Zero Hour (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE
THE LAMPS ARE GOING OUT

‘A Soldier of the Great War Known Unto God.'

INSCRIPTION ON THE HEADSTONES
OF UNIDENTIFIED SOLDIERS

AT ZERO HOUR, 5.25 a.m., the artillery opened fire. The creeping barrage of exploding shells was meant to give the men cover and maim the Germans but it was thin and ragged and spewed up mud and steam, rather than shrapnel and dust. Some shells fell short and exploded among the Australians and New Zealanders and the swampy river and mud slowed them down. But the Diggers still advanced.

The Germans waited, their guns silent. They knew the attack was coming—a Scottish deserter had told them—so the commanders had put their elite Jaeger troops with extra machine guns into the line. Each machine gun could shoot 500 bullets a minute, and as the Diggers came into sight, the Germans fired. Wounded men slumped into the swamp or water-swollen shell holes and drowned. Private Leonard Hurse had begged to take part after being selected to stay behind. As he ploughed through the mud he turned to Lance Corporal Ernest Williams, bellowing, ‘I wouldn't have missed this for a thousand.' He was shot through the head. The following wave filled the gaping holes in the line, passing the wounded and dead. The cratered slope was too slippery to charge, so they slithered forward from shell hole to shell hole, their clothes weighed down by mud.

As more men got close to the dense, uncut belts of wire, they unclogged their guns and rifles and looked for ways through. One group charged into a gap across a sunken road that led to Passchendaele, but it was a trap, and they were gunned down.

It was 12 October 1917, over three years since the Great War had started, and the Australians and New Zealanders were now considered crack troops. They'd been put into the centre of the attack to capture Bellevue Spur and Passchen-daele, near Ypres, Belgium, and were charged with securing the most vital objectives in an offensive that the British commanders believed could bring the war's end closer. But men kept dying in their thousands, and the war, which many had expected to last six months, just kept going.

1914

The Great War, or the ‘war to end all wars', was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, by a Serbian on 28 June 1914. At first, no one expected a single death to lead to a world war, but tensions in Europe had been building for decades. Old empires wanted to maintain their power while new countries wanted a share of the world's resources.

On one side the Allies were lined up: Britain, France and Russia. On the other side were Germany and Austria– Hungary.

On 28 July, Austria began bombarding the Serbian capital. The Austrians had the backing of Germany, which saw an opportunity to break the growing military power of Russia and France. Russia, which had its own links to Serbia, declared war on Austria. As France called up its army, Germany declared war on both Russia and France and launched the Schlieffen Plan: to knock the French out of the war before Russia had fully mobilised its massive army.

THE SCHLIEFFEN PLAN

Despite having over 1.5 million soldiers on the French borders, the Germans knew that the heavily defended French forts would be too formidable to pass. Instead, 320,000 German troops would march into neutral Belgium, overrun the 84,000-strong Belgian Army, then sweep down into France and circle in behind Paris. The manoeuvre was meant to take six weeks. Paris was to be captured, trapping the French troops between the city and the border. With France's surrender, General Helmuth von Moltke would be able to shift his troops to face the Russians.

The German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, knew the invasion of Belgium would bring Britain into the war, but he and his generals had little respect for the 80,000-strong British force. He referred to them as a ‘contemptible little army' and expected to roll over them as easily as the Belgians.

The Germans invaded Belgium on 4 August. Britain declared war on Germany that night. The Great War had started.

GOD SAVE THE KING

On the other side of the world, people in Australia and New Zealand closely followed the events in Europe. The two countries were part of the vast British Empire, and saw Britain, their major trading partner, as the ‘mother country'. Even those not born there were raised on stories about British conflicts—the Battle of Waterloo and the Crimean War—and sang ‘God Save the King'. If Britain was defeated, they not only faced being alone in the Pacific, they also risked becoming German colonies.

When New Zealand and Australian politicians immediately offered ‘the last man and last shilling' to defend Britain, people in both countries took to the streets, waving the Union Flag and singing patriotic songs.

Most people welcomed the war, and as soon as the recruiting offices opened men queued to volunteer. Initially only men aged between 19 and 38 were accepted, so some simply lied about their age while others got permission from their parents. Eighteen-year-old Sergeant Henry ‘Harry' Kahan was accepted after his mum wrote a note saying it was okay. Older men shaved their faces to look younger and some who were rejected tried their luck again in a different city. One man travelled from Adelaide to Hobart to Sydney before being accepted.

In cities, men gave up their jobs as teachers, policemen or office clerks, while in the country, bush-clearers and farmhands travelled to the nearest recruitment station. One New Zealander sold a horse he'd stolen to pay his way to the nearest station. Some farmers simply locked their gates, not knowing when they'd return.

The men, who were mainly single, volunteered for many reasons—to see the world, for the adventure, to defeat the ‘barbaric' Germans, to escape unhappiness, to see the ‘mother country', or to fight for the English King, the British Empire, and their own country. Others needed a job, and the army was paying five shillings a day for the New Zealanders and six for the Australians. Some men just went because their mates were going.

At military camps the men—20,000 Australians and 8000 New Zealanders—put their full effort into training. No one wanted to be left behind and miss out on what was going to be a short war. With the new artillery and rapid-firing guns, many people believed it would be over by Christmas, six months away. Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary didn't share that view. ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe,' he wrote. ‘We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.'

The Australian and New Zealand forces were offered to the British Army to use however and wherever its commanders saw fit, although both countries were responsible for the men's food, transport, clothing, wages and even ammunition. Despite their pay being below the minimum wage, the Australians were the highest paid soldiers in the war. They became known as ‘six bob a day tourists'. British troops would come to hate going into towns that the Australians and New Zealanders had been in; their one-shilling pay wasn't enough to cover what the locals expected.

‘THE CONTEMPTIBLES'

The small Belgian Army momentarily slowed the German advance at its borders but was forced into retreat. When Belgian civilians took up arms to defend their homeland, the Germans dragged young and old from their houses and killed them without trial—by the end of the war over 5000 civilians had been executed. In one mediaeval town, they burned down buildings dating from 1425. As masses of refugees fled the advancing army, stories were printed in newspapers around the world about atrocities committed by ‘barbaric monsters' against the ‘poor people' of Belgium.

The Belgian resistance gave the British time to get their 80,000 troops, under the command of Field Marshal Sir John French, across the English Channel. On 23 August, in Mons, Belgium, the British held off 160,000 German troops for six hours. When news reached them that the defeated French forces on their right were pulling back and that the Belgian Army on their left had retreated, they were forced into a fighting withdrawal.

After a two-week, 190-kilometre retreat to the River Marne, the Allied forces finally halted the Germans within 70 kilometres of Paris, thwarting the Schlieffen Plan. The Russians also mobilised faster than expected, and the Germans sent five divisions east to fight them. Knowing they no longer had the troop numbers or energy to encircle Paris—the men had been moving nonstop for a month— the Germans changed their plan and, instead, attacked the exposed left flank of the British and French forces.

DIGGING TO LIVE

In early September the French and British counterattacked, and drove the exhausted and overstretched Germans 64 kilometres back to the Aisne River, where they began digging trenches into the steep bank overlooking the river. After several unsuccessful attempts to take the bank, the British and French troops also dug in for protection. The first lines of the Western Front had been drawn.

The front-line lengthened as both sides tried and failed to get around each other's exposed flanks. Each time they were halted, the Germans dug trenches to avoid shells and bullets, and the British and French responded by digging their own trenches. In the ‘race to the sea', the line lengthened northwards through France—through the Somme region and the towns of Arras and Armentières—and into Belgium, through Messines, and along the ridges overlooking Ypres in the Flanders region, until it reached the coastal town of Nieuport. The historic town of Ypres, just 50 kilometres from the coast, was one of the most vital areas of the front. If the Germans broke through there, they would have access to the English Channel.

On 20 October, four days after the New Zealanders had sailed from home, the Germans attacked the Belgian Army near Nieuport and the British on the strategic high ridges around Ypres. The Belgians eventually halted the German advance with French help, while the Germans and British continued to fight what became known as the First Battle of Ypres. The inexperienced German troops—some only 16 years old, many of them students—were no match for the professional British soldiers, who mowed them down in a day the Germans called the ‘slaughter of the innocents'. But, as the Australians and New Zealanders steamed across the Indian Ocean towards Europe, the Germans forced the British off Messines Ridge, and came as close as six kilometres to Ypres after vicious hand-to-hand battles on Menin Road. The name of Ypres was becoming infamous around the world.

TROOPSHIPS

The convoy of Australian and New Zealand troopships to Europe was escorted by three cruisers to guard it against enemy vessels. One German raider, SMS
Emden
—often mistaken for a British ship because of its fake fourth funnel—became the most hunted German ship in the war. It had sunk 15 merchant ships in September 1914 alone, as well as several naval vessels. En route, news reached the convoy that the SMS
Emden
was within three hours' sail. The Australian light cruiser HMAS
Sydney
steamed out to meet it, and after the two vessels had shelled each other for over an hour, the SMS
Emden
admitted defeat—it had been hit over 100 times. The survivors were transferred to the convoys, and many of the Australian and New Zealand troops took the opportunity to meet them. New Zealander Corporal Gerald Sievers was in charge of guarding some of them and traded souvenirs with them, forming the opinion that they were ‘good fellows'.

Two other German merchant raiders continued to cause headaches around New Zealand and Australia. One, commanded by Felix von Luckner, a young man who'd run away from home at the age of 13, captured the attention of the New Zealanders. In a three-masted sailing ship, Luckner was considered a pirate, boarding ships, taking prisoners and then sinking the vessels. Even when he was captured, he commandeered two boats in a failed escape attempt.

The SMS
Wolf
, a larger merchant raider, laid mines off the New Zealand and Australian coasts—some of which still wash up today. It captured numerous ships and returned to Germany filled with captured booty.

THE LINES FORM

With winter approaching, and the front-lines now stretching 800 kilometres from the Swiss Alps to the Belgian coast, the generals on both sides ordered their men to consolidate their positions. The Germans dug trenches deep into the soil, or built sandbag walls on soggy ground. They situated them in areas easy to guard, often on the high ground overlooking the British and French. Every effort was put in to make the trenches defendable: the two-metre walls were riveted with wood, and wire was strung in front.

Villages, buildings, factories and cottages were incorporated into the lines. Cellars reinforced with concrete became dugouts, while concrete blockhouses constructed inside buildings held machine-gun nests with perfect fields of fire. The Germans had every reason to build up their trench systems: they had gained valuable land in Belgium and France, and now controlled much of France's iron supplies, which were essential for war.

Opposite them, across no-man's-land, the British and French also dug in; however, their trenches were not yet as advanced because they had no intention of just holding the line. Trenches were for defence and protection, whereas the Allies intended to advance and force the Germans from Belgium and France.

On 3 December, the Australians and New Zealanders landed at Alexandria, Egypt. Many were frustrated about not going straight to England and then the Western Front, but there wasn't enough accommodation for them. Britain also wanted extra troops in Egypt as defence against the Ottoman Empire—Turkey and parts of the Middle East—which had joined the war to side with Germany. In the desert, surrounded by pyramids, the men trained under the harsh sun and became known as the Anzacs—the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps.

At the Western Front, the soldiers battled the climate more than each other. On Christmas day, some German and British troops sang carols to each other, then climbed out into no-man's-land, where they shook hands. The truce lasted from several hours to days in some areas, with men sharing cigarettes and food and playing football. It would never happen again on that scale.