreat and it was better for them to work now rather than allow the Germans to dig in on the hills behind Péronne.15 He urged them to reconsider: they would be marched to a compound in the rear or they could return to their battalion, in which case Elliott would speak in their favour. After 30 minutes, the men decided to return to the 59th and the crisis passed. No disciplinary charges were laid.

  This situation, which developed just after the capture of Péronne, reveals the extent to which the Australian divisions had been pushed. Elliott blamed it in part on the ‘impossible’ objectives which had been set on 1 and 2 September and the despondency the men felt when they did not achieve these.16 He also privately felt that ‘the men were being worked to death’, a sentiment he frequently reiterated during the Péronne ‘stunt’ itself.17 However, there was nothing in this incident to suggest that the men would not stand firm in battle.

  When Hughes visited France on 12 September, he stated that he did not want the Australians in any more big offensives, proposed a scheme for home leave for two months for 1914 men, which Monash and other commanders such as Elliott vehemently opposed, and emphatically declared that he was not going to leave England until the troops came out of the line and, if they did not come out, he would not leave England and might even sack Monash.18 The home leave scheme saw 6000 of the AIF’s most experienced soldiers leave France for Australia in September 1918, a move which Elliott regarded as disastrous for the AIF and which would make it very difficult indeed for Monash to resist the disbandment of battalions. Rawlinson, too, was concerned about the trouble Hughes might cause.19

  To add fuel to the fire, another more serious ‘mutiny’ occurred on 20 September, this time in the 1st Battalion of the 1st Division close to the Hindenburg Outpost Line. Around 120 men from three companies refused to go back into the line after their relief was postponed, declaring again that they were being asked to do the work of British units. These men began to straggle to the rear and even an appeal to comradeship made no difference. The remainder of the battalion attacked on 21 September with fewer than 100 men and successfully took their objectives. However, on this occasion the ‘mutineers’ were placed under arrest to be tried by court martial, where they were found guilty of desertion rather than mutiny and sentenced to periods of imprisonment ranging from three to ten years. At first they were sent to military prisons in France before being transferred to Dartmoor in England. Monash requested that they be released after the Armistice but Thomas Glasgow, the 1st Division commander, refused. Bean and several of the divisional commanders alleged that Monash did not have the ‘moral courage’ to deal with these types of incidents and that this may have become a disciplinary issue if the war had been prolonged.20 However, as was amply demonstrated at Mont St Quentin-Péronne, Monash did not lack moral courage and this criticism appears largely unjustified.

  The threatened disbandment of battalions to bring AIF divisions into line with British units, which were reduced earlier in the year to nine battalions instead of 12, caused much grief in the AIF in September 1918. Australian soldiers were intensely loyal to their units, the battalion was their surrogate ‘home’, and they wore its distinctive badge with pride. These badges, or colour patches, dated from March 1915 and identified a man’s battalion, brigade and division. Each was an emblem that ‘would enable men to recognise their comrades, would give units an individuality, and assist in developing esprit de corps’ as well as making identification difficult for the enemy.21 Colour patches achieved enormous importance. In addition, each battalion had its own flag which it would often carry into battle. After the war, it was battalion histories that were written — there were no brigade histories and only one divisional history, that of the 5th Division, plans for which Hobbs set in motion as early as 24 August 1918. Thus, when Monash appealed to the men on the basis of brigade loyalty and cohesion in September, this could only ever be second best.

  The War Office ordered the disbandment of units, and the instruction was passed on to these battalions just as the important battles for the Hindenburg Line were looming. Monash, not unexpectedly, was distressed and Birdwood paid a personal visit to inform him that the disbandments must take place. However, the men in the affected units had other ideas. The discontent began in the 37th Battalion of the 10th Brigade, 3rd Division. On 12 September the battalion was told by the divisional commander, Gellibrand, that it must disband but its tradition would be kept alive. Its commander believed that the decision to split the 37th was based on personal animosity between himself and the brigadier, Walter McNicoll, to whom he protested. Then the dispute became bitter and acrimonious as he went further and ‘wrote a couple of very wild letters to General Birdwood, over the head of his superior officers’, in which he accused the 38th and 39th battalions, also from the 10th Brigade, of misconduct in the field, a very serious allegation.22

  On 20 September the men disobeyed their brigadier’s orders on parade and refused to march to their new units, spurred on by their battalion commander. Gellibrand tried to reason with them, only to be told that they would prefer to fight until not a man was left, but only as the 37th — they did not want to join another battalion. Had the commanders stopped rations and pay, they may have been faced with open rebellion. Monash, very angry with the 37th’s commander whom he had already decided to relieve of his command, refused to allow the men of the 37th to become martyrs and threatened to transfer them individually throughout the corps rather than ensuring that they remained in their brigade.23

  However, the ‘strike’ of the 37th Battalion spread to other units on 24 and 25 September
. In the 6th Brigade, the 21st Battalion was selected for disbandment on the basis that it was the weakest numerically, its staff was not as efficient nor was its esprit de corps as strong as the other battalions, and it had the highest crime rate in the brigade.24 This must have been devastating for a unit which had recently performed so well at Mont St Quentin. The 21st now put its arguments against disbandment in writing and presented them to Robertson, then to Rosenthal. The men would discharge all their duties except falling in to march to another unit. They kept rigorous discipline, changed guards and duties, organised games, played a football match and drew rations, all organised by the men themselves.25 Cleve Potter wrote that ‘it is not too much to ask that we go under as the Battalion we have been in all through the “ploy” and he ‘didn’t know how much attached to the battalion I was until ordered to report to another.’ The 21st’s ‘grand old colonel’, Bernie Duggan, ‘broke up completely’. There were ‘deafening cheers’ when the news of a respite came through.26

  In the 15th Brigade, the axe fell on the 60th Battalion. Here Pompey Elliott persuaded the men to carry out the order, winning acclaim from Bean in standing firm and showing ‘himself to be a commander worth following’ and one who had acted in the best interests of the AIF.27 It was also a tribute to Elliott’s standing with his men although personally he was devastated. In April 1918, when disbandment of the 60th was first mooted, he believed that if 1000 men could not be found in Melbourne to save the battalion, Australia had deserted her men at the front.28

  In September 1918, the men of the 60th were to continue to wear their own colours and carry their own flag in their new battalion. However, ‘the men said they did not mind going into the line; some of the older men were almost in tears – said it was like deserting the dead’.29 Such was the feeling of these battle-hardened diggers towards their battalion. Their disgust and that of Elliott when the other battalions gained a respite can only be imagined. Monash, worried about how this issue would affect morale before another major offensive and possibly realising the importance of battalion identity to the men themselves, managed to have the disbandments postponed until October.

  These ‘strikes’ were not combat refusals and were therefore quite different in character to the ‘mutinies’ of the 59th and 1st battalions. However, they were nonetheless worrying and divisional commanders were obviously deeply concerned, expecting that there might be trouble in the future. Bean noted in his diary that ‘the position which this creates is obviously a very difficult and dangerous one, and the results of it are too distant and important to be able accurately to judge at present.’ The ‘mutinies’, too, represented ‘a crisis of the history of the force’.30

  Fortunately for Bean, and probably the AIF as a whole, the war ended before any ramifications could be felt. He treated the ‘mutinies’ briefly in the Official History but gave to the disbandments a heroic quality consistent with the image he created of the AIF. Thus, the 25th Battalion is portrayed as asking to be given the hardest task in the next battle so it could prove itself so effectively that no-one could possibly wish to split it, and all battalions expressing eagerness to be a part of the next ‘great attack’, but only with their individual identities intact. Bean wrote that the action ‘had its origin in some of the best men and finest qualities of the AIF’.31 There is no mention of difficulty or danger here.

  In October 1918, fortunately after the Australians’ final battle although they did not know this at the time, the 19th, 21st, 25th, 54th, 37th and 42nd battalions from this story ceased to exist, bringing the total number of disbandments since April 1918 to ten. This had occurred because insufficient reinforcements were arriving from Australia. The part played by those six battalions at Mont St Quentin-Péronne and their stories in that battle allow some understanding of the enormity of the disbandment issue in a volunteer formation which was so compact and in which the battalion meant so much. It was also difficult for the units which now had to accept the new men — their particular ‘culture’ was also undermined. The logic behind the disbandments was sound — the need for fewer staff components, bringing under-strength units up to strength by creating three strong battalions instead of four weak ones — but none of this mattered to the digger of the AIF when his identity was threatened. Another ‘crack’ had appeared in the Australian Corps; it was perhaps fortunate that this was not exacerbated by a continuation of the war into 1919.

  At 11.00 am on 11 November 1918 the guns fell silent. The war was over. For the troops of all nations on the Western Front it was an anti-climactic moment and not immediately greeted with great celebration or joy. After years of war, an unknown future stretched before them. As repatriation and demobilisation became the core business of the AIF, ‘the Old Force passed down the road to history. The dust of its march settled. The sound of its arms died. Upon a hundred battlefields the broken trees stretched their lean arms over sixty thousand of its graves.’32

  EPILOGUE

  The shattered fields of France

  The AIF left the field on 5 October 1918 with its reputation and prestige as an elite fighting force intact. John Terraine paid tribute to it when he stressed the uniformity of standard across all five divisions — they were all shock troops and this set them apart from any other force. In the 60 days of incessant attack from 8 August to 5 October, the Australians suffered 3500 fatalities and 22,000 men wounded. For Terraine these casualty figures illustrated how ‘on the bloodiest fields good training, high morale and sound leadership can procure victory at a price that does not make a mockery of the word.’1 These figures can be compared to those of the Canadian Corps, which suffered over 45,000 casualties in the Hundred Days, a price for victory that Tim Cook feels was far too high and far too bloody.2 The image of the AIF as Bean created it was not so different from the reality in October 1918.

  Monash himself was relentless, ruthless, driven, ambitious, aggressive, and, by October, exhausted through driving himself as hard as his men. The decision to capture Mont St Quentin and Péronne and to do so ‘without delay’ was ultimately proven correct as events unfolded along the line in late August and early September 1918. The Australian Corps’ contribution to the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line certainly shortened the war and inevitably saved lives. Thus, Monash was correct to drive the fine force under his command to the extreme limits of its endurance, as Bean himself later acknowledged, as the value of an army can be determined by its ability to hold on despite strain and exhaustion ‘in perhaps unbelievable degree and for an unbelievable time’.3

  Thus it can be said that Monash completed his career as commander of the Australian Corps with honour and that he had more than done his duty. He was fortunate to be in command during the time of the AIF’s greatest successes and when it was at the height of its effectiveness and had no small part in its victories, although it is perhaps worth questioning, as did Bean, how effective his leadership would have been if events had gone against him and if the war had extended into 1919.4

  Charles Bean felt that Monash was driven by ‘military prestige’ rather than ‘the high aims of justice and humanity’ which led the men to make the sacrifices they did.5 But it was the ‘military prestige’ of the AIF that Hughes hoped would give Australia bargaining power on the world stage, allow it to express its voice at the Paris Peace Conference and gain support in any future conflicts which might affect its interests. Military achievement became a pawn in the political game but, as hopes for a lasting peace became more and more illusory as the years passed, some began to think that the lives of the men in France had been sacrificed in vain.

  The men themselves fought in the belief that the world would have a clearer vision or outlook following the war and that they would have a strong voice in the shaping of post-war Australia.6 In February 1919 Hughes was cheered when he delivered a speech to the 2nd Division — standing on a table and holding onto a telegraph post — in which he urged the men to work to develop the wealth of Australia when they went ho
me.7

  Inevitably, some became disillusioned and frustrated as they attempted to readjust to civilian life amid the political and industrial turmoil in which they returned to Australia in 1919. Hughes was trying to sustain the fragile Nationalist coalition he had created during the war in the election year of 1919 and across the country there were strikes for better wages, with 6.31 million working days lost. Returned soldiers were responsible for outbreaks of violence in the major cities in the first half of 1919 as their palpable frustration at not being able to find employment or settle back into society combined with the ‘shirkers’ deprecating the value of their achievement or not offering the support they felt they deserved.8 Their voices often went unheard; the brave new world remained a dream, the price of glory far too high.

  All of them were in some way affected, or even traumatised, by their experiences. The descendents of those men uniformly record that they rarely spoke about the war with family or friends, but many became involved in organisations such as the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA, later the RSL) or battalion associations where they could yarn with other men who ‘knew’. Some penned their memoirs or accounts and donated or sold them to an archive where they could moulder the years away.