It is clear that Fromelles had a debilitating effect on its commanders, who faced the combined challenges of sleep deprivation and immense emotional strain in the lead-up to and during the savage battle. Their experience would be a prelude to the strains that Walker, Sinclair-MacLagan, Smyth, and Forsyth would be exposed to over the coming days at Pozières.
While Bean talked with the brigade commanders, the survivors cleaned up the mess in the trenches: they collected the dead, tended to the wounded, and rescued those stranded in no-man’s-land. The scene was appalling, recorded Lieutenant Hugh Knyvett in his biography, ‘Over There’ with the Australians: ‘If you had gathered the stock of a thousand butcher shops, cut it into small pieces and strewn it about, it would give you a faint conception of the shambles that those trenches were.’14
Captain Thomas Barbour recounted just one example of the carnage — the horrific sight of a soldier with both legs blown off crawling on his stumps across no-man’s-land. ‘He was last seen moving slowly into a sap where he no doubt perished,’ he said.15
The feint shattered the Australian 5th Division: about half of its attacking troops were killed, wounded, or captured. It suffered 5533 casualties in 27 hours. The date 19 July 1916 remains the bloodiest day in Australia’s history.
The carnage at Fromelles particularly shocked Bean, White, and Elliott. Naturally, they thought someone must be to blame. They asked uncomfortable questions immediately after the battle, and well into the 1920s and 1930s. Bean wanted to know why ‘second rate territorials’ (the 61st British Division) had been used in the attack, and why a ‘fine division’ (the 5th Australian Division), which had only been in the trenches for a week, had been sacrificed.16 White, who hated what he called ‘these little unprepared shows’, could not understand why a feint had been required at all.17 Elliott, who claimed in a letter to Bean in 1926 that he was always of the opinion that ‘success was impossible’ because of the distance his troops had had to cover to reach the German trenches, was the most scathing. He asked why Haking hadn’t supported the attack with more artillery and why Haig hadn’t checked Haking’s plans more thoroughly, or cancelled the attack.18 In 1930, an embittered Elliott delivered a lecture that largely blamed the British commanders for the debacle. Elliott committed suicide a year after delivering his caustic talk; he was quite possibly another victim of Fromelles.
Newspaper articles and books written by survivors after the war continued to raise uncomfortable questions and apportion blame for the disaster. In 1920, The Argus featured an article on Fromelles under the headline ‘What Really Happened’ and concluded, somewhat confusingly, that the botched attack was ‘a glorious failure’.19 Ninety-five years after the battle, the discovery of the unidentified remains of Australian and British soldiers in an unmarked mass grave just outside the village resurrected these uncomfortable questions.20 Emotions still remain high, with one historian recently likening Haking’s planning to a ‘dog’s breakfast’.21
The prospects for the Australians attacking at Fromelles — as they were for the British attacking along the Somme and the Germans attacking at Verdun — were always bleak. Even if preparations had been perfect (and they never were) and all the trenches captured and held (which they never seemed to be), artillery would not have been able to support them indefinitely, and the Germans would have undoubtedly counterattacked. But the costly gamble had to be taken as part of a broader strategy aimed at achieving a breakthrough on the Somme: if the Germans had hesitated for one moment in sending troops south, it might have provided the critical window of opportunity that Haig so desperately sought to break through their defences. It might just have made the Australians’ job at Pozières a touch easier.
The lesson of Fromelles was a brutal one, and it would have dire implications for the I Anzac Corps marching toward Pozières: war on the Western Front was completely different from anything the Australians had ever experienced. A feint like Fromelles only constituted a minor part of the overall Somme battle plan; it could take up to 40 or 50 attacks like Fromelles, all ending in carnage, to pierce the German line — if it could be pierced at all.
Battles like those on the Somme no longer had defined start or end points. They were rarely decisive and were more about attrition than breakthrough. Battle plans were always clouded by uncertainty and indecision; there were no sure paths to victory. And it seemed, irrespective of whether it was a major offensive, feint, or minor raid, and whether it was a success, draw, or failure, that the outcome was always the same: mass carnage.
The Australians had hoped that the Great War would be an opportunity to prove the nation a valuable member of the British Empire. They had anticipated short, set-piece battles and quick victories. Fromelles demonstrated that this was an illusion. In reality, the Somme was a human-mincing machine on a scale 20 times larger than Fromelles. British divisions were marching into it with metronomic regularity, to be ravaged and spat out days later with casualty rates similar to those of Australia’s 5th Division.
Later that day, Bean returned to the Somme and met with an anxious White, who was grappling with some significant operational problems. ‘Tomorrow is a more important attack,’ he reminded Bean. White explained that critical issues still remained unresolved: there appeared to be ‘no definite written arrangement’ for the complex artillery plan supporting the 1st Division’s advance, even though he had ‘begged’ the Reserve Army for it, and the objectives for the night attack still remained uncertain, although he had implored Hooky to take more than just the ‘first miserable trench’ in his midnight attack.22 Would the Australians succeed and add fresh laurels to their name, or would they fail, their bodies becoming intermingled with those of British soldiers that hung from the German wire entanglements in front of Pozières? Perhaps White — late that night, while sitting at his desk, smoking his pipe — reflected on the Fromelles carnage, and pondered, in light of the problems he now confronted, whether it would be repeated at Pozières, with him there to witness it.
chapter four
Lurid Clouds of War
‘If the motherland was in danger, so was the Commonwealth.
If Great Britain went to her Armageddon we, as Britishers, would go with her.’
— Sir John Forrest, minister in Australia’s first federal parliament
The morning of Saturday 22 July saw bright sunshine burn off the dawn mist. By mid-afternoon, when Charles Bean ventured up to an advanced post near Pozières Trench to sketch the lay of the battlefield in his diary, it had ripened into ‘bright hot day’. As Bean worked forward, he observed that the Anzacs who sheltered nearby in shallow red-earth trenches were in good spirits.1 Looking back, it is hard to fathom how these men, who would soon be called upon to kill others without hesitation — to shoot them at close range, drive a bayonet through their bellies, or bludgeon them to death — could feel this way. Although, according to Bean, outwardly the Anzacs displayed good spirits, what emotions did they experience privately? As each minute passed and they edged closer to their reckoning, did they feel a heightened sense of anxiety, apprehension, or fear?
Private Walter Wright, 4th Battalion, revealed his state of mind in a letter he wrote some time before the battle: ‘Can’t help wondering what fate holds in store for me. Will my luck go west? Whatever it is I guess I’ll take what is coming to me.’2
Captain William Donovan Joynt, 5th Battalion, remembered one soldier expressing the unease felt by many: ‘Well, I suppose others before us have gone through the same ordeal and come out of it all right. But I wonder if they felt fear and did they overcome it?’3 Joynt summed up the prevailing emotion among his men as fear of ‘being afraid’.
Lance-Corporal Douglas Horton, a 26-year-old schoolteacher from Mittagong assigned to the 2nd Battalion, describe how his platoon attempted to pass the time by singing songs and swapping jokes. Behind the lightheartedness, Horton sensed a quiet confidence within his plato
on, noting: ‘Every man was sure of himself and being sure of himself was sure of the man next to him.’4
To occupy themselves and possibly block out unsettling thoughts, the soldiers packed and repacked their haversacks, shaved, wrote letters home, watched the bombardment, or tried to snatch some sleep. Some huddled together and played hands of Housey-Housey and Crown and Anchor. Others lay in the grass, watching the aeroplanes circling overhead or the odd lark fluttering about the scarred fields.5 ‘The Battalion was restless all day,’ summed up one battalion history. ‘No one could settle down.’6
Each soldier prepared for battle in his own way. Some kept crumpled copies of Henry Lawson’s stirring verse ‘The Star of Australasia’ inside their pocket-sized diaries.7 Reading the verse must have helped to fortify their resolve. Lawson, the ‘grey dreamer’, didn’t write soft and soapy poetry; his verse cut like a farmhouse axe. He prophesied: ‘I tell you the Star of the South shall rise — in the lurid clouds of war.’8 He promised them all — clerks, jackeroos, labourers, or drovers — that one great battle was their destiny, and after it their exploits would be remembered for the next 1000 years.
‘The day is near when Australia’s boys will once again be given an opportunity to show the World what we are made of,’ wrote Lieutenant Harold Malpas in a letter before the battle. ‘Tomorrow we hope to be on the road to Berlin …’9
Arthur Foxcroft would have been sitting quietly among his platoon cobbers, scribbling notes in his diary, which records: ‘We are getting ready for our first big battle … We are to take Pozières and must not retire unless beaten back in hand to hand fighting and must not fire a shot unless forced to.’10 Other soldiers, like Arthur Thomas, immersed themselves in writing what they knew could be their final letters to loved ones. ‘This is my last letter before going into a stunt,’ he explained to his wife and children. ‘God bless you, all my loved ones; pray hard for me.’11
Some ‘cleanskins’ observed the grim Gallipoli veterans — many of whom were distinguishable by the Australian flag tattooed on their arms, as well as brown, leathery skin cured by the Asian sun — for clues on how to prepare for battle. ‘The boys at Gallipoli made a name. Now we’ll make one too,’ vowed Bendigo boy Private George Londey.12 The veterans sat quietly; a nod here, perhaps a quiet word there, would have guided the ‘cleanskins’. Underneath their seemingly calm exterior, they were probably equally anxious. Nothing on Gallipoli would have prepared them for what they were about to confront. ‘You can’t tell me that all the troops do not feel fear,’ remarked one Gallipoli veteran as he watched the heavy barrage falling upon Pozières. ‘They must!’13
Late in the afternoon, officers inspected their platoons to make sure that each man had everything he required — ammunition, gas masks, wire cutters, and signalling flares. After a late tea, rations were issued and water bottles filled. Under a glaring sun, the laden troops marched in single file toward the firing line, taking only the occasional breather to wipe the sweat from their flushed faces.14
Although the staff officers and commanders responsible for orchestrating the looming battle were many miles behind the front line, their diaries, letters, and memoirs reveal that they experienced emotions similar to those felt by their troops. At I Anzac Corps headquarters, White paused from his work to write to Ethel. His letter indicates that his immense responsibilities, combined with feelings of homesickness, had drained him. ‘Ethel, you must pray that I may endure to the end,’ he wrote.15
Meanwhile, outside the corps headquarters, 21-year-old Lieutenant John Treloar sat in one of the tents pitched on the château’s lawns. As supervising clerk, he would play a critical role in the battle by overseeing the Central Registry, responsible for distributing all orders, intelligence, and memoranda flowing in and out of the corps. It was a 24-hour-a-day job — the Central Registry’s messages fired the war machine. Treloar’s diary, mostly recorded in shorthand script, shows a thoughtful man — it describes how, as he sat sorting through piles of correspondence, he could see ‘flashes of the guns preparing for the attack’. Treloar had served on Gallipoli and had a ‘goodly number’ of friends in the fighting units; he felt anxious about how they would fare.16
At about the same time, Gough gave one last briefing to Paul Maze at Reserve Army headquarters. Gough, as an army commander, could not witness the attack firsthand, so Maze would be his eyes and ears. ‘I could feel his keenness as he was explaining things on the map,’ wrote Maze.17 Gough wanted him to remain in close contact with the attacking troops and to make sketches illustrating the lay of the land. This meant that Maze would be going over the top with the Anzacs.
Meanwhile, at divisional headquarters at Rue Pont-Noyelles in Albert, Hooky Walker and his staff feverishly completed their final preparations. His staff were not only responsible for coordinating the movements of their own troops, but also for liaising with a huge supporting ensemble of formations, each critical to the attack’s success. Many things had to go right for Hooky’s plan to succeed; only a few things needed to go wrong for it to fail. Hooky told Bean that he feared his beloved 1st Division would be ‘knocked out’ in the attack.18 Amid the frenetic preparations, Thomas Blamey sought higher guidance: ‘God grant me a clear brain to plan and think for it.’19
Birdie’s diary shows that late in the afternoon he visited Hooky to check the preparations. That evening, he dined with a friend from Gallipoli days, Lieutenant-General Aylmer Hunter Weston, whose VIII British Corps had almost been completely wiped out on 1 July — a feat that Birdie, no doubt, would not care to emulate.
As Birdie dined with Hunter-Weston, Bean worked his way along a series of ‘lonely’ roads and shallow trenches toward Sinclair-MacLagan’s 3rd Brigade headquarters, located in a dugout somewhere near the village of Contalmaison. On the horizon he could see bursting shrapnel that resembled the bright flashes of a match striking flint. Bean, who was travelling alone, heard a voice from the shadows: ‘Anyone going from here along the road is to prepare for gas.’ As Bean fumbled with his gas mask, he wondered whether he would ever find the dugout from which he hoped to monitor his first big European battle.20
Long, grey shadows cast themselves across the battlefield; the last patches of lingering sunlight disappeared. The attack would commence in a few hours.
The burning question, looking back on the eve of this important battle, was why did so many Australian men find themselves about to be thrown into battle against Germany, the undisputed world military superpower, to capture a tiny village — why did Australia, a minor outpost in the Southern Hemisphere, feel compelled to fight someone else’s war? To answer this, we must return to 1914.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by a Serb nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, was first reported in Australian newspapers on 29 June 1914. The importance that Australians placed on this event was reflected in the Monday edition of The Sydney Morning Herald, which devoted the same column space to the murder as it did to England’s thrashing of Australia in a rugby league Test in Sydney. The historian Ernest Scott, in Australia During the War, indicated that Australians, possibly preoccupied with the pending federal election and Norman Brookes’s quest to win the men’s singles title at Wimbledon, didn’t appreciate the country’s gradual drift toward war.21
On 29 July, the British government sent a cablegram to Australia, warning: ‘See preface defence scheme. Adopt precautionary stage. Names of powers will be communicated later if necessary.’22 The cablegram was a prearranged signal that war was likely, and an instruction to implement certain steps in a defence procedure laid down in 1907 by the Committee of Imperial Defence. Australian prime minister Joseph Cook met with his cabinet on 3 August and agreed to despatch 20,000 Australian troops to support the British government in the event of war. A cablegram informed London of Australia’s proposal; on the next day, Britain accepted the offer.
By ea
rly August, the mood among Australians had transformed from cursory interest in European affairs to enthusiastic anticipation of war. This shift was nowhere more evident than outside the Argus newspaper outlet in Collins Street, Melbourne, on the morning of 4 August. A crowd of hundreds gathered, eagerly awaiting the newspaper’s special midday edition. The Argus reported that police on duty were unable to stop the crowd from gaining access to the delivery counter, where copies of the special edition would be handed out. ‘What’s the news, tell us the news,’ the seething crowd yelled.23
A day later, on 5 August, London sent a cablegram to all state governors in the Commonwealth, announcing that war had broken out between Great Britain and Germany. With Britain at war, so too was Australia. Ernest Scott wrote that when the call to arms came in August 1914, the response in Australia was ‘immediate, it was jubilant, and it was unanimous’.24 Yet what did Australians believe they were fighting for? The Australian government had no war aims beyond those of Britain, and theirs only made vague references to upholding the London Treaty that guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality, which Germany had violated by advancing westward through its territories. Harry S. Gullett, in his October 1914 article ‘United Empire’, claimed all that mattered was kinship: ‘There is no reasoning about it; it is not a matter of head but of heart. We have merely answered the call of race. We are fighting side by side with Britain because of our British blood.’25
Although Gullett’s sentiment may appear naive, it accurately reflected the nature of the relationship between the two countries. Australia and Britain were inextricably bound by constitutional, social, and economic links. Gavin Souter, in Lion and Kangaroo, explained that Australia was still constitutionally tethered to Britain in 1914. Australia’s constitution prevented it from making any formal treaties with foreign states; in fact, Australia had no diplomatic status abroad. The Parliament of Westminster could pass or void legislation applicable to Australia. In many matters, the prime minister and his parliament were subservient to the governor-general. If the prime minister wished to communicate formally with his opposite number in a foreign country or even in Britain, he had to do it through the governor-general and the Colonial Office. There was, therefore, no need for cabinet to discuss the merits of entering the war: London would decide this. If war was declared, the cabinet simply had to decide to what degree it would support the empire.
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