Australians, Volume 2

by Thomas Keneally

  W.C. Watson, a stretcher bearer, describes entering the recently thawed and thus nearly uninhabitable British trenches on the Somme near Bapaume in the spring of 1917. The mud of the region added pounds of clag to the boots, equipment and arms of men marching up to the line. This was the muck in which the dead of the previous summer had been buried, and their putrefying bodies liberated from the grave again, in whole or part, by endless artillery barrages.

  A man’s native susceptibilities had to be deadened by the effect of walking over the dead body of some poor Tommy lying scarcely covered in the bottom of the trench or here and there to observe a limb, boot or hand or a piece of khaki sticking out from the side of the trench with no other legend than ‘an unknown British soldier’ . . . here an arm was exposed, here a hand, just a sodden remnant of bone and muscle, there a leg and there two Blucher boots, pointing skyward, suggesting their Hun owner had been buried head downward, or had been thrown that way by a subsequent explosion.

  Watson had a fear of being buried while sheltering in undercut holes in the sides of trenches. Here men slept like dogs, he said, but whenever high explosive shells began to arrive, he would come out. ‘I felt always a horror of being buried alive.’ Five men were one night lying 3 or 4 yards from him in such holds when an explosion brought tons of heavy wet earth down on them. Three of the men were quickly dug out, but one of the diggers hurled his shovelfuls of mud over the parapet, and this attracted increased German shelling on that part of the trench. An older man was still buried, and when at last dug out with Watson’s help he was immobile. Whether he was at that stage dead or not Watson would never know, since a shell now exploded and a spear of shrapnel ripped the man’s back open.

  Men learned, however, that the old shell holes were like quicksand and were advised to shelter in the fresher ones. Near some duckboards men sank and smothered. In October 1917, near Westhoeck in Flanders, an Australian motor ambulance skidded off the road and sank roof first into the bog.

  It was a terrible element for those who were casualties. On 13 October 1917 stretcher bearers were trying to find the wounded in front of the German lines in the morass of Passchendaele. The Germans mercifully refrained from firing and in some cases, seeing the bearers wallowing in the mud, even directed the bearers to wounded Australians who had become barely visible in the mire. But finding a wounded man was merely a beginning. Carrying the wounded back to the trenches and down the rearwards communication trenches to the nearest form of medical attention, the regimental aid post, was a labour with mud, and a struggle with traffic of other mud-encumbered men that could take half a day. At the aid post areas themselves men were laid down in mud, still under shelling, which filled the air with falling body parts and mud.

  Crown Prince Rupprecht, aware of the impact of mud on the Allies, wrote in his diary: ‘Most gratifying rain; our most effective ally.’ General Haig said after Passchendaele, perhaps with too much complacency, that Flanders mud was famous in the history of war and had defeated more armies than his. The alternative was the freezing of the terrain, which replaced trench foot with frostbite and froze men’s mufflers to their face. Thus there were only two seasons at the front—mud and ice.

  General Monash, like other generals on both sides of the line, was willing to use gas. In military terms it could be so effective since in human terms it could induce such terror. Near Ypres in late February 1917, Monash combined smoke and gas shells in the preparatory bombardments of his divisional artillery. When the Australians attacked, smoke shells alone were fired in the final bombardment so that the Australians would not be subject to the poisonous effects, but German defenders, seeing the smoke, would continue to wear their incapacitating gas masks. This method of deception would be used by both sides in World War I since it was taken as axiomatic that men could not fight a battle in gas masks, and that they hated wearing them only a little more than they hated the blistering, choking range of gases used by both sides. By the time the Australians reached the Western Front, gas was still released in clouds from cylinders when the wind was right and would be even in the last phase of the war, when the Germans were holding on to the Hindenburg Line.

  The first Australians to encounter a gas cloud of this nature were an advance party of 2nd Division troops in June 1916. They had already trained in a released gas practice behind the British line so they seemed to have survived it well—except for a cyclist-messenger who had left his gas mask behind and suffered an acute dose as he pedalled rearwards to find it. As the war continued, gas arrived chiefly by shells which landed not with a bang but a thud. For another two decades, Australian families would hear the racking and wheezing of the gas victims. The gases they had been poisoned by included the damaging and often fatal lung irritants such as chlorine, phosgene and diphosgene, which could make a man choke to death by attacking the pulmonary system and bursting apart the walls of the air sacs in the lung. When phosgene and the other lung irritants were inhaled, the victim’s lungs would flood with oedema fluid. After the most acute torture, death would result by choking and drowning. At the casualty clearing stations oxygen was given to those men whose panicked eyes and blue skin betrayed the symptoms of gas damage. The patient often became semi-delirious.

  The last category were the vesicants which irritated or burned the skin—the most famous being dichlorethylsulphide or mustard gas. Mustard gas could slough away the membranes of the trachea. The dead skin served as a breeding ground for secondary infections and men could die of bronchopneumonia and other diseases. Men who sat on ground that was contaminated by mustard gas would often be burned through their clothing and develop blisters.

  There were rarer cases of hydrocyanic gas, which attacked the central nervous system, but attacking troops of the side who used it were themselves unwilling to advance into such a lethal cloud. This notorious gas would later be used in concentration camps in World War II.

  It was militarily useful also to use the less deadly but disorienting ‘lachrymators’, tear gas, such as benzyl bromide, or sneezing gas, which the troops called ‘smokes’. The chemical officers of both sides mixed and matched all these ingredients at any given time. If an irritant gas could get to a man’s mouth and nostrils a second or two before he got his clumsy mask on, it could cause such acute irritation of eyes or nose that he was likely to rip it off again and become subject to something more deadly. For the convenience of their gunners, the Germans marked their shells with a yellow, blue or green cross, to signify the main contents.

  Australian nurses such as May Tilton, working in September 1917 in a ward for gas victims at a casualty clearing station several miles behind the lines in Belgium, noticed how, unlike the other wounded, the gas victims wore ‘such frightened expressions’. (It is a matter of the incidental cruelty of the situation that May Tilton’s fiancé was killed while she was working in the gas wards that October.) She bathed the victims’ eyes with sodium bicarbonate, put cocaine drops in them, and relieved the outer flesh and inner membrane pain of mustard-gas burns with morphine. She and other nurses administered oxygen from a device named ‘the octopus’, an oxygen cylinder to which many tubes and masks were attached, allowing a number of soldiers to benefit from the cylinder at the same time. But she and the other women could work in the ward only for a certain time, since the gas fumes rising from the men and their uniforms would begin to attack the nurses’ throats and eyes also, and they would go out into the open to inhale air and drink tea before returning. Sister Topsy Tyson declared after working in a ward permeated by the residue of a gas attack at Messines, ‘My throat and eyes were smarting and I felt awfully sick.’ Elsie Cook (daughter-in-law of the prime minister Joseph Cook), an Australian volunteer nurse working in a hospital near Amiens in April 1918, wrote, ‘Hundreds of gas cases coming in all night . . . they were quite blinded and suffering.’ Sister Tev Davies found that even when the gas victims got as far from the front as Boulogne, their condition was still
pitiable. ‘Mum, such cruel stuff it is . . . one runs all day with inhalations, gargles, douches, eye baths. Mercy me! Fritz is fiendish alright. Not warfare at all, it is slaughter absolutely.’

  Adolescent Fritzes, of course, suffered as badly from the same causes as did the British and Australians. Near Messines in May–June 1917 a mixture of explosive and gas shells were fired at the German batteries to force the gun crews to wear their masks continuously and so deny them sleep. In reciprocation, in July the artillery of the 2nd, 4th and 5th Australian Divisions at Ypres were shelled with mustard gas and, at a breath, the 4th Division’s artillery lost four officers and 117 men. Near Polygon Wood, close to Ypres, the Australian Pioneer Squads, whose job was to lay down the duckboards leading to the frontline, continually suffered from burns due to the mustard gas oil which settled into the soil of shell holes and impregnated their clothing. These were considered minor problems compared to those visited upon the troops by explosive shells. But gas so terrified the troops and so impregnated the air and soil that Colonel Butler, the official historian, mentions cases of men disabled by the sincere belief they had been gassed when they had not. Gas lingered in the air in any case and reduced men to speaking in croaking voices.

  The back areas were regularly shelled with gas as a means of preventing reinforcements and supplies from moving, and to disable the gunners. In the summer and early autumn of 1917, the German chemical officers were favouring shells named Blue Cross, which released what was called a ‘sneezing gas’ penetrating the respirators, then they changed over to Yellow Cross mustard gas to catch those who had taken their masks off. On the night of 28 October, at Passchendaele, the officers and men of the 5th and 6th Batteries were put totally out of action by gas. On 2 November, two battery commanders were gassed and died within forty-eight hours. Even in the support line, the 25th Battalion, six officers and 202 men were gassed and bivouacs had to be changed again and again because of mustard gas impregnation of the soil.

  Particularly from 1917 troops found the bombing of front and rear areas unnerving, the bombers coming in low and releasing their high-explosive bombs by a lever and to great effect. ‘Fritz is a constant visitor over these parts nearly every night,’ wrote a soldier from hospital. In the dark of the night, casualty clearing stations and hospitals ran the risk of being bombed. In July 1917 the 3rd Australian Casualty Clearing Station was near a railroad at Passchendaele and close to an observation balloon unit and suffered accordingly, one tent of patients disappearing. Every bottle of anaesthetic in the operating theatres was shattered. The mortuary was hit with grisly results. One stretcher case was found deeply embedded in the earth, dead of concussion, still on his stretcher. The attrition from bombing continued for two months, and the wounded, immobilised on their beds, felt very exposed during these attacks. Nor were nurses immune. One nurse, Alice Ross King, winner of the Military Medal, found it hard to be ordered away from her wounded into a dugout as bombs fell. In late 1917 another Australian nurse, Eileen King, serving in a tented field hospital in France, had her left thigh broken when a stick of bombs fell. She continued to work, getting patients out of a burning marquee. For this she was also awarded the Military Medal.

  SHELL SHOCK

  There were cases of war-induced ‘madness’ even at Gallipoli, and the 287 cases ultimately evacuated from Gallipoli were only the worst instances. Some men who landed at Gallipoli were already suffering from mental disease. One of Australia’s senior medical consultants, Dr Harry Maudsley, claimed that some of these soldiers had been specifically advised by their practitioners to enlist, for the transportation to the battle zone and a bracing involvement in combat were seen as potential cures for their condition.

  Even so, the possibility of psychiatric problems arising at Gallipoli had not occurred to the military beforehand, and the system for recording the causes why men were evacuated were crude. In aid stations on the slopes running down to Anzac Cove, regimental medical officers began to see tremors, stammering, speechlessness (mutism or aphonia) and paralysis. Previously brave young men who, without being physically wounded, were obviously unfit to carry on were taken off the beach to the island of Lemnos or to Malta or Alexandria to recuperate.

  At Gallipoli there was never relief. There could be no going AWL, ducking back to a village for wine or the company of women, as the Australians in France became notorious for. Only on a rare leave on Lemnos or Imbros was such release from pressure possible. Neuroses and mental breakdown were not the preserve of the private soldier. From 25 April 1915 Lieutenant Colonel W.T. Paterson amazed other officers by his behaviour, hunting around with a revolver in his hand ‘looking for General Bridges to kill him’. Paterson was shipped out to Lemnos and eventually to Egypt with ‘nervous instability’. Of men like Paterson, the commander of the 4th Field Ambulance, L.J. Beeston, wrote, ‘The number of officers clearing out is not commendable. One cannot wonder at the men’s squibbing it, one is more and more surprised at officers in whom we would have placed every confidence before the war and they are so bare-faced about it.’

  But was everyone who went ‘squibbing it’? The nurse May Tilton remembered nursing a twenty-year-old who regained his reason but had lost his ability to talk in more than nearly inaudible murmurs. ‘He told me in the faintest whisper that he saw his two elder brothers killed one day on the peninsula. He went mad and wanted to rush the Turks’ trenches; remembered being prevented; then knew no more.’

  Major Alfred Campbell, who would serve in Egypt and run the first ‘nerve hospital’ for diggers at Randwick in Sydney, wrote of the trigger for mental disorder that ‘in most the cause was a severe shock, such as a shell explosion close at hand, lifting them in the air and burying them with debris’. One man had been rendered blind due to psychic shock within a few minutes of landing at Anzac Cove. He made a rapid recovery and returned to the front but the first nearby shell explosion brought the blindness on again. ‘These were not necessarily wanting in courage,’ said Campbell. ‘Many of them possibly self-goaded continued on duty for weeks . . . some were finally knocked out, but not wounded, by an explosion of some kind.’

  Campbell took particular note of a case of the condition named hemichorea in a young man who had done considerable trench fighting at Gallipoli. ‘Movements of face, trunk and limbs on one side so violent that the subject was unable to walk, use a bed pan or take food unassisted.’

  In 1916, as the Australians went into action in France, the British military were still avoiding the term ‘shell shock’. They divided all such cases diagnosed in the field into two categories—one was ‘shell concussion’, the symptoms of concussion of the brain or spinal cord of a severe nature, and the second was ‘nervous shock’. Soldiers in the first category were to be evacuated as wounded, and the second as sick. The latter were directed to special clearing stations behind the lines.

  In France, the men in the frontline did not doubt the reality of shell shock. Doomed young Lieutenant Raws saw the officer commanding the 23rd Battalion go ‘temporarily mad’ and desert his men. References to temporary madness stud soldiers’ letters, and later—even in civilian life—the madness and the torment could return and become more permanent. Raws mentions in a letter to his sister dated 8 August 1916 that ‘the strain had sent two officers mad’. But comrades do not seem to blame other men for this temporary madness from which men often recovered; nor, in the case of those with whom a range of symptoms became more permanent, did they despise. The term ‘poor fellow’ was often used for those who were sent back to the rear with manifestations of more long-running mental disorders. W.C. Watson saw men crazed by shells bursting near them. ‘It was pitiful to see the nervous wrecks of men being led out by the hand crouching in terror at the sound of every passing shell.’

  How temporary madness and ultimate shell shock might arise is suggested by Corporal Archie Barwick, who wrote, ‘As the ground heaved under the frightful bombardment any amount of men
were driven stark staring mad and more than one of them rushed out of the trenches towards the Germans, any amount of them could be seen crying and sobbing like children, their nerves completely gone. How on earth anyone could stand it God alone knows. We were all nearly in a state of silliness and half-dazed.’ Captain G.D. Mitchell, a young man who would later write a book on his experience, Backs to the Wall, admitted that at the beginning of the winter of 1916 a nearly disabling terror overwhelmed him. It was probably a delayed reaction, he believed, for the night was quite still, there was no bombardment and he was on listening duty—listening in particular for enemy activity and patrols. ‘In that hour was born in me a fear that lasted throughout the whole winter. It was the dread of dying in the mud, going down into that stinking morass and though dead being conscious throughout the ages. It was probably a form of claustrophobia.’ Indeed, one of the common triggers of ‘madness’ or shell shock was burial alive in soil impregnated with gas, rats and body parts. Sergeant J.R. Edwards of the medical detail attached to the 27th Battalion wrote almost cheerily of the experience of being buried alive. He and a friend were lying together in a recess of a trench running alongside the road between the village of La Boisselle and Pozières. At one o’clock La Boisselle came ‘under attention’ from the German gunners.

  A 5.9 landed fair on the parapet above our ‘possie’. It broke down the 3 or 4 feet of earth above the recess, and buried us . . . I tried to raise a cry but the earth was over my face and my hands were pinned across my chest by the weight . . . I struggled like hell but could do nothing. All of a sudden the pressure became heavier; it was irresistible, and I was blotted out. I recollect thinking, ‘I’m gone’, and knew nothing more until coming to in the colonel’s dugout sometime later.