Zero Hour (6 page)

Heavy firing all morning—simply murder. Men falling everywhere…expecting death every second. 23 men smothered in one trench. Dead and dying everywhere. Some simply blown to pieces.

Many men couldn't cope. One runner, unable to face the barrage again, handed over his last message and shot himself. Others delivered their messages then fell dead from wounds.

With the shelling making it difficult to remove the wounded, Private Edward Jenkins, a bushman from New South Wales, worked with others to carry as many as they could to safer areas. Jenkins set up shelters for them and gave out the last of his water. His officers considered him a larrikin and a troublemaker, but at Pozières he worked tirelessly and without orders until a shell killed him as he was carrying his dixie of tea to give to the wounded.

The bombardment was as severe as any experienced at the Somme or Verdun, and when it died down, on 26 July, over 5000 Australians had been killed or wounded in their seven days in the front-line. When the 1st Division was relieved by the 2nd Australian Division during the night of 27 July, the men marched out, dazed and staring into space, some wearing souvenired German spike helmets and belts inscribed with the motto ‘
Gott mit uns
'—God with us.

POZIÈRES HEIGHTS

The 2nd Division was confronted with a land littered with blackened, bloated, fly-ridden bodies and limbs. German shells continued to pulverise Pozières to dust and ash. With the trenches levelled, supply parties had to walk over tracks in the open. There was no safe place to rest. Men expected death or to be buried, ‘dug out and buried again'. One group tried to distract themselves by playing cards. When their sergeant was killed, they threw his body out of the trench, then kept playing until an exploding shell killed them all.

Even though the Germans were clearly expecting an attack, General Gough insisted that the Australians seize the Old German Lines on the heights behind Pozières. The 2nd Division commander, Major General Gordon Legge, did not ask for a postponement despite a report from an artillery commander that the dust and haze meant he couldn't be certain that the wire had been cut. Legge, commanding a battle of this scale for the first time, was certain that the entanglements would be cut in time. Just after midnight on 29 July, the Australians advanced. It took them eight long minutes to cross no-man's-land, and, as flares turned night to day, the German machine guns opened fire. The bombardment hadn't pierced the wire and the men that made it through the gunfire used wire-cutters, their rifle butts and their bare hands to try to get through. Men fell dead or wounded into the wire, which tightened around the living as they struggled.

In half an hour, 2000 men had been killed or wounded. As the 2nd Division withdrew, the sky was lit with red and green German flares of success. General Haig reminded the Australian commanders that they weren't fighting Turks any more but the ‘most scientific and most military nation in Europe'. Legge insisted his men be given another go, but this time the attack would begin only when everything was properly prepared—a one-metre-deep jumping-off trench would be dug closer to the German trenches.

DOING IT PROPERLY

On the night of 31 July, 500 soldiers moved into no-man's-land to dig the trench. Melbourne journalist Lieutenant John Raws, unaware that his brother had been killed in the previous attack and was lying in no-man's-land, reached the jumping-off point to find soldiers and officers alike losing their nerve through the constant shelling. After one officer was killed and, according to Raws, ‘the strain had sent two other officers mad', Raws and a fellow officer took over and insisted that the digging be finished. The dead and wounded were no longer to be buried or carried out. The soldiers' only task was to dig. Another officer, driven to the edge, ordered the men to retire, but Raws threatened to shoot anyone who left.

For five nights, the men dug the jumping-off line under shellfire. Some fled into the dark to escape the noise and fear. Raws wrote: As Raws left, he and three others helped a wounded man, using Raws' puttee to tie the man's severed leg to his pack.

I have had much luck and kept my nerve so far. The awful difficulty is to keep it. The bravest of all often lose it—courage does not count here. It is all nerve—once that goes one becomes a gibbering maniac…

And forests! There are not even tree trunks left, not a leaf or a twig. All is buried, and churned up again, and buried again. The sad part is that one can see no end of this. If we live to-night, we have to go through to-morrow night, and next week, and next month. Poor wounded devils you meet on the stretchers are laughing with glee. One cannot blame them—they are getting out of this…

…We are lousy, stinking, ragged, unshaven, sleepless…I have one puttee, a dead man's helmet, another dead man's gas protector, a dead man's bayonet. My tunic is rotten with other men's blood, and partly spattered with a comrade's brains.

On 4 August, the 2nd Division lay in the newly completed jumping-off line. The moment their artillery shells stopped hitting the German trenches, they rushed across the shortened no-man's-land and quickly captured the two almost flattened trenches of the Old German Lines on the ridge behind Pozières. In the 10 days that the 2nd Division had been in the line, 6800 had been killed or wounded.

A GERMAN REPLY

With only two days' experience in trenches at Armentières, on 6 August the 4th Australian Division relieved the 2nd Division. Several attempts to recapture the heights had already been shot down, but the Germans were determined. General Falkenhayn, the German commander, had insisted from the start of the war that no land was to be relinquished without a fight and that lost land was to be recaptured at the first opportunity. But with German commanders rushing counterattacks, the Germans were now being as mauled as the Allies.

At dawn on 7 August, as the 4th Division sheltered in captured dugouts from a systematic bombardment, the Germans attacked again. The heights were lightly held by the Australians to prevent loss of life during heavy shelling, and three battalions of German troops swept over the battered trenches, stopping only to roll bombs into the dugouts and to leave sentries at the exits before the rest moved down the slope towards Pozières.

In one dugout, Lieutenant Albert Jacka, who had won a Victoria Cross for his actions at Gallipoli, fired his revolver up the stairs over two wounded soldiers, killing the German stationed at the top. Jacka and seven others prepared to dash back through the Germans to Pozières, but when they saw 40 Australian prisoners under a guard of the same number being led back towards the new German lines, Jacka lined up his men and charged.

The German guards opened fire, hitting every man— Jacka was hit seven times—but they reached the guards and a savage bayonet and fist-fight erupted, with the prisoners also attacking their guards. More raced over to join in, until

Huns and Aussies were scattered in ones and twos all along the side of the hill…Each Aussie seemed as if he was having a war all on his own.

The Germans, now outnumbered, surrendered. When Jacka was carried out, few gave him any chance of survival, but he recovered and returned to the Western Front, serving until he was poisoned by gas in 1918.

A GRINDING ADVANCE— 8 AUGUST TO 5 SEPTEMBER

With Pozières heights now secured, General Haig ordered the commanders in the area to organise their own attacks while he built up new divisions and ammunition for a September advance. Under General Gough, the Australians were to advance towards Mouquet Farm—a German strong point—to get in behind Thiepval, another bastion of the German line. Over the next 28 days, the 1st, 2nd and 4th Australian Divisions were all used as Gough ordered attack after attack to drive a narrow salient two kilometres to the farm. The Germans made them fight for every metre, shelling their salient from the front and both sides. Fresh battalions were sent to the front via different routes to prevent them seeing the dead bodies from the previous attacks. When the ground was ‘spongy' underfoot, the men realised they were stepping on corpses.

Twenty-year-old Sergeant David Badger wrote to his parents in South Australia, saying:

When you see this I'll be dead; don't worry…Try to think I did the only possible thing, as I tell you I would do it again if I had the chance.

He died in the next attack.

The Australians hated the shallow advances on narrow fronts—now reduced to one or two battalions—and many felt they were just being sent to kill Germans. In one Australian's opinion, ‘All we are doing is using up German Reserves, and, at a faster rate, our own.' Even the New Zealand commander, Major General Sir Andrew Russell, believed the Australians were being wasted.

The tactics created bitterness towards the commanders, and a feeling that no one knew what they, the soldiers, were going through. In their view, the newspapers reported only the official line about successful attacks, with no mention of the human cost. Corporal Arthur Thomas wrote that a ‘book on the life of an infantryman' needed to be written to ‘quickly prevent these shocking tragedies'. Captain Gordon Maxfield felt that

Nothing published in the papers is worth a damn… There are some astounding tales to be told about the war which will make your hair stand on end when the facts are made public.

Lieutenant Raws believed his comrades were being murdered ‘through the incompetence, callousness and personal vanity of those high in authority'. He died before Mouquet Farm fell; in all, 6300 Australians were wounded or killed in the drive to the farm.

Many soldiers came to see the generals as butchers—sending thousands to be massacred without a second thought— and bunglers, who planned botched battles in luxury, well behind the front-line, while their men suffered in the trenches. With little or no contact between the generals and ordinary soldiers, it was easy for the men to blame the commanders for failures. The war was meant to have been short, won using old military tactics of men marching in massed formations, but new technology had wiped out that hope and the generals, faced with a different kind of war, struggled to adapt. They tried new methods—creeping barrages, warfare in the skies, gas and massed artillery bombardments—but limited advances still came with horrendous casualties. The pressure was enormous—their governments and people at home wanted and expected a quick, decisive victory.

Despite 58 generals being killed on the Western Front— 53 British, three New Zealanders and two Australians—most were well behind the front-line during battles. With wireless communication still in its infancy, it was difficult for the commanders to have a real-time understanding of what was occurring once a battle started; the phone lines were routinely cut, despite signallers risking their lives to fix them. Runners, carrier pigeons and flares were used, but these all had limitations—even if a runner made it through, it was more than likely that the course of the battle had changed before the generals could act on the new information.

On 5 September, the Australians withdrew from the Somme after being relieved by Canadian forces. In 45 days, since they had waited in the trench opposite Pozières, the I Anzac Corps had launched 19 attacks, the last seven in front of Mouquet Farm. According to Charles Bean, Australia's official war correspondent, Pozières ‘marks a ridge more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth'. Over 23,000 Australians became casualties in those 45 days—resulting in calls for conscription to replace the losses. And although Pozières had fallen, Mouquet Farm and Thiepval hadn't—the one trench the Australian's had captured at the farm was retaken by the Germans three days later.

KILLED IN ACTION
____________________

PRIVATE EDWARD JENKINS
Bushman. 24 July 1916

SERGEANT DAVID BADGER
Bank clerk. 21 August 1916

LIEUTENANT JOHN RAWS
Journalist. 23 August 1916

CAPTAIN GORDON MAXFIELD
Accountant auditor. 3 May 1917

SERGEANT LEONARD ELVIN
Engine driver. 5 May 1917

CORPORAL ARTHUR THOMAS
Tailor. 8 June 1918

CHAPTER FOUR
THE SOMME, FLERS, 1916

In Memoriam
(extract)

To the men of the 3rd Battalion
N.Z.R.B who fell on the Somme

I am sitting in the shadows
I have borne the heat of day,
And I'm thinking of the comrades
Who have passed along the way.
They have scaled the furthest parapet,
Have crossed the Great Divide,
And are sleeping in their dugouts
Upon the farther side.

THIRD RESERVE

ON 12 SEPTEMBER 1916, the New Zealanders were welcomed by the sight of the dead as they crowded into the trenches at the Somme front-line, six kilometres from Pozières. In five days, they would take part in the British commander-in-chief General Haig's next major advance to capture the Germans' third defensive line, which included the villages of Morval, Gueudecourt and Flers. The New Zealanders were to capture three objectives: Switch trench, Flers trench and the Gird trench system behind Flers, an advance close to three kilometres. Instead of the narrow frontal advances the I Anzac Corps had faced, the New Zealanders would take part in a wide advance. With greater artillery than the Germans and a new secret weapon, the tank, Haig hoped for victory at the Somme before the winter rains arrived.

The ground was littered with swollen, sodden corpses. Fat flies crawled over limbs sticking out from the dirt, and pieces of bodies hung in the trees. A stench lingered in the air. In the trenches themselves, dead men lay beneath the mud, their bodies quivering as the soldiers stepped on them. On either side were the shattered remains of Delville Wood and High Wood. Haig had wanted them captured on the first day of the Somme battle, but they'd taken weeks of fighting to clear—the far end of High Wood was still held by the Germans.

At dawn on 15 September, sentries peered into no-man's-land as the sky paled. The soldiers had rum with their breakfast, and stared at the black trees of High Wood on the distant ridge. They'd had a bad night's rest; it was cold and they'd had to sleep in gasmasks. The men waited for zero hour and hoped to do their best. Two brigades were to follow a creeping barrage of shells that would leap forward 45 metres every minute. Each man was weighed down with a rifle, a bayonet, 220 bullets, two grenades, two empty sandbags, a waterproof sheet, a jacket, rations, filled water bottles, gasmasks, a steel helmet and a pick or shovel—36 kilograms in all.