Pozieres

by Scott Bennett

  Battalion histories published in the 1920s and 1930s paid tribute to deceased comrades. One senses that the passage of time did little to dull the veterans’ painful memories. ‘It is not easy to write the story of Pozières, the bloodiest and most costly battle in which the Battalion was ever engaged,’ opened one account.31

  Veteran Donovan Joynt returned to the Somme battlefields in 1956 to pay his respects. He stood under the famous Albert basilica from which the statue of the Virgin Mary had once hung precariously.32 Near there, 40 years earlier, he’d watched the high-spirited Anzacs march, joking and singing, toward Pozières. It seemed like yesterday.

  Reverend John Raws also visited the Somme in the 1920s and 1930s, wandering its fields in a vain search for the graves of his sons Goldy and Alec.33 Fred Hocking, who was wounded at Pozières on the same day that Goldy Raws disappeared, returned to the Somme to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Anzac Day. While congregating at the Australian National Memorial, near Villers-Bretonneux, a Sydney Morning Herald reporter asked him if he had known a certain soldier killed at Pozières. Standing among rows of uniform headstones that converged into the distance, Hocking replied in the only way he could: ‘There were so many killed at Pozières.’34

  In memoriam notices in newspapers provide the most intimate glimpse of the grief that consumed many families. On anniversaries of heavy fighting, such as 23 July or 4 August, in memoriam notices covered the front page of newspapers. Society dictated that parents, brothers, sisters, and wives had to bear their loss stoically. Australians were supposed to have all the ‘self control of a ruling race and they will not let their private sufferings dim their eyes to the glory of wounds and death,’ preached The Argus to its readers.35 Unsurprisingly, emotionally laden language was avoided in the notices, with poems and verse preferred:

  You fell at the Battle of Pozières;

  We know that you fought brave and true;

  You fought for your King and Country;

  And the flag of the red, white and blue.36

  While repressed emotion was regarded as a sign of inner strength, this veneer occasionally slipped. In the privacy of home, behind drawn curtains, many seemed to buckle under the weight of their overwhelming grief, as this notice inserted for William Johnstone suggests:

  We mourn for you, dear Willie;

  No eyes can see us weep;

  But many a silent tear we shed;

  While many are asleep.

  The true feelings of Clarence Woolcock’s family were unmasked in this notice:

  His unknown grave is the bitterest blow;

  That none but our sobbing hearts can know.

  And the passage of time did little to dull the grief. Thomas Lillie’s family wrote in 1921:

  Five years have passed and, oh, how we miss him;

  Some may think the wound has healed;

  But little they know of the sorrow;

  That oft’ beneath a smile concealed.37

  Over the years, the Anzac legend, propagated by the likes of Charles Bean, flourished. Many Australians identified with the legend. It was what they wanted to be: bred in the bush, strong, resourceful, and independent. The legend was one-dimensional, but attractive in its simplicity.

  It did not have much to do with Ernie Lee. Runaway Lee did not fight at Pozières, as The Herald article written in 1919 suggested. He did, however, eventually rejoin the 5th Battalion at Ypres in 1916. Within weeks of returning, he clashed with his corporal, Charles Woodham. According to court-martial proceedings contained within his personnel dossier, while Lee was performing sentry duty, Woodham told him to stop reading a trench paper and return to his post.

  ‘I’m fucked if I will,’ replied Lee.

  Woodham snatched the paper from him. Lee apparently had his father’s temper — he reached for his rifle, shoved a cartridge into its breech, and pulled the bolt back. ‘I’ll shoot a bastard like you.’

  Woodham wrestled the rifle from him and placed him under close arrest. Lee was charged with offering violence to his superior officer, tried by court martial, found guilty, and sentenced to ten years’ penal servitude. Gradually, word spread that he was only 15 years old. Eventually, the Australian minister for defence intervened, suspending the sentence and sending Lee back to Australia.

  Lee arrived back in Australia in April 1917. He re-enlisted six months later. And he didn’t re-enlist to redeem himself — within a month, he’d been charged with using obscene language, refusing to obey an order, being absent without leave, and being improperly dressed. And that was before he had even left Australia’s shores. Lee returned to Europe just before Christmas 1917.

  Lee’s disappearance added to his parents’ worries. Their eldest son, Jack, a quietly spoken boy who had just turned 19, enlisted in April 1917, destined for France. With a constant eye on the casualty lists, Herman and Mary Lee would have realised that the odds of both sons returning home safely were low. Mary, a devout Catholic, lit two candles rather than one at the little Bruthen church each Sunday.

  Lee’s personnel dossier tells us that, upon disembarking in Italy in early 1918, he was charged with using threatening language against an officer. In April, he went absent again. He was jailed for ten days, only to escape from custody twice. In November, he went absent again, desperately trying to meet up with his brother Jack, who had just arrived in France. They never met up. Jack came down with a mild bout of influenza, and he was evacuated to No. 3 Australian General Hospital in Abbeville, France, where the influenza took a turn for the worse. He died of bronchial pneumonia only a few weeks before the war ended. His grave at the Abbeville Communal Cemetery, Plot 4, Row H, No. 22, received no visitors for the next 90 years.38

  Military police eventually caught Ernie Lee in Paris. Finally — and undoubtedly with great relief to all those in the Australian Imperial Force — he was discharged in May 1919.

  After the war, Lee tried his hand at farming. ‘I will settle down now,’ he told his father, ‘and get a piece of land.’39 After securing a selection through the Repatriation Committee, his interest quickly waned. On the afternoon of 22 May 1919, while hunting ducks on a swamp, he shot two birds. He stripped off everything except his trousers, leggings, and boots and swam toward them. He started to struggle, and then disappeared from sight.

  That afternoon, the parish priest, Reverend Father Buckley, and Constable Howard knocked on Greville Farm’s door. Ernie’s younger sister Essie answered. They delivered the sad news that Ernie had drowned. It was less than a month since he had returned home.

  On the following Saturday, a hearse transported his body to the Bruthen Cemetery. His comrades fired a three-shot volley, and the Last Post sounded as his coffin descended into the ground. His teenage fiancée, Mabel Baade, stood silently by.

  Lee’s death was widely reported. The evening Herald ran the headline: ‘Youngest AIF soldier, enlisting at fourteen, lad fights at Pozières’.40 A local newspaper finished his obituary with the words, ‘this splendid specimen of Australia’s young manhood is to sleep his last long sleep in his native land on the hillside of the Bruthen Township’.41 The newspapers didn’t mention his colourful past.

  Lee’s death reveals much about the Anzac legend. Whatever way you look at it, he was a common criminal with a record more like that of hardened criminals twice his age. But Lee had enlisted, left his family, and served overseas in a deadly war. For this, he was permitted to wear the cloak of the legend. The unwritten social covenant that the correspondents, soldiers, soldiers’ families, public, and politicians were unconsciously party to allowed him to be referred to evermore in glowing terms as a ‘splendid specimen of Australia’s young manhood’, those who ‘with their fine physiques fought for the Empire’.

  What was the purpose of this social covenant? Perhaps it rewarded the labourers, farmhands, and clerks who had enlisted and risked their lives for their country with a mytho
logical status that they could never have hoped to achieve in civilian life. Perhaps it softened the blow felt by families, particularly mothers, of the dead. Even though their sons had been blown to bits, mothers could be comforted by the anaesthetising words that their sons had given up their lives gallantly and that their deeds would live forever — their sons were immortalised as Anzac legends. Perhaps this was what Henry Lawson meant when he said that their deeds would be remembered for the next thousand years.

  And who would begrudge the Lees the comfort of the legend? Herman and Mary Lee did not have a lot to celebrate. According to the Herald article, they were poor and had struggled against bushfire and drought to maintain their large family. The strain of farming a barren selection had broken Herman’s health. They had lost their house and all their possessions to fire. They had lost their eldest son, Jack, to pneumonia on the Western Front. At least they could be proud, even if it was just for a moment, that their son Ernie had served the Empire as a hallowed Anzac. These honours were beyond their grasp in normal life.

  Is anything gained by stripping Ernie of the Anzac cloak? Is there any justification in revealing the unflattering truth about him? Charles Bean said a historian’s obligation was to write the truest history possible. Perhaps the wound of brutal disclosure is the price paid for writing the truth.

  It was left to Bean to record that fragile, fleeting, and sometimes ungraspable thing called history. He selected the old station homestead of Tuggeranong as his headquarters from which to draft it, as it was free from distractions and located in the bush he loved so much.

  Denis Winter’s book, Making the Legend, which details the research and drafting of the Official History, records that Bean began setting down the history of Pozières and the Great War on Armistice Day, 1919, working from 9.00 a.m. to 11.00 p.m. seven days a week and hardly ever taking a break. And every day that passed, he knew that ‘history’ was slowly slipping away from him, like grains of sand through outstretched fingers. ‘There is only a limited time during which events can be fixed. Men’s memories fade. The chief actors die,’ explained Bean. Effie Bean quietly watched as her husband spent the 1920s and 1930s absorbed in his memories and documents of the war. 42

  For Bean, there was not one absolute truth that could be wrestled from the piles of manuscripts and records he sifted through. Besides the baldest of facts — the day, the place, the recorded word — everything else seemed open to interpretation. There was even randomness in the way he came across evidence. One day, by chance, he spoke to an electrician, Apcar de Vine, rewiring his office at Victoria Barracks and found out that he had kept a detailed diary during the war; Apcar de Vine’s writings were to feature heavily in Bean’s Pozières account. Bean also drew from the unit diaries — a massive resource of over 20 million sheets — that John Treloar had carefully catalogued. By including the rich information gained from these sources, Bean turned a roughly three-year undertaking into a mission lasting almost a quarter of a century. In 1926, he wrote a letter to his friend, Major Phillips of the Australian war graves section in London, about their arduous undertaking: ‘You and I are some of the few Australians still at work on the war. I expect to reach a declaration of peace somewhere about 1935!’43

  Occasionally, Bean was asked to explain why the publication of the Official History was delayed. ‘No one feels more keenly than I the fact that the official history is taking much longer to produce than was originally estimated,’ wrote Bean in response to such a request from prime minister Stanley Bruce in 1927. Bean explained that if Australians only wanted a simple narrative of events, it could be produced in six months. But if the people wanted to know the answers to the questions that had puzzled them, it would take longer. For example: What was the real reason for the terrible struggle at Pozières? What happened on the German side of the line? ‘If this knowledge is required there is no short cut,’ explained an unrepentant Bean. ‘It is being obtained by patient labour.’44

  By chance, Bean also stumbled across Alec Raws’s vivid letters describing the horrors of Pozières. Should they be included in the Official History — was Alec Raws’s dark view, when coming out the trenches, of being ‘lousy, stinking, unshaven and sleepless’ the dominant emotion experienced by others at Pozières? Bean sought advice from his close friend White, who had read nearly every draft of his history. He responded: ‘I saw many of the men as they came out but I am not prepared to agree that all were in the condition you describe so vividly.’45 Bean drafted another one of the 10,000 letters he wrote to validate facts, sending it to Raws’s company commander, Captain Lionel Short, asking his opinion. Of Raws’s quote, Short wrote:

  He says with such pathos, ‘We were lousy, stinking, unshaven, sleepless.’ Now, I remember halting at a cooker as we came out of the line and enjoying some hot tea. I suppose I was lousy, stinking, unshaven and sleepless but I didn’t feel those things as a tragedy; rather with exhilaration that one had been through such an experience. Does it all merely lie in the point of view?46

  And maybe that was the only absolute truth: that it all lay in one’s own point of view. Perhaps there was no uniform set of facts; maybe it was impossible to distil the diverse experiences of tens of thousands of men into one definitive document.

  When Bean published his final volume in 1942, he had produced one of the most comprehensive histories ever written. He detailed 6550 soldiers in it.47 Despite White’s misgivings, he quoted extensively from Raws’s letters, although omitting his most vehement comments.

  Bean’s Official History was largely a concise tome of facts, figures, names, and places. It was, without doubt, true to its title of ‘official’. Bean’s real literary masterpiece was his diary: fresh and full of unguarded opinions and observations. After the war, Bean, perhaps uncomfortable with his candour, affixed to the inside cover of each volume a typed note with official red lettering that cautioned future readers that his notes were often jotted in the midst of battle, when he was very tired or almost asleep, and typically captured what was utmost on his mind. Despite Bean’s half-apology, it is these factors that make his diary a timeless piece of war writing.

  White did not live to see the final volumes of the Official History published. His tenure as chief of the general staff was cut short in 1940 when the plane he was travelling in, along with three federal ministers, crashed near the Canberra aerodrome, killing all on board. Bean was devastated. ‘For me a light went out that was never relit,’ he wrote.48

  In his Official History, Bean successfully provided a memorial to those men who fought in the Great War, but had he been ‘true’ to himself? Much of the horror of war and his unfiltered opinions about it never made it into the Official History. Perhaps this troubled him, for later in life, he began what he called his ‘unofficial history’. Having fulfilled his official obligations, he set about testing what he had believed to be the truth. But he was 78 years old and his hand was weak and shaky; it soon became apparent that the book that he felt compelled to write was beyond his mortal grasp. He never got beyond his rough draft of the Gallipoli campaign.49

  In 1952, Bean made possibly his last visit to Pozières. Although grass, stubble, beet trees, and hedges had replaced mud, craters, and lines of ragged stumps, he wrote, ‘For me it was as though I had left it yesterday.’50

  In 1964, he was admitted to the Concord Repatriation Hospital in Sydney, and he spent his last years among comrades from Gallipoli and the Somme. He died in August 1968. There was probably never an Australian who held higher hopes and aspirations for his country than Charles Bean.

  Bean predicted that Pozières would become a place of ‘eternal pilgrimage’ for future generations of Australians.51 Despite his prediction, Pozières has gradually faded from our memories. Besides battalion reunions and a few church services, the tenth anniversary of Pozières passed without notice. Newspapers seemed more concerned about the pending Ashes Test and whether Clarrie Grimmett
or Arthur Mailey would be selected. On the 50th anniversary, only one reference to Pozières appeared in newspapers. In 2004, it finally passed from the edges of our memory into history when Marcel Caux, the last surviving Australian Pozières veteran, passed away, aged 105.52

  Despite fading memories, the fields of Pozières still disengorge reminders of the past. In 1998, a farmer’s plough caught on something. Upon investigating, the farmer found human remains. A special team that excavated the site found a skeleton, part of a uniform, a weapon, some ammunition, and, most importantly, a badly corroded identity disc. It was Australian Russell Bosisto of the 27th Battalion, who had disappeared on 4 August 1916.

  Eighty-two years on, with hundreds crowded into the Courcelette Military Cemetery, including four Great War veterans, and with a pipe band playing in the background, Bosisto was finally laid to rest. With the burial came some irony — even though Bosisto’s remains have been identified, he lies with 1177 other men who remain unknown. Many are Australians.

  In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the Somme battle and Pozières. Australians are increasingly curious about their past. Battalions of Australians visit the Somme each year. These individuals come as tourists, walking the battlefields and exploring the cemeteries, rather than as soldiers.

  The visitors find that while many things have changed on the Somme, some have remained the same. The faint whiff of manure still hangs in the air, but now massive caterpillar tractors, rather than peasant’s carts and marching troops, tread it into the roads. Albert’s war economy continues to flourish. Ninety-five years ago, peasants sold fruit and eggs to troops at exorbitant prices. Now they sell tickets to the war museum, beneath the rebuilt basilica, or brass shell casings with intricate carvings to those visiting the battlefields. The farms of Pozières have retained their traditional quadrangle shape, but are now constructed of brick, rather than yellow clay slapped over wooden frames. The church and cemetery were reconstructed. The windmill was not.