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[Page 32]
Sun 3/11/19
WHERE THEY FOUGHT
Silent Fields of Bullecourt
Relics of Australian Fights
Emptiness and Desolation
(No. 4)
("The Sun's" Special Representative)
LONDON, August 19.
Those daily communiqués which called every reverse a victory and twisted disasters into triumphs have no more bitter commentary than the lonely field of Bullecourt. Here four of our divisions, together with many fine British battalions, battered their way a few hundred yards up a gentle slope – for nothing.
The corps had followed the Hindenburg retreat across wantonly devastated farm and orchard lands from Flers and Le Sars, through the ghost city at Bapaume, through dynamited villages and over little ridges to the Hindenburg line. Our men had had a pitiless winter on the Somme battlefield, with trench feet and trench sicknesses accounting for casualty lists as heavy as those of a normal offensive. Some fights in the pursuit were tough and costly.
In those days the thick wire in front of the Hindenburg line was like broad red bands stretching zig-zag across the hillside. But those forbidding, jagged barriers did not stop the Fourth Division, though no artillery cut passages through them, and the tanks that were to have rolled out a path got nowhere near them.
There are no recognisable signs to-day of that famous Fourth Division attack, except heaps of rusty iron that were once tanks. It is still the most compact cemetery of tanks in France. The monsters lie on their sides in shell holes, stand rocklike on the horizon wherever you turn, meet you unexpectedly in huge pits, partly overgrown, as you walk across the fields.
The wire has been pounded to nothing. The trenches are recognisable only by the dugout entrances. Someone – can it have been a relative wandering here? – has planted an Australian flag amongst the few graves at the railway embankment. But there is no distinctive mark of a truly brave action.
Australian Heroism
The six battalions of the Fourth Division which went out over the snow that morning had to come back. Enfiladed, battered by shells, with no supplies arriving across the bullet-swept field, they put their backs to the walls of their cul-de-sac and fought until few men had a bomb left, and some had no more cartridges. They faced complete encirclement. And to come back, as they did, with machine-guns playing upon them from right, left, and rear, was as gallant a deed as their advance.
It is so easy to forget, to make light now of such heroism. So easy to be content with pity, with a little hasty sorrow; so easy to glance over this field and see nothing. Yet this was the land where priceless lads, princes amongst the Australians of to-day, spilt their blood. These were the trenches against which 50,000 Australians had to storm, in an inferno of death and wounds, with souls and bodies reaching an apex of effort for their country, before the Hindenburg line was firmly ours.
Such an immensity of national effort, of high resolve and noble devotion, does not come in every generation's history. Yet that it should have been here, round Bullecourt, is almost unbelievable. One is again puzzled by the barrenness, the emptiness, the weediness and the loneliness of the battlefield.
The Fourth Division was whisked away north to follow the Third into the battle of Messines. The Second, First, and Fifth Divisions, in that order, set out to break the Hindenburg Line. Great guns had come up, and the wire had been cut.
A railway embankment ran along our front, and here one still finds little Australian relics – tattered uniforms, broken rifles, the cave headquarters which shuddered under the German shelling. Our engineers did one of their most gallant battle works during the first hours of this prolonged, costly battle, digging a sap between the embankment and the first Hindenburg trench. Our men were the target for every German gun within range for the next three weeks, for we alone had advanced. The Germans made of this sap – our only path for supplies – a veritable line of death. And upon those Hindenburg trenches seized by the Australians, they turned an enormous weight of artillery.
The Forbidden Village
Bullecourt, which to-day is nothing but a signboard and a few broken concrete cellar emplacements, seemed to be a forbidden village until our Fifth Division, and particularly the 15th Brigade, going in late, completed the British hold upon it. Remembering the clouds of brick dust tossed above the smoke of our exploding shells, one wonders why there is no sign here now of those pretty brick houses, those red barns, that high-standing sugar factory, that once was here. But not a brick remains.
Bullecourt we took. But there was a forbidden village, and its shell still stands, 200 yards from our old outpost line. It is called Riencourt, and it is truly a village to-day, for three old couples have built shanties on the ruins, and flattened out some land, and planted some seed – the only people to be met for miles around. They have not gone down the dug-outs, they say, but they have found things – interesting things, helmets and pistols, and Australian tunics, and little piles of letters.
Our second wave was to have over-run Riencourt on that fateful day in early May, and a third wave – still the Fifth and Sixth Brigades – was to have gone far afield. But the Victorians, who went on from the Hindenburg Line, still lie out there beneath the village, and none will ever know how far they got, though all know that before they leapt forward they knew they would never come back, or see their own land again. Riencourt was not in British hands until the last days of the war.
The sunken road heading diagonally across the battlefield to Riencourt is yellow, sandy, neglected. The Germans had deep dug-outs in it – doubtless company headquarters. There are duckboards and isolated German graves. The roads about Noreuil, Lagnicourt and Vrau are much as we left them. Our corrugated iron shelter and little man-holes, made when we used them for our reserves, have not been touched. Shell-holes make them impassable. The shell-hole out of which Captain C.E.W. Bean stepped, as by a miracle, at the instant we thought he had perished amid the smoke and clatter of explosives, can be identified near the old aid posts.
The whole field is horribly empty, even of graves. Apart from a dozen neglected graves by the railway embankment, and the lonely crosses here and there in the long grass, the little military cemetery at Vaulx-Vraucourt, is all that I could see. The dead of twenty battalions are here, but the saddest sight is the group of new graves, rows of them, bearing the words, "an Unknown Australian Soldier."
Bapaume-Pozieres
Bapaume, which had stood for centuries, is making a bid for life. About a thousand French people are back there, though how they live is a mystery, for there is no cultivation, and battlefields yield nothing in the way of wealth. The old houses can never be rebuilt. A new township of tin shanties is arising, centred round the railway station. Beer and vermouth – bad stuff, the same bad dead level in every estaminet, but plenty of drinking shops from which to choose.
A few of our artillery officers lie in the Bapaume cemetery, which remains shattered, and in small part disgorged by shellfire. Our graves are well tended; some friends have been there. I came on a German officer's grave in the deserted wilderness close to Grevillers, covered with fresh flowers, and wreaths of everlastings, and showing the marks of a woman's trowel. Doubtless, some woman's tears too, though it seemed impossible that a German woman could have got there. At Grevillers the ruins remain, and the old corps headquarters buildings are occupied by prisoners of war. Our Australian cemetery is where the casualty clearing stations used to be. For the first time since entering the Ypres area I saw a man with a plough.
Flers, Pozieres, Mouquet Farm – the old Somme field – is sheer dishevelled waste, more a lonely wilderness, because more broken, than the driest patch of saltbush country at home. At Pozieres the First Division's memorial party has raised an Australian flag, and out of the tunnels of Mouquet Farm Australian bodies are still being carried. Some were found locked with Germans. The cemetery at Pozieres is stretching now far back from the road. Grass is high in the fields covering the white crosses of the scattered graves. But the British soldiers, busy at re-burying have many months of work in hand.
The next article in this series will appear on Wednesday.
WHERE THEY FOUGHT
The Ypres Ridges To-day
Silent and Inscrutable
Passchendaele Memories
(No. 5)
("The Sun's" Special Representative)
LONDON, August 25
Not even on Gallipoli did Australia pour out her blood more generously than on these bleak hills of Passchendaele. All five divisions were full to overflowing when they went in here. They fought until exhausted.
That was the experience here of the whole British army, every division of which took its turn, time and again, in this cockpit. Few units of Haig's force were spared the scorching. Some, like the Canadians, who have bought the ramparts of Ypres at the Menin Gate as a site for their national memorial, suffered here more than half their casualties.
Brave battalions marched in, and came out after a week or so, mere remnants, stunned and shocked by utter weariness and the horrors of battle. The mud was sometimes such that strong men, slipping with fatigue, were drowned in it. The artillery massed here brought such scourging by shell-fire, such waves and torrents of shells, that death came at all parts of the field. The sky became red with reflection, and the flickering lights of the guns were at times constant. For miles behind the lines, camps were shelled or bombed.
That happened on both sides. The visitor to the German side is impressed with the devastation marked out there. But one thing the Germans escaped – mud. They were driven back slowly on to comparatively fresh battle-ground. Our men suffered the fatigues of that little-known, but deeply-remembered, duty - the carrying up of all supplies through miles of sticky mud, so deep that to slip off the duckboard meant sinking waist-high in morass, whilst the shells thundered around.
A Fruitless Battle
Strategists have unsparingly condemned the Passchendaele battles. I have heard some of the most responsible statesmen in Britain refer to them as the prime British mistake. It brought changes in commands, and on Haig's staff; but its worst effect was to shock the British army, which suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties, and was worn here so thin that the German breaks-through four months later should not have been surprising.
Standing at Broodseinde, which our Second Division took, one can survey the whole field. The slope is gradual, the total rise from Ypres being only a few hundred feet. The only things now standing above the level of the grounds are the Butte of Polygon Wood, that mysterious high mound of earth on which the Fifth Division is planting its memorial! a few redoubts; the ruins of Zonnebeke, and the new estaminets.
All else is deeply pitted earth, covered with weeds. Not an animal is to be seen. Scarcely a man. Transport has vanished. The iron, the battle breakage, are rusted and decayed. It is a wilderness – is it abandoned to desolation?
On all old battlefields one is oppressed, heavily, by the lifelessness, the emptiness, of the scene. Where life's struggles had reached its intensest hours, where millions of young men, with spirits lifted to the pinnacle of hope and high enterprise, and feet slushing in the mud, had engaged in whirlwinds of action – here nothing now was left but abodes of the dead.
This feeling of barrenness is strongest on the Ypres Ridge, where one stands as though in mid-ocean, and looks across measureless wastes. The battles here were much compressed – compressed by failure. The British Empire won the ridge, by series of frightful hammer-strokes, time and again recoiling upon itself, time and again finding divisions consumed without the slightest gain. Having won it, in Britain's obdurate way, it was found to be worth – nothing.
I went over the Australian lines of advance, and found it impossible to fit the scores of thousands of Diggers into the scene again. The contrast between the furious energies of battle and this weedy sepulchre is too great. But there are many familiar places.
The Fateful Wire of Bellevue
Bits of brown tape can be picked up on our starting lines, where men lay silently waiting for zero hour. Sometimes they waited under pitiless German barrages, such as that which took heavy toll of the First Division as they gathered for their second advance. I sought the deep narrow holes in which the clearer-headed, zealous platoon commanders had sheltered their men. But they are lost in the maze of pits.
The redoubts, each one of which cost some Australian section or platoon a supreme effort, lie demolished, mere shapeless blocks of concrete. Here and there a garish estaminet stands, with its flaxen-haired Belgian maids, where the cries of battle had once been savage and brave men had died in plenty.
Polygon Wood, where three of our divisions had the full shock of battle, and the Fifth Division did heroic things in repelling counter-attacks, and in advancing, has vanished. Scarcely a splinter of wood remains. The Butte of Polygon, around which the Fifteenth (Victorian) Brigade lost heavily of it best, has been straightened down and cleaned, as a piece of hallowed ground. Bodies are still being recovered from it, and the graves of the brave Colonel Scott and of an English colonel who (if I remember right) commanded one of our Fourteenth Brigade battalions that day, and was shot through the head whilst leading his men with revolver in hand, have been made beneath its shadows.
A strange survival of the storm is Snipers' Tree. It is shorn of branches and foliage, and is dead. But the little platform stands upon it still. The German sniping round the Butte of Polygon was deadly. It cost us a battalion headquarters staff and many men. But the idea that it came from this tree must surely have been a delusion.
From Polygon Racecourse to Broodseinde, Australian remembrances are thick. There are broken rifles, clothing, the remains of trenches, and many sights that would move a heart of stone. The little tracks from Zonnebeke can be picked up, with here and there a broken length of duckboard.
Near Passchendaele I found a grave, a rough, discolored wooden cross marked merely, "5099, Pte. A.E. Toll, 20th Bn., A.I.F." Some men of the Ninth Brigade are believed to have died closer still to the goal, in a little house of which not even a stone can be found. But I could discover no other Australian mark, not even the piece of uniform which on these fields means so much.
Of fascinating interest are the redoubts of the Bellevue Spur, standing still intact, but shorn of that menacing sense of power and fastness which was so impressive in the October days of disaster. Thick belts of red lie in front of them – the fateful wire. Now torn, confused, tangled. Yorkshire, then Norfolk, then New Zealand brigades, were shattered here, in quick succession, whilst German machine-gunners, secure behind them, slew the Australians advancing on the flank. Then the fresh, overflowing Canadian corps came up to do the task which had been apportioned to a few battalions, ill-supported by artillery.
Farthermost Australians
The little river over which the New Zealanders had to climb, through a curtain of shrapnel, is not flooded to-day, nor is the advance, through a multitude of shellholes, as difficult as on that terrible day when men knew before they started through the morass towards the uncut wire that they had been ordered to do the impossible. Thistles and the rankest growths cover this memorable hill; there are a few rusty gravemarks; the inscrutable waste, the brooding silence, tell you nothing.
Over the ridge, at a point not quite as high as Passchendaele itself, but giving a glorious view of the Promised Land beyond, are three places whose names will bring a hush upon the soul of many Australian soldiers. They are Dairy Wood, Daisy Wood, and Malakoff Farm.
Here lie the Australians who got farthest into Belgium. Few crosses mark their resting-places. Theirs is one of the saddest yet most glorious stories of the A.I.F.
They were men of the 2nd Division. They had been twice over the top, and were lying on the edge of these woods when the rains and storms began. The difficulties of relief were great, and all the divisions were thin. Those in authority judged it best that these brigades should carry on, though battalions were down as low as a hundred fighting men, and the grind of heavy fighting, in wet and mud, with little food, and less sleep, and no warmth, had brought physical agony such as less great men could not have endured.
They had six days of this, and then the call came again, on the fateful October 12, and they flogged their stiffening muscles with the last whips of their invincible resolution, and dragged forward once more through the mud, the tree stumps, the splintering shells. The two woods were commanded by the shoulder of a hill on the right, where German machine-gunners were posted in great strength. Our artillery, disorganised by the collapse of the road communications, could not reach them. Our own shells fell sometimes among our own men.
That was a tragic day, for we lost many men of great heart and resolute character. The 6th Brigade, not dashingly, as of old, but with sheer tortured will-power, stormed Malakoff Farm, pass it – and were fired on from behind. Had it a tunnel, through which German machine-gunners dribbled in after we had passed? Or were the battalions too weak to supply mopping-up parties, and thus overlooked part of the German garrison? There is to-day no sign of a tunnel about the place.
The last posts of the 6th Brigade can be seen along the outer fringes of the woods. Little signs of this last Australian offensive in Belgium can be picked up.
During the next few bitterly cold and stormy nights the Australian forces were relieved. The fresh Canadians came. We moved back. The men did not know at the time, but they were not destined again to pour out their blood and strength in Flanders. Desperate fighting came, but the flow of battle had taken us far to the south.