Pozieres Read online

  Scribe Publications

  POZIÈRES

  Scott Bennett was born in Bairnsdale, Victoria, in 1966, and holds an Executive Master of Business Administration from the Australian Graduate School of Management at the University of Sydney. Over the last ten years, he has worked for many of Australia’s most recognised retail companies as a management consultant or an executive manager.

  In 2003, he visited the Great War battlefields in France and Belgium to retrace the steps of his great-uncles, who had fought there. The experience led him to question the many ‘truths’ that have developed around the Anzac legend. The result was the writing of Pozières, which re-examines the battle of Pozières and the Anzac legend.

  To my special girls: Alexandra, Isabella, and Amelia.

  Thank you for your patience.

  In loving memory of James ‘Jim’ Bennett.

  Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

  18-20 Edward St

  Brunswick, Victoria, Australia 3056

  Email: [email protected]

  First published by Scribe 2011

  This edition published 2012

  Copyright © Scott Bennett 2011

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

  Maps by Bruce Godden

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication data

  Bennett, Scott, 1966-

  Pozières: the Anzac story.

  New ed.

  9781921753763 (e-book.)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  1. Somme, 1st Battle of the, France, 1916. 2. World War, 1914-1918–Campaigns–France. 3. World War, 1914-1918–Participation, Australian. 4. Pozières (France)–History, Military.

  940.4272

  www.scribepublications.com.au

  He died a hero’s death,

  They said,

  When they came to tell me

  My boy was dead;

  But out in the street

  A dead dog lies;

  Flies in his mouth,

  Ants in his eyes.

  — Mary Gilmore, ‘War’

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 The Road to Pozières

  2 Foreboding

  3 Fromelles

  4 Lurid Clouds of War

  5 Storming Pozières

  6 Consolidation

  7 The Pozières Ridge

  8 The Price of Glory

  9 Legge’s Reckoning

  10 Promised Land

  11 Folly

  12 La Ferme du Mouquet

  13 Kicking in the Back Door

  14 Second Stunt

  15 Battering Ram

  16 Graveyard or Glory

  17 Aftermath

  18 War-weariness

  19 The Missing

  Abbreviations

  References

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Maps

  1 The Allied and British Front Line in Northern France

  2 The Somme District

  3 The Battlefield Between 22 July and 5 September

  4 2nd Division’s Advance on OG lines

  5 I Anzac Corps’ Advance on Mouquet Farm, August to September 1916

  6 4th Division’s Advance on Mouquet Farm

  7 The Gains of the Somme Offensive

  I have chosen to reproduce all quotations from letters, diaries, and official sources exactly as they appear in the source documents, with no alteration to spelling, punctuation, or grammar. Ranks cited are those held at the time of the events being described in the text.

  Introduction

  ‘Many loved Truth, and lavished life’s best oil

  Amid the dust of books to find her’

  — James Russell Lowell, ‘Commemoration Ode’

  In July 1916, 24-year-old Private Arthur Foxcroft sat in the French staging village of Warloy, a needle and thread in hand, purposefully stitching away. Close by sat the other men of C Company, 4th Battalion, blokes like ‘Bluey’ Wilson and Paddy South, each concentrating hard, carefully threading a needle through a rough-cut square of flannel to affix it to the back of his coarse, pea-coloured tunic. These seemingly innocuous flannels, pink and frayed around the edges, could mean the difference between life and death in the coming battle — Foxcroft noted in his diary that they would enable artillery observers to identify the soldiers while they were charging.1

  The roads nearby heaved with activity: columns of troops marched toward the front line while a slow procession of motorised field ambulances returned from the other direction, carrying broken men. Teams of horses, hauling ammunition limbers destined for the forward-supply dumps, stirred up clouds of dust as they went by. French peasants scattered about the fields, flaying their sickles at the sun-bleached hay, were ambivalent about the frenetic activity; for them, the war seemed just another force of nature to contend with, like floods, famine, or drought.2

  Foxcroft was a world away from the little town of Gilgandra, New South Wales, where he had humped his swag in 1914, searching for work. He had taken a job as a farmhand, but it turned out to be backbreaking work. Soldiering, with a wage of ‘six bob a day’, had seemed a better proposition than battling against the severe drought that had baked the Outback dry. In August 1915, no doubt motivated by the widely reported exploits of the Australian troops on Gallipoli, he offered his services to the British Empire.

  Just eleven months later, Foxcroft — who had spent the past week marching through the northern French countryside, through vast, ripening crops and scarlet poppies in full bloom — had been transformed into a soldier ready to fight, and possibly die, in the coming battle.

  After finishing their needlework, the soldiers discarded all unnecessary kit. They would only carry the essentials into battle: a change of underclothing, a woollen blanket, a waterproof sheet, 120 rounds of small-arms ammunition, a rifle and bayonet, basic rations, a steel helmet, an entrenching tool, and a great overcoat.3 Coloured armbands were allocated to those soldiers, such as runners and signallers, who had special functions to perform.4

  Foxcroft’s platoon officer, 23-year-old Second Lieutenant William Clemenger, checked the soldiers’ kit: water bottles had to be positioned on the right hip; haversacks, just below the shoulder blades; ground sheets, in the small of the back; the entrenching tool moved to the front; and the ammunition bandoliers slung over the right shoulder.5

  Just before dusk on 19 July 1916, C Company set off on the last leg of its march eastward, toward the sound of the distant, booming cannons, which shook the nearby houses. Foxcroft was one of about 60,000 soldiers of I Anzac Corps (ANZAC was the official acronym of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps; members of the corps were informally known as Anzacs).6 The corps, composed of three all-Australian divisions, was converging upon a small parcel of land bordering the gloomy Somme river, where one million men were already locked in battle.7

  Almost two years before I Anzac Corps began its journey eastward, the Great War — or the First World War, as it is known today — had erupted. Germany’s armies, in a pre-emptive blow, swept through Belgium and into the rump of France in a desperate attempt to knock the country and its ally Britain out of the war before Russia could fully mobilise its massive force on the Eastern Front. The French armies man
aged to check the German advance a month later, in early September 1914, effectively ending the war of mobility. The combatants then entrenched themselves along a front line running from the North Sea down to the Swiss border. The Allies remained determined to break the deadlock, and on 1 July 1916 the French and British armies launched a massive offensive that became known as the Battle of the Somme. Yet by mid-July the ‘Big Push’ had stalled. The small farming village of Pozières was proving to be the impenetrable obstacle.8

  Before the war, Pozières was a little-known village strung along the Bapaume road.9 However, Pozières’s location, on the highest ridge of the Somme, meant that militarily it was valuable: it provided the Germans with a clear view across the surrounding valleys and into the British positions. If the British could expel the Germans from Pozières, they would snatch this critical advantage. Pozières also provided a potential backdoor route to capturing the German strongpoint of Thiepval, a once-beautiful village that had been dominated by a magnificent château and its surrounding wood, but the château had been destroyed and its ruins converted into a German-held fortress. After five bloody and unsuccessful attempts by British troops to take Pozières, the British high command assigned the unenviable task to the Anzacs.

  Just after midnight on 23 July 1916, wave after wave of Anzac soldiers stormed the seemingly impregnable village. Over the next seven weeks they inched their way forward over shell-torn ground. When the corps was relieved on 3 September, it only had secured a few miles of shattered landscape — and at the frightful cost of 23,000 casualties. Yet despite their small gains and staggering losses, the Anzacs’ efforts were widely celebrated. British historian Lyn Macdonald stated that as long as battles were remembered, the names of Pozières and the Anzacs would never be separated; British Expeditionary Force commander-in-chief General Sir Douglas Haig claimed that its capture would live in history; Australia’s official war historian, Charles Bean, wrote that no acre in France was more richly steeped with Australian blood; and British poet laureate John Masefield believed that Pozières was as famous as Troy during those weeks in 1916.10

  And yet, seeing Pozières today, I found it hard to believe that it was ever worth fighting and dying for. It’s a blur of cottages barely noticeable while one travels along the Bapaume road to more-interesting places; it’s no different from dozens of other villages dotted around the Somme countryside. There is nothing to suggest that it had any strategic importance back then, at least not enough to justify the masses of neatly tended cemeteries close by. I found myself asking why a labourer from Gilgandra — let alone 60,000 young Australian men — was thrown into conflict to capture such a minor prize. I couldn’t help but question how a battle that resulted in such heavy casualties could be conceived as a victory.

  To make sense of the events, I tried to connect with those men who had fought there, such as Foxcroft, by reading their fragile diaries and letters, held in libraries and museums. Their words reveal that they were excited and battle-hungry as they marched through the French countryside toward the Somme Valley. Yet their thoughts quickly turned from glory to survival once the battle erupted in all its chaos. In the trenches, they pondered simple yet crucial questions such as where they would sleep that night, whether the shelling would stop them from getting their day’s rations, and when they would be relieved. They didn’t mention valiant charges or glorious victories, but instead described how they cowered in shallow trenches, surrounded by bloated corpses, praying that the relentless German bombardments wouldn’t bury them alive or kill them.

  After escaping Pozières, they became sombre and reflective. They asked themselves why they had survived when others had not. They contemplated whether it would be better to have lived a life — any life, even one under German rule — than to have been subjected to the horrors of Pozières. Some wondered if God was really on their side.

  Tellingly, their diaries cast doubt upon the many ‘truths’ that Australians have been fed about the Anzacs — a legend that has shaped our country’s cultural identity. The embodiment of the legend, a bush-bred, square-jawed, and physically imposing man, does not feature in their diaries.11 The fighting qualities that define an Anzac — an indifference to danger, nonchalance toward death, fierceness in battle, and natural competence as a leader — are rarely mentioned. Rather, they revealed that Australian officers were just as capable of sending their troops to slaughter in ill-conceived attacks as their British counterparts, and that most Australian soldiers were ordinary men who, at times, were understandably overcome with fear — sometimes deserting, refusing to go up to the front line, or running away once they got there. They reveal how Australian commanders grappled with a battle conducted on a scale never before experienced and how, after the war, many veterans struggled to live up to the suffocating Anzac legend.

  But their diaries don’t explain why the Pozières battle — a bloody and controversial military engagement on the Western Front — has been largely neglected by Australians while the Gallipoli campaign has etched itself upon the national psyche. Their diaries don’t help us to understand why the numbers that turn out for the Gallipoli anniversary continue to swell while the Pozières anniversary passes without notice, or why Gallipoli has become a place of pilgrimage when there is little at Pozières to signify its importance to Australians.

  In writing this book, I wanted to strip away the perceived ‘truths’ and to document the raw experiences of those individuals connected to the battle. I wanted to develop a deeper understanding of how the conflict touched its wide ensemble of characters — volunteer privates, career commanders, grieving mothers, war correspondents, veterans struggling to forget the battle, and future generations trying to make sense of it. How did the fight for Pozières change their lives, and what legacy did it leave upon their society?

  This book is not primarily a military dissection of the Pozières battle; rather, the battle is the backdrop against which I’ve tried to explore the motivations and emotions of those involved. The key conflicts are laid out not to preserve the correct sequence of military events, but to give the reader a sense of how repetitive the attacks were, and how they gradually ground down the Australian soldiers’ spirit and fighting capabilities. Nor is this book written in homage to those select few — one in 10,000 — awarded the empire’s highest honour for valour, the Victoria Cross. To tell the story through their eyes would be like telling the story of Australia through the eyes of a lottery winner.

  Nearly 7000 young Australians died at Pozières. After the battle, the curtains were drawn in thousands of homes across Australia. How did a mother like Hester Allen cope when told that her two sons would never return home? It was frowned upon to display emotions in public — Melbourne’s Argus told its readers on 3 May 1915 that they must exhibit the self-control of a ruling race and not let their private sufferings dim their eyes to the glory of those injured or killed for the empire. ‘No eyes can see us weep,’ grieving mothers wrote in newspaper in memoriam notices on the anniversaries of their sons’ deaths.12 Hester had no grave at which to mourn — her sons’ remains were never recovered. She wrote letters to their friends, officers, and the Red Cross, searching for answers, but few were ever proffered. Pozières resulted in thousands of Hester Allens.

  In addition, almost 17,000 were wounded at Pozières. How does one ‘recover’ from a wound inflicted in a modern industrialised war? What impact does a piece of jagged iron propelled at high velocity have upon human flesh, and the human mind? How did 23-year-old Private Roy Smith explain to his mother that his mangled leg had been amputated? And what of the thousands of soldiers who suffered from ‘shell shock’, the condition associated with the rise of industrialised warfare? Many felt ashamed that their ‘nerves’ had given way in battle. Proud men like schoolmaster Captain John Harris could not reconcile their bravery on one day with their lack of it on another. Some veterans felt too ashamed to march on Anzac Day.

  Th
e correspondents reporting on the battle rarely got close to the fighting. Yet when they did, they were often torn between their desire to report on the waste of human life and their duty to maintain morale back home. Official war correspondent Charles Bean exemplified those facing this dilemma. British prime minister David Lloyd George stated that if the correspondents reported the suffering of the Somme offensive truthfully, the public would stop the war in a day.13 It was an ethical dilemma that each correspondent continually tried to navigate, and it often resulted in them recording ‘public’ and ‘private’ accounts of the war.

  For politicians like prime minister William Morris Hughes, Pozières also posed a moral question. Although Hughes abhorred the deaths, it was a political reality that each fatality provided him with an additional bargaining chip when dealing with his British counterparts. By the war’s end, Hughes could claim for Australia a seat at the Paris Peace Conference — an unthinkable possibility four years earlier. But the blood of 60,000 young Australians had paid for it. Did the political gains justify the lives lost at Pozières?

  Australians closely monitored the Pozières battle through the newspapers. In July and August 1916, The Sydney Morning Herald published optimistic reports on the battle’s progress, while the Melbourne Herald repeatedly reassured its readers that casualties were ‘light’, ‘comfortably few’, and ‘less than expected’.14 Then the butcher’s bill came in, spilling over many pages. Between 2 August and 23 September, The Herald reported 21,000 casualties — Australia had incurred the same number of casualties in seven weeks as it had over each of the war’s preceding two years. The escalating casualty lists pierced the public’s resolve: people were shocked, and felt deceived. On 12 August 1916, the minister for defence publicly denied rumours that the government had deliberately tried to conceal the true extent of the casualties.15 Cracks opened between the public and those once-trusted institutions — the British Empire, the government, the church, and the press — which were viewed as being in some way complicit in the slaughter. By October 1916, those cracks had widened into a chasm, culminating in the nation rejecting the government’s plea to vote ‘yes’ in the conscription referendum.