Pozieres

by Scott Bennett

  The ‘nervy’ men, such as John Harris, who had suffered shell shock at Pozières and returned to Australia in 1918, found it difficult to ease back into civilian life. Their condition was little understood, and administrators treated their pension claims inconsistently. ‘Unless you had an arm off or a leg off or a hand off or something like that, it was almost as hard to get a pension as it would be to win Tatts,’ remembered Fred Farrall with excusable exaggeration. ‘I had neurosis that was not recognised in those days, and so we just had it. You put up with it.’34 It was speculated among some quarters that the condition was linked to some inherent character defect which exacerbated their plight. Some ended up in lunatic asylums and would have rotted there, had it not been for the soldier associations that pressured medical organisations to take a more enlightened approach to their treatment.

  Harris’s repatriation medical files indicate that he never sought treatment for shell shock after the war. This is unsurprising, considering that post-traumatic stress disorder was not recognised as a war-induced ailment until the 1980s.35 Harris most probably felt embarrassed and stigmatised by his inexplicable ‘bouts of nerves’. Perhaps he couldn’t reconcile his braveness on the one hand with his ‘nerves’ on the other. Harris conceivably felt that he had disappointed his troops, some of them past students, who still affectionately called him ‘Dad’.36

  Records of other shell-shock victims provide some insight into what Harris may have experienced. Neighbours might have thought he was a bit queer, a little nervous, sometimes tense and jumpy. Fronting a classroom again would have been difficult. Perhaps sometimes his heart would thump against his chest for apparently no reason. The slamming of a door or the back firing of a car would have, most likely, startled him.

  Harris didn’t talk much about the war. It seemed best forgotten. He did, however, write about his experience at Pozières. The piece, written with a shaky hand and on thin writing paper, might have helped him a bit, but it was more about times, events, and places rather than his personal feelings and experiences. The lasting effect of the ‘tremendous bombardment’ upon Harris was revealed in a letter he sent to Charles Bean in 1926: he explained that his recollections of Pozières were very ‘vague and shadowy’ owing to ‘shellshock’. ‘I lost my memory in regard to numerous things which happened, of which I was informed afterwards by others,’ he wrote in the letter.37

  Harris taught throughout Australia until 1951. He then applied for a pension, claiming that he suffered from arthritis due to exposure to severe weather conditions at Ypres in 1917. In his letter to the deputy commissioner of the repatriation department, Harris wrote that he found it difficult to get and retain a decent position, as headmasters did not want to employ a cripple. His claim was approved. His health declined in later years. Confined to a bed, he died at Bodington Hospital in New South Wales in 1960, aged 82.38

  Fred Farrall claimed it was hard to get a pension unless you had an arm or leg off, but Robert Smith’s plight suggested that it was even a tricky proposition for an amputee. Smith was discharged from the Australian Imperial Force in February 1918. He was initially granted a full pension, but it was reduced to 75 per cent in 1919, after he got a job as a jeweller with Dunklings. Although considered a ‘conscientious, diligent’ worker, Smith was frequently absent due to chronic stomach trouble. In 1924, he lost his job because of a trade depression. In 1926, he applied to the Repatriation Commission for a living allowance. Although he had not worked for the last 22 months, the commission rejected his application, believing that he was capable of getting a job as a boot repairer. In 1932, Smith’s pension was reduced under the Financial Emergency Act.

  Smith ‘led a quiet and reserved life’ and joined the Limbless Soldiers’ Association of Queensland. He required constant treatment for his stomach complaint, which doctors attributed, in part, to his incessant worrying.

  Smith’s health gradually deteriorated. In 1929, he suffered the first of many nerve storms in his stump, which he compared to the pain of an auger boring into his foot. In 1949, he experienced severe back and leg pain due to his artificial leg being inches shorter than his good leg. In 1950, Smith ceased working as a boot maker at the Limb Factory because he was unable to stand for long periods due to his shaky right knee. In 1959, Smith abandoned his peg leg and began to use crutches, as the prosthesis chafed the skin on his scarred stump. Life proved a struggle for Smith: repeated bouts of unemployment, menial jobs, frequent illness, and fluctuating financial circumstances. It was a life that an adventurous 22-year-old soldier, who had enjoyed the pleasures of good French champagne and cheap beer in the months before Pozières, could never have anticipated. Smith died in 1977.39

  The post-war malaise did not discriminate between officers and soldiers. Gordon Legge’s melancholic mood possibly reached its lowest ebb in 1918 when his eldest son, George, died on the Western Front. George’s death most likely compounded the disillusionment Legge felt in early 1917, when Birdie relieved him of his 2nd Division command after he fell ill with the ’flu, although Legge claimed that he felt perfectly well. Legge’s opinionated and abrasive personality had sealed his fate. Had he worked more collaboratively with fellow officers, he may well have kept his command.40

  Legge returned to Australia and filled his old pre-war role of chief of the general staff. After the war, he was unceremoniously shoved out of the role in favour of White. History did not treat him kindly, blaming him, along with Gough, for the 2nd Division’s failed attack upon the OG lines, even though White and Gellibrand suggested that he had been made a scapegoat: ‘Every senior officer in the Corps knew of Gough’s constant insistence upon haste.’41 Bean concluded that Legge’s judgement was sometimes defective and that his lack of experience prevented him, despite his intelligence, from being a good leader in battle. Legge seemed to develop a certain inevitability — perhaps resignation — toward his place in history. He elected not to comment publicly on Bean’s assessment and chose to spend his remaining years as a semi-recluse on his farm at Weetangera, near Canberra, reluctant to participate in reunions or official ceremonies.42

  A letter that Legge wrote to Bean in 1928, explaining that his recall to Australia in 1917 was due to the ‘higher powers’ playing a trick on him, confirmed that he still harboured some bitterness toward his perceived enemies. He also intimated that his divisional papers had mysteriously disappeared: ‘It would have been inconvenient for some people if I had been able to refer to them.’43

  In Legge’s twilight years, a cold reserve gradually replaced his talkativeness. Did he brood on his troubled past? His biography described how, on the odd occasion, while sitting quietly at his homestead, he would reminisce about those days in France — recalling how his troops, even when wet and tired, kept up their spirits by singing marching songs.

  When Legge died in 1947, his funeral was a private affair. There was no headstone or memorial placed upon his grave, and his private papers were destroyed.44 Today, there is no enduring monument or memorial to him. It seemed that Legge’s last forlorn wish was to be expunged from the history books altogether, rather than being damned for his failure at Pozières.

  Others weren’t going to risk history damning them. They realised that if history was to treat them kindly, they must write it themselves. In the 1920s and 1930s, Gough, Birdie, Monash, Churchill, Lloyd George, and Charteris all recorded their own version of events, justifying their decisions, celebrating their victories, and blaming others for their failures. Yet writing his own version of events didn’t prevent history from damning Gough. The brilliant young general and former protégé of Haig was sacked in 1918, blamed for the Fifth British Army’s (formerly the Reserve Army) disorganised retreat in the wake of the Germans’ final offensive. Hooky Walker’s post-war verdict on Gough was scathing: he claimed that Gough had exhibited the worst generalship of the whole campaign.45 Gough took his fall from grace badly — he took potshots at his rivals, most of w
hom he outlived, labelling them as ‘crawlers’, ‘funks’, and ‘indecisive’. Gough never accepted responsibility for the costly attacks launched upon Mouquet Farm. In his autobiography, he claimed that corps and divisional commanders such as Birdie had pleaded with him to carry out these ‘hopeless’ attacks and that he had ‘reluctantly consented’ to do so.46 In the end, Gough’s greatest failing was that he was never able to make the transition from leading a small brigade to managing the logistics of a massive army.

  Birdie escaped the post-war malaise and lived a charmed life. What he lacked in intellect he made up for in nonchalance. One general believed that Birdie’s way was to shake hands with everyone so that, by the time anyone had found him out, ‘thousands more had been won by handshakes in arithmetic progression’.47 He never achieved his ambition of becoming governor-general: Australians came to their senses and appointed one of their own. While history condemned Legge and Gough for their perceived failings at Pozières, Birdie escaped with his reputation intact. One suspects that his so-called special relationship with the Anzacs dulled people’s awareness of his shortcomings. It seemed to be a relationship of unequals: in Birdie’s world, there were English Christian gentlemen and then there were the rest. Birdie’s imperialist vanities meant that he considered the colonial Australians as little more than tools to further his own mediocre career — Birdie was for Birdie and no one else. For too long, Birdie’s patronising praise seduced Australians and blinded them to his limitations, which were laid bare at Pozières.

  White never came out from behind Birdie’s shadow, even though Haig told him privately in July 1917 that he should command I Anzac Corps. White responded that Birdie should never be removed, as he was an ‘imperial asset’.48 Monash succeeded Birdie as the Australian corps commander in 1918, after Birdie replaced Gough as the Fifth British Army commander.

  Upon his transfer to the Fifth Army, Birdie immediately appointed White as his chief-of-staff, no doubt assuring him that it would be good for his career. White was loyal to a fault, which Birdie skilfully exploited. His views on imperialism, at a time when Australia wanted to assert itself, were more suited to 1914 than 1918. He remained captive to the British tradition, still believing that the Australian force was an instrument of the British Imperial Army. What can never be questioned is White’s contribution to I Anzac Corps in the first years of the war, particularly at Pozières, when the Australian divisions were inexperienced and the Germans at their strongest.

  When the Depression hit in the 1930s, capital-works programs were slashed, leaving many Pozières veterans jobless. In addition, the Financial Emergency Act of 1932 cut back those eligible for pensions. Some veterans, down on their luck, took to hawking cigarettes and bootlaces door to door. Fellow comrades often invited them in for a cup of tea and offered them some discarded clothing or a few spare pennies, no matter how tough their own circumstances were — it was the Anzac way. Ironically, during this crisis the Australian government continued to honour its repayments to British bondholders, who had financed Australia’s involvement in the war. It seemed, according to Gerald Stone in his book 1932, that veterans were once again being asked to make sacrifices while British bondholders got paid every penny in full.49

  Gellibrand and Haig devoted themselves to the cause of returned soldiers. Gellibrand established the Legacy movement in Tasmania, which aimed to protect the interests of veterans and the needs of their widows and children. The movement quickly spread throughout Australia, and continues to thrive today. Occasionally, Gellibrand led the Anzac Day march down Swanston Street in Melbourne and, true to form, was admonished for wearing the incorrect uniform.

  Haig worked tirelessly for veteran organisations after the war. His cool demeanour gradually gave way to concern and empathy. He flatly refused any honours or rewards until the prime minister fixed allowances for disabled officers and ranks.50 In 1920, with his army commitments fulfilled, he withdrew from public life, but never wavered in championing the cause of returned soldiers. He died suddenly in 1928. One wonders if the ghosts of the Somme ever haunted him. He did not live to see the tide of public opinion turn savagely against him in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It did not soften over time — Patrick Cook of The Bulletin wrote of Haig in 2006: ‘From first to last, from top to bottom, slice him where you like, Haig was a dense, impermeable, incompetent shit.’51

  Haig’s burden was that his Somme victory was so expensive it became indistinguishable from defeat. The battle is rarely viewed in its full context, that of being a necessary precursor to the victories of late 1918. This viewpoint, which Haig, unsurprisingly, subscribed to, contends that, after the initial manoeuvring for position in 1914, a ‘welter of slaughter’ was inevitable in 1916 as two opposing forces of equal strength struggled against each other. At some point, one of the belligerents would have had to weaken.52 Conclusive battles of history, from Carthage to Stalingrad, suggest that this phase of slow slaughter was unavoidable. This viewpoint adds gravity to the words attributed to a Roman general after conquering Carthage: ‘Another such victory will destroy us.’53 On page 946 of the Official History, Bean concluded similarly of the Somme offensive.

  Billy Hughes tried to exercise his newfound political clout at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. ‘Australia has suffered 90,000 casualties in this war and lost 60,000 killed,’ he announced at the conference.54 But Hughes’s voice was drowned out by those of other nations and ethnic groups — the Polish, Chinese, Jews, Arabs, Czechs, Slovaks — that flocked to Paris seeking long-awaited justice. Australia successfully secured a mandate over New Guinea and helped to defeat Japan’s attempts to have a racial-equity clause inserted in the League of Nations covenant, but failed to secure reparations from Germany. It’s doubtful if the ghosts of Pozières and Mouquet Farm, their graves unmarked, their bodies ploughed into the soil, would have rested any easier knowing that their deaths had extracted such a meagre return.

  After the Paris Peace Conference, the French held a victory march, symbolically led by their grands mutilés, that legion of men left limbless, armless, blind, crippled, and broken by the Great War. The message was subtle but jolting: this war hadn’t been won, but survived.

  chapter nineteen

  The Missing

  ‘It is only the dead who have seen the end of war.’

  — attributed to Plato

  While politicians redrew the world’s boundaries, back in Australia thousands of families continued their painful search for lost relatives. Four thousand Australians soldiers were posted as missing at Pozières, their bodies never recovered — or, if found, never identified. It was as if they had simply vanished. A cold telegram or a clergyman’s visit delivered the sad news. Patsy Adam-Smith noted, in Australian Women at War, that ‘some women wouldn’t open their doors to a clergyman during the first war’.1 They received little beyond the bare facts, forcing families to write to the Base Records Office, the Red Cross Society, fellow soldiers, or anyone else who might shed some greater light on their loved one’s fate. It seemed, according to historians Bruce Scates and Raelene Francis, that they had entered a twilight world somewhere between life and death.2

  While on leave in Edinburgh visiting a bereaved family, Ted Rule witnessed the overwhelming anguish that the simple word ‘missing’ inflicted. Rule saw the heartache as, day after day, the mother of a missing soldier betrayed her thoughts: ‘“The missing did very often show up again, didn’t they? … Probably he was a prisoner-of-war. Maybe he had lost his memory and was in some hospital” … What could I say? I felt justified in telling lies.’3

  Numerous agencies were set up to deal with the ‘missing’. In 1915, the Australian government established a department dedicated to answering the flood of enquiries that came from distraught families. The Australian Red Cross Society created the Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau to identify, investigate, and respond to enquiries made regarding the fate of Australian personnel
. The Australian Imperial Force conducted its own court of enquiry in the field to ascertain the fate of missing soldiers.

  How was a soldier registered as missing, and what investigations were conducted into his disappearance? Who notified his family that he was unaccounted for? Could his relatives achieve emotional closure as long as ‘missing’ was stamped in his personnel file? The stories of Sergeant Philip Browne and privates George Drosen, Robert Allen, and Stephen Allen provide some insight into these questions.

  Private George Drosen, a 36-year-old stevedore from the Melbourne bayside suburb of Williamstown, had apparently disappeared without a trace on 10 August near Mouquet Farm. According to the Red Cross enquiry, he was with a party of 46th Battalion men withdrawing from the front-line trench at about 10.30 p.m. when a shell exploded; in the confusion and darkness, they scattered. Most managed to work their way back to safety, but Drosen did not answer at rollcall.

  The 48th Battalion held an enquiry into Drosen’s fate in May 1917, nine months after he had disappeared. Witness Sergeant Leonard Coulson testified that he went back to search for Drosen, but all he could find was the warm and quivering trunk of a man. He could not find any identification papers on the body. When the court asked what had happened to the body, Coulson explained that it was buried quickly; however, he reassured the officers that the trunk seemed to be Drosen, as it had a similar build to him. With no identification papers, no body to examine, and reliant on the sketchy identification of a severed torso in the darkness, the court concluded on 2 May 1917 that shellfire had killed Drosen.