Zero Hour (8 page)

SHEETS OF ICE

On 19 November, the battlefield conditions forced Haig to end the Somme offensive. The weather was a blessing for the Germans; it gave them time to recover and develop new defensive systems.

Since the battle had started, four and a half months earlier, over 500,000 British troops had been killed or wounded— the precise number their commanders had planned for. All that had been gained for those lives was an advance of eight kilometres. Although the French at Verdun had been relieved, the German Army hadn't collapsed and even the attempt to kill more Germans seemed to have failed—Australians patrolling in no-man's-land counted three British corpses for every dead German.

Gloomy drizzle settled over the land. The Australians stayed in the Somme trenches, peering through the winter grey towards the quiet German lines. The thinly held Allied trenches were almost invisible in the mud, and some carrying parties missed them, continuing on into German trenches. The back roads were slowly repaired, and materials arrived to fix the trenches. Eventually the men walked on wooden duckboards rather than mud, and sheltered under heavy sheets of iron. The New Zealanders took over the swampy land in front of Fromelles, manning strong points with nicknames like ‘Windy Post' and ‘Charred Post'.

In December, snow covered the land. Water in bottles froze solid, and hot tea iced over within a minute. Icicles hung from trench walls and helmets. It was the worst winter in 40 years. The men's hands and feet froze, and their thoughts turned to home and loved ones. They welcomed the sheepskin jackets and hot food delivered to the trenches and the cocoa and soup served in old jam tins at stalls on the way up to the front-line. Wrapped in layers of clothes, their greatcoats covered in frost, they burned anything they could get their hands on. In billeted barns they crowded around braziers, reading, writing or playing cards. They visited the warmer YMCA tents to chat, drink hot cocoa, write letters home or watch concerts.

The men loved getting letters from home, but Lieutenant George Mitchell recalled that ‘the longer a man served, the fewer letters he got, the more he was forgotten'. Others complained that their letters had been lost or slowed down because of the submarine menace. Some sent letters home threatening not to write again until they received a reply.

It was a long hard winter, and many soldiers, like Mitchell, waited, knowing that ‘some day there will be warmth, light and laughter—some day—for some of us!'

MORE WOODEN CROSSES

As the Australians and New Zealanders drained their trenches, brought in fresh bedding straw and tried to recuperate, reinforcements trickled in to rebuild the decimated battalions to fighting strength for the coming spring.

The French could tell immediately if a soldier was new or returning after a wound. The new troops all had the same ‘happy, hopeful, young faces.' Once in France, New Zealand reinforcements were trained in bomb throwing and the ‘spirit of the bayonet' at the ‘bullring' at Étaples. The Australians were trained in their brigades. They were then transported to the front in cattle carriages with signs saying ‘40 men or 8 horses'. The journey was slow, and at each stop, troops left the carriages to stretch, buy alcohol or play two-up.

Closer to the front the mood changed, especially when hospital trains, loaded with the wounded, passed by. When Australian Sergeant Eric Evans, a new reinforcement, arrived at Messines in Belgium, 11 kilometres from Ypres, the sight of the many wooden crosses silenced him and the other new soldiers.

Once at the front, the reinforcements were split up and sent to different battalions and companies. The old hands— those who'd survived the Somme—did not give them a warm welcome; the new recruits were usually the first to be killed or wounded so no one wanted to befriend them. If they got any advice it was to forget all they had learned. New officers were trusted even less; most knew less about war than the men they were to command.

ANOTHER NEW YEAR

As the end of the year drew near, both sides tried to make the best of a bad situation. Despite several brutal raids, few shots were fired and the men were able to move about in the open more freely. But the Allies marked Christmas day by bombarding the German trenches. There was to be no repeat of the informal 1914 truce. As shells tore into the Germans, the Australians and New Zealanders manning the front-line ate a ‘bully beef stew, layered with ice, though sort of warm at the bottom', with a frozen orange for dessert that needed a bayonet to slice it. The Christmas pudding had to be thawed.

In February, as the frosts melted, 500 New Zealanders struggled across no-man's-land on a final raid before moving to Messines. With German SOS flares bursting overhead, the New Zealanders stormed the enemy trench, bayoneting, bombing and shooting in the darkness. As they returned, the German artillery smothered no-man's-land, killing and wounding many.

Stretcher-bearers returned to help the wounded, well aware that they made easy targets. But the Germans didn't fire. Instead, one soldier stood up in his trench with his hands raised to show they were empty. One by one, more Germans stood up, surrounded by their own dead comrades, and raised empty hands. The stretcher-bearers removed all the wounded they could find, then returned to their trench as a shot was fired, declaring the informal truce over.

KILLED IN ACTION
____________________

PRIVATE HECTOR MCLEOD
12 October 1917

CHAPTER FIVE
RABBITS IN HOLES, 1916

SING ME TO SLEEP
(extract)

Sing me to sleep where bombs explode,
And shrapnel shells plough up the road
Over the sandbag helmets you'll find,
Wounded in front of you, wounded behind

Far, Far, from France I want to be,
Sights of New Zealand I'd rather see.
Think of me crouching in rain and sleet
Waiting for orders, but not for retreat.

BY A RETURNED TROOPER

WHEN SECOND LIEUTENANT Lindsay Inglis wrote home, he had little to say. ‘Once more from the same old place. Still living the same old life, still fighting the same old war.' Days blended into weeks and months as the men followed the same routines. In their battalions, the men spent eight days in billets, four days in the subsidiary line, and four days in the front and support lines.

The first line of defence was the front-line. Although it was lightly held to prevent annihilating casualties during bombardments, the soldiers were still expected to hold off an attack until help arrived from troops in the support line, 130 metres to the rear. This fully manned trench was considered the strongest defence line. The subsidiary line, another fully held trench, was 450 metres further back, and was used as a semi-resting position before the men returned to their billets.

In the front-line, seven to eight men defended each bay in the two-metre-deep trenches, taking turns to monitor no-man's-land through periscopes—it was too dangerous to look over the parapet. Usually, little was seen of the Germans, or ‘Fritz' as the Australians and New Zealanders called them, just the occasional grey-clad figure, or a dark silhouette moving in the distance. But ‘Parapet Joe'—a nickname for the German machine-gunners who shot up the sandbags in front of the trenches—made sure they weren't forgotten. New Zealander Lance Corporal Ernest Williams found his first night in the trenches ‘very quiet, the only thing we heard from Fritz being an occasional burst of machine-gun fire'.

At dusk, and again at dawn, the men ‘stood to' for an hour with bayonets fixed to their rifles. Both sides used the grey uncertain light to launch attacks, as those charging could see the ground but might not be spotted until too late. At ‘stand down', one sentry in each bay watched no-man's-land while the others cleaned rifles and had hot tea, bacon and bread for breakfast. During quiet days, they chatted, read, played cards, slept on the fire steps or in shelters, and wrote letters. At night—a more dangerous time—two men watched no-man's-land from each bay as the others waited or dozed, in full equipment, until their turn came.

Lieutenant George Mitchell felt that ‘night crept slowly by. Time never lags so much as when in the front line.' Once, for entertainment, he practised firing single shots with his Lewis gun. Opposite him, a German soldier copied each shot. Mitchell fired off several shots in a rhythm. The German echoed them. Mitchell shot over a rifle grenade, saying, ‘That shut the cow up.' But the German mimicked that too. After firing a phosphorous bomb, and hearing a ‘terrible yell', Mitchell returned to his dugout to read. Not long after, three of his comrades ducked for cover as a phosphorous bomb exploded over their trench.

FATIGUES , PATROLS AND RATS

When not in the front-line, soldiers did fatigues—jobs required for the maintenance and defence of the trenches. They dug ditches for telephone signal wire, and took supplies like barbed wire, corrugated iron, pickets and ammunition up to the front-line. They also took turns on ‘gas guard', and were extra alert when there was a wind from the east, which was signalled by windvanes on dugouts and trenches. Different gases had different odours, varying from rotten pears to mouldy hay to geraniums. When a suspicious smell was detected, the sentries banged on their empty shells and yelled ‘Gas!' Soldiers scrambled to put on gasmasks and manned the fire steps, as church bells tolled and horns blew.

In the darkness, groups of soldiers slipped into no-man's-land to fix broken wire entanglements or to patrol. They passed ‘advanced listening posts', in which several soldiers waited in shell holes to warn those in the front-line about enemy patrols or raids. Crawling on their bellies, they stopped and started, aware that the slightest movement or noise could draw attention to them. When the Germans illuminated no-man's-land with flares, the men froze and were mistaken for debris in the uncertain light. For Australian Sergeant Eric Evans, it was a nerve-racking time.

Those damn flares constantly rising, hovering and fading, only to be replaced by yet more. Beautiful from a distance but deadly if caught in no-man's-land, as many a patrol has discovered. It was a chilly night but we were all dripping with sweat as we lay motionless and stranded.

Two or three patrollers, armed only with revolvers and Mills bombs, tried to locate shell-damaged enemy wire for future raids and prevent the Germans from carrying out their own patrols. They listened for digging in the German lines, which might indicate preparations for an advance, but often they heard nothing more than ‘some snatches of indistinct talk or a burst of song in undertones'. They avoided enemy listening posts. If they were spotted, the Germans would alert their comrades with a ‘low whistle' or ‘the tinkle of a handbell', or perhaps just hurl a stick grenade at the men instead. If they ran into a German patrol, both sides would try to retreat secretly. If they couldn't, they'd fight a quick, brutal battle with revolvers and bombs before the survivors scurried away. If they came across a German wiring party, they returned to their lines, giving a password so they weren't mistaken for Germans, then passed on the wiring location to the artillery or machine-gunners, who targeted the area being repaired.

Each day, horse-drawn wagons carried up the next day's rations and ammunition, along with timber and iron for trench reinforcement. The supplies were dropped off at the side of the road for troops to carry to the front, along with food and hot tea from kitchens set up further back. In quieter, more established areas, the men pushed up supplies in carts on rail tracks, sprinting for their lives across exposed sections. On good days, the troops got hot tea three times, and in the evening, hot stew. At other times, the food delivery was more difficult. In his diary, Private Thomas Cleary wrote: ‘Very short of tucker yesterday. Short again today. No breakfast…Very cold and miserable.' When water was scarce, men shaved and washed around shell holes, despite knowing there might be bodies in them.

The men's dugouts—often small shelters with a corrugated roof, surrounded by sandbags—became their homes, even if they leaked and couldn't withstand a direct hit. New Zealander Rifleman Alexander Hutton felt the men lived

like rabbits in holes in the ground. It often makes me laugh to see all the heads poking out through the openings and to see how they disappear at any sign of danger in the shape of one of Fritz's shells.

At times, the incessant shellfire made it difficult to sleep, as did the lice, which moved over the men's skin. Sergeant Evans found it impossible to sleep with lice ‘gnawing' at him. ‘They are tireless brutes. My skin is already red from itching.' He killed the eggs with a lit candle—another way was to run a thumb along the seams of clothes—and got ‘satisfaction from the popping sound of burning them. But, like the “Huns”, they don't know when to give up.'

Two soldiers look out of a dugout at the front-line, Hébuterne, France.
Alexander Turnbull Library G- 13190-1/2