John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  Now that it is out of cultivation, one can find wild flowers all over that battlefield. In July, when the fighting began, it grew the flowers common in cultivated chalk soils at that time of the year: the purple hardhead, pale purple scabious, pale blue chicory; and the common weeds of cultivation: yellow ragwort, red poppies, and blue cornflowers. In the spring and earlier summer it is thickly set with dandelions. On both sides of the road, but especially near the windmill, there are patches of strongly growing henbit. To the east of the road, on the plateau, and in and near the quarry and middle gullies, there are patches of speedwell, ground-ivy, deadnettle of two kinds, one with pink, one with yellow flowers (which also grows freely in Mametz Wood). Among the grass one can also find dock, milfoil, starwort, stitchwort, “a white, small, starry, cuppy flower,” Venus needle, daisy, field madder, Lamb’s lettuce, a cut-leaved wild geranium, a veronica, and the little heart’s-ease pansy. Perhaps someday, when Australia makes a Campo Santo of the earth of Pozières, these plants may be set there. In their place at Pozières, they will grow in Australian dust for ever.

  The best view of Pozières is from the east of the Roman Road, from the direction of the main Australian attack. From a point 1,200 yards S.E. from the windmill, the appearance is of a valley of sand, with grass in stretches, and Pozières as the wall of an old town on the horizon. The Authuille Wood is just visible over the saddle or dip in the road, and the town is like a long, low dyke of sand sloping gradually up behind the road. Near the windmill, the actual crest, this dyke is more marked. From Contalmaison, one sees the line of the road (the line of the ridge) with some forty stumps of trees beside it. One can see the traffic on the road passing along the ridge, becoming dim against the background of the village, and then standing out again, clear against the sky as it nears the windmill.

  The enemy defences at the time of the attack ringed in both village and wood with trenches. The cellars and piles of ruin had been fitted with machine guns, and the mill, the school, and Gibraltar, were all fortresses of the usual strong, defensive type. The external defences seem to have been:

  (a) To the north: the two lines, old German lines one and two (O.G. 1 and 2), which were dug so as to enfilade any attack upon the village from the east. At the time of the assault we held these lines to within 600 yards of the village. They lay well to the north of the ruins of the village itself.

  (b) To the east: a line shutting in the village and wood, on the line of the old hedge of the wood. This was strongly held.

  (c) A sunken light-railway track, which could be held as a trench.

  (d) A line or part of a line still further to the east, dug so as to enfilade Hospital Valley, and to link up with the O.G.s.

  (e) To the south: a big wired line close to the village, linking it with the intermediate positions at Contalmaison and Mametz Wood. This line ran in front of the lower part of the village, so as to defend the cemetery. From it, minor communication lines ran to the south-west and south-east. All these lines could be, and were, held by the enemy to check our advance. In one of them, last spring, the last surviving hen of Pozières laid some successful eggs.

  During the night of Saturday-Sunday, July 22nd – 23rd, the troops took up their positions for the attack on the village. The attack was to be made upon the eastern and southern faces of the position by Australian troops and English Territorials. The English were to advance from the direction of Ovillers Hill and Mash Valley upon the cemetery and that straggling end or outlier of the village which stretched out towards Thiepval. Their right was to rest upon the Albert-Bapaume Road, their left on the strong, newly converted enemy lines on Ovillers Hill. The Australian left was to touch the English right at the road, to push up, in the main direction of the road, from Suicide Corner and Contalmaison, by way of the spur, the Quarry Road, and Hospital Road, so as to close in on the village from the south-east. The Australian right, forming up from about Contalmaison Villa, outside Little Bazentin Wood, to O.G. 1, with their faces to the west, were to charge across the plateau, taking whatever trenches there might be in their path, right into the village, through the wood or copse, and across the gardens to the houses. It was known that the garrison of Pozières had been relieved by a fresh division, and that, like other enemy reliefs, this division had brought in plenty of food and drink. The attack had been prepared by some days of shelling over the whole area. Not much of the village was standing, though one observer speaks of some parts of red-tiled roofs near the cemetery. The smash and ruin were general, but the place was not obliterated, nor were all the trees razed. The weather had cleared. It was hot, dry, dusty weather, with much haze and stillness in the air. At midnight on the 22nd – 23rd of July the attack was timed to begin. It was the first big fight in which the Australians had been engaged since the Battle of Gallipoli, almost a year before. Then they had fallen in in the night for an attack in the dark, which won only glory and regret. This time the battle was to be one of the hardest of the war, and there was to be glory for all and regret for very many, and the prize was to be the key to the ridge of Bapaume beyond the skyline, with possible victory and peace. At midnight, when the men had reached their starting-places, the attack began, and a great wave of Australian infantry went across the plateau towards the east of the village. A part of this wave attacked the enemy who were still holding out in O.G. 1. The rest crossed the plateau, got into one enemy line, which was lightly held or held only by dead men, took it, got into another (really the sunken track of the light railway) which was held more strongly, took that, and so, by successive rushes, and by countless acts of dash and daring, trying (as it happened) to find objectives which our guns had utterly destroyed, they reached the outskirts of the place, across a wreck of a part of the wood. They made a line from about the southern end of the village to their starting-place near Bazentin Wood.

  When the daylight came on that Sunday morning, the Australians were in the village, on the eastern side of the road with the road as their front. Beyond the road they had to their front the tumbled bricks of the main part of the village. To their right, they had a markless wilderness of plateau tilting very slightly upwards to the crest on which the O.G. lines ran. Australians who were there have given accounts of the fighting which won them this position, but, as usually happens in a night attack, those who were there saw little. It seems to be agreed that the second enemy trench was more strongly held than the outer line, and that the right of the attack, which came under direct enfilading fire from the O.Gs., had the hardest task. Some have said that the eastern outskirts of the village were lightly held by the enemy, and that not more than 200 enemy dead were found in that part of the field after the charge, which is very likely, for it was the enemy’s custom to hold an advanced post with a few men and many machine guns.

  On the left of the attack, on the western side of the road, where the English Territorials were engaged, the objectives were swiftly taken, so that by dawn the village was shut in as firmly from the south as from the east.

  When it was light, both sides tried to reconnoitre. Neither side shelled the village for fear of killing its own men, since neither side, as yet, knew how the lines ran. The two sides sniped at each other from the ruins across the road. Early in the forenoon an Australian officer took a small party across the road into the main ruin of the village, and creeping from one heap of bricks to another, surprised, bombed out, and caused the surrender of a section of the enemy, including a regimental surgeon in his dressing-station. The work of linking up the captured positions went on all through the day under a shellfire which increased steadily as the enemy observers came to know what was going on. The sniping sometimes increased into hot rifle fire.

  By ten o’clock on that Sunday night, the Australians had plotted out the main stations of the Pozières garrison. They attacked across the road, bombed out some more dugouts, and cleared the scattered groups of enemy out of the trenches, remains of trenches, converted ditches, and old gun emplacements, where they still made a kin
d of organized resistance. Having won these places, they linked them up into a system, and dug a communication trench by which men could pass across the road from one half of the village to the other. This gave them (and secured to us) nearly the whole village, and though there were snipers and bombers who troubled our men, the enemy made no determined counter-attack in force against the village itself.

  When day dawned on Monday, 24th of July, the Australians had secured and were occupying practically the whole of the village, and faced, roughly speaking, to a northern front. In front of them was the gentle depression of the northern end of Mash Valley. To their right the ground was almost flat, though trending very slightly uphill from them to the O.G. 1 and 2, only 200 yards away. A hundred yards behind the enemy lines was the wreck of the famous windmill, marking the highest part of the crest, and the nearest point from which the Australians could hope to see into the valley beyond. The Australians’ next task was to attack the O.G. lines on their right flank and front, seize the windmill on the crest, and then to take from the enemy his power of observation and his control of all that system of defence.

  Before the attacks began, the enemy bombardment came down. At first it was simply a heavy fire upon the village, but it soon increased to a barrage on the district. Sometimes it would lift, to search Contalmaison and the road past Suicide Corner; then it would play upon the valleys leading up to Pozières and upon those recesses or quarries near them where the little shelter might harbour stores or wounded men. Then it would fall on village and wood in lines and simultaneous dottings of explosion, till a dull red, dirty haze covered the site of the village, and smokes and stinks of all colours and poisons smouldered and rotted in it. In this haze and poison the Australians lived, and dug, and held the line. The first bombardment lasted for four days and nights, and in all that time there was little fighting, by either side, in that district; yet all are agreed that those four days made up some of the hottest battle of this war.

  The tactical aim of the Australians was to drive the enemy off the high land. The tactical aim of the enemy was to shell the Australians off it. All are agreed that their shelling was some of the heaviest ever seen. It made a fog all over the high land, and into this fog the Australians disappeared to a feat of endurance which few will know how to praise. So many acts of courage are hot and quick with inspiration, they must be as great a joy to do as to read about. But those swift acts of decision are for individuals, not for masses of men. The holding of the ground of Pozières was done by brigades at a time. Their casualty lists will show the nature of the work. The appearance of the ground and of the graves marks it to the visitor. It was as hard a service as any that has been on this earth.

  One who was there has said: “I went in from Sausage Valley way, past Suicide Corner. At first I only noticed that they were shelling Contalmaison like hell, but when I got down by the Quarry and saw what they were serving out on Pozières, by God, I felt, you may call this war, I call it just sending men to be killed. By God, they were sending some stuff over as we went up. The first thing I knew I was completely buried. I was in a trench when it happened, but there was no trench when I got out. That went on all the time that we were in. We would get some kind of trench dug, and then it would be blown in, and the men buried or killed, and all the time there were crumps, whizz-bangs, and tear-shells till you couldn’t hear or see. We would get some kind of a line made and try to make a dump, but you might as well have tried to build a dance-hall and give a dance. I looked back one night and saw the dump in the Quarry burning. They had brought up a lot of lights and star-shells and dumped them there, and a shell had got in among them and set them all off together; they lit up the whole sky.”

  Another who saw the fighting has said: “About the end of July, I had to go to the C.C.S. (Casualty Clearing Station) at – – – – – . The C.C.S. was in the school, at the bottom of a courtyard, and there were benches round the courtyard full of Australians who were all suffering from shell-shock, and they were jumping about and couldn’t keep their hands and feet still; I never saw such a sight. One of the doctors said to me: ‘I don’t know how it is. The Australians must be more highly strung or something. I get more shell-shock cases from among them than from any other units.’ ‘You silly – – – – – ,’ I said. ‘These poor – – – – – have been in at Pozières, where they’ve been shelled to hell for the best part of a week, and nobody else so far has had anything like it.’”

  A third has said: “I got a crump on the head the night I first went in, so I don’t know much about it, except that that damned trench called Centre Way was a damned unpleasant place to be in.”

  Centre Way, which is still partly to be traced, ran obliquely from close to the church of Pozières in a north-westerly direction towards the O.G. lines, which it reached about three-quarters of a mile to the west of the windmill. In the markless plain of mud, it was the middle one of three trenches by which the Australians approached the O.G. lines.

  A fourth has said: “A damned funny thing happened in the early days of Pozières. The trees in the wood then were not like what they are now, all shot to pieces. Some of them were quite good trees, and we had an O. Pip in one of them (artillery observation post), and had an officer there with a telescope. He was up there with his telescope about the 25th of July. There was a hell of a barrage going on behind him, for they were putting one across the gullies to stop men coming up. He was looking at this barrage one moment, when he saw an Australian coming through the barrage across the open. He was trotting along, almost naked, as we were in the Peninsula, and this officer expected to see him blown to pieces every second, but he came through the barrage all right, and then the officer recognized that it was his own servant coming with a letter. He had to look away for a while, and the next thing he knew the fellow was shouting at him from the foot of the tree. He expected that it would be some urgent thing that might be going to alter the whole campaign, so he put down his telescope, and climbed down and got the letter and read it. It was from the veterinary surgeon, and it said, ‘Sir, I have the honour to report that your old mare is suffering from an attack of the strangles.’ He acknowledged the letter, and the man went back the way he came, across the open, hopping through the barrage, and got back all right.”

  Few men can face such a thing as a modern barrage without awe; none the less, these men did face it, and lived in it, for days together. Under the fiercest of its terror, they bombed out towards the mill, got the mill – or the mound on which it once stood – but could not hold it. Coming again they got the mill and made it theirs, and spreading out to the left, they got the O.Gs., and with the English Territorials they moved forward, up the head of Mash Valley, on to the formless, markless, pocky, mud-barren. Up near the windmill, when they got it, they could peer from their lines through the smoke into the Promised Land.

  The ground slopes down to the northward from the windmill, at first very slightly. Three hundred yards from the mill, there is a lynchet, some four feet high, running roughly N.W.-S.E. across what was then the Australian front. Beyond this, the ground slopes much more rapidly for some 300 or 400 yards to the village of Courcelette among its trees. When the Australians took the windmill, there was a greenness upon all this slope of hill. The trees of Courcelette were leafy; there were houses in the village; and the great, wide, gently sloping valley beyond was green. It was not long to remain green, but at the Australians’ first sight of it it was green and lovely, though in the hands of the enemy. The Australians, looking down from the windmill across the valley, saw that there was no ground for a strong, defensive line nearer than the ridge of Bapaume, three miles away. They knew that the enemy could not hope to make a permanent line nearer than that, for all the nearer ground was under direct observation. They realized that the capture and holding of the Pozières Ridge would lead to the capture of all the valley below it; not immediately – for there is no position which cannot be defended for a time in modern war as long as there are ma
chine guns – but certainly, and before very long. As they looked over the valley, they saw and heard some great explosions not far below them, in and near Courcelette. The enemy was hurrying away his field guns and blowing up his dumps of field gun ammunition.

  This capture of Pozières may be said to mark the end of the second stage of the great battle. The first stage ended in the capture of the first line along some miles of front. This second stage ended in the capture of the second line along some miles of front, thus deepening the wound in the enemy defensive system.

  The third stage, beginning even then, in the mark-less mud towards Thiepval and on the Guillemont plateau, was to widen the wound.

  Enemies and detractors who hate us have said that, after all, the battle was no great affair; that it took, indeed, a few trenches, at great cost, but did not defeat the enemy nor relieve our Allies, and that we sacrificed our Colonial troops rather than expose our own. Lies are best left to Time, who is the surest confounder of malice; but some must be answered. To these few liars it may be said that the battle was the first real measuring of strength, on equal terms, between the enemy and ourselves, and that, therefore, it was a great affair. In the early years of the war our picked men had fought their picked men, in the proportion one of ours to seven of theirs, and our men had held them and been killed. In the Battle of the Somme, the picked men on both sides being gone, the fighters were the average of each race, and the result proved that superiority of the British which none in our army had ever doubted. It is true, that our men took a few trenches at great cost. It is also true, that they failed to take a few trenches at the first attack. The same is true of all fighting in all wars. But the result of the battle is written plain on the map of France. There on the map, and still more plainly on the sacred soil of France, it is marked, that the battle beat the enemy out of his picked defences, where he was strongest, and drove him back, from ditch to ditch, over a ground where all things were in his favour, in spite of all that he could do, for not less than twelve miles. It is not claimed that this was a decisive defeat of the enemy, to rank with the battles which end wars, but it was a sound beating. He did his best to hold his best fortifications, and he could not hold them: he was beaten out of them. If the battle failed to save Roumania, as some of our enemies (not very wisely) cry, it relieved Verdun. As to the lie, that during the battle we sacrificed our Colonial troops rather than expose our own, the graves of our men, in the mud, by the hundred and the thousand, from Maricourt to Gommecourt, and in every acre of the field, are sufficient answer. For each Colonial lost, not less than nine or ten of our men were lost.