Pozieres

by Scott Bennett

  Haig’s and Gough’s positive attitudes were possibly influenced by German papers unearthed by John Charteris’s intelligence officers after the attack. The documents urged the German people to rise up in revolt and enforce peace on their rulers.93 At I Anzac Corps headquarters, John Treloar reviewed similar letters taken from prisoners. Their families asked the soldiers to bring food home from the front. One writer predicted that there would be no third winter campaign.94 It seemed plausible that the German armies could collapse imminently under the weight of the constant attacks.

  Had the 2nd Division’s expensive victory done enough to redeem Legge’s career? Possibly not, given that he’d already fallen out with Birdie and did not have White’s confidence. Bean, who seemed to reflect White’s views on many issues, criticised Legge, writing in his diary on 5 August that he could not grasp a battle. Expanding on his criticism, Bean claimed that Legge had repeatedly failed to accurately assess his division’s state of readiness for attacks. In reality, Legge’s record at Pozières closely matched Hooky Walker’s — he had had one outstanding success and one notable failure. Legge’s effort was, perhaps, the more difficult of the two, as he carried out his first and second attacks on the OG lines under intense shelling and without the element of surprise. The main difference between the two commanders’ records, reflected White in a conversation with Bean, was that Gough, who ‘naturally wanted to push along as fast as possible’, had pressed Legge into attacking in an under-prepared state on 28 July, while Hooky held his ground prior to the 23 July attack.95

  Unfortunately, these facts regarding Legge’s performance didn’t seem to matter. Legge’s abrasive personality had alienated his superiors, his fellow officers, and the British general staff. Birdie confided in a letter to Senator Pearce that he did not ‘feel anything like the confidence in him [Legge] as a divisional commander I do in both Generals Cox and Walker when their divisions are engaged’.96 Haig would be crucial in deciding Legge’s fate, and he thought the major-general was not particularly capable. Sacking Legge outright, however, was almost certainly out of the question. As the only Australian divisional commander on the Somme, the Australian government would not have tolerated such a move and Birdie would be loath to sully his own career by attempting it. Rather, his preferred method was to push Legge sideways into a harmless staff role. The poised axe would fall in the winter.

  Even though the Australians had captured the OG lines on 4 August and Field-Marshal William Robertson had presented Haig’s reply to the War Council on 5 August, concerns about the Somme offensive still persisted. Robertson sent a private letter to Haig, warning him that Winston Churchill, General Sir John French, and others were trying to make mischief.97 The whispers criticising Haig’s leadership gradually increased. In late August, Bean condemned Haig’s generals for suffering from ‘a poverty of brains’; in November, Lloyd George claimed that Haig’s judgement was ‘clouded by the smoke of the battle’; and in 1917, war correspondent Colonel Charles Repington criticised Haig’s officers for failing to visit the front often enough.98 These early disparate whispers, which eventually became a deafening roar after the war and blackened Haig’s name, focused on three perceived failings: firstly, that Haig rarely left his château to visit the front line; secondly, that he had scant regard for the suffering of his troops; and thirdly, that he persisted with the costly Somme battle even when all hope of a breakthrough had disappeared.

  The undercurrent to these devious rumours was that Haig was out of touch with his troops. Yet visiting the soldiers on the front line was not an easy task. Charteris said that one of the great difficulties for everyone at General Headquarters was to get away from their office often and long enough to keep in close touch with their subordinates and events at the front. Few could ever get further forward than the headquarters of the armies; the divisions were housed mostly in farmhouses, but these were within the fighting line. ‘We all manage … to see something of divisional headquarters, but it is only when there is some particular object, more than simply looking around, that one can give up time to go beyond them.’99 Haig’s diary makes no reference to him visiting a brigade headquarters in the first month of the Somme offensive.

  What would Haig have gained by visiting the front line? He might have met a handful of soldiers and better appreciated the conditions they fought under, but he would likely have gained few strategic insights beyond that. Like his soldiers, he would have been lucky to see anything beyond the small section of trench he was in. It would have been an unnecessary risk to allow him further afield — in 1915, three of nine British divisional commanders had been killed or died of wounds at the Battle of Loos. Haig, who commanded the British First Army in the battle, would have likely realised that the British Expeditionary Force couldn’t afford to suffer such losses, let alone that of its commander-in-chief.100 Visiting the front line during a raging battle was thus nothing more than a symbolic act witnessed by a handful of soldiers. Birdie, no doubt, visited the fighting line more often than Haig but, at the same time, appeared completely out of touch with the pressing organisational issues of his corps.

  Haig’s critics also claimed that he was unmoved by his soldiers’ suffering. Yet Haig was in some touch with his men and he did visit the wounded. In fact, according to historian Gordon Corrigan in Mud, Blood and Poppycock, their suffering made him physically ill — so much so that his staff, worried that it might affect his judgement, counselled him against it.101 Haig was not alone on this count: his French counterpart, General Joseph Joffre, once said, after pinning a medal on a blinded soldier, ‘I mustn’t be shown any more such spectacles [otherwise] I would no longer have the courage to give the order to attack.’102 In The Great War, Dan Todman noted that ‘no general who cared too much about the lives of his soldiers could function in the attritional warfare of the Western Front’.103

  The loudest whisper intimated that Haig was obsessed with battles of attrition on the Western Front. Lloyd George, for example, wrote that Haig had wastefully prolonged the Somme campaign after it had become clear that a breakthrough was unattainable.104 However, Haig was in fact simply adhering to secretary of state for war Lord Kitchener’s explicit directions. His instructions, dated 28 December 1915, stated that the defeat of the enemy by the combined Allied armies must always be regarded as the primary objective for which British troops were sent to France and, to achieve that end, ‘the closest cooperation of French and British as a united army must be the governing policy’.105 Haig had little choice but to continue to fight on the Somme — the Allies had agreed at the French headquarters at Chantilly in December 1915 to seek a decision there in 1916. The Somme was the juncture between the British and French armies, and the most logical place for the joint offensive.

  In fact, many commanders adhered to the strategy of attrition, which by definition was prolonged offensives on the largest possible scale in order to wear down the enemy by slow destruction — or as Charteris crudely phrased it, to kill Germans. The Germans and French practised it as well: it was von Falkenhayn’s plan at Verdun, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch adopted a comparable matériel-intensive strategy in the later years of the war.106 The events of 1914 had demonstrated that breakthroughs were a dangerous illusion, and Haig believed the other oft-mentioned alternative of pursuing ‘easy victories in unimportant theatres’ was a fool’s option.107 Charteris agreed: ‘How on earth one can hope to beat Germany by killing Turks or Bulgars passes comprehension.’108

  Several claimed that Haig abhorred the colonials. Even the Germans pedalled this view, claiming that the British did not send their own countrymen into the firing line on the Somme but employed colonial troops.109 This simplistic myth still exists today. One popular Australian history, Noel Carthew’s Voices from the Trenches, was adamant that ‘Haig used Australians to sever barbed wire entanglements before the British went into action’, and that ‘Haig orchestrated the slaughter of Australians’.110 What evidence support
s this? Although Haig was stretched to the limit — 52 divisions were thrown into the summer offensive, three of which were Australian — he had shown extreme concern in how the Anzacs were deployed on the Somme. He demanded that Gough provide them a simple task; he heaped praise on them when they captured Pozières; he intervened on 29 July when he believed Legge’s haphazard planning had contributed to the 2nd Division’s failed attempt to capture the OG lines. In his diary, he devoted three pages to discussing the artillery arrangements for the 23 July attack, and he forced Birdie to dismiss artillery commander Charles Cunliffe-Owen, whom he deemed incompetent. He listened to alternative views from Australian officers such as White, and there is no evidence that he treated them any differently to the British troops. Admittedly, Haig didn’t pander to their vanities like Birdie did, but he certainly didn’t abhor them.

  It is clear from the various biographical accounts of Haig that he lacked the spark of genius.111 His limitations are well documented, but they are sometimes overplayed. While he may have lacked Winston Churchill’s brilliant intellect, he had an unshakable resolve — once he selected a course of action, he adhered to it strictly. He didn’t have Birdie’s magnetic personality, but proved more measured in his decisions. His skills suited him to the demands of the Western Front, which required an uncompromising commander who could adhere to a brutish strategy of attrition in the face of horrific casualties and the temptation to pursue perhaps less costly but most likely equally ineffective campaigns. His oft-quoted maxim, ‘a mediocre plan consistently followed is better than a brilliant one frequently changed’, summed up his steadfast approach.112 Winston Churchill correctly said of Haig, ‘He might be, he surely was, unequal to the prodigious scale of events; but no one else was discerned as his equal or better.’113 Similarly, his most vehement critic, Lloyd George, admitted in the last paragraphs of his 2043-page memoirs that there was no known officer in the army who seemed ‘better qualified for the Highest Command than Haig’.114

  All morning on 5 August, the heavy German howitzers worked methodically up and down the OG trenches, churning up everything in their path. The bursting shells threw up clouds of white dust that created a haze along the length of the ridge. The worst thing for Private Robin Ferguson, a labourer from Linton, in country Victoria, was seeing all the dead and wounded lying about. ‘You could do nothing for them,’ he wrote.115

  Walter Elkington recounted that the wounded had to remain in the trenches, and many died for want of attention: ‘One man was badly shellshocked and the poor beggar had to endure the agony of shellfire all day long until he was taken out at nightfall, an absolute wreck.’116 The coveted ridge that the Australians had fought so hard for was now one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Later, John Masefield would write that thousands of men were killed on that plateau, and buried and unburied, and buried and unburied again, until no bit of dust was without a man in it.117

  By mid-afternoon, the situation on the ridge had become critical. ‘There were too many men crowded into the front trenches,’ remembered Arthur Clifford.118 Finally, some battalions received orders to withdraw. In the confusion, other battalions withdrew without permission, leaving gaping holes in the line. By late afternoon, it became clear that the 2nd Division would be unable to hold it if attacked. Brigadier-General Holmes believed that his exhausted 5th Brigade could take no more, and requested immediate relief. Corps headquarters flatly rejected his request, replying: ‘On no account will OG1 be evacuated. Men to go forward into shell holes rather than fall back.’119

  At corps headquarters, the deteriorating situation weighed heavily on White’s mind. In a letter to Ethel, he wrote: ‘It is a horrid feeling that one is safe and in comparative comfort while those poor fellows are suffering under appalling shellfire.’120 Despite his misgivings, the sober White would have realised that nothing could be achieved on the Somme without a colossal expenditure of ammunition and great losses of life. As for Birdie, he seemed somewhat concerned about breaking the news to Gough that there would be no attack northward that evening. Reluctant to disappoint his commander, he promised to launch ‘minor’ attacks on the German flanks instead.121

  The capture of 2000 yards of the OG trench by the Australians marked the conclusion of the second week of fighting. They had successfully punched deeper into the Germans’ lines; however, their position was now exposed to German shellfire from three directions. What would Gough expect of the Australians in the coming weeks — would he order them to continue to batter their way forward, at the cost of more lives, for minor tactical gains? Haig wanted to seize the Thiepval–Morval ridge prior to his September offensive, but how did he expect his divisions to secure and hold such a narrow frontage? White sensed this operational dilemma, which would potentially condemn more divisions to attacks along narrow fronts in the coming weeks if decisive action was not taken.

  A German captured in the attack on the ridge summed up the apparent futility of the battle for both sides, taunting his captors: ‘Nobody will win it.’122 Many Australians at that point would probably have agreed with him.

  chapter eleven

  Folly

  ‘You may call this war, I call it just sending men to be killed.’

  — Correspondent John Masefield, The Battle of the Somme

  The 2nd Division, in a staggering feat of endurance, had held the line for 12 days. But the division’s gains had come at a high price: 6846 soldiers had been killed, wounded, or reported as missing. Of Legge’s 12 battalions, five had suffered a casualty rate of more than 60 per cent.1 Gellibrand, exaggerating, claimed he went into action ‘with full numbers’, but came out with not more than a ‘baggage guard’.2 Even survivors didn’t escape untouched — many, for some time after their relief, shook like aspen leaves.3

  From 5 to 7 August, the fresh 4th Division relieved the 2nd Division. Private Alfred Stewart of the 2nd Division described in his diary the strain of waiting to be called. On 30 July, he recorded how depressed the men were when they heard that they would not be relieved that day. Stewart received no further news the next day, prompting him to write: ‘We are all frightfully unnerved and shaken and deserve relief and wonder that it does not come.’ 4 On 2 August, he recorded: ‘We are all as nervy as old women and have been under the strain for far too long and even our officers wonder why we are not relieved.’ Stewart eventually made it out of the trenches on a stretcher. ‘At 9 a.m. our wounds were examined and I was marked for England. Hurrah!!!’ he wrote on 7 August.

  Alec Raws’s 23rd Battalion was also relieved. Away from the guns, he reflected on what he had just been through. ‘I yet never conceived that the war could be this dreadful. The carnage in our little sector was as bad, or worse, than that of Verdun, and yet I never saw a body buried in ten days,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend. ‘The men who say they believe in this war should be hung.’5 Away from the front line, Raws and his company commander, Captain Lionel Short, quietly discussed their experiences. It left Short feeling concerned: Raws, he thought, seemed obsessed with the horror of what they had just been through. ‘It had not weakened his courage but it had affected his spirit,’ he reflected some years after the war.6

  It seemed that the spirit of the relieved troops of the 6th Brigade Machine-gun Company had been similarly damaged by the battle. Their history, In Good Company, described how, upon reaching the comparative quiet of a reserve position, some of the gunners broke down completely. None of them could sleep, although not one had slept a wink for over 50 hours. ‘Some cried, others laughed and cried together, and one or two were merely moody and nerve-stricken,’ the history recorded.7

  News of the 2nd Division’s withdrawal reached John Treloar at I Anzac Corps headquarters. ‘A goodly number of my friends are in the 2nd Division and I am rather anxious to hear how they fared,’ he wrote in his diary.8 It is unclear whether Treloar knew the officers of Gellibrand’s 24th Battalion — Major Charlie Manning, Capt
ain William Tatnall, Captain Harold Plant, and Lieutenant James Carvick — who were killed by a single shell burst on the night of 7 August after they had come out safely from the front line. Upon hearing the news, Arthur Clifford wrote in his diary that ‘this terrible loss was a hard knock’ that ‘had a depressing effect’ upon the men.9 Bean, shaken by the death of his good friend Charlie Manning, wrote despairingly in his diary, ‘When will this awful war cease?’10

  The 4th Division lacked battle experience — two of its brigades hadn’t even conducted a trench raid, and the third had only a few days’ experience in the front line on the Western Front. German intelligence noted that the division had few Gallipoli veterans. ‘It consists almost entirely of inexperienced replacements,’ one report noted.11 However, Bean correctly estimated that about 25 to 30 per cent were veteran troops — mainly 4th Brigade soldiers — which was about the same ratio as the other divisions.12

  The 4th Division troops, who came mainly from the outer states — Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, and Queensland — were considered willing fighters but lacking in espirit de corps. This was attributed, in part, to poor leadership, due to key positions being filled according to seniority rather than performance. The division’s chequered reputation had spread throughout I Anzac Corps. ‘Rotten lot; they reckon they can’t be trusted in the lines,’ remarked one soldier, while another believed that the divisional staff were mostly ‘cold-footed birds, chucked out of the British Army’.13

  The division’s poor discipline while marching to the Somme in July had reinforced these opinions. According to the 4th Division diary, the troops’ march discipline could have ‘scarcely be[en] worse’ — about 800 men fell out of the 12th Brigade’s march.14 The 4th Brigade’s march discipline was just as bad, remembered Sergeant Ted Rule of the 14th Battalion: ‘We had men lying out on the roads for miles, too exhausted to go further.’15 The dreadful marching was attributed to a heavy drinking session the night and early morning before. The 4th Division commander, Major-General Sir Herbert Cox, drove out specifically to observe the march discipline of the 13th Brigade, which had set off at dawn for Herissart. Mid-morning, standing beside he road, he watched the troops struggle by.16 Cox described the march discipline as deplorable, and saw many men — some still drunk — straggling behind their units in twos and threes, smoking and talking as they passed by. Some had hitched rides on wagons, while others had discarded their kit by the roadside or shoved it onto the wagons, which were covered in rifles and packs.17