These letters are in no sense a history—except that they contain the truth. They were written at the time and within close range of the events they describe. Half of the fighting, including the brave attack before Fromelles, is left untouched on, for these pages do not attempt to narrate the full story of the Australian Imperial Force in France. They were written to depict the surroundings in which, and the spirit with which, that history has been made; first in the quiet green Flemish lowlands, then with a swift, sudden plunge into the grim, reeking, naked desolation of the Somme. The record of the A.I.F., and its now historical units in their full action, will be painted upon that background some day. If these letters convey some reflection of the spirit which fought at Pozières, their object is well fulfilled. The author's profits are devoted to the fund for nursing back to useful citizenship Australians blinded or maimed in the war.
C. E. W. Bean.
Australians Watching the Bombardment of Pozières | Frontispiece |
FACING PAGE | |
Sketch Map | 1 |
"Talking with the Kiddies in the Street" | 12 |
"An Occasional Broken Tree-Trunk" | 16 |
No Man's Land | 16 |
Along the Road to Lille | 26 |
The Trenches here have to be Built Above the Ground in Breastwork | 30 |
A Main Street of Pozières | 112 |
The Church Pozières | 112 |
The Windmill of Pozières | 140 |
The Barely Recognisable Remains of a Trench | 140 |
The Tumbled Heap of Bricks and Timber which the World Knows as Mouquet Farm | 160 |
"Past the Mud-Heaps Scraped by the Road Gangs" | 160 |
France, April 8th, 1916.
The sun glared from a Mediterranean sky and from the surface of the Mediterranean sea. The liner heaved easily to a slow swell. In the waist of the ship a densely packed crowd of sunburnt faces upturned towards a speaker who leaned over the rail of the promenade deck above. Beside the speaker was a slight figure with three long rows of ribbons across the left breast. Every man in the Australian Imperial Force is as proud of those ribbons as the leader who wears them so modestly.
Australian ships had been moving through those waters for days. High over one's head, as one listened to that speaker, there sawed the wireless aerial backwards and forwards across the silver sky. Only yesterday that aerial had intercepted a stammering signal from far, far away over the brim of the world. "S.O.S.," it ran, "S.O.S." There followed half inarticulate fragments of a latitude. That evening about sundown we ran into the shreds of some ocean conversation about boats' crews, and about someone who was still absent—just that broken fragment in the buzz of the wireless conversation which runs around the world. A big Australian transport, we knew, was some twelve hours away from us upon the waters. Could it be about her that these personages of the ocean were calling one to another? Days afterwards we heard that it had not been an Australian or any other transport.
Somewhere in those dazzling seas there was an eye watching for us too, just above the water, and always waiting—waiting—waiting—. It would have been a rich harvest, that crowded deck below one. If the monster struck just there he could not fail to kill many with the mere explosion. But I don't believe a man in the crowd gave it a thought. The strong, tanned, clean-shaven faces under the old slouch hats were all gazing up in rapt attention at the speaker. For he was telling them the right thing.
He was not a regular chaplain—there was no regular padre in that ship, and we were likely to have no church parade until there was discovered amongst the reinforcement officers one little subaltern who was a padre in Tasmania, but who was going to the front as a fighting man. We had heard other padres speak to troops on the eve of their plunging into a great enterprise, when the sermon had made some of us wish that we only had the power and gift to seize that wonderful opportunity as it might be seized, and have done with texts and doctrines and speak to the men as men. Every man there had his ideals—he was giving his life, as like as not, because, however crude the exterior, there was an eye within which saw truly and surely through the mists. And now when they stood on the brink of the last great sacrifice, could he not seize upon those truths—?
But this time we simply stood and wondered. For that slip of a figure in khaki, high up there with one hand on the stanchion and the other tapping the rail, was telling them a thousand times better than any of us could ever have put it to himself exactly the things one would have longed to say.
He told them first, his voice firm with conviction, that God had not populated this world with saints, but with ordinary human men; and that they need not fear that, simply because they might not have been churchgoers or lived what the world calls religious lives, therefore God would desert them in the danger and trials and perhaps the death to which they went. "If I thought that God wished any man to be tortured eternally," he said, "to be tortured for all time and not to have any hope of heaven, then I would go down to Hell cheerfully with a smile on my lips rather than worship such a being. I don't know whether a man may put it beyond the power of God to help him. But I know this, that whether you are bad or good, or religious or not religious, God is with you all the time trying to help you.
"And what have we to fear now?" he went on, raising his eyes for a moment from the puckered, interested brown foreheads below him and looking out over the shimmering distant silver of the horizon, as if away over there, over the edge of the world, he could read what the next few months had in store for them. "We know what we have come for, and we know that it is right. We have all read of the things which have happened in Belgium and in France. We know that the Germans invaded a peaceful country and brought these horrors into it, we know how they tore up treaties like so much paper; how they sank the Lusitania and showered their bombs on harmless women and children in London and in the villages of England. We came of our own free wills—we came to say that this sort of thing shall not happen in the world so long as we are in it. We know that we are doing right, and I tell you that on this mission on which we have come, so long as every man plays the game and plays it cleanly, he need not fear about his religion—for what else is his religion than that? Play the game and God will be with you—never fear.
"And what if some of us do pass over before this struggle is ended—what is there in that? If it were not for the dear ones whom he leaves behind him, mightn't a man almost pray for a death like that? The newspapers too often call us heroes, but we know we are not heroes for having come, and we do not want to be called heroes. We should have been less than men if we hadn't."
The rapt, unconscious approval in those weather-scarred upturned faces made it quite obvious that they were with him in every word. In those simple sentences this man was speaking the whole soul of Australia. He looked up for a second to the wide sky as clear as his own conscience, and then looked down at them again. "Isn't it the most wonderful thing that could ever have happened?" he went on. "Didn't everyone of us as a boy long to go about the world as they did in the days of Drake and Raleigh, and didn't it seem almost beyond hope that that adventure would ever come to us? And isn't that the very thing that has happened? And here we are on that great enterprise going out across the world, and with no thought of gain or conquest, but to help to right a great wrong. What else do we wish except to go straight forward at the enemy—with our dear ones far behind us and God above us, and our friends on each side of us and only the enemy in front of us—what more do we wish than that?"
There were tears in many men's eyes when he finished—and that does not often happen with Australians. But it happened this time—far out there on a distant sea. And that was because he had put his finger, just for one moment, straight on to the heart of his nation.
France, April 8th.
So the Australians are in France. A great reception at the port of landing, so we hear. A long, weary train journey in a troop train which never alters its pace, but moves steadily on, halts for meals, jogs on again, waits interminably outside strange junctions. Some days ago it landed the first units, somewhere behind the front.
We reached France some time after the first units. The excitement of seeing an Australian hat had long since evaporated. A few troops had been left in camp near the port, and we met some of those on leave in the big town. They might have been there since their babyhood for all they or the big town cared.
And there we first heard mentioned the name of a town to which our troops were supposed to have gone. It was quite a different town from the one which we had heard of on board ship. It was snowing up there where our men were, they said.
The train took us through beautiful country not yet touched by the spring of the year. There were magnificent horses in the rich brown fields—great draught horses such as I have never seen in any country yet. But the figure that drove the harrow was always that of an old man or a young boy; or, once or twice, of a woman. There were women digging in the fields everywhere; or trudging back along the roads under great bundles of firewood. The country was almost all cultivated land, one vast farming industry. And they had managed to get through the whole year's work exactly as if the men were there. As far as we could see every field was ploughed, every green crop springing. It is a wonderful performance.
We had not the least idea where we were going until in the end we actually got there. Travelling in France is quite different from travelling in Egypt or England. In Egypt you still exercise your brain as to which train you shall travel by and where you will stay and where you will change. But in France there is no need for you to think out your own journey—it is useless for you to do so. The moment you reach France the big hand of General Headquarters takes hold of you; and from that instant it picks you up and puts you down as if you were a pawn on a chessboard. Whatever the railway station, there is always a big British policeman. The policeman directs you to the Railway Transport Officer and the Railway Transport Officer tells you how long you will stay and when you will leave and where you will go to next. And when you get to the next place there is another policeman who sends you to another Railway Transport Officer; until you finally come to a policeman who directs you from the station and up the street of a little French town, where, standing on the wet cobbles at the corner of the old city square, under dripping stage scenery gables, you find another British policeman who passes you to another policeman at another corner who directs you under the very archway and into the very office which you are intended by General Headquarters to reach.
And if you go on right up to the very trenches themselves you will find that British policeman all the way; directing the traffic at every country cross-road where there is likely to be a congestion of the great lumbering motor-lorries; standing outside the ruined village church which the long-range guns have knocked to pieces in trying to get at a supply dump or a headquarters; waiting at the fork-roads where you finally have to leave your motor-car and walk only in small parties if you wish to avoid sudden death; on point duty at the ruined farmhouses which it is unhealthy at certain hours of the day to pass. At the corner where you finally turn off the road into the long, deepening communication trench; even at the point where the second line trenches cross the communication trench to the front trenches—in some cases you find that policeman there also, faithfully telling you the way, incidentally with a very close and critical eye upon you at the same time.
He is simply the British policeman doing his famous old job in his famous old way. He is mostly the London policeman, but there are policemen from Burnley, from Manchester, from Glasgow amongst them. And up near the lines you find the policeman from Sydney and Melbourne waving the traffic along with a flag just as he used to do at the corner of Pitt and King Streets. Just as he used to see that the by-laws of the local council were carried out, so he now has to see to the rules and orders made by the local general. It is a thankless job generally; but when they get as far as this most people begin to be a little grateful to the policeman.
Our railway train and the policeman had carried us over endless farmlands, through forests, beside rivers, before we noticed, drawn up along the side of a quarter of a mile of road, an endless procession of big grey motor-lorries. Every one was exactly like the next—a tall grey hood in front and a long grey tarpaulin behind. It was the first sign of the front. Presently a French regiment went by along a country road—not at all unlike our Australian troops in some ways—biggish fellows in grey-blue overcoats, all singing a jolly song. They waved to us in the same light-hearted way Australians have. There were more fair-haired men, among some of the French troops we have seen, than there would be in one of our own battalions.
After this there came great stores at intervals, and timber yards—hour after hour of farmhouses and villages where there was a Tommy in every doorway, Tommies in every barn, a Tommy's khaki jacket showing through every kitchen window; until at last towards evening we reached a country populated by the familiar old pea-soup overcoats and high-necked jackets and slouch hats of Australians.
There they were, the men whom we had last seen on the Suez Canal—here they were, already, in the orchard alongside of the old lichened, steep-roofed barn—four or five of them squatting round a fire of sticks, one stuffing his pipe and talking, talking, talking all the while. I knew that they were happy there before ever they said it. A track led across a big field—there were two Australians walking along it. A road crossed the railway—two Australians were standing at the open door of the house, and another talking to the kiddies in the street. There was a platoon of them drilling behind a long barn.
A long way ahead of that, still going through an Australian country, we stopped; and a policeman showed us to the station entrance where there was a motor-car which took us and our baggage to the little house where we were billeted. On the green door of the house next to it, behind the pretty garden, was scrawled in chalk, "Mess—five officers." That was where we were to feed.
It was as we came back from tea that I first noticed a distant sound—ever so familiar—the far-off heavy roar of the big guns at Cape Helles. It was guns firing along the lines away to the east of us.
And as we walked back after dinner that night from the little mess-room, across the garden hedge and over the country beyond, there flashed ever and anon hither and thither a distant halo of light. It was the field guns firing, and the searchlights flashing over a German parapet.
Yesterday for the first time an Anzac unit entered the trenches in France.
France, April, 1916.
Rich green meadows. Rows of tall, slender elm trees along the hedges. Low, stunted and pollarded willows lining some distant ditch, with their thick trunks showing notched against a distant blue hill-side like a row of soldiers. Here and there a red roof nestled among the hawthorn under the tall trees just bursting into green. Violets—great bunches of them—in the patches of scrub between the tall trunks and yellow cowslips and white and pink anemones and primroses. You see the flaxen-haired children out in the woods and along the roadside gathering them. A rosy-cheeked woman stands in the doorway of a farm at the cross-roads, and a golden-haired youngster, scarce able to run as yet, totters across the road to her, laughing.
Only this morning, as we passed that same house, there was the low whine of a shell, and a metallic bang like the sound of a dented kerosene tin when you try to straighten the bend in it. Then another and another and another. We could see the white smoke of the shells floating past behind the spring greenery of a hedgerow only a few fields away. It drifted slowly through the trees and then came another salvo. There were some red roofs near—those of a neighbouring farm—but we could not see whether they were firing at them, or at some sign of moving troops, or at a working party if there were any; and I do not know now. As we came back that way in the afternoon there was more shelling farther along. The woman in the doorway simply turned her head in its direction for a moment, and so did a younger woman who came to the doorway behind her. Then they turned to the baby again.
Through the trees one could see that the farmhouses and cottages farther on had mostly been battered and broken. There was a road running at a little distance, and every roof and wall in it had been shattered. There was a feverish, insane disorder about the little groups of buildings there, all shattered, burnt and gaping, like the tangled nightmare of desolation on the morning after a great city fire. Farther still was open country again, where long communication trenches began to run through the fields—but you could see none of this from where we stood. Only in the distant hedgerows, perhaps, we might have noticed, if we had looked for it, an occasional broken tree trunk—snapped off short or broken down at a sharp angle by shell fire.
Those distant trees would be growing over our firing line—or the German.
It is a more beautiful country than any we saw in Gallipoli, in spite of its waterlogged ditches and the rain which had fallen miserably almost every day since we arrived. There is green grass up to within a few yards of the filthy mud of the front trenches; and not a hinterland of powdered white earth which was all we had at Anzac or at Helles. Here you have hedgerows just bursting into spring, and green grass, which on a fine day fairly tempts you to lie on it if you are far enough away from the lines. The country is flat and you see no sign of the enemy's trenches, or your own—the hedgerows shut them out at half a mile as completely as if they did not exist.
But you realise, when you have been in that country for a little while, that you have eyes upon you all the time—you are being watched as you have never been watched in your life before. You move along the country road as you would walk along the roads about your own home, until, sooner or later, things happen which make you think suddenly and think hard. You are passing, a dozen of you together instead of the usual two or three, through those green fields by those green hedgerows when there is a sharp whiz and a crash, and a shrapnel shell from a German seventy-seven (their field gun) bursts ten yards behind you. You are standing at a corner studying a map, and you notice that a working party is passing the corner frequently on some duty or another. You were barely aware that there was a house near you.
Twenty-four hours later you hear that that house was levelled to the ground next morning—a shrapnel shell on each side of it to get the range—a high explosive into it to burst it up—and an incendiary shell to burn the rubbish; and one more French family is homeless.
It takes you some time to realise that it was you who burnt that house—you and that working party which moved past the cross-roads so often. Somebody must have seen you when the shell burst alongside that hedge. Somebody must have been watching you all the time when you were loitering with your map at that corner. Somebody, at any rate, must have been marking down from the distance everything that happened at those cross-roads. Somebody in the landscape is clearly watching you all the while. And then for the first time you recall that those grey trees in the distance must be behind the German lines; that distant roof and chimney notched against a background of scrub is in German ground; the pretty blue hill against which the willows in the plain show out like a row of railway sleepers is cut off from you by a barrier deeper than the Atlantic—the German trenches; and that from all yonder landscape, which moves behind the screen of nearer trees as you walk, eyes are watching for you all day long; telescopes are glaring at you; brains behind the telescopes are patiently reconstructing, from every movement in our roads or on our fields, the method of our life, studying us as a naturalist watches his ants under a glass case.
Long before you get near the lines, away over the horizon before you, there is floating what looks most like a flat white garden grub—small because of its distance. Look to the south and to the north and you will see at wide intervals others, one after the other until they fade into the distance. Every fine day brings them out as regularly as the worms rise after rain; they sit there all day long in the sky, each one apparently drowsing over his own stretch of country. But they are anything but drowsy. Each one contains his own quick eyes, keen brain, his telescope, his telephone, and heaven knows what instruments. And out on every beautiful fresh morning of spring come the butterflies of modern warfare—two or three of our own planes, low down; and then a white insect very, very high—now hidden behind a cloud, now appearing again across the rift. It is delightful to stand there and watch it all like a play. The bombs, if they drop 'em, are worth risking any day.
But it isn't the bombs that matter, and it isn't you who run the risk. The observer is not there to drop bombs, in most cases, but to watch, watch, watch. A motor standing by the roadside, a body of men about some work, extra traffic along a road—and a red tick goes down on a map; that is all. You go away. But next day, or sometimes much sooner, that red tick comes up for shelling as part of the normal day's routine of some German battery.
So if these letters from France ever seem thin, remember that the war correspondent does not wish to give to the enemy for a penny what he would gladly give a regiment to get. On our way back is a field pock-marked by a hundred ancient shell-holes around a few deserted earthworks. On some bygone afternoon it must have been wild, raging, reeking hell there for half an hour or so. Somebody in this landscape put a red tick once against that long-forgotten corner.
France, April.
There is a house at a certain corner I passed of late. On it, in big white letters on a blue ground, is written "To Lille." Every township for a hundred miles has that same signpost, showing you the way to the great city of Northern France. But Rockefeller himself with all his motor-cars could not follow its direction to-day. For the city to which it points is six miles behind the German lines. You can get from our lines the edge of some outlying suburb overlapping a distant hill-top.
And that is all that the French people can see of the second city of their State. The distant roofs, the smoke rising from some great centre of human activity nestled in a depression into which you cannot look; you can peer at them all day long through a telescope and wonder why it is they are stoking their chimneys, or what it is that causes the haze to hang deeply on such and such a day over this or that corner—you can study the place as an astronomer studies the faint markings upon the surface of Mars. But to all intents and purposes that country is as much cut off from you as is the farthest star.