Eyewitness (6 page)

Most of us considered that it should have been a bar to his V.C. He himself said afterwards that he spent some time crawling about in front of the German trenches, and, when he was about to enter the narrow lane through their barbed-wire, he saw an enemy patrol enter the other end. Lying close to the ground, he watched them flit by. ‘How they failed to see me was a puzzle – they almost trod on me.’ When a friend asked if he hadn’t the wind up, he said: ‘Oh, no, I was quite calm, because I knew what to do. I was watching them, and if they had discovered me, I was going to get in among them and shoot the lot before they knew what had happened. I would have got away easily enough.’ But to come back to the night before the battle. I walked down the road a little way to where a couple of tanks were waiting to move up. The crews were outside them, and I was having a yarn to some of them when two officers came up and asked a few questions. Not getting much satisfaction, they moved away a little, and one of the tank men said: ‘What do they want to know all that for?’ This set me thinking, and I walked over to the officers, and they asked me the way to Bullecourt and which way the tanks were going. I went closer to them and peered into their faces, and this seemed to upset them a little. The taller said: ‘It’s all right, sergeant’ and, on asking them who they were, he said Lieutenant So-and-so of some trench-mortar battery. My suspicions were rising, and I kept debating with myself whether I ought to rope them in and take them to headquarters. But fear of making a fool of myself kept me from acting, and before I knew what to do they turned, and went back down towards Death Gully. I followed them, and on the outskirts of Noreuil we met a man who asked us where he could get some water for the cooks. As I was talking to him one of these fellows said in a very agitated sort of way: ‘Oh, leave it until daylight,’ and went on. Before I knew what had happened, they were out of sight in the darkness. All at once I woke up and, from their actions, questions and manner, became fully convinced that they were spies. With my mind fully made up to halt them and if not obeyed instantly to kill the two of them, I ran after them, but they seemed to be wise to me by this time, for although I tore along the gully, they must have run along it faster. Several times I passed men who had seen them go by, but I could not catch up with them, and must have spent an hour in hunting for them before I gave it up, I always felt guilty about this, and it taught me a lesson. Whatever may be said to the contrary, I still have no doubt that they were Huns left behind in villages during the retirement, and were in communication by some means or other with their own people. (We knew that we had agents behind the Hun lines at this time also. A few days previously our battalion had been warned to look out for ‘gold beater’ balloons coming from the Hun lines. They were to shoot them down and take them immediately to headquarters.)

When I got back, it was time to load up and get going. When we reached the line we found everyone beginning to get their things ready for the attack. Captain Williamson was walking about among the men cheering them, and when I reported to him he told me to stay by him during the stunt. One remark he passed I never forgot, and it was a very great satisfaction to me to think he thought of me in that way. When it came out that I was not supposed to be with him but with the thirty-three and a third per cent carrying bombs and other supplies, he said: ‘You’re too good a man to be on a job like that.’

A little while after this – at 1 a.m. on the 11th – our mortars pelted gas bombs into Bullecourt. As soon as they started, the Hun lit up the sky with Very lights, and we could plainly see our gas bombs bursting and giving off dense clouds of gas which were slowly drifting over the village, and it was so thick that it must have caught a few Huns. Strange to relate, no special retaliation came back, although odd shells were bursting here and there. Two nine-inch shells from the enemy batteries that were rich in their results arrived about this time. One landed on two trench-mortar crews and blotted them right out; between 30 and 40 men were killed or wounded. The other almost robbed us of Jacka. He was thrown down and Lieutenant McKinley, his assistant intelligence officer, was mortally wounded. This morning, there was less trouble about the arrival of the tanks; they began to come into the line soon after the gas was let go. C Company lay on a railway embankment, and it was here that about half the tanks came to await the onslaught. Under the shelter of the bank they tightened up their nuts and had a final overhaul. Having no men to look after, I poked about among the crews of the tanks, and from the first I noticed that they were highly nervous about the job. For a while all I could hear was: ‘I wonder if the Huns heard us coming in?’ Those of us who had watched them crawling one by one down to our bank felt that it was impossible for the Huns to have yet heard the low muffled chug-chug- chug, but all the assurances in the world could not convince the crews. (I have since heard that the Germans did detect this noise before the attack.) The only thing that I feared was their exhaust pipe, which came out through the top of their buses and from which I noticed tiny sparks flying at times. Of course I never mentioned this to them, thinking that just as soon as they got going they would lose all nervousness and box on. When C Company lined up and were preparing to move out onto the tape, Captain Williamson ordered me to take charge of the bomb dump, and see that ammunition was sent up to him during the action. He said his reason for changing his mind was that most of the men were new to me, also most of the officers. I was to go up to him, with the last lot of ammunition. To say that I was disappointed would put it mildly. I never felt so optimistic about a stunt in my life, and in fact, all hands did. I’ve never before or since seen troops go into action with so much heart; it was remarkable. Captain Williamson had intended Sergeant-Major Garcia to mind the bomb dump, but at the last minute had changed his mind and taken Garcia instead of me. As the boys filed out I recognised many more old pals, among them Sergeant Jack McRae. I saw him for the last time. After they had gone the tanks started up and commenced climbing right up the bank. My bomb dump was on the edge of it, and one of the tanks made straight for it. I had visions of bombs, tank and men all mingled in one grand explosion, and I danced and yelled right in front of the tank. Even then the officer inside only just steered a few feet away. When he was almost on the dump, I left and cleared to the rear for protection against the coming rumpus, but, strange to say, the tank merely squashed a couple of boxes down into the earth and nothing happened. When the tank had passed I started to sort out the bombs, and I noticed that one or two had no detonators in them. This made me suspicious, and in going through the lot I found about 20 out of about 60 boxes undetonated. To think that these were the things that men would have to fight for their lives with made me furious at the negligence of someone in not detonating them. As I was picking the undetonated bombs out and putting them on one side, Captain Stanton came along and asked me if I’d seen any of his company; evidently he had lost some of them. As the bank was deserted, I soon convinced him – I was the only one there. Just before zero, 4.45 a.m., I had a bit of a spell and tried to take an impartial view of the show, and the only thing that I did not like was the unearthly quietness and absence of Very lights from Riencourt. Not a light was to be seen, whereas over Bullecourt the Hun was making his usual display. North-east of Bullecourt, on the left, was the objective of the 12
^th
Brigade, and ours was Riencourt, farther to the right. Riencourt was perched away along a spur, and to get to it our boys had to go up a slight slope. Bullecourt, on our left, was much lower. In getting to Riencourt our boys would be subjected to enfilade fire from the 12
^th
Brigade front. Apart from these little difficulties or signs of them, I still had the greatest confidence. Just about zero time a company of the 12
^th
Brigade came in along the railway bank, and went over the top making towards the left.

At zero I saw the tanks waddle out and our boys follow them at a distance of about a hundred yards or so. The tank right in front of me got ditched almost as soon as they started, and the boys went on and left it. By what I saw of the tank crews afterwards, it was a question whether some of them had their hearts in this fight. Our guns opened at the same time, but not a shell was to be seen bursting on the Hun lines. Pretty soon the Hun opened with artillery and machine-guns, and the bullets flew around thickly. I ducked more than once as sparks of fire were flicked up in front of our trench. The Hun commenced to put up lights now, and during one lot that lit the place up like day, I saw a sight that I’ll never forget. Advancing along the side of the spur as if they were on parade, with their rifles held at the high port, was a line of our boys. I think that they were the third wave, and there were gaps here and there, and in one or two places big spaces. With such intense machine-gun fire, there was no need to inquire what was happening. When the lights died down, the scene vanished in the gloom. I thought that I was all on my own until I went for a bit of a walk under the bank, and there, in a dugout, found a cold-footer of the 12
^th
Brigade, who had funked it at the last minute. He had such a plausible tale that I did not tumble to him till afterwards. As daylight came, the first objects that we made out were the tanks – but, alas, they seemed to be in every place except where they were most needed, with one or two exceptions. One I saw, apparently over the Hun trenches on the outskirts of Riencourt and working along to the right. Even this one, after going a few hundred yards headed back to the rear. A tank directly in front of me was stuck in a shell hole, and its crew were tinkering around it. Later another tank came to its assistance, but it seemed to me that it should have supported our troops instead of attending to other business in the back area. A third was between Bullecourt and Riencourt, and, as I watched it, it started to move towards the Hun wire. On reaching the wire, it burst out in flames – apparently no man escaped, for I saw none leave it. Another was retiring when a shell burst at its side. The crew jumped out, one at a time, and ran to shelter. Several others were burning fiercely, belching out dense clouds of black smoke, and they continued to burn for hours. What with one thing and another, not a tank escaped. One did get back past Noreuil, I believe, but a shell caught it even there. Their work had been of the most unsatisfactory kind; some of the crews were good, and some bad, but they were the cause of disaster to us and they never received the least sympathy. Right up until the stunt on 4 July 1918 at Vaire Wood, where they fully redeemed their name among us, the mention of tanks brought forth abuse and curses from every Australian and at one time we even heard that the authorities were thinking of doing away with them.

Later on a couple of English officers came round, they were very dubious as to the success of the stunt. As I could not see any Aussies in the open I knew that they were in the Hun trenches, and I remember telling these officers that once our boys got in they’d take some driving out. As we were sitting up watching things, a Hun over in Bullecourt must have seen us, as he turned his machine-gun on us. The two officers got away without being hit but, for an hour after that, if I showed my head, over would come a shower of bullets. Nevertheless, I managed to keep an eye on the Hindenburg Line, and every now and then I saw a few Diggers get out of it and bolt for our line, and I also saw about 30 Hun prisoners come back on their own without any escort. When they came near the ditched tank they held their hands above their heads. They seemed amazed at the thing. One boy came right past me and when he had gone about a hundred yards a shell burst close alongside him. Down he went like a log. Several of us were on the point of going out for him, when a man who was nearer ran and picked him up and brought him back to the embankment. They had barely gone 50 yards from the place where he was hit when another shell burst in the same spot. If it had been left to us to go and get him, we would have been just about picking him up when the second one came, and probably we would have received the same dose.

An hour or so after daylight I saw some cavalry scouts going forward. They were in full fighting togs, and the amount of stuff hanging onto them and their horses was enormous. Poor beggars, I truly pitied them, for they never had a ghost of a hope, and they very soon caught it in the neck. Of course, by this time we all knew that something was wrong, and we received a fair notion of how many machine-guns were working by the way they let go at one of our aeroplanes which went over to size up the stunt. There seemed to be so many bullets in the air that one almost wondered that they did not jam each other up there. The suspense at this stage was very great, especially for those at the various battalion headquarters. I was told afterwards that, at our battalion headquarters, the following conversation took place. Captain Harold Wanliss (the adjutant): ‘I’m going to ask you once again, Colonel, to let me go. We’ve a good idea now of what’s happened, and I can’t be any use here. I feel I ought to be up there doing what I can to help the fellows. God knows what has happened to Jacka and the rest of them, and I can’t stand the suspense.’

Colonel Peck: ‘Look here, Wanliss, do you think that it’s an easy matter for me to stay here glued to this damned dugout, simply waiting for news?’

‘All the more reason why I should be out there sending you information.’

‘Wanliss, listen to me. You’ve been a soldier long enough to know that it’s sometimes harder to stick this waiting than it is to fight. Your idea is to leave me all alone with my responsibilities.’

‘Well, Colonel, if you put it that way, I’ll not ask, again.’

Long afterwards we found out that our C.O. had a special reason in holding Wanliss back; he felt that he was a man whom Australia might badly need some day, and he did all he could to prevent him from thrusting himself into unnecessary danger. As time went on I became as hungry as a hunter, and as I could see no-one who had any certain information, I made up my mind to go back to Noreuil and find out what was happening, and also obtain something to eat. By this time it was getting on towards midday, and I had not long to wait before several boys came back who told us the most terrible things imaginable. As others arrived we were able to form a fair notion of what had happened. When zero hour came, and the first wave went off, it had very soon overtaken the tanks, which were mostly floundering around close in front. Some of them even fired on our own men, but no-one knows precisely how many they killed. As it was fatal to hesitate and wait for the tanks, the line advanced alone. As soon as it came in sight of the Huns the massacre commenced, the enemy lining his parapet and shooting down our boys like rabbits. Lots of them reached the wire, but as it had not been cut, they had to run along it until they came to an opening. This turning to a flank caused them to bunch together; and they fell in heaps on the wire and in front of it. The wonder is that any of them reached the trench. But reach it they did, and took the enemy’s front-line.