Eyewitness (8 page)

… Our 80,000 horses, camels, and mules have churned the plains into finest dust, the sea breeze blows all day and we live in one vast red haze that rises to the skies; it hangs all day long over the earth as a fine red vapour. It is hell when the sea wind changes and a scorcher blows in from the desert.

… We’ve seen where the papers gave us an odd paragraph or two about the Second Battle of Gaza. Now one has come out with a lot of rot about the ‘Great Gaza Victory’, and glowing lies about the lads out here living in a ‘Land of Paradise’, revelling in oranges, pomegranates and all the fruits of the Orient. We wish that the idiots responsible for such lies were out here swallowing dust.

May 19th
. The En Zeds smashed up a Turkish troop in a patrol scrap a day or two ago, but we hear they were unlucky yesterday losing three men in a little private outpost affair … The rations are very leangutted lately. Summer has brought the dreaded
khamsin
. It flames in from the desert as if the world were on fire.

May 23rd
. The night before last the Anzac Mounted Division and the Imperial Mounted Division made a raid on the Turkish railway between Asluj and Auja. It was a cheeky enterprise, splendidly carried out. The object was to blow up the railway line as the Turks might any day move their troops along it for a large-scale attack against our right flank.

The brigade left camp at 7.30 p.m., the 5
^th
Regiment being advance guard to the column. One division moved towards Beersheba, the other towards Galaze. The all-night ride was in choking dust – snort of horses blowing dust from their nostrils – muffled hooves down along the invisible column – thump of rifle-butt against a comrade’s leggings.

A
khamsin
sprang up. It whined in from the desert and its breath was fire – we rode through a haze of hell. I could not see Norry or Stan; I could feel them. The air was saturated with electricity – my little neddy’s mane all stiff and bristly. When I touched it, blue sparks leaped through my fingers. A man lost all sense of direction and conscious unity – he felt he was a blind atom in an invisible body moving across the earth.

The regiment started out with a native guide but he soon got lost. The screen went on by compass – when they could see it. At daylight the divisions, spread over some miles, were riding right on to the railway line. The sun glowed through the dust like a molten globe.

Our brigade was disappointed. We were not in the actual blowing up of the line – we just cleared the country of snipers and guarded the flank of the Demolition Troops. The 5
^th
took up a line between Gos Shelili and Hill 1240, rode thankfully on grassy country away from the dust right on to rifle and machine-gun fire. We galloped straight down on the outposts fronting us. One of our lads away out in front had an exciting time. The sun was just bathing the hills – we cheered as he raced over a skyline at the heels of a mounted Arab scout, both blazing from their saddles. Neither scored a hit. The last we saw of the Arab he was hitting the dust towards Beersheba. Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! And our vicious little Tommy guns were surprising the Turks in Beersheba. General Chaytor is a game old beggar. He is very sick but insisted on coming out all that long distance and directing operations from his bed in a sandcart. About eleven o’clock, our brigade thought we were in for a scrap. Two brigades of Turkish cavalry threatened us but they changed their minds and rode back on Beersheba. Meanwhile the demolition forces, the 1
^st
Light Horse Brigade, the New Zealanders and the Camel Corps were busy on the railway line. Presently the great Asluj Bridge was destroyed, 18 fine arches of stone, all Ashlar work. The German engineers must have cried to see their masterpiece obliterated in that roaring series of explosions. Then up into the sky went 17 miles of line with smaller bridges and fine stone culverts, all exceedingly well built. We were all ready to retire by three o’clock. The ride back that night was the very devil. We rode on a big camp where no camp had been before. It was a blooming Yeomanry division: I wonder what would have happened had we attacked it! Who would have got the greater surprise? The uncertainty delayed us getting back to camp until after midnight.

… One of our lads got a parcel addressed to ‘a lonely soldier’. Enclosed was a note from the lady expressing the pious wish that a brave soldier in France should get the parcel and not a cold-footed squib in Egypt. The chap who received the parcel sent the lady some photos of our desert graves, with compliments from a cold-footed squib in Egypt.

May 24th
. Had an amusing little ride this morning. Quite a common ride: we happened to be engaged in the peaceful task of collecting wood to boil the regimental stew. In this treeless country, we have to rely on the beams in the Bedouin mud-hovels. But the scattered hovels all along the wadi are long since cleaned out, so pioneers must push right to the Turkish lines for the wherewithal to boil our quart-pots. This morning, seven of us went out, hard-boiled old Corporal Nix in charge, with four packhorses. Every hut we visited was timberless. Norry and I rode well ahead as a target to save the packhorses coming under possible rifle-fire. When about four miles out, we noticed a New Zealand outpost on a low hill to our left, and fronting us was a house. Nix and his cautious men edged away towards the outpost. Norry and I rode on, guessing that concealed riflemen must have driven the outpost from the house. But wood is precious. There was always the possibility of some lying round about a house, so we rode on cautiously but hopefully, spreading out and cantering so that probable marksmen would not have too easy a target. Norry yelled: ‘Blow ’em! if the b—s fire at us we’ll turn around and come home.’ I grinned.

We drew dangerously close to the house. It was surrounded by a hedge of prickly pear, lovely cover for riflemen. So we agreed on an old, old trick that always seems to work. I suddenly stood in the stirrups gazing earnestly, then yelled and instantly we swerved over our horses’ necks and wheeled away at the full gallop. Crack-whizz, crackwhizz, crack-crack-zip-zip-zip. The ground had been ploughed. Our neddies took it at a plunging gallop, knowing the haste necessary as the bullets whizzed by – bullets have a tearing whistle at close range. We cleared the bad ground and took the hard country beyond at an exhilarating gallop, seeing the New Zealand outpost and our own mates on the little hill and knowing how they must be enjoying the joke. I looked at Norry and laughed. His hard face wreathed in an appreciative grin. I waved my hat derisively at the Turks, confident in the little mare racing me away. Suddenly the firing ceased. We imagined we were out of range so pulled up into a canter, laughing, but we had merely ridden into a hollow momentarily out of sight, for as we rode up came whizz, whizz, whizz, whizz, and again into a rollicking gallop. A bullet screeched by my ear, others whizzed between the neddies and stung the ground in front. ‘What splendid range they keep!’ I thought. Then we rode around the little outpost hill and there were the En Zeds and our chaps grinning as they put their glasses away. They had quite enjoyed the fun. They asked if there was any wood in the house. Norry replied: ‘No, it’s in our heads.’ The En Zeds had an ambulance cart with them. They might have had a job for it. However, we scouted around and had luck. Got just enough wood to load the packhorses.

The guns are booming, machine-guns are stuttering from the Gaza trenches. Damn trench warfare. It gets us nowhere; its monotony is heartbreaking; its loss of life futile.

W.H. Downing

The battle to recapture Villers-Bretonneux on Anzac Day, 1918 by the men of the 5
^th
Division was a major factor in repelling the German attack that threatened Amiens and the Channel ports. Had the breakthrough been achieved, the war might well have been lost.

Villers-Bretonneux was the first of Monash’s brilliantly organised and executed actions in 1918, in which Downing’s 57
^th
Battalion played its part.

Villers-Bretonneux is the heart of Australia in France. The Australian National Memorial, the Adelaide Cemetery from where the Unknown Soldier was buried and re-interred at the Australian War Memorial, and the school and museum rebuilt after the war with the pennies of Victorian schoolchildren, all testify to the sign on the shelter shed – ‘Never Forget Australia.’

*

English boys of eighteen and nineteen with a very small leaven of older men took over the heavy responsibility of the sector. They were new to the line – drafts hurried over from England in a time of desperate need. The 8
^th
and 14
^th
Brigades occupied the trenches on their left, the former near Vaire Wood, the latter between them and the English. The 15
^th
were immediately behind both, at Fouilloy and Hamelet and in the Aubigny line, from where they could give prompt aid to the front by Vaire, or Hamel, where the line curved back.

Next morning we stood to arms while French colonials attacked at Hangard Wood and Hangard-en-Santerre, a mile or two on the right of Bretonneux. Here there was heavy fighting, backwards and forwards, day by day. Then for several mornings we stood to arms in the expectation of an attack on the divisional front. It was known that a heavy onset was pending, so we waited every evening, and in the morning long before the dawn. For weeks the enemy had been drenching the whole area with gas – with phosgene, ‘Yellow Cross II’, ‘mustard’, ‘sneezing’ and ‘vomiting’ gas.

Early in the morning of the 24th of April there was a heavy bombardment. Where we were we had few casualties, but the thunder of doom rolled and boomed along the front.

Mid-morning grew calm. There was an insistent shelling of roads and approaches. Royal Berks. and East Lancs. came by with stretchers. They had been almost annihilated by the weight of metal. They had looked up and seen above them the iron prows of enemy tanks – used here for the first time on the Western Front – then the German masses had rolled like a juggernaut over the remnants of the garrison. The Australian line had held, but the defenders of Villers-Bretonneux had been completely smashed. The town was lost.

At midday, horses were harnessed to our field-cookers and galloped away. We grumbled at losing our meal, then suddenly became aware that the opposite hill was full of German infantry. Then came orders to stop all stragglers of whatever Allied nationality, and keep them with us. We were not sorry thus to reinforce our weak platoons. The Tommies proved themselves good men that night, and we thanked our stars we had escaped the hell that they had already endured. Nevertheless, we would have preferred Australians.

We heard one or two guns firing. That was some of the Australian artillery slamming at the enemy over open sights. Their fire and the existence of the long and elaborate Aubigny Line – of which the Germans already possessed the plans – alone appear to have bluffed the enemy from pushing forward then and there. If he had, there was nothing to stop him, except a few gunners. At evening we received orders to proceed to the English sector and retake the town.

From a chain of hills parallel to the Somme and south of it, an arm reaches out towards the river. Villers-Bretonneux is on a high hill at the biceps, Vaire is the elbow, Hamel is a lump on the wrist. From Villers-Bretonneux alone is there a clear view of Amiens, twelve miles away. With their overwhelming preponderance of artillery, the enemy dominated Amiens, the most vital nerve centre of the front, the most vulnerable part of the Allied spine. It was the point at which the main railway (Calais–Amiens–Paris–Verdun–Belfort) approached most nearly to the battle line. It was the point opposite which the French and British armies joined – always a vital spot, but never so much as now. Moreover, apart from ordinary dangers of a deep enemy penetration, the Germans were here within a few days’ march of the estuary of the Somme near Abbeville, between which and Nieuport all the British armies could be confined and wiped out in detail, leaving the flank of the French in the air, the road to Paris open. Alternatively, the British, flying along the coast from Nieuport to Havre, might perhaps have escaped that trap, and in a concave V retained touch with the French. It is hard to see how; but in any case, that line of retreat was double the distance between the Germans and Paris. Under these circumstances, the best for which we could have hoped was to lose Paris, the Channel ports, and 150 miles of coastline fronting the south of England – and to postpone an utter defeat for a few weeks only.

A mere embarrassment near Amiens would have been sufficient to put the world in dreadful jeopardy. From Villers-Bretonneux the enemy, if he had decided to stay there, could have rendered the railway at Amiens useless and blown the city to dust – had in fact already begun to do so; for he possessed strong artillery of his own, against which we had a few – relatively very few – light guns and howitzers. But he would not have stayed on the ridge. He would have been in Amiens in two days, had not a handful of Australians flung themselves against a German corps in that black hour.

The line was stretched to breaking point, like a sheet of rubber into which a finger has been pressed. It is improbable that there were any available British reserves. Assuming their existence, it is still more improbable that they could have arrived within those terrific hours between 3.30 a.m. on the 24th and 4 a.m. on the 25th. After then, if the German forces, so numerous and so triumphant, had held the town, a larger number of divisions than could possibly have been spared would have been necessary for its recapture.

Those were the issues when less than 3000 Australians attacked three full divisions with, it was thought, eight others in reserve. (But it is said that at this crucial point of time those eight divisions were sent by the enemy to Bailleul.) Grenades and extra bandoliers were issued. We were to move at nightfall. There were successive conferences between battalion, company and platoon commanders as new facts forced the reconsideration of the plans. We set off about 10 p.m. The final dispositions were communicated to subordinate leaders while on the move. The 15
^th
Brigade were ordered to advance on the left of the town, the 13
^th
on the right, and by joining on the far side, to encircle it. A few English were on the western end to prevent the enemy from coming out of the town behind the striking force and cutting it off.

Along the valley we walked in single file towards Abbe Wood. We halted at the ‘lie-out’ position, faced left and found whatever shelter we could, for the enemy was heavily shelling this place. At length word came that all detachments were in position. Then we rose and went forward in artillery formation – lines of platoons each in a diamond with a section at the four corners. We halted at a second sunken road to spread into a double line of skirmishers, 60
^th
on the left, 59
^th
on the right, 57
^th
in rear of the 59
^th
, and some of the 58
^th
behind the 60
^th
. The line wheeled slightly left to avoid some hedges, then half right, the left running and stumbling. The moon sank behind clouds. There were houses burning in the town, throwing a sinister light on the scene. It was past midnight. Men muttered, ‘It’s Anzac Day,’ smiling to each other, enlivened by the omen.

The die was now cast. It seemed that there was nothing to do but go straight forward and die hard. There was no artillery firing on either side, and we were glad. All was quiet as the grave.

Two companies of the 57
^th
faced right to form a flank guard. They were immediately involved in fighting with German outposts. At the same time the main force, led into a bunch by converging belts of wire, became crowded and entangled in attempting to get through. It was seen. German flares of all kinds shot into the air – reds, whites, greens, bunches of golden rain. A storm of machine-gun fire came from the right and the front. Remarkably few were hit.

A snarl came from the throat of the mob, the fierce, low growl of tigers scenting blood. There was a howling as of demons as the 57
^th
, fighting mad, drove through the wire, through the 59
^th
, who sprang to their sides – through their enemy. The yelling rose high and passed to the 58
^th
and 60
^th
, who were in another mob on the left. Baying like hell-hounds, they also charged. The wild cry rose to a voluminous, vengeful roar that was heard by the 13
^th
Brigade far on the right of Villers-Bretonneux. Cheering, our men rushed straight to the muzzles of machine-guns, not troubling to take them in the flank. There was no quarter on either side. Germans continued to fire their machineguns, although transfixed by bayonets; but though they were crack regiments of Prussian and Bavarian Guards, and though they were brave and far outnumbered the Australians, they had no chance in the wild onslaught of maddened men, who forgot no whit, in their fury, of their traditional skill. The latter were bathed in spurting blood. They killed and killed. Bayonets passed with ease through grey-clad bodies, and were withdrawn with a sucking noise. The dozen English we had with us, mere boys, and without arms till they could find a rifle, were fighting with fists and boots, happy so long as they knew where to find the Australian put in charge of them. Men were shouting, ‘Coming mit a flare, Herman!’ ‘Vos you dere, Fritz?’ Many had tallies of 20 and 30 and more, all killed with bayonet, or bullet, or bomb. Some found chances in the slaughter to light cigarettes, then continued the killing. Then, as they looked for more victims, there were cries of ‘There they go, there they go!’ and over heaps of big dead Germans they sprang in pursuit. One huge Australian advanced firing a Lewis gun from the shoulder, spraying the ground with lead.

It is unlikely that any of the enemy escaped their swift, relentless pursuers. They were slaughtered against the lurid glare of the fire in the town. It was man against man, and the quickest with the bayonet won. Several times Germans and Australians stood up to each other in the open and fought with grenades, the former tugging the strings in the handles of their canister bombs, then flinging them at their adversaries, the latter pulling out the pins of Mills grenades with their teeth, and bowling them overarm. One saw running forms in the dark, and the flashes of rifles, then the evil pyre in the town flared and showed to their killers the white faces of Germans lurking in shell holes, or flinging away their arms and trying to escape, only to be stabbed or shot down as they ran. Machine-gun positions were discovered burrowed under haystacks, crammed with men, who on being found were smashed and mangled by bomb after bomb after bomb. It was impossible to take prisoners. Men could not be spared to take them to the rear; also they might easily have conducted them, in the deceiving light, to the enemy lines behind us, where erstwhile prisoners could have given their compatriots information which would have been our undoing.

We had advanced through a bottleneck, and until we could join with the 13
^th
Brigade we were far inside the bottle. Here we recaptured a few wounded English who had been taken the day before. For a few minutes there was confusion. Officers were crying that we were on our objective, and ordering the men back to the trench we had passed. After a short delay, we went to the East–West Road (Warfusée–Villers- Bretonneux) a few hundred yards ahead, and sat down. We heard enemy transport rumbling over the roads. Some drove unconcernedly into our hands. They could not believe their eyes when they saw us. They were utterly ignorant of what had been happening. One would like to know what the enemy were doing all this time. These men were shot. A cart carrying a
minenwerfer
gun appeared. Its driver had short shrift.

There was a weird silence. An extraordinary scene then took place. ‘Markers’ were set out as if it were an ordinary parade ground, and a thousand men fell in two ranks, in close order, dressed by the right, and were numbered and checked by the platoon commanders. The lurid glare of the burning houses in the town shone fitfully on the quiet ranks, where each man stood erect and steady with his rifle at the order, bloody, shining bayonet fixed, the flames reflected at intervals on all our faces.

When organisation had been rapidly induced by this extraordinary means, the line extended and went forward once more in deadly stillness. Now and again there was a shot and a wail as a German hiding in a dugout passed out, a scream and then stillness as one was found lurking in the old huts through which we were passing. Here was an abandoned British aerodrome. The great hangars bulked against the sky were black clouds passed slowly across the faces of the stars. We reached the summit of a further ridge and commenced to dig in. There was still no sign of a German counter-attack. We occupied two isolated houses.

But we were too far advanced and too far to the left. There were long undefended spaces between the English and the two flank companies left behind, and between the flank companies and us. There was also a gap on the left between the 14
^th
and 15
^th
Brigades. Through any of these the enemy might easily have poured and cut us off. But they did not, even though we were very few, and far ‘out in the blue’.

The 57
^th
therefore retired to the hangars, by the Warfusée Road, and the 59
^th
passed to the right. The advance of the previous night had been about 3000 yards on an average front of 600 – unprecedented.

Daylight found us wearily digging in. A few Germans were moving across the front, escaping from the town. We sniped them, one by one. Enemy machine-gunners dashed to the house where we had been the night before, and established their guns in a trench close by. We hit many of them, but those guns gave great trouble that day.