Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  Two soldiers named Bert and Jim were the rescuers, and had begun work with shovels almost at once. They dug with shells falling all around them and at last got Edwards’ companion, Telfer, out. To get to Telfer, however, they had to pull out a wooden strut and that caused the further collapse of dirt on top of Edwards. When he was excavated, ‘It took four swaddies [orderlies] to hold me on the stretcher. I believe I yelled and screeched like mad. Evidently resurrection is a tougher ordeal than death.’ He said that ‘something had been jarred inside my tough old nut, and my memory was affected’. Telfer and he were taken back to an auxiliary dressing station at Bécourt and were admitted to the base hospital. But Edwards, an extraordinarily robust soul, was discharged a week later, rejoined his battalion and served in it till the war’s end. Other men, through no fault of their own, would have been affected for life—indeed, we do not know whether or not Edwards himself was.

  It had been at Pozières on the Somme in late July 1916, said the psychiatrist Lieutenant Colonel J.W. Springthorpe, that for the first time shell shock ‘fell like an avalanche’ on thousands. Gunner Butcher, who had enlisted in mid-1915, was blown up three times during the campaigns of 1916 and was evacuated to England suffering from stabbing pains in the head. He was excitable, shook and perspired, and often felt as if the bed was being pulled from under him to pitch him over a precipice. Private A., a minor from the 17th Battalion who had been blown up twice in three days, was admitted to hospital in England and was still suffering in May 1918. On the Somme in September 1916, Lieutenant Colonel E.A. Harris was brought in by a stretcher party ‘blown up by a shell’, said C.E.W. Bean, ‘and suffering from shell shock’, and told Brigadier-General Pompey Elliott that he doubted he could face another battle. Bean would also write, ‘The genuine shell shocks were a feature of Pozières.’ Private Longford Colley-Priest, a stretcher bearer with the 8th Australian Field Ambulance, wrote of his experiences at Fromelles in July 1916, ‘A chap has just been brought in and is sitting by my side, poor devil, his whole body is shaking, one would think he was shivering from the cold. His nerves must be shattered.’

  By 1917 Springthorpe had established a network of sympathetic English families who were willing to host his Australian hospital patients. But military bureaucracy intervened. Springthorpe angrily asked why his patients could never be allowed sick leave since ‘I have continuously and repeatedly made use of sick leave for selected shell shock patients’. But the director of Australia’s services, Major General Neville Howse VC, wrote that there seemed to be no sufficient reason to allow it.

  C.E.W. Bean admitted he had been appalled ‘with the look of the men’ in general. He had passed an Australian battalion without seeing a single smile on any man’s face. The Somme had wrought this. Doctors attributed some of the problems to the passive and impersonal nature of the warfare when, as official historian Lieutenant Colonel Butler wrote, ‘after each minor advance the troops must sit tight in sectors of the front system which the enemy then pounded to dust’. With this went lack of sleep, poor food, unrelenting anxiety and acute physical discomfort. As Charles Bean wrote, the Somme sector left the Australians ‘facing the storm with no other protection than the naked framework of their character’.

  The numbers who suffered the conditions should not be exaggerated nor underestimated. Between October 1915 and August 1918 nearly 20 000 sick and wounded casualties were sent home to Australia. Of these 878 were considered to be suffering from the freshly diagnosed condition named shell shock, but 1400 from disordered action of the heart (DAH), a diagnosis often deployed by surgeons to save brave men from the stigma of mental disease, for which the high command had little sympathy. Indeed, merciful Australian regimental medical officers were frowned on for diagnosing men as suffering DAH or the curiously named Effort Syndrome rather than shame their patients by tagging them with a mental condition. The use of the diagnosis DAH as a cover for shell shock would be banned by the British high command in late May 1918. Many surgeons were in any case sending men back labelled NYD, or Not Yet Diagnosed. NYD (W) became the notation written on the labels attached to the fragments of men’s uniforms when they were sent back down with shell shock and wound, NYD (S) was the diagnosis of shell shock without a wound. Later in the war medical officers became confident enough to write ‘Shell shock W’. The W stood for ‘wound’ but also for ‘windage’, which would come to be called ‘blast’.

  As well as the figures for shell shock and DAH amongst those transported home, however, there were the thousands more Australians who could not be moved yet from British hospitals entirely or partially devoted to the treatment of the condition. And shell shock was often associated with being wounded, and it was the physical wound rather than the mental one that made it into the list. One historian argues from the details provided for casualties that 16.96 per cent of the Australians on the Western Front suffered from shell shock at some time or other, though many recovered with treatment. But any attempt to work out how many soldiers suffered shell shock in combination with wounds is an impossibility.

  Some validly argue that a remarkable solidarity between men could itself act as a preventive of shock. In the Australian army this solidarity often arose between officers promoted from the ranks or respected in their own right and their men, and operated on an intimacy which would not have been tolerated in other armies. Captain J.G. Croft, a Queensland officer, wrote of himself that ‘I was one of a mob’. Major G.D. Mitchell would later write that the post-war hit play Journey’s End, which featured British officers sitting in a dugout utterly separate from the men, could never have been written about the Australian army. Instead of ‘solitary glory’ the Australian platoon officer fed from his mess tin amongst his men. ‘I have often had my rum issue swiped by some dissolute private when my back was turned. And cigarettes—blazes! When I had one left, the platoon considered they had an option on it.’ Indeed, men commissioned in the field felt such an egalitarian desire to validate themselves in front of their friends in the ranks they were frequently killed doing it, giving rise to the saying, ‘One star, one stunt [battle].’

  Yet sometimes this safety net of brotherhood was not enough. The damage from shell shock could be long-term. Nineteen-year-old Private John Hargreaves, a tall and sturdy young man, had enlisted in the AIF in July 1915, and in 1916 the family received official notification that he was returning home because of his wounds. The Hargreaves family travelled by train from Ararat in western Victoria to meet the hospital ship Karoola in Melbourne, which carried a number of the men who had been wounded at Pozières five months earlier. The Hargreaves could not find their son amongst the disembarking soldiers, and tracked him down to Caulfield Hospital. Their son sat before them in ‘mental stupor’. He had been buried alive by a shell at Pozières, an experience which was a common trigger of shell shock. He could not move or acknowledge anyone, or recognise his family, although he did squeeze the hand of his favourite younger sister Teddy. The family found out that on the way back to Australia John needed to be hand-fed by one of the ship’s cooks. He suffered, amongst all else, from aphonia, the inability to speak. Men with such symptoms had already been shipped home from Gallipoli in 1915, and their relatives had begun to agitate for special hospitals to treat them, instead of seeing them sent to civilian lunatic asylums and sanatoria.

  There remained a suspicion that those who succumbed to shell shock were morally or genetically inferior. Even Lieutenant Colonel Arthur ‘Gertie’ Butler, an accomplished Queensland surgeon, Cambridge athlete and graduate, an obstetrician and gynaecologist before the war, and brilliant writer of the three-volume official medical history of the AIF afterwards, found the condition both complex and mystifying. It was not for lack of encountering what soldiers called ‘madness’. He had been one of the first to land at Gallipoli on 25 April, and in France had run field ambulances and the 1st Division’s main dressing station at Bullecourt and on the Menin Road in Flanders in 1917. Butler
wrote, ‘Shell-shock was a term used in the early days to describe a variety of conditions ranging from cowardice to maniacal insanity.’ Butler gave his study of shell shock the chapter heading ‘Moral and Mental Disorders in the War of 1914–18’. ‘At the other end . . . comes the problem of the line between “cowardice”—a military crime—and “nervous breakdown”.’ Butler argued, however, that Australian soldiers were more ‘constructively “democratic”’ than other troops, and thus were more influenced by what they saw around them in the trenches than by any diktat on ‘madness’ or ‘funk’ coming down the line from the staff. They knew what they knew about other men and themselves, and what they knew was the inhuman strain of it all. This knowledge, too, might account for the fact that the Australian authorities would impose but never carry out the death penalty for desertion, despite British pressure to do so.

  POWS

  Only 3800 Australians surrendered to the Germans, and such a small proportion of all the Australians engaged is itself a sign that war in the trenches was a bitter affray in which high explosives, gas, machine guns and bacteria imposed the great majority of casualties.

  Prisoners of war are not often mentioned in the popular record of World War I. Perhaps it was difficult to find them a place in the Anzac legend. Five hundred were taken at Fromelles, the opening Australian engagement, another 1200 the following spring at Bullecourt and more still at Villers-Bretonneux in 1918. The imprisonment of these latter men was relatively short. But a document entitled How the Germans Treated Australian Prisoners of War, produced by the Department of Defence in Melbourne in 1919, seemed to place a measure of blame for a failure of esprit on the captives’ part. ‘In such a situation men so entrapped could minimise their chances of being killed by becoming passive and presenting a non-threatening attitude to the enemy or fleeing. When large numbers of men have been captured, it is certain that a moment is reached, almost collectively, in which they forfeit their aggressive instincts and opt for survival.’ Yet often enough they had had no choice in the matter, having been left wounded on the field.

  Private G. Davidson, captured at Fromelles, later remembered a reasonable level of treatment. ‘I was taken to Douai hospital [behind German lines in France] and I remained in hospital there until October . . . was then sent to Munster. I was in hospital until April 30 1917 and was then transferred to the Lager. I remained in the Lager until December 7 1917. Then I was moved to Mannheim where I passed the Medical Board for internment in a neutral country.’ Davidson’s Fromelles wounds, which had kept him in hospital for nine months, made him no further threat to the German state and so he was sent to Holland under the care of the Red Cross and ultimately repatriated.

  Not everyone thought fondly of the Douai military hospital. Lance Corporal Alder went through four operations on his arms and legs there but was at one stage left for twenty-three days without fresh bandages. ‘My wounds were covered in maggots. I complained to the doctor through the interpreter . . . he replied to catch them would be a good pastime for me.’ Private Marrinon, shot through his arm and both thighs, found that after his operation he was neglected and his wounds dressed only every ten days, and on one occasion after a delay of sixteen days. Private Wait says he often saw a German under-officer named Marks ill-treat the men, and when they cried out in pain behave even worse. ‘He was brutal in his handling of the patients . . .’ In some cases men became aware of the shortages of everything from food to bandages that were occurring due to the blockade of Germany by the Royal Navy and which might explain some of the neglect of prisoners. Anaesthetics became rare commodities, and paper bandages began to replace cloth ones.

  The story of the neglect and misuse of Australian POWs by Germans must be balanced against the experience of Alice Ross King, an Australian nursing sister at Number 2 Casualty Clearing Station near the front, a veteran of bombings and the shelling and gas-shelling of the little sump where the station was located. In November 1917, on her way back to her own tent, she heard the cries of men from beneath a tent she had not noticed before. Inside, she found fifty-three wounded German prisoners who had been forgotten for the past three days, a period during which the clearing station had been flooded with wounded. She found their condition horrifying and, though everyone on the staff was ‘dead beat’, she called the doctor and they went to work, getting orderlies to remove the thirteen who had died and treating the other forty patients. Similarly, George Faulkner of the Medical Corps confessed that when a German plane which was constantly bombing the frontlines, communication trenches and dressing stations crashed, and a surviving airman, wearing an Iron Cross, came to the dressing station, ‘I gave him as much pain as possible, felt like knocking him out.’

  Those unwounded who were captured at Fromelles had been marched to a collecting prison, Fort MacDonald in Lille, known as the Black Hole. But again the later reports of prisoners varied. Some complained of inhumane treatment and starvation. Private S.E. McGarvie of the 30th Battalion remembers his march to Fort MacDonald as brutal, with the Uhlan (lancer) cavalry lowering their lances to ride down a French crowd who emerged to look at the Australian prisoners.

  The War Department was skimpy in the details it sent to relatives of such men, and did not see taking much further interest in them as its chief business. One of the most meaningful and informative points of contact between the Australian prisoners and the home front was provided by an Australian volunteer, Miss Mary Elizabeth Chomley. Mary Chomley, a woman in her midforties, was the daughter of a Victorian judge. She had been involved in the Australian arts and craft movement, and in 1897 had served as secretary of the Australian Exhibition of Women’s Work. Chomley had gone to England as a Red Cross volunteer worker early in the war and worked in a British hospital until in 1916 she was given an office in Red Cross headquarters as Secretary of the Prisoner of War Department of the Australian Red Cross. In appearance, she was a rangy woman wearing on each lapel of her uniform the rising sun of Australia, and the badge of the Red Cross on her tie and hat band.

  One of her first steps after Fromelles was to discover from the Red Cross the location of prisoners taken in that battle and to write to them. Private W. Inwood of the 28th Battalion would write to Miss Chomley in July 1917, ‘I have just received your letter of March 4th . . . it gives me great pleasure to be able to write to such a staunch friend.’ Miss Chomley’s new department not only gave the wider Red Cross organisation the names and prison addresses of POWs so that comfort parcels could be sent, but it received about 20 000 letters a month from Australian prisoners and relatives, all of which Chomley and her small staff attempted to answer. The department also catalogued personal details of prisoners, such as clothing and shoe size, and medical requirements, so that they could assemble personalised comfort parcels for the prisoners. Prisoners wrote to her asking for toothpaste, books and boxing gloves. Many of the letters thanked Miss Chomley and told her of the regular arrival of parcels, or else reported on their failure to turn up. Robert Duff of the 43rd Battalion told Miss Chomley that the arrival of the parcels ‘lets a chap know that he is not forgotten’.

  She received a great deal of information on the post-capture experiences of soldiers. Private Nelligan, one of Miss Chomley’s correspondents, remembers being hit by a bomb (in World War I parlance this generally meant a grenade) after witnessing ‘an ugly tragedy’. Two of the men of his battalion were badly wounded by fragments and lying not far away. One of them, leaving his wounded comrade ‘in a restful position’, went to the German lines to get help. A German soldier, believed by Nelligan to be a member of the enemy’s medical corps, shot him through the head. Private John Bolton, wounded, was treated badly after capture. He was taken with other captives through a communication trench full of Germans soldiers who kicked and knocked them about. At the dressing station, none of his wounds or those of other Australians were dressed. According to John Bolton, a wounded man with him died of the rough handling in the communicati
ons trench. By contrast, a Private Donovan, suffering shrapnel wounds and a bullet through the left hip, was wrapped up in a sheet suspended from a pole, and carried by German bearers behind the lines to have his wounds dressed. A Private White was taken to a dressing station and ‘treated kindly and given some coffee, bread and cheese’. Since Nelligan, Bolton and White were captured at approximately the same time, and their experiences were polar opposites, Mary Chomley was left to contemplate, if she had time for it, the range of human impulses in time of war. Some Australians wrote that the Germans were particularly vengeful towards them for fighting so far away from their homes, in a war that—in German eyes—was none of their business.

  The winter of 1916–17 was known as ‘the turnip winter’ and brought starvation in German cities, and the onset of rickets amongst German children. Private White declared that ‘the Germans do not seem to have the food to give us’. Private T.E. Gippsland wrote that for fifteen months he and his fellows had been given barely sufficient food to survive and had ‘been forced to gather weeds and herbs for sustenance’. While in parts of Germany civilians were pursuing that option as well, there was a strong sense in the testimonies of prisoners that the German guards were deliberately starving them. One of the camps most complained about was at Schneide-Mühle, in what is now western Poland. Dinner, said Private Storey, was a ladleful of horse beans and water with occasionally a square inch of some ‘mysterious flesh’. Breakfast consisted of a cup of acorn coffee. It is easy at this distance of time to look at the effects of the British blockade upon Germany in general. It would have been harder then to endure slow starvation in a prisoner-of-war camp.

  But even then the food ration varied from camp to camp. Hunger does not seem to have been a systematic tactic, though the Australians suspected that in some camps it was applied as a means of keeping them docile. On a three-day journey from Dülmen to Schneide-Mühle by train, Private Noll was fed only one meal and a cup of coffee. Private Thomas, who was held in Dülmen prisoner-of-war camp in western Germany, said that those in his section were fed less than those in other sections. If that is true it means that the ration was not uniform even within the one camp. Thomas said that when moved to a camp in Erkrath, again in good farming country in western Germany, the food was a feast by comparison, and cheese, sausages, bacon, vegetables and the occasional stewed apple were available.