Zero Hour (5 page)

A LONG BLURRY NIGHT

With only the 8th and 14th Brigades now fighting, German reinforcements moved out of a ruined farm, known as ‘Dead Sow Farm', to attack the isolated soldiers in the ditch. Men from the 8th Brigade were closest to the farm and took the brunt of the attack. But the Germans were quickly shot down by machine guns that the Australians had moved forward. Shelling had blocked the river's flow and the water was rising in the ditch. Unless the wounded were spotted and pulled out in time, they drowned. When the men's rifles became clogged with mud, they took dry ones from the dead. Behind them, in the captured front-line, Toll and his men worked to make the middle section secure, building up the destroyed breastworks with rotten, disintegrating sandbags and German corpses.

Then the Germans rushed down from the uncaptured Sugarloaf and moved along the empty zigzagging breastworks of their old front-line from the right, towards Toll. As they did they drew parallel with the men of the 14th Brigade in the ditch. Flares of white stars lit up a night ‘blurred by dust and smoke' and the 14th Brigade could see the spikes of German helmets moving behind them. Realising they were about to be cut off from the captured German front-line and consequently their own lines, a group charged the Germans across the open ground. They were shot down, and the survivors were forced to scramble back to the ditch.

The Germans kept moving down their old front-line towards the middle section and Toll. Bombers were sent to stop them getting further behind the men in the ditch, and when the bombers and Germans met, as many as 12 bombs were ‘in the air at a time'. Slowly, the Germans were pushed back towards the Sugarloaf. Then, at 3.15 a.m., Germans from Dead Sow Farm attacked the 8th Brigade again, overrunning part of the ditch, and reoccupying the left section of their old front-line.

The Australians had been fighting for nine hours. With Germans now back on both sides of their old line and still moving out of Dead Sow Farm, the exhausted men in the ditch were faced with a choice of surrendering or dying. Over 150 of the 8th Brigade charged back, pouring into the reoccupied German trench, where they fought savagely with the enemy, before scrambling out and rushing back towards their own trenches. Two men out of a group of 11 who'd made a pact to stick together were caught in the trench. The other nine returned to help them, then they rushed across no-man's-land. All but one made it. He was shot dead as they reached the wire entanglements.

With news reaching McCay and Haking that the 8th Brigade had retreated and the Germans were back in either end of their original front-line, Haking ordered the last Australians to withdraw. As the sky grew lighter, Toll's men in the German front-line streamed down the communication trench back to the Australian line. Those still in the ditch had no escape; the Germans were behind them. Some surrendered; others kept fighting—calling desperately for reinforcements. When they ran out of ammunition they reached for their bayonets but by 9 a.m. the attempt to capture the Sugarloaf was over. In one bombing post, seven men lay motionless in the mud.

CRYING OUT

For three more hours the German artillery pounded the smashed Australian trenches, which were filled with the dead and dying, blood and mud caking their uniforms. At midday, the shelling stopped. The ensuing stillness was broken only by the cries of the wounded lying in no-man's-land. The ‘wounded could be seen everywhere raising their limbs in pain or turning hopelessly, hour after hour, from one side to the other.' They called for help and for water as the sun burned them and flies crawled over their faces and their wounds. German bullets smacked into any that tried to crawl back. In the trenches, men sat in a state of shock, staring at nothing.

Later, while some men ate cold bully beef from the tin, others slipped out into no-man's-land, taking advantage of an informal offer by a German officer to let the wounded be collected. But when McCay found out, he ended the truce— no informal negotiations were allowed with the Germans.

Australian dead lying in a gap in a barbed-wire entanglement, Somme region.
AWM E03149

The Australians then risked their lives on mercy missions. Three hundred men were brought back on the first night, but the following day no-man's-land was still cluttered with men. One soldier with a serious head wound walked around in circles, collapsed then got up and walked again. No one could reach him. He kept walking, collapsing, getting up, until a German sniper shot him, perhaps to end his misery. The Australians drew lots to decide who would venture into no-man's-land for the wounded. Sergeant Major Arthur Brunton wrote a farewell to his wife, ‘perhaps for the last time, though I hope not'. Second Lieutenant Simon Fraser, a Victorian farmer, was bringing back a wounded soldier when someone else called out, ‘Don't forget me, cobber.' When Fraser returned with reinforcements to collect the wounded man, another soldier screamed, ‘Stretcher-bearer! stretcher-bearer!' then ‘Come on New South Wales.' He'd been out there for three days, and when he was finally brought in, his wound was fly-blown.

Many others weren't found, and they died in no-man's-land. Private Algernon Bell wrote in his diary that he was wounded ‘in arm and leg. Going to try and crawl back to trenches tonight'. He made it, but died four days later.

The first battle that the Australians fought on the Western Front was a complete failure. Over 5500 had been killed or wounded and 400 taken prisoner. In one day, the Australians suffered one-fifth of the casualties sustained during their eight months at Gallipoli. As his men returned, Elliot cried. In the 60th Battalion alone, only one officer and 106 men out of 887 made it to the morning roll call. Almost nothing had been gained. And the Germans had been distracted from the Somme for just a moment.

In his report, Haking said that the artillery barrage was strong and that the attack had failed because the British lacked fighting spirit and the Australians ‘were not sufficiently trained to consolidate the ground gained'. This ignored the fact that the ultimate objective—the German support lines—had turned out to be water-filled ditches. They ‘lost heavily', he wrote, but he felt that, despite the failure, the battle had done both the Australian and the British division ‘a great deal of good'.

The British headquarters dressed up the failure as a successful raid. In Australia, the newspapers followed the British communiqué:

Yesterday evening, south of Armentières, we carried out some important raids on a front of two miles in which Australian troops took part. About 140 German prisoners were captured.

In reality, the 5th Division had been wiped out and the survivors were demoralised. They were learning what war on the Western Front was like. Lieutenant Ronald McInnis wrote that ‘We thought we knew something of the horrors of war but we were mere recruits and have had our full education in one day.' The men of I Anzac Corps were about to find out for themselves. As the Germans buried the Australian dead in mass graves, the three divisions of the corps— the 1st, 2nd and 4th Australian Divisions—moved from Messines down to the Somme.

KILLED IN ACTION
____________________

LANCE CORPORAL GEORGE BLAKE
Carpenter. 19 July 1916

SECOND LIEUTENANT WALTER CARRUTHERS
Bank clerk. 29 September 1918

DIED OF WOUNDS
____________________

PRIVATE ALGERNON BELL
Fireman. 24 July 1916

CHAPTER THREE
THE SOMME, POZIÈRES, 1916

NOCTURNE
(EXTRACT)

Silent I sit and gaze into the gloom
Of No Man's Land, and see the shattered trees,
Set like a row of ghostly sentinels,
There where the stakes and
tangled bard-wire cease.

Now to my staring eyes
they seem to move:
Have they advanced or
were they there before?

Skyward a star-shell soars
with silver ray—
I flout my fears and think
of them no more.

PRIVATE TUNU PARAU

IN THE HOT sun on 20 July, the 1st Australian Division waited in a hastily dug trench that faced the tree-lined streets of the German-occupied hamlet of Pozières and the two formidable trenches of the second German line (known as Old German Lines) on a ridge 450 metres behind it. Whoever held Pozières had control of the highest point of the battlefield. General Sir Henry Rawlinson considered it the key to the area, and General Haig wanted it captured. British troops had tried to take the hamlet on the first day of the Somme offensive, nearly three weeks earlier. But the Germans had held on through that attack and four others, and the bodies of British dead hung in the wire.

On 19 July, the men of the 1st Division had left their billets and marched 15 kilometres, leaving behind the green countryside as they got closer to the front-line. Just before the town of Albert, the men put on their tin hats, and officers discarded their ‘Sam Browne' revolver belts so snipers couldn't easily distinguish their rank. They passed under a golden statue of the Virgin Mary and child hanging from a shelled cathedral in Albert. The Australians nicknamed her ‘Fanny Durack' after the 1912 Olympic swimming and diving champion. The statue was by now famous and symbolic—both sides believed its fall would signify the end of the war. Then the Australians crossed a shell-holed land and barely recognisable German trenches. In the dark, they moved through a gas attack into the trench facing Pozières— the gas smelled sweet, like hyacinths.

The I Anzac Corps was now under the command of General Sir Hubert Gough of the Reserve Army (soon to become the 5th Army), a relatively inexperienced British general who wanted immediate results. On 18 July, Gough had told the 1st Division commander, Lieutenant General Sir Harold Walker, ‘I want you to go into the line and attack Pozières tomorrow night.' Walker, feeling that he might be rushed into an action that was ‘hasty or ill-considered' argued for a postponement. The date was set for 23 July, when Haig's third great effort on the Somme would begin. Six divisions, stretched from Pozières to Guillemont, would advance—the Australians were to attack Pozières; the British, Guillemont. After proper artillery preparations, the Australians were to overrun Pozières trench, which surrounded the hamlet, and go on to capture a main road running through its centre.

HAIL STORM

As zero hour approached, the men's fears grew. It was the worst time, the waiting. According to Lieutenant Ben Champion, ‘The tension affected the men in different ways. I couldn't stop urinating, and we were all anxious for the barrage to begin.' Men re-read letters, looked at photos they carried in their breast pocket, wrote farewell letters, prayed silently or chain-smoked to calm their nerves. Some vomited; others told jokes. No one wanted to let themselves or their comrades down.

Three hours after sunset on 22 July, the first waves went ‘over the bags' and, keeping low, moved up close to the enemy line, where they waited for zero hour. The Germans waited inside their dugouts; one soldier wrote to his wife and children that he was in ‘Hell's trenches', and had ‘given up hope of life' and would think of them to his last moment. Then the artillery struck. German flares floated downwards as the British bombarded them with such intensity that the shell bursts could be seen 30 kilometres away. The gunners loaded and fired shells as fast as they could. This was the bombardment the Australians had needed at Fromelles.

At 12.30 a.m., as the artillery lifted off Pozières trench and back to the orchards on the hamlet's outskirts, officers blew their whistles and the first wave charged. They quickly overcame the shell-shocked Germans holding Pozières trench. Following waves passed over the trench, stumbling over shell holes, through dark hedges and the remains of gardens and houses, to reach what was left of the main street. A three-metre-high reinforced concrete blockhouse was the only structure still standing; out of a slit poked a machine-gun muzzle. The Australians charged from the side, surprising the 25 Germans inside. Down in the lower chamber, Private Jack Bourke found parcels and several letters addressed to soldiers in children's handwriting. Nearby was a German trench coat with a blood-stained shrapnel hole.

The Australians gained the only notable success that day; the British troops had failed to secure Guillemont.

During the day, the Australians shot down three German attempts to recapture the hamlet, then rested or searched the nearby ruins, dugouts and German dead for souvenirs. As they waited for night, the two colonels in charge of the next advance received an ‘urgent and secret' message that insisted the Australians had to be more disciplined and must salute all British officers, even those driving past in cars. That night the 1st Division captured the rest of Pozières, but from seven o'clock the next morning, the German artillery responded, and for the next three days their shells fell like hail. At times, 15 to 20 shells a minute were bursting in the same spot. The Germans had abandoned the idea of recapturing Pozières, so their gunners set out to make it unliveable. Trenches disappeared and the debris from one exploding shell would simply fill in the crater next to it. Men were blown to pieces, or killed by the concussion waves from the blasts. Others were buried alive. If they were lucky, their comrades dug them out in time and they gasped for breath as the air about them shrieked and whistled with incoming shells. On 25 July, Sergeant Leonard Elvin wrote: