Our Darkest Day

by Patrick Lindsay

  Chapman, Gibbins and the survivors tried to cross no-man’s land in small parties, through the crowded communication trench, by crawling from one shell hole to the next or by making a dash for it. Some men’s luck ran out tantalisingly close to safety. One badly wounded man crawled across no-man’s land and was within metres of rescue when he was hit in the back and killed by a dud artillery shell. All the while, the rearguard led by Gibbins gave covering fire and attacked with grenades. Cass was among the last to leave and get clear. Gibbins was the last to leave his trench and followed at the tail of his men as they made their way along the communications trench. They had almost reached the Australian lines when they came across a mass of injured Diggers who blocked the exit from the communications trench to the Australian front line. Gibbins tried to by-pass the blockage by hopping over the parapet. Tragically, as he made his final step to safety, he was struck by a bullet to the head and killed instantly.

  Chapman concluded his diary note on the battle by writing of Gibbins:

  I have never known a braver man than he. If ever a man died bravely doing his duty old Gib did. Well, so ends the first fight. I am the only officer left in B Company. About 25% of the Battalion are either killed or wounded – but our losses were light in comparison to some. The 60th Btn. have only 61 men and one officer left.

  Bob Chapman was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery during the battle. He was wounded in November 1916 and sent to hospital in England to recover. He returned to France, now promoted to captain and given command of B Company of the 55th Battalion. Sadly, at 30 years of age, he was killed in action on 12 March 1917 near Bernafay Wood. His grave is in the Bernafay British Cemetery, Montauban.

  10

  DON’T FORGET ME, COBBER!

  I’ve been talking to dead men for days. There was two men came

  up to speak to me who carried their heads under their arms.

  CAPTAIN R. HUGH KNYVETT, OVER THERE WITH THE

  AUSTRALIANS, 1917

  So the attack on Fromelles had ended in complete failure. And worse was to come. Some small groups had not received the order to withdraw and fought to the last. Others refused to retreat and fought on until they were killed or ran out of ammunition and were overwhelmed and captured. Some, defenceless because they had run out of ammunition and grenades, surrendered in the face of certain death. Still others, like Lieutenant Robert Burns of the 14th Machine-Gun Company, heir to the Burns Philp shipping fortune, refused to surrender. He smashed his gun and, with a few of his surviving men, tried to make his way back. He was killed and his body never found.

  An immediate post-war view of the German concrete blockhouses along the Aubers ridgeline, towards which the Australians attacked on 19 July 1916. (AWM PHOTO E03969)

  From the Australian lines, the Diggers saw some isolated defenders vainly signalling for reinforcements for some hours. But at 9.20 am, the Bavarians reported to their HQ:

  The last of the Englishmen who were defending themselves have been captured.

  In fact it’s interesting to view the proceedings through German eyes. Major-General Julius Ritter von Braun compiled the history of the 21BRIR from its war diaries. It provides a snapshot from the enemy’s perspective, on 19 July 1916:

  7 pm. Several enemy divisions are attacking the three left units of the division. In the third unit the attack is being completely repulsed; in the fourth unit, it is only temporarily successful. On the other hand, the enemy is managing to penetrate the second unit [RIR21], initially near C [11th Company], where their artillery and heavy mortars have swept away the barriers, levelled the defence installations and destroyed most of the garrison. From here the enemy is spreading southwards to sub-unit D, where the 12th Company is blocking its continued advance in a heroic battle, and northwards towards unit 2B. There they are gradually pushing 10th Company, which they are simultaneously attacking on the front in fresh waves, back over the front end of the Kastenweg. Only here are the remaining forces of 10th and 9th Company, which will soon receive backup from the left flank company of Reserve Infantry Regiment 20, able to seal off the position. The enemy is also making deep advances in Kastenweg as far as Toten Sau Heights and to the south-west as far as the vicinity of Hofgarten, Grashof and even as far as 200 m from Brandhof. But then all attempts to secure further territory are being frustrated by our artillery fire and the accurate and superior fire of our infantrymen and the machine gunners from Toten Sau, Schmitzhofe, the left flank of the Türkenecke base and from Brandhof. Unfortunately, the Grashof base is still not ready and therefore unoccupied.

  The article goes on to report that reserves were deployed in a counter-attack, which although initially unsuccessful, tried again.

  The difficulty of communicating in pitch blackness, made all the more uncertain by the smoke from exploding shells, as well as the heavy deployment of hand grenades, is initially delaying progress. Only after the pioneers move in new munitions does the attack proceed, slowly at first, then more fiercely despite all the resistance of the enemy who have entrenched themselves and are bringing in fresh forces.

  The German report notes that by around 7 am the following morning they controlled the position once again. It also reported that the dense ground fog, which greeted the next day

  prevented a large section of the enemy forces from surveying the situation. Having left it too late to retreat, they are now finding their retreat path blocked.

  Three Australian dead in the German lines after the battle at Fromelles, taken on the morning of 20 July 1916, perhaps at the site of a temporary aid post, as indicated by the bandages and the fact that some of the Diggers’ boots have been removed. (AWM PHOTO A01565)

  The firing began to ease around midday as both sides began to take stock, doing what they could to rescue their wounded and taking prisoners back behind the front lines. The German positions were substantially damaged as their war diaries noted:

  Our own position and the Kastenweg look very bad, as well as the railway track running behind our position. It requires extensive improvements, including re-railing to a large degree. The paradoses have been extensively damaged by our own mortars and batteries during the counter-attack. New work is in progress.

  On the other side, the Australian front line was a scene straight from Hades. Hugh Knyvett was there:

  The sight of our trenches that next morning is burned into my brain. Here and there a man could stand upright, but in most places if you did not wish to be exposed to a sniper’s bullet you had to progress on your hands and knees. If you had gathered the stock of a thousand butcher-shops, cut it into small pieces and strewn it about, it would give you a faint conception of the shambles these trenches were.

  One did not ask the whereabouts of brother or chum. If we did not see him, then it were best to hope that he were of the dead.

  One of the beloved figures in the 14th Brigade, the Reverend Spencer Maxted, Chaplain of the 54th Battalion, was killed as he worked tirelessly comforting the wounded. He had refused to stay in the safety of the rear echelons and went out with the first stretcherbearers into no-man’s land.

  The Division’s medical staff had established twelve regimental aid posts (RAPs), six of which were moved forward with the assault battalions and operated from about 500 metres behind the Australian front line. They handled the casualties from no-man’s land, those brought back from behind the enemy lines and those wounded by shelling behind the Australian lines.

  The RAPs provided rudimentary treatment: morphia for pain, temporary control of bleeding, dressing open wounds, treating shellshock and splinting broken limbs. They then sorted the wounded into ‘walking’ or ‘stretcher’ cases. The walking wounded were sent on to an aid post further to the rear while the stretcher cases were loaded on to horse-drawn or motor wagons and either taken to advanced dressing stations some kilometres to the rear or sent further back to main dressing stations, out of range of the enemy’s artillery. The frantic work of the medical staff is evident from the
final tallies which show they handled, on average, one casualty every minute, non-stop for 56 hours! A total of 3277 wounded passed through the main dressing stations from noon on 19 July to 8 pm on 21 July.

  The reality was that, from midnight on the day of the battle, the flow of casualties had swamped the capacity of the medical staff and the stretcher-bearers and the front-line trenches were chock full of the wounded and dying. Even there they were still in a perilous position until they could be recovered, as the enemy shelling continued randomly. While the front lines were a confusion of wounded and dying, many more still lay exposed in no-man’s land. The communications trenches in front of each brigade’s lines were full of them. Bean, who had rushed to Fromelles from the Somme when he heard about the battle, was greatly moved:

  Especially in front of the 15th Brigade, around the Laies, the wounded could be seen raising their limbs in pain or turning hopelessly, hour after hour, from one side to the other …

  There followed a stillness never again experienced by the 5th Division in the front trenches. The sight of the wounded lying tortured and helpless in no-man’s land, within a stone’s throw of safety but apparently without hope of it, made so strong an appeal that more than one Australian, taking his life in his hands, went out to tend them.

  The Diggers organised rescue parties, and once darkness fell they crept out on their hands and knees and scoured no-man’s land to try to find and bring back those who were still alive. The sheer numbers of the wounded meant that they quickly ran out of stretchers and were forced to carry the rescued on their backs. Hugh Knyvett was one of them.

  One lad, who looked about fifteen, called to me: ‘Don’t leave me sir.’ I said: ‘I will come back for you sonny’, as I had a man on my back at the time. In that waste of dead one wounded man was like a gem in sawdust – just as hard to find.

  Four trips I made before I found him, then it was as if I had found my young brother. Both of his legs had been broken, and he was only a schoolboy, one of those overgrown lads who had added a couple of years in declaring his age to get into the army. But the circumstances brought out his youth, and he clung to me as though I were his father. Nothing I have ever done has given me the joy that the rescuing of that lad did, and I do not even know his name.

  At one stage Knyvett heard a groan. Unbelievably, he claimed this was a rarity. For, despite their terrible injuries, the wounded tried everything they could not to cry out.

  Why. Some had gritted teeth on bayonets, others had stuffed their tunics in their mouths, lest they should groan. Someone had written of the Australian soldier, in the early part of the war, that ‘they never groan’ and these men who had read that would rather die than not live up to the reputation that some newspaper correspondent had given them.

  Knyvett witnessed one extraordinary act of bravery during the rescue. He describes an unnamed sergeant (most likely Alexander Gordon Ross of the 57th Battalion, a former horse tamer from Geelong) who was with him when they found a badly wounded man on the German barbed wire:

  when we tried to pick him up, one by the shoulders and the other by the feet, it almost seemed that we would pull him apart. The blood was gushing from his mouth, where he had bitten through lips and tongue, so that he might not jeopardise, by groaning, the chances of some other man who was less badly wounded than he.

  He begged us to put him out of his misery, but we were determined we would give him his chance, though we did not expect him to live.

  But the sergeant threw himself down on the ground and made of his body a human sledge. Some others joined us and we put the wounded man on his back and dragged them thus across no-man’s land, through the broken barbed wire and shell-torn ground, where every few inches there was a piece of jagged shell, and in and out of the shell holes.

  So anxious were we to get to safety that we did not notice the condition of the man underneath until we got to our trenches; then it was hard to see which was the worse wounded of the two. The sergeant had his hands, face and body torn to ribbons, and we had never guessed it, for never once did he ask us to ‘go slow’ or ‘wait a bit’. Such is the stuff that men are made of.

  Sergeant Ross won the Distinguished Service Medal for his gallantry in the rescue. His recommendation read:

  During a raid made by a party from the 57th Battalion on the enemy’s trenches near PETILLON on the night of the 19th of August 1916, Sergt. Ross displayed great gallantry in reconnaissance work before the trenches were entered. Whilst in the trenches he set an example of absolute fearlessness in leading his party. During the retirement of the party when heavy casualties were suffered crossing ‘NO MAN’S LAND’ and whilst his enemy’s barrage was at its height, Sergt Ross went backwards and forwards repeatedly whilst assisting in the return of the party and the rescue of the wounded men. In addition, this N.C.O. has on many occasions during the three months, July–September at PETILLON, conducted most daring reconnaissance as a patrol leader along the enemy’s wire and has repeatedly gained valuable information.

  He served from beginning to end of the GALLIPOLI Campaign and did good service throughout.

  The recommendation was signed by Pompey Elliott and the award was signed by McCay.

  On another occasion Hugh Knyvett found himself in a shell hole with a wounded man who was trapped waist-deep in the mud. Seeing his rescuer, he cried out:

  It’s so good matey to see a real live man again. I’ve been talking to dead men for days. There was two men came up to speak to me who carried their heads under their arms.

  Unfortunately, the delighted man’s booming voice attracted the attention of the German machine-gunners, who peppered the edge of the hole as Knyvett held his man down. No matter how hard Knyvett tried to quieten him, the man yabbered on, even as they dug him out and slipped into a neighbouring shell hole during a lull in the firing. When they had him at last in a stretcher and were trying to silently edge their way back to their lines, the man found his full voice again:

  To cap it all, our passenger broke into song, and we just dropped in time as the bullets pinged over us. These did not worry our friend on the stretcher, nor did the bump hurt him, for he cheerfully shouted ‘Down go my horses!’

  During this rescue period, an event took place in front of the 8th Brigade’s lines where the line was held by the 29th Battalion that could have saved countless further loss of life and suffering. There are a number of variations of the story but Bean’s account is that one of the 29th’s privates, Billy Miles, a 36-year-old sailor who had fought in the Boer War, was searching for one of his officers, Captain Ken Mortimer, in no-man’s land near the German front line when he heard a voice from the enemy lines call out to him in English. The speaker was a Saxon officer who spoke English fluently and asked Miles what he was supposed to be doing. He was tending his wounded, Miles answered, giving them water and making them comfortable until they could be brought back in.

  Miles had taken the precaution of wearing a Red Cross arm badge and when the German queried him as to whether he was laying wires, he replied that the Red Cross was always allowed to go about its work unmolested. The German made him stand with his hands in the air while he spoke on a field telephone to his headquarters. Then he asked Miles his rank. Learning he was ‘just a private sir’, he told him to return to his own lines and bring back an officer.

  We will have a parlementaire and see if we can arrange about collecting the wounded.

  Promising he would return, Miles hurried back to the Australian lines where he found Captain John McArthur and explained what had happened. McArthur called for a ceasefire along his line and arranged for a rough Red Cross (made from red paper on a board covered with newspaper) to be hoisted above the parapet.

  Billy Miles was joined by his company commander, Major Alexander Murdoch, on the journey back to the German wire. On the way out through no-man’s land both men distributed as many water bottles as they could carry to their wounded. Soldiers from both front lines watched in silence as th
ey reached the German line. Murdoch asked if they could arrange an informal truce. The Bavarian officer politely replied that he didn’t have the authority but would phone through a request to his superiors. The answer came back swiftly. The Germans agreed on the basis that each side’s stretcher-bearers would work in their half of no-man’s land. Murdoch was to seek his superiors’ permission, and if it was granted to return blindfolded to be held as a hostage until the operation was completed in good faith.

  Murdoch and Miles returned and telephoned the proposal through to McCay’s HQ. While they waited for the response, an informal truce had organically spread along the line. The Australians started leaving their trenches and bringing in wounded close-by and the Germans followed suit. But McCay ordered that the truce be refused. He would later claim he had no option under the ‘definiteness of the G.H.Q. orders’ to the effect that ‘no negotiations of any kind, and on any subject, were to be had with the enemy’. He also claimed that he mentioned his actions subsequently to Generals Haking and Monro and they both supported his action. Bean took a sanguine view:

  Lt Simon Fraser of the 57th Battalion, who, as a sergeant, helped rescue hundreds of wounded Diggers from no-man’s-land after the battle at Fromelles. He is immortalised by Peter Corlett’s evocative Cobbers statue that stands in the grounds of the Australian Memorial Park outside Fromelles. (AWM PHOTO 05926)