Pozieres

by Scott Bennett

  More bodies were found in 1927, including Leslie Parsons’. ‘It is a great gratification to us all in the family to know that his poor remains have been recovered after 11 years,’ wrote his mother to Base Records upon hearing the news. She later received Leslie’s perished identity discs in the mail.38

  The Anzac legend found its roots on Gallipoli, where journalists such as Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett cultivated a romantic image of the Anzacs based on the values of independence, mateship, equality, and a healthy disregard for authority. Pozières was different from Gallipoli — it was darker and uglier. Even though the horror of Pozières filtered back to Australians through telegrams, letters, and casualty lists, the battle added another dimension to the Anzac legend. Emerging themes, such as the Diggers’ needless sacrifice due to incompetent leadership and their perseverance in the face of overwhelming odds, became particularly meaningful to Australians, who sought a society free of class distinction and were perhaps keen to erase the stain of their convict past.39

  Perhaps, in this context, it is unsurprising that Margaret Lee paused when asked whether her grandmother, Hilda, felt resentful that the Great War had snatched her husband away. Margaret suggested that Hilda’s resentment was overshadowed by a belief that Ralph had nobly performed his duty for a young country that sought to forge its own path and step away from the societal strictures cast by the old country.40

  And why do later generations of Australians cling tightly to the Anzac themes that originated at Pozières? Perhaps questioning these premises weakens the foundations of the all-important Anzac legend.

  Although Gallipoli remains Australia’s chosen and most visible symbol of the Anzac legend, almost certainly the lesser-known Pozières battle casts its own gloom over the myth and, consequently, the national identity.

  From a military perspective, Haig had set three objectives for the Somme offensive — the capture of ground, the wearing down of the German army, and relieving the French army at Verdun. Were they achieved?

  The final advance totalled, at best, seven miles. The cost of capturing these few miles was unsustainable, and in any case the Germans still had to be thrust back another 150 to 200 miles to reinstate pre-war boundaries. The cost of capturing objectives such as Mouquet Farm was simply too expensive. According to Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson’s calculations in their book The Somme, it took seven Australian, British, and Canadian divisions and a staggering 18,200 casualties to advance one mile to capture the farm’s ruins.41 As one battalion history noted poignantly, Mouquet Farm smashed some of the finest fighting battalions ever known in history, without anything like commensurate gain in land or enemy losses.42

  As for the success of the brutal strategy of war by attrition, the scorecard read 623,000 Allied casualties and an estimated 420,000 German casualties. The German army was probably best placed to judge the impact of the Somme offensive. Captain von Hentig, a staff officer with the Guard Reserve Division, said it was ‘the muddy grave of the German field army’.43 In some ways, they helped to dig their own grave — General Erich von Falkenhayn’s decree that any ground lost should be retaken by ‘immediate counterattack’, even to the ‘last man’, unnecessarily wasted reserves and drained his army.44 Equally, one is left wondering what it cost the Allies to deliver this blow — the collapse of the French army a year later suggests a high cost. The Somme appeared to be a pyrrhic victory, although its architect, Haig, saw things differently: ‘If the whole operations of the … war are regarded in correct perspective, the summer and autumn victories of 1918 will be seen to be directly dependent upon the two years of stubborn fighting that preceded them.’45 Haig rightly calculated that the Allies’ armies could absorb the losses on the Somme and subsequent battles marginally better than the German army. Haig’s view was supported by his adversary, General Erich Ludendorff, who reflected in his memoirs that the strain of 1916 completely exhausted his army on the Western Front.46

  A young officer perhaps best summed up the prevailing mood of all soldiers. ‘In 1916 English, French, and Germans alike saw victory within their grasp, and expected it after every local advantage,’ wrote Charles Edmonds. ‘In 1917 the war seemed likely to go on forever.’47

  chapter eighteen

  War-weariness

  ‘I have returned to these:

  The farm and the kindly Bush, and the young calves lowing

  But all that my mind sees

  Is the quaking bog in the mist — stark, snapped trees

  And the dark Somme flowing.’

  — Vance Palmer, ‘The Farmer Remembers the Somme’

  The Great War lurched through the autumn and winter months of 1916 as if it would never end. According to Manning Clark, stories got back to Australia about what had happened at Pozières. Siblings such as Lennon Raws heard how their beloved relatives had been blown to pieces; mothers such as Hester Allen received a knock on the door from a clergyman, or those such as Annie Bennison read letters written by their disfigured sons. Yet ‘patriots wanted the war to go on’, as Clark noted in his History of Australia, ‘but the number of doubters had increased.’1 The political ramifications of the Somme offensive would be felt across Australia and Britain.

  Billy Hughes returned to a divided Australia. The prime minister, who had vigorously championed compulsory military service since 1902, was convinced that conscription was the only option. Hughes did not reveal his hand immediately, as he knew his party did not support it. He held a series of meetings all over Australia to gauge the public’s mood on the issue, after which his political instincts sensed they were ripe for it. He lobbied his party to put the issue to the people in the form of a referendum vote, and the bill was passed in September.

  From that moment, Hughes showed his colours, becoming the most vehement proponent for the ‘yes’ vote. ‘For myself, I say that I am going into this referendum campaign as if it were the only thing for which I lived,’ he told parliament.2 According to Ernest Scott’s tome, Australia During the War, the Irish-born Roman Catholic archbishop Dr Daniel Mannix became the voice for the ‘no’ vote. Mannix, with his dark, brooding eyes, hollow cheeks, and pallbearer’s demeanour, asked how Irish-Australians could provide unbridled support for Britain’s war effort when the nation had persecuted the Irish. The Sinn Fein Easter Rising in Dublin in April, which had resulted in 300 deaths, further sharpened the divide. Trade unions were generally against it, believing that no one could compel a man to kill another against his will.

  Even soldiers had mixed feelings. After Pozières, many weren’t keen to drag unwilling men into the war. One soldier warned his brother never to take any part in trying to persuade others to enlist, as ‘they who are too thick-skinned to come away are in the end the luckiest. After seeing what I have seen in the few short weeks I have been in the trenches, I would not drive a dog of mine into them.’3

  Others, like Sergeant Daniel Scanlon of the 49th Battalion, supported a ‘yes’ vote. ‘About conscription men are needed at the front badly if they don’t come I am afraid that very few of us here will ever return to Australia,’ he wrote in a letter home.4

  Still others weren’t sure. ‘We are preparing to give our votes on the conscription question,’ wrote Pozières veteran Stanley Cocking. ‘It’s giving me some hard thinking.’5

  In the end, the troops voted for conscription in a slight majority. In Australia, just under 80,000 votes defeated the referendum. It was a staggering blow for the conscription supporters, particularly as other dominions to which they constantly compared themselves, such as New Zealand, had already introduced it. How would Australia make its mark upon the world if its people weren’t prepared to unite toward the war? Hughes, in a humiliating backdown, telegraphed the Army Council, indicating that his cable of 31 August required amendment: ‘Not possible now to provide the 20,000 reinforcements promised.’6

  The ‘no’ vote reflected the growing feeling among Australia
ns that Australia was not under threat; they were supporting Britain in a war of Europe’s making. ‘If Australia had really been in danger of invasion, there would be no need to conscript me,’ wrote Henry Booth, the editor of the left-leaning paper The Worker. ‘I would have fought there myself.’7

  The conscription vote created a political crisis and the Labor Party split. On 14 November, Hughes and 23 other ministers walked out of the party room and formed a new government, with the support of the Liberals, called the Nationalists. Its objective was simply stated as ‘winning the war’.8

  Soldiers had mixed views on the vote’s outcome. ‘The lads are nearly all glad conscription was not carried,’ wrote Stanley Cocking. ‘They did not want to fight along conscripts, but we do want more willing men to come over and help us.’9 Yet they didn’t come; voluntary enlistments had dried up. By December, the recruitment offices could only raise 2617 recruits.10 Undeterred, Hughes held another referendum, in September 1917, but it was again defeated, with the margin almost exactly the same as the first vote.

  In the end, the conscription debate tore apart a young nation. It inflamed hatred between Protestants and Catholics, destroyed the Labor government, and left lasting divisions within the nation. ‘The riff has never since been quite closed,’ admitted Charles Bean in 1957.11

  The Somme offensive also contributed to the downfall of Britain’s Asquith government in December 1916. The new prime minister, David Lloyd George, thought that the Somme offensive had been a bloody and disastrous failure, and wasn’t willing to repeat it the following year.12 At an Anglo–French conference in Boulogne in October 1916, he had said that the time had come for the Allies to distinguish between the illusions and realities of the struggle. ‘In 1914–15–16 we could afford to blunder without throwing away the final chance of victory. If we take the wrong turning in 1917, I do not believe that our fortunes can be retrieved,’ he advised the conference.

  Lloyd George said that whatever the Allies did, it had to mark a distinct break with the methods and conceptions of the past.13 But, in 1917, the bloody battles fought at Bullecourt, Flanders, Aisne, Arras, and Ypres demonstrated that there were no such ‘new methods’ to quicken the war’s end against Germany. The enemy nation had enacted the Hindenburg Program in 1916, which granted the military absolute control of the economy, so as to better wage total war.14 Lloyd George had no plausible option other than to persist with the detested war of attrition. As Bean predicted, the Anzacs who survived the Somme would be condemned to more battles, to fight and fight and fight.

  The Great War ground on through 1917 and 1918 without an end in sight. The Anzacs continued fighting along the Western Front at Passchendaele, Le Hamel, Villers-Bretonneux, and Mont St Quentin. Gradually, empires, nations, kingdoms, and armies wilted under the all-consuming demands of industrialised war. At five o’clock in the morning of 11 November 1918, the German delegation at Compiègne signed the armistice; at 11.00 a.m., the fighting and dying on the Western Front ceased. Correlli Barnett’s book The Great War recorded that after 11.00 a.m. soldiers stood upright in unaccustomed safety, listening to the birdsong, marvelling that they had survived, and mourning the dead.15 Australian troops accepted the news with singular calm. It took days for the men to realise that the bloodshed was over; only then could their thoughts ‘be confidently turned towards home’.16 But what did ‘home’ hold for the veterans — could they settle back in to society? Would their sacrifices at Pozières be remembered, or would they fade from the nation’s mind?

  Many Pozières veterans never lived to see Armistice Day. Even senior officers died. A stray shell struck William Holmes, the ‘spit and polish’ commander of the 5th Brigade, in the chest in July 1917. Taken to the nearest aid post, he died soon after. A shell also wounded Duncan Glasfurd, the plucky Scottish commander of the 12th Brigade, in November 1916. After an agonising ten-hour journey through the mud by stretcher, he died at a casualty clearing station. Third Battalion commander Owen Howell-Price was shot through the brain while checking a machine-gun emplacement in November 1916. He lingered on for two days before dying. Howell-Price symbolised all the promise of a ‘new’ Australia: bright and energetic, but with a touch of youthful awkwardness. The Great War matured him, but just as quickly snuffed him out. For every soldier who achieved great things after the war, there were many more Owen Howell-Prices, with the same promise left on the battlefields of France.

  Other commanders survived the war but were permanently scarred by it. Seventh Brigade commander John Paton wept as his broken battalions returned from the failed attack on the OG lines. He was wounded in November 1916, and later relinquished his command, unable to cope with the strain. The quiet 2nd Brigade commander, John Forsyth, was relieved, exhausted after the heavy shelling at Pozières. After hospitalisation, he assumed command of a training centre in England; however, his health failed again. After doctors assessed him as unfit for active service, he returned to Australia a broken man.17 Fourth Division commander Herbert Cox suffered another nervous breakdown in January 1917, and was relieved of his command. The ‘bloody business’ on the Somme also affected 6th Brigade commander, Jack Gellibrand. After a wasteful and ill-planned attack at Bullecourt in 1917, a disgusted Gellibrand, with his ‘health broken’, walked away from his command. And, after Pozières, sleep was never easy for 3rd Brigade commander Ewan Sinclair-MacLagan — his granddaughter said that after the war he rarely spoke of Gallipoli or France, but he could often be heard shouting out orders in his sleep.18

  Some of the soldiers whose letters and diaries feature in this book died in later battles. Frederick Callaway, who wrote of sparing a German Red Cross prisoner, died on 5 September 1916 — the day that the last Australian unit was relieved at Mouquet Farm. A Minenwerfer exploded in his dugout in Ypres, killing him instantly.19 Collins Street tailor Arthur Thomas, who described the awe-inspiring sight of columns of Anzacs marching through the French countryside in July 1916, died on a stretcher in February 1917 after an exploding shell cut him to pieces.20

  Others survived the wearing battles, but evidently lost their will to live. Lieutenant-Colonel Leslie Mather was awarded a Distinguished Service Order for gallantry at Pozières, but was also seriously wounded when a bullet grazed his spine. It left him in terrible pain. ‘It must have smashed a bunch of nerves controlling the left arm as I have had almost continuous agony in the shoulder,’ he explained in a letter to his friend Geoffrey Drake-Brockman.21 Maher shot himself on 24 January 1919. According to his suicide note, his ‘deliberate and premeditated act’ was due to intense worry and ill health, both physical and mental. A court of enquiry concluded that 30-year-old Mather had committed suicide while ‘temporarily insane’.22

  The Pozières veterans returning to Australia had been away for over three years. One veteran accurately predicted that it was ‘going to be as hard to demobilise as it was to beat Fritz’.23 The battalion came home in instalments, never to assemble again, said Ted Rule, with a touch of regret. ‘The AIF was slowly dissolving and becoming a mere memory,’ he wrote in his war memoirs.24 It faded from memory, perhaps, but not from sight. Patsy Adam-Smith wrote in The Anzacs:

  We [now] lived in a world where men were called ‘Hoppy’, ‘Wingy’, ‘Shifty’, ‘Gunner’, ‘Stumpy’, ‘Deafy’, ‘Hooky’ according to whether they lost a leg, an arm (or part of one), an eye, their hearing, or had a disfigured face drawn by rough surgery into a leer.25

  The Repatriation Department eased the returning soldiers back into civilian life. It helped thousands to find jobs, vocational training, and, for a few, university courses.26 Some sought soldier settlement blocks at cheap interest rates. Pozières veteran John Edey took up a lot in the Mallee, while Donovan Joynt ran some cattle in Berwick. Like many of their neighbours, they hardly knew how to milk a cow or mend a fence.27

  Although John Edey persevered with his selection, the Soldier Settlement Scheme didn’t prove to be the utopia that e
veryone expected. Veterans were often allocated barren land unsuitable for farming, and many did not have the skills to make a go of it. Donovan Joynt was one of many who laboured under a mounting burden of debt. ‘After paying my farm employees, little remained in the way of revenue from the land … I walked off it broke after ten years of hard work and the loss of my capital and war savings,’ he wrote in his autobiography.28 Thousands, including Joynt, simply walked away, sometimes only leaving behind a note and a set of keys. In the midst of the Depression, it was a national catastrophe. ‘It killed many,’ claimed Joynt.

  The Australian government provided war-damaged soldiers with a pension. Arthur Foxcroft was one recipient. In 1917, he was seriously wounded a second time, shot through the thigh, which left him with ‘drop foot’. His mother, Amelia, pleaded with authorities for his return so he could ‘properly mend’ himself. He returned in late 1917, recording in his diary on 21 November, while anchored off Williamstown, that he saw his ‘first sunrise in Australia for two years’. Unable to raise much more than a shuffle, Foxcroft moved in with his parents in Coburg, Victoria, surviving on a meagre pension of 15 shillings per week.29 Foxcroft’s diary reveals that, upon returning home, he adopted a mundane routine of seeking treatment, occasionally visiting friends, and completing everyday chores. It contrasted starkly with the exhilarating highs and plummeting lows he had experienced during the Great War. Did this adjustment to the normality of civilian life present its own challenges? Foxcroft’s diary doesn’t disclose the answer, petering out in early 1918.

  By June 1921, the government was paying out a quarter of a million war pensions to men like Foxcroft; but soon after, the number decreased, as short-term pensions ended.30 The statistics hid the melancholy felt by many returning soldiers. Some called it war-weariness. The generous repatriation scheme could never relieve the chronic pain of old wounds, or ease the psychological scars of battle. ‘Though most settled back into the community, many were unwell, not only due to their mental scars, but also crippling wounds and severe lung damage from gas,’ recounted one battalion history.31 Doctors found that the soldiers, compared to their civilian counterparts, suffered chronic and advanced stages of disease much earlier in life. These diseases included chronic lung conditions caused by gas poisoning, kidney disease caused by trench nephritis, and mental illness exacerbated by severe shell shock.32 By 1931, the number of war pensions had increased 27 per cent on the 1921 figure. In Dinkum Diggers, Dale Blair traced 1st Battalion soldiers throughout the war; he found that those who relied on pensions were sometimes consumed by guilt, feeling they had betrayed the spirit of those who had died.33 Some who deserved pensions never bothered to claim them, choosing to suffer in silence.