Eyewitness (4 page)

The afternoon wore on and I suddenly saw men crossing the trench a little way to my right – amongst them was Col. Owen. I wished afterwards I had gone alone and spoken to him – that was really my chance and I should have found Jack; but he was some way away and I didn’t. The shelling went on and on – of course a good many bullets were nipping overhead – you heard the whistle and the low scrub just above the trench bank looked pretty dangerous …

It was getting on towards evening so I decided to go on and find 3
^rd
Bn, if I could, myself. I went along the trench to near the mouth, jumped out, and ran across the top and at once found myself in a little dip in the front side of the hill. There were a few men there, all lying down under the brow of the slope. On the edge of the slope was standing – I think he came up at that moment – Evans, the machine-gun officer of the 3
^rd
Bn … and I told him I was glad to see he wasn’t hit. I lay down under the cover of the edge of the ridge – it was slight cover – but he sat up on the edge of it all by himself, treating the bullets as if they did not exist, and they were pretty thick. The men were lying down pretty closely and I did the same. He didn’t know where Jock’s dressing station was and the men of the 3
^rd
Bn with him didn’t either. (I think it must have been in that very place to start off with.) As I lay there a lot of New Zealanders came up the hill and lined this ridge to left and right: the firing seemed to be heavy away to our left all the time and I couldn’t help thinking that the Turks were getting round our left flank … As we were lying there six guns just behind us somewhere opened over our heads with a delicious salvo. It was like a soothing draught of water to hear those guns blaze at the Turks …

I went down and found H.Q. about dinner time. I thought I noticed the fellows seemed rather quiet with me – I couldn’t help wondering if they had heard that anything was wrong with Jock. After dinner – I forget what time – Col. White told me that he had seen Jock. ‘He was very cheerful – I don’t think Howse thinks he’s been badly hit,’ he said. That was the first I heard of it. Howse told me he had seen him and he never saw a wounded man better – not the least sign of collapse. ‘I don’t think the bullet hit any important part,’ he said. ‘It was still in – but I don’t think it hit the intestine.’ He said Jock had gone off to a hospital ship – he didn’t know which. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon Jock was hit. He was the only medical officer wounded.

When I got down to the beach I found that almost everyone had a dugout – a sort of ditch cut, something between a grave and a cave, into the creek side. The General’s was pretty well finished.

Next it was a little one which Glasfurd was sharing with Casey – they asked me to sit in it – a sort of little kennel place. They were awfully kind …

I presently got my things and started on a dugout for myself. I started first up amongst the signallers. Several of them were lying cooped up there in little half-circular places, not unlike tiny sandpits. I found a vacant corner – only a few feet, for the whole place was covered with these dugouts especially on the south side (for protection against Kaba Tepe). I started to dig. The man in the dugout next door strongly objected – I don’t know who it was. ‘What do you want to keep a man awake with that damned digging for?’ he asked. ‘Haven’t you got any bloody consideration?’ I thought that was a bit humorous – a chap who was safely cuddled up in his dugout objecting to me making one on a night like this. I went on – but I presently got a better place on the other side of the creek a little way up the bank, just above the beach. As I was digging Ramsay and Murphy came up and gave me a hand – it really was a welcome help for I was fearfully hot. When they finished the dugout looked quite well – we heaped the earth on the Kaba Tepe side of it, which would keep out shrapnel bullets. But after they had finished I went on and dug and dug until it seemed to me ordinarily safe against gun fire from either flank – Kaba Tepe might get your boots, but not much else …

I don’t know what time it was – perhaps 10 p.m. – when the dugout was finished. The staff were mostly sitting somewhere around not far from the General’s dugout. In front of it was another dugout for the office which was also used as a mess room – tea was going there at meal times. But I, like most others, never felt in the least hungry and needed very little to drink. After the dugout was finished I fetched my pack, haversack and things there … The following morning first thing I went out and cut some arbutus branches and spread them overhead with the waterproof sheet over them for a roof. I had a post across the top and Riley helped me heap sandbags there for a bit of head cover – very heavy work but it made the dugout reasonably safe and was certainly needed for the roof was hit with shrapnel pellets. The dugout was never wide but it was safe. I used to write there at night after turning in – scribbling notes into the notebook from which I am transcribing this. The nights were moonlit and fortunately one could see to write by the light of the moon (for I had no other light) on most nights. But on Sunday and Wednesday nights when it was wet, and before the moon rose or after she went down, one could only guess at the position of the words one wrote, and I found pages afterwards scribbled over with lines written one on top of the other. One had not many hours of sleep – three or four this Sunday night – perhaps from 10 to 4 the following nights. There was a cup of tea at 4.30 and breakfast at 7. This continued for about four or five days when the hour became seven o’clock breakfast, one o’clock lunch and about six or seven o’clock dinner – I was always very irregular so I never really knew what hours these meals were. I was out the whole day and wrote at night what little I did – bare notes. It was the third day – or perhaps the second evening before I discovered that the mess was going for I was out nearly all day long. My meals until then consisted of chocolate and biscuits and water. (I generally took the water bottle to the trenches in case the men might like a drink.) You filled your water bottle at some large tins on the beach into which water was pumped from a barge through a canvas hose. An A.M.C. man stood over these tins and there were several pannikins for ladling water out. There was also a low trough or tin for the mules. After the first few days these water tins, which were opposite the end of our gully, just on the edge of the sea, became very exposed to shrapnel and they built up sandbags in front of them. The water was taken up to the firing line in petrol or kerosene tins painted khaki and carried two on each side of a mule in wooden panniers … The men knew the value of these mules though they never liked them. As you went along the jostling crowded beach, a kick from a mule was very easy thing to get. You avoid them! A man would say – I’d rather have a bullet than a kick from a mule any day.

A pile of the kerosene tins and a pile of biscuit boxes gradually began to rise in front of my dugout – high and wider every day. The kerosene tins often had water in them and both they and the biscuit boxes provided shelters for the men on the beach when shrapnel came, although the working parties usually disregarded the shrapnel altogether …

Of course the beach was fearfully congested. As the night went on a great number of these stragglers were organised into parties to carry water, ammunition and food, up to the lines. I have heard their number put at anything from 600 to 1000. Many of them came down with wounded men. This is an offence in war, but few realised it at this early stage. The helping down of wounded did not really begin until about 4 or 5. Then it began to reach fair proportions – six men came down with one wounded officer. It is very easy to persuade yourself that you are really doing a charitable soldierly action in helping a wounded soldier to the rear. In later actions this has been chiefly done by the wounded themselves – one wounded man helping another – the men now realise that it is not right to leave the firing line. They were raw soldiers on that first day …

I went to sleep at about 11 or 12 for a couple of hours or less – I don’t know if I even dropped off. The firing on the ridge above was tremendous and incessant and it sounded as though it were on the ridge above our heads – in fact many down on the beach thought it was – but it was not. There were every now and then a few specially sharp cracks and bullets whistled softly through the air …

I thought I could not tell how important these hours or the first night might be – and I particularly wanted to know how the artillery was landing; so I got up again and sat down by D.H.Q. with some of the others. General Godley had been in there earlier in the evening as the guest of our general. Howse was standing outside, talking to Col. Giblin. Watson of the Signal Coy was there and clearly something was in the wind. In a minute or two I had what it was – some question as to whether we were to hold on or to embark at once. Col. Howse unquestionably thought it was likely that the casualty clearing hospital would have to move off at once …

It was two o’clock then. I couldn’t help looking at the sky to see if the dawn were breaking. One knew that it might have been possible to embark part of the force before daybreak if we had begun at night – but there were only two and a half hours of darkness left. It would have been sheer annihilation to attempt embarkation then – I was sure of that – the only possible way would be to hold on all next day, prepare all possible means of safeguarding the retirement and then embark next night without the enemy knowing what we were thinking of (if it were possible to deceive him). Even so the last part of the force covering the retirement would probably be sacrificed. I waited there sitting on the sand slope with some companion in the moonlight – with Howse and Col. Giblin talking in front of us. The General had gone somewhere – I don’t know where – but one understood that the decision would be brought back by him. At 2.30 either he, or some message, came back. There was a general stir in the small crowd which was in the know.

I heard a message being read out from the General’s dugout for sending to all the units out on the ridges: ‘Sir Ian Hamilton hopes they will dig … and that the morning will find them securely dug in where they are … The Australian sailors have just got a submarine through the Dardanelles and torpedoed a Turkish ship.’

W.H. Downing

W.H. ‘Jimmy’ Downing served in the 57
^th
Battalion, part of the legendary Brigadier Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott’s 15
^th
Brigade – which meant Downing participated in most of the significant Australian actions of the war.

Downing was born in 1893 at Portland in Victoria, and was rejected by the army eight times on account of his height. He managed to stretch himself on the ninth occasion. He was accepted on September 30
^th
, 1915, joining the 7
^th
Battalion in Egypt, before transferring to the 57
^th
in France. Sergeant Downing was awarded the Military Medal at Polygon Wood.

Fromelles is a village not far from Armentières and Fleurbaix in Northern France. On July 19
^th
, 1916 it was the A.I.F.’s introduction to the slaughter of the Western Front, and was the worst 24 hours in Australian history. The 5
^th
Division suffered 5533 casualties. Downing’s 57
^th
Battalion, in support, was spared the worst of the frontal attack, but nevertheless lost 35 killed. The Australians (and the British 6
^1st
Division) were ordered (by British High Command) to charge across open boggy ground against entrenched German machine-guns. It was hopeless and brave – but a slaughter.

After the war Downing completed a law degree and eventually went into partnership with Pompey Elliott in the firm H.E. Elliott and Downing. Some of the material in
To the Last Ridge
was published by the Melbourne newspapers
Argus
and the
Herald,
before book publication in 1920. (A new edition was published in 1998.) Downing also published the wonderful dictionary
Digger
Dialects
in 1919 (new edition, 1990). Walter Downing MM died in 1965.

*

There is a holy place by a little stream, a marsh between the orchards near Fromelles. This is its story.

From 10
^th
to 17
^th
of July the Black and Purple Battalions held the line. On the night of the 12
^th
there was an alarm – the S.O.S. (two red stars hovering in the night) – barrages, counter-barrages. There were raids and violent shelling. There was the frightful chaos of
minenwerfers
(trench mortars), shaking the ground into waves, trailing lines of sparks criss-crossed on the gloom, swerving just before they fell, confounding, dreadful, abhorred far more than shells, killing by their very concussion, destroying all within many yards. The enemy knew that a division fresh to the Western Front was in the line. He was bent on breaking its spirit. How little he succeeded, those battered breastworks and the little marsh bear witness.

No-man’s-land, on the front occupied by the 15
^th
Brigade, was a double curve like the letter S. It was from five to seven hundred yards wide, narrowing on the left to two or three hundred, where the 8
^th
and 14
^th
Brigades were placed. At the wide end it was split lengthwise by a little stream, which wandered at last beneath our parapet by Pinney Avenue, where the tunnellers worked.

By the stream the ground was marshy but not impassable, for it was mid-summer. On either side, the British and the German lines fronted each other on low opposing slopes, rising in tiers – front-line, supports, close reserves, reserves. Owing to the wet, low-lying nature of the ground there were no trenches, but solid breastworks of beaten sandbags reveted with iron and timber, fortified with concrete slabs or ‘bursters’. These were from 20 to 30 feet thick, and seven to ten feet high. There was no parados (rear wall of a trench). A fire step was in every bay and a sandbag blockhouse used as a dugout.

Two miles behind our line was the village of Fleurbaix, occupied by civilians. Further back was the town of Sailly-sur-la-Lys. On the right, as one faced the front, was Laventie. Behind the German line was a large and lonely farm, and Fromelles, on a high ridge, where French and Indian cavalry fought in 1914. There was also that rising ground on the right named Sugarloaf. The graves of Englishmen lay everywhere; the dates on the little crosses had almost faded since ‘December, 1914’, ‘February’, ‘May’, ‘October, 1915’. Most of the graves were nameless.

For several days trench stores, materials for the attack, picks, shovels, light bridges for the creek and scaling ladders were carried through the saps.

Through Brompton, Exeter, V.C., Pinneys and Mine Avenues they were carried by day – and held high. One could look into the white German communication saps (connecting trenches) meandering over the hillside. The Germans could look into ours.

The attack was to be made on the 17th. The objective was the German second line. The strategic reason was provided by the presence of a number of Prussian Guard divisions about to entrain from Lille to the Somme, and by the imminence of the important battle of Pozières. The British Army was numerically much weaker than the German, and subterfuges and diversions were necessary.

All this was known to pseudo-refugees, to spies, in the villages behind. Enemy airmen observed the white and coloured cloths spread in order and in designs in fields, like washing left to dry, according to the custom of the
blanchisseuses
(washer-women) of Flanders. Fields were ploughed lengthwise, crosswise and diagonally. White horses were depastured in particular fields. Even the genuine inhabitants knew far more about the attack than we. The Germans were in possession of a copy of operation orders before our battalion commanders had received them. And in those days information was not freely communicated to junior officers and the rank and file, as was afterwards the custom.

On the 17th July, within five minutes of zero time, the attack was countermanded.

On the 18th, the 59
^th
and 60
^th
took over the sector. The 57
^th
were withdrawn to sleep for the night. We lay in a mill on the outskirts of Sailly, on the Sailly road. Sleep was sweet – for thousands it was their second last. Nevertheless, we neither knew nor cared what the morrow might bring. One accepts the immediate present, in the army. We woke with the birds, reminded of friendly magpies in the morning back in Australia. Here were only twitterings under the eaves, but at least it was a cheerful sound, pleasant on a lazy summer morning when the ripening corn was splashed with poppies, and the clover was pink, and the cornflowers blue under the hedges.

In Sailly, in the morning, we listened to the chatter in the
estaminets
(cafés). At the mill, old women and very small girls were selling gingerbread and sweets with cognac in them, sitting on stools, gossiping among themselves.

At midday we were told.

Usual preliminaries were gone through. Operation orders (including some indifferent prophesying) were explained, or as much of them as was thought fit. Rations and ammunition were issued.

At a quarter to two we moved off. Shelling commenced. These were the days of long and casual bombardments. Labourers were hoeing in the mangold fields. Stooping men and women watched us pass, without ceasing their work. It may have been courage, or stolidity, or the numbness of the peasant bound to the soil, or else necessity, that held the sad tenacious people here in such an hour of portent. Their old faces were inscrutable. They tilled the fields on the edge of the flames, under the arching trajectory of shells.

Bees hummed in the clear and drowsy sunshine. There was little smoke about the cottages, where the creepers were green. The road curved between grass which was like two green waves poised on either side.

We battalions came to the four crossroads where there were trenches in the corn, by a crucifix of wood in a damaged brick shrine. There was much gun-fire. We waited.

Late in the afternoon we were ordered forward. From his crucifix the Man of Sorrows watched our going. One wondered if His mild look was bent especially on those marked for death that day. We left the road at an old orchard, and entered a sap. We passed V.C. House and wound down V.C. Avenue. Shells fell rapidly.

A bald man with a red moustache lay on a board, very still, his face to the wall. The sap was littered with rubbish, splintered wood and iron poking from the heaps of burnt earth. Here and there the sap was completely blown in. Then there were more dead. Further on, it was no sap, but a line of rubble heaps. We came to the Three-Hundred- Yard line. Then, issuing from a sally port, we dashed through the shrapnel barrage in artillery formation, and reached the front-line. Again we waited.

A sad-faced man, sitting beside a body, said, ‘Sniper – my brother – keep under the parapet.’ Here the line was enfiladed (shot at) from the left flank where it curved.

The 59
^th
and 60
^th
were in the line. They knew their orders by heart. They were to wave their bayonets and cheer, then remain quiet. Three times this would be done. It was a bluff. They would not go over.

When this had been done once, the order to attack ran from mouth to mouth. ‘Over the bags in five minutes – over the bags in five minutes’; so it passed along. Then, ‘Over you go.’

The 60
^th
climbed on the parapet, heavily laden, dragging with them scaling ladders, light bridges, picks, shovels and bags of bombs. There was wire to go through, and sinking ground; a creek to cross, more marsh and wire; then the German line.

Scores of stammering German machine-guns spluttered violently, drowning the noise of the cannonade. The air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat lattice of death. There were gaps in the lines of men – wide ones, small ones. The survivors spread across the front, keeping the line straight. There was no hesitation, no recoil, no dropping of the unwounded into shell holes. The bullets skimmed low, from knee to groin, riddling the tumbling bodies before they touched the ground. Still the line kept on.

Hundreds were mown down in the flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb, but still the line went on, thinning and stretching. Wounded wriggled into shell holes or were hit again.

Men were cut in two by streams of bullets. And still the line went on.

The 59
^th
were watching from the breastwork. Here one man alone, there two or three, walked unhurrying, with the mien of kings, rifles at the high port and tipped with that foot of steel which carries the spirit of an army – heads high, that few, to meet the death they scorned. No fury of battle but a determined calm bore them forward. Theirs was an unquestioning self-sacrifice that held back nothing. They died, all but one or two who walked through the fire by a miracle. A few had fallen behind in the marsh, exhausted by the weight they carried. Some had fallen in the creek, and under their heavy equipment could not mount the slippery banks. There were also some slightly wounded.

Fifty-six remained of a full thousand. It was over in five minutes.

And then the 59
^th
rose, vengeful, with a shout – a thousand as one man. The chattering, metallic staccato of the tempest of hell burst in nickelled gusts. Sheaves and streams of bullets swept like whirling knives. There were many corpses hung inert on our wire, but the 59
^th
surged forward, now in silence, more steadily, more precise than on parade. A few yards and there were but two hundred marching on. The rest lay in heaps and bloody swathes. They began firing at the German line as they advanced. Lewis gunners dropped into shell holes and fired burst after burst, dashing from cover to cover.

A hundred men broke into a wild but futile charge, determined to strike, if possible, one blow, but enemies pressed their red-hot thumbpieces with blistered fingers, spraying death from the tortured muzzles. That hundred lay flat in the attitudes of sleep.

It grew quiet again. A few wounded crawled in the grass, sniped at by riflemen. Then there was silence. Eighty came back that night.

Two companies from the 58
^th
rose from the breastwork – the remainder were elsewhere carrying ammunition – and advanced by rushes, with covering fire. In banks of battle reek the sun went down, as red as blood.

As darkness drew on, the 57
^th
went forward, but most were recalled almost before they left, for there was nothing to be gained by further loss of life. A few reached the creek.

It was the Charge of the Light Brigade once more, but more terrible, more hopeless – magnificent, but not war – a valley of death filled by somebody’s blunder, or the horrid necessities of war.

The handful in our trenches stood to arms all night, because the line was now dangerously weak, for there were no supports and no reserves, and many enemy elite forces were in front.

The bays and traverses were jammed with dead and wounded lying head to foot for two miles, in a treble row, on the fire steps, beneath them, and behind the blockhouses. Wounded came crawling in, rolling over the parapet and sprawling to the bottom. A white-faced boy, naked to the waist, was being led along the trench, a hole in his side. He cracked some joke, then, ‘I think I’ll spell a minute; it’s all going dark.’ He sat down. An hour later someone shook him, but he was stiff and cold.

A barrage chopped and pounded on the crammed line. The blockhouses were packed with dying men. Men shot through the stomach screamed for water. In mercy it was denied them. Some pleaded to be shot. High explosive crumped in the line; shrapnel crashed in the air.

Out in front wounded were firing in a careless passion of rage, blazing at the inexorable parapet. This was stopped by a flurry of enemy fire. The interminable hours wore on. It was a night of horror and doubt.

Parties went forth to rescue the wounded and to find whether any Australians were in the German trenches. Many more were hit. Wounded were calling for their mates. There was a pause in the shelling. One in delirium was singing a marching song far out in front –

‘My mother told me

That she would buy me

A rubber dollie,