Australians, Volume 2

by Thomas Keneally

  Prisoners’ rations could be supplemented by food packages from Australia and Miss Chomley’s Australian Red Cross POW Department, which sent food parcels every fortnight containing meat, tea, jam, butter and tobacco. Some repatriated prisoners, including Private W. Mayo of the 53rd Battalion, said they would not have survived without the Red Cross parcels. But often the packages were plundered or German guards would tease prisoners with their contents and then withdraw them. In Lechfeld camp, Sergeant Batteram said that for the first ten or eleven weeks ‘the Germans robbed us of our parcels’, but when the distribution of parcels continued, they were mutilated or smashed. Private Patrick Regan wrote, ‘Prisoners tended to be as much resigned as resentful at having items pinched knowing as most did that the guards had little to eat themselves.’ The guards also received letters from home complaining of food shortages, and the fruitcake and preserves from Australia were better-quality food than any of them were getting. The battle cruiser Australia and the light cruisers Sydney and Melbourne were operating in the North Sea as part of the Grand Fleet preventing neutral ships from carrying goods to Germany, and thus contributing to the discomfort of Australian and other prisoners, and of their guards and their guards’ families. The Australians pitied fellow prisoners—Italians, Russians—who received no such relief as Miss Chomley offered at all. Private J.P.V. Marrinon claimed that many Russians and Italians simply died of starvation or misuse. From pity, the Australians gave some of the food that arrived by parcel to prisoners from other countries.

  Many prisoners were sent in groups or ‘commandos’ to work in salt or coal mines or lime quarries. Here hours were long and food even more basic. Private W. Grant performed a variety of ‘commando’ work, from railway building at Halle to timber-cutting near Dülmen camp. He claimed that when he was sent to a labour camp in a quarry, he experienced delayed parcels and brutality, the guards driving men along with the butts of their rifles. Men who were considered disobedient or lazy had a period in what Private White called the ‘silly stand’, standing at attention for a period of hours at the guard’s discretion. Private Noll was flogged with a whip at a quarry. ‘Threats to shoot us were frequent and we were starved,’ he declared. But some of the prisoners went to work on farms and factories and had a better time of it both as regards labour and rations. Just the same, Private Meyers was sent back from a hospital before he had properly recovered from an infection and was put to work in a timber yard. He asked to see a doctor. ‘I was made to stand to attention for two and a half days and during that time I was kicked by four guards and slashed about with a rifle and bayonet.’ Even so, the Australians were appalled by the condition of foreign ‘prisoners of respite’ who were used for labour close to the enemy lines. ‘During October 1917,’ wrote Private White, ‘I saw fifteen hundred prisoners of war who had been working behind the lines since April 1917 . . . they were practically skeletons, helping each other along.’

  POWs asked Miss Chomley to write to their mothers and wives and reassure them, and she obliged. Her work hours must have extended into the long English twilight of summer and the dour early nights of winter.

  A Lance Corporal Baird tried with other Australians to escape the prison depot in Lille. Miss Chomley was able to verify for his family that he had not been shot on recapture but had received fourteen days’ solitary confinement. Indeed some families had been initially informed of their soldier’s death, and then received the welcome news of his being a POW. Sadly, some of these died of disease, often as a result of the impact of wounds on the immune system. Private Bisset was initially reported as having been killed in action, again through the work of Miss Chomley and Miss Deakin was found to be a POW, only to die in captivity in the late months of the war or early months of the peace. Lieutenant Arthur Dent’s family received a notification that their son had been killed in action in November 1916 in the final days of the Battle of the Somme, but then Mary Chomley’s office was able to tell Mrs Dent that her son, though badly wounded, was alive and a POW in Germany. Dent would ultimately write a letter of glowing gratitude to Miss Chomley and her staff. ‘Untold sufferings are alleviated by their prompt attention to the prisoner’s requirements.’

  ‘My dear friend,’ Private Clare addressed her in a letter. ‘The winter here is very severe, snow and ice, but thanks to your society, I do not feel the cold.’ The 1917 Christmas parcels arrived in packaging which displayed Australian wattle and a map of the continent, and came at a time when the prisoners were yearning for a blazing Australian summer.

  But Mary Chomley was not always praised. Sometimes the frustrations of prisoners were directed at her. She received a letter of complaint from a group of NCOs about their unfulfilled needs, although one Sergeant Alex Campbell was quick to write her a letter of apology. Watt Finlay wrote to her in July 1918: ‘Ask any Australian here what he is going to do directly he arrives in England—and what do we hear? “Go direct to the Red Cross and meet Miss Chomley . . . She’s the goods.”’

  A similar body, the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Bureau, was founded and run by Vera Deakin, the daughter of the former prime minister Alfred Deakin, from London Red Cross offices, and collaborated with Miss Chomley’s office in matters to do with POWs. For the sake of families in Australia it scoured the hospitals, base depots, war front and POW camps for news of individual Australian soldiers. During one month alone in 1917, Miss Deakin and her staff had to attend to 4000 inquiries. Eva Collins, for example, wrote to the Australian Red Cross about her brother, Private John Collins, who had been reported wounded and missing at Fromelles. Two of his friends, Vera Deakin reported, had seen him stricken with ‘a couple of machine gun bullets in his side’. Yet Miss Chomley’s and Miss Deakin’s departments, working in cooperation, were able to confirm by December that Private Collins was a prisoner in Germany.

  On thousands of others no definite news was ever received, there being none. They were many who simply vanished, children and brothers and husbands who had been torn to gobbets by heavy artillery, or whose bodies, gouged by machine-gun bullets, sank into the mud of France or Flanders.

  An Australian army nurse, Alice Ross King, wrote to Vera Deakin, concerned about the disappearance of her fiancé, Harry Moffitt. She had met him in Egypt just after he had been evacuated with all the others from Gallipoli, but he had disappeared at Fromelles while serving as the adjutant of the 53rd Battalion of the AIF, a position held in peacetime by officers in their forties but in the Great War by boys. Vera’s pursuit of the truth in this matter, as in others, was admirable. On 28 October 1916 she wrote to the anxious Alice, now serving at Number 1 Australian General Hospital in Rouen, that an eyewitness had seen Lieutenant Moffitt killed by a shell, the same shell that had killed his remarkably young battalion commander, Colonel Norris. Vera would write a further series of letters to Alice based on the bureau’s remarkable breadth of research amongst survivors of Fromelles, and other sources such as the Red Cross. When Harry Moffitt’s name appeared on a German-released death list it meant, as Vera Deakin told Alice Ross King, that the Germans had found his pay book and identification disc, very likely on his dead body. Alice absorbed this and continued to nurse at Rouen, amongst other things roasting chestnuts on the stoves in her ward as a treat for the wounded. Even then, Vera Deakin did further research, and in January 1917 wrote again to say that a sergeant in the 53rd Battalion reported that he saw Major Moffitt suffer a head wound and die instantly. Given the deaths she had seen occur at Rouen, and the intractable wounds that presented themselves there and often went septic or gangrenous, Alice could console herself with the idea that Harry Moffitt’s death had been instantaneous. His grave was never found.

  The admirable Miss Chomley returned to Australia after the war, but then later went back to London to pursue a career as an emigration official. In December 1918 Vera Deakin’s office was visited by young Australian airman and escaped POW Thomas White, who had absconded from Istanbul by st
eamer in the later summer of 1918. They were engaged within three weeks. Later Thomas White would stand for the National Party and serve in the cabinet of Stanley Melbourne Bruce throughout the mid-1920s.

  BEARING STRETCHERS

  Stretcher bearers’ journals show something of the shambles of the frontline and—given that their job was not primarily to fight but they still took heavy casualties in their own ranks—provide a particular lens on the war in France. Even before the first official action there were, said W.C. Watson, ‘Several cases of noses blown right off, to say nothing of fractures—shock, etc.’ At the field dressing station where he worked as part of the 5th Division, George Faulkner treated a Private Brice of the 57th Battalion who ‘was in great agony, died in our arms, as soon as we lifted him off the ambulance car’. On 19 July 1916, the day the Battle of Fromelles was to begin, it was Faulkner’s turn to go up to the trenches. He thought that the brigade going into the trenches had ‘a sort of heavy, dull manner, not usually like our Australians’.

  By the end of the next day, ‘My back and loins are as tho broken from carrying our good brave lads . . . The regimental stretcher bearers who without a doubt are as brave as any men in the army were either shot, fagged out or gone in the nerves.’ As a result not many wounded were arriving at the dressing posts and field ambulance stations during the day the battle waned. On the night following a dozen volunteers, including Faulkner, crawled out into no-man’s-land and brought back eight cases. Their priority, retrieval, was not the chief priority of men on either side of the line. ‘The snipers made it too hot, so we had to give it up. All day today we can see on to No Man’s Land by periscope at least five cases trying to move to give us a signal they are still alive.’

  They brought in three during the following day by throwing them first a water bottle and then a rope they could attach to themselves and be dragged to safety. After withdrawing from the enemy positions they had temporarily held, Faulkner said, ‘all the lads were emphatic on two points’. One was the lack of reinforcements, the other was that their own 5th Division artillery had—for lack of practice—killed and wounded many of their own men. Back at the field ambulance station, ‘as near as we can estimate we have since Wednesday midday till Friday midday treated nearly 3,400 cases—the majority of these were carried in’—there not being sufficient motor ambulances. Around the dressing stations a little further forward many dead were being buried. On 24 July, a Monday, Faulkner and his friends heard a faint voice over the parapet and leaned over to drag in a Private Morris from Sydney who had been out there since the Thursday morning before.

  Back in the reserve line, no one was safe. Even while pumping water into a bucket by a disused convent wall, a sniper’s bullet came close to finding Faulkner. Artillery was wreaking great damage either side of the line and Faulkner could hear the Germans’ trumpet playing, a signal for the need for stretcher bearers. It was a good day when he could write, ‘Not many casualties.’ And, Faulkner observed, one of the wounded made the men in the dressing station laugh hysterically when he clapped the doctor on the back and said, ‘Give us a tot, Doc—never mind the wound.’

  The rebuilt 5th Division had returned to the front at Bapaume in the late spring of 1917. The stretcher bearers found they could not force their way back with the wounded through the crowds of reinforcements, ammunition carriers, ration bearers, runners, etc. ‘As it is impossible for us to convey the wounded down the saps, we have to do it all over the top and we are under observation from Fritz on his slight elevation . . . it is very evident a lot of us will never leave the Somme. I am sadly afraid our infantry are also disheartened and as great things are expected of them they are not getting a fair show.’ He believed their rations were poor to the point of dispiriting them. In these conditions, too, a dozen of the stretcher bearers were out of action through ‘Blightys’, wounds for which they would be taken out of the line and perhaps sent to England. Some of them were suffering shell shock—the fact that Faulkner uses the term in a journal in late 1916 shows that the soldiers believed in it as a distinct condition.

  The bearers at Bapaume felt they were under observation from the steeple of the church. To collect the wounded they had to hurry across a hundred yards of open ground. Faulkner describes a very tragic coincidence when three of the twelve men detailed from the infantry to help them in the stretcher bearing were hit by a shell while taking a spell in a dugout. One was killed instantly. ‘The other two had both legs blown off from the thighs and they were in great agony, we could not do much for these poor fellows . . . We were all completely done in from ploughing knee deep through the stiff mud.’

  In early February 1917, Faulkner became close to one of the wounded men who had multiple wounds in his right leg and side. ‘Absolutely the best patient I have yet handled—he died while in our charge from secondary haemorrhage and I had the painful duty of taking charge of his personal belongings.’ He extracted a promise from Faulkner that Faulkner would write to Miss R. Edwards of Stanmore, Sydney to whom he was engaged.

  On 17 March the Australians took Bapaume. They were exhilarated and it was probably the best day for the AIF in what would be a fierce year on the Western Front. Moving up to tend to wounded, Faulkner ‘saw a captain hung up on the entanglements—also a lance corporal who had died but not without his victim, who lay alongside him—many souvenirs in the form of photos, postcards etc were offering’. Faulkner preferred to leave it all alone.

  Though there was no doubting Faulkner’s bravery, when General Birdwood came and visited the field ambulances and invited the stretcher bearers to attend an officers’ school, the stretcher bearer declined. ‘Twenty volunteered. I was nearly going to apply but I thought it better to be a live coward than a Lance Jack Lieutenant with a DCM and wooden cross.’ It was a curious observation given the number of stretcher bearers who died and that his chances of acquiring a wooden cross in the field ambulance were very good.

  The subsequent Australian attack on Bullecourt on 2–4 April 1917 would be greeted by Faulkner with the cry, ‘horrors and more horror’.

  Afterwards he went looking around the village of Ligny-Thilloy and the bloody crossroads near to Factory Corner where not only the recent dead but the Australian remains from an action the previous November were scattered. He was searching for the body of a friend named Hubert O’Kelly, ‘who I am sure fell just about there’. He knew O’Kelly’s family would want to know where. ‘My friend, Les Bowden, who was looking for a friend had the very good fortune to identify him by some papers strewn about.’ There is an unutterable poignancy to the picture of these two young searching a spring meadow for the dead. Faulkner somehow worked out from the Royal Engineers’ survey post that O’Kelly had fallen one and a half miles from Ligny-Thilloy. ‘I would like to put up a cross, about fifty metres from either the right survey post or the big mound where some dozen Tommies are buried.’ On Anzac Day 1917 he struck out across country from a rest area to try to find the grave of another friend, Percy Single, near Mouquet Farm.

  Meanwhile, he expressed something close to envy of a wounded friend. ‘Poor old Reg Wood’s got a nice Blighty, got a nice little piece of HE in the thigh that missed the femoral artery.’ Carrying a man, he found himself hit on the head by shrapnel, which made a hole in his steel helmet. ‘Captain Young or Captain Beard would easily have given me a Blighty ticket—if I had been less honest—all I had to say was that I couldn’t carry on and had a headache, but I couldn’t pretend.’

  Suddenly something more serious befell him. The copybook handwriting now vanished from his journal, and was succeeded by handwriting like that of a child. Obviously, his writing arm has been lost. He confided to his journal that he was wounded at Bullecourt on 15 May. ‘Arm amputated on 18th. Stayed at Number Eight Rouen till 3.30 am on 25th, lay on troop ship E812 till 10.30 on 27th.’ Queen Alexandra Hospital at Millbank received him. ‘Great kindness everywhere.’

  THE M
ODEL GENERAL MAKES THE MODEL BATTLE

  John Monash was not particularly liked by C.E.W. Bean, the lanky redhead official correspondent and, later, historian. Monash in return believed that both his 4th Brigade at Gallipoli and then his 3rd Division in France received inadequate praise in the pieces C.E.W. Bean wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald. Bean depicted Monash on 3 May 1918, during the German spring offensive, as talking of a ‘disaster’, of seeming shaken. He reserved the strongest criticism he had of any general for Monash. To what extent Bean’s attitude was based on what he saw—with some justice—as Monash’s powers of self-promotion, and to what extent on Monash’s German heritage and Jewishness, is hard to say.

  The Australian government—in the absence of Prime Minister Billy Hughes, who was travelling in the United States—had approved the appointment of Monash as commander of the new Australian Corps on 18 May 1918. Monash was delighted. It was, he said, ‘the finest corps command in the British Army’ and also one of the largest, consisting of 166 000 men. General Birdwood himself, administrative head of the AIF—or, in title, General Officer Commanding—was almost simultaneously invited by the British to take over the shattered British Fifth Army, which had caved in under the German spring offensive, and re-form it. At the same time he was to continue in his job as GOC of the Australians. From the beginning of Australian campaigning in France, Lieutenant General William Birdwood, an English soldier appointed to overall command of the Australians and New Zealanders at Gallipoli, had left his staff in London under the industrious and clever Australian General Brudenell White and gone amongst the troops. He became a favourite with the Australians, and instinctively understood the difference between their military casualness and genuine indiscipline.