The Silent Division
The Silent Division
New Zealanders at the Front:
O. E. Burton , M.M., M.d'H.
The Auckland Regiment, A Study in Creative HistoryWith Foreword by
K.C.B., K.C.M.G.Major-General Sir Andrew Russell ,
Australia
Angus & Robertson Limited
Castlereagh Street, Sydney
Set Up, Printed and Bound
In Australia By
Halstead Printing Company
Ltd., Arnold Place, Sydney
1935
Obtainable in London From
The Australian Book Company,
37 Great Russell
Street. W.C.l.
Foreword
This is in no sense a book of fiction but one of facts and of the reaction of a kindly soul to his experiences as a front-line Digger.
In it is to be found a truer reflection both of the grim side of the thing we call war as of its lighter and carefree aspect than is commonly found in war books. If the sense of tragedy grows deeper as the story unfolds and becomes almost overwhelming in the description of life in the trenches and of the realities of the battlefield, there yet runs through the fabric of the narrative a golden thread—a sense of beauty, of humour: and while he laments the apparent futility of war, the writer glimpses the glory of sacrifice, of the endurance of hardship and of the suffering of wounds that others may escape.
To everyone who has shared in the Iliad, in which the writer took part, the vivid descriptions of the wanderings of the N.Z.E.F. will inevitably recall his own experiences, nor will the memories be all unpleasant.
May it bring to its other readers a more lively appreciation of the inevitable after effects on the health, both physical and mental, of those whose lives at the front are written in these pages.
It is natural and perhaps inevitable that such experiences should lead to criticisms and to the free expression on the writer's part of opinions with which his readers do not agree. They are none the less interesting, and share with the rest of his story the merit of being an honest record of his experiences.
A. H. Russell .
Author's Preface
Perhaps a word should be said about the form of this book. No name has been mentioned except that of our Divisional Commander. It was difficult to leave out some great names, but it would have been impossible to have used names with anything like proportion and balance. There are no records available which would have enabled this to be done. It was suggested to the writer that he should throw the narrative into the form of a personal diary. This was felt to be impossible for a variety of reasons, not the least being his desire to retain many friendships that might have been gravely imperilled by the liberties that would necessarily have had to be taken. Also he felt strongly that what most people in New Zealand wanted was the story of the N.Z.E.F. in Gallipoli, France and Flanders in a single volume and in such a form as would describe the adventures and sufferings, the good fun and fellowship, the selfsacrifice and valour of our men as a mass.
Burton.
Contents
Chapter I
Of How We Commenced to Go about the World and up and down in It
And away across the bay they rowed southward, while the people lined the cliffs; and the women wept, while the men shouted, at the starting of that gallant crew.
Kingsley:
The Heroes.
Within a few days of the declaration of war the young manhood of New Zealand was assembling in the camps at Alexandria Park, Awapuni racecourse, Addington and Tahuna parks. From the gum fields and the timber mills, from the sheep runs and the dairy farms and the flax swamps, from mine and office and factory and school, shop hands and lawyers, labourers and university professors, mechanics and parsons, a few crooks and deadbeats, and a great crowd of decent chaps—they came pouring in. There was no troubled conscience in New Zealand. The schools and the editors and the parsons had done their work too thoroughly for that
… how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods?
There was enthusiasm and a haze of rather splendid feeling. A great adventure was opening up. All
Civilian clothes were quickly bundled up and uniform donned with a feeling akin to reverence. The various odds and ends that go to the making of the complete soldier were issued by instalments. Men gradually learned their right relationship to their sections and platoons and companies. Everyone was desperately keen because the war was bound to be over soon, and if anybody was slack they were to be left behind—a fearful fate. Apparently the matter of greatest importance was the magic thing—discipline. It was the greatest virtue of the soldier— the quality which if we could only attain we would win the war. The old regulars who seemed to spring up in the most amazing fashion as sergeant majors hinted that in all probability we would never get it. We were a little downcast, but persevered, manfully clicking our heels, casting the eyes to the left and right and saluting at all times passing authority with what precision we could muster. The shining of brass buttons was another all-important matter. The glitter and gleam of these were evidently to cause consternation in the ranks of the Hun, who was, according to the cablegrams, growing a blacker and more unspeakable person every day. For the rest men learned to turn to right and left, to form fours, to make proper connection between rifle and bayonet and to march reasonably.
But for the awful fear that the war might not last, all went well. The food was splendid. The training was not too hard. There was a reasonable Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, surely?
Most of us, like Sir Francis Drake and Mr Phileas Fogg, went round the world. We took on the average about the same time as the former, but proceeded rather more in the manner of the latter. On transports of every kind from Atlantic liners to Channel ferries, some supplied by Lord Inchcape on a strictly business basis, others kindly donated free of all charge by His Imperial Majesty of Germany; by stretcher, ambulance car, hospital train, and hospital ship; by London bus, and motor lorry, and troop train; on mule and prancing steed, and most of all on Shanks's pony—we peregrinated up and down and roundabout on the most marvellous of all the grand tours.
The majority of New Zealanders throughout the war commenced their Odyssey from Trentham camp. As dawn broke in pink and grey over the dark mass of the hills that backed the training ground, the rubbish fires blazed, and the men, falling in, marched away to the train, rattled down the Hutt Valley, and
The Main Body of the N.Z.E.F. put to sea at dawn on 16 October, and, steaming out in file, the grey-painted transports fell into two divisions of five ships in each and headed westward across the stormy waters of the Tasman Sea. At Hobart the men were landed for a route march that rapidly degenerated into a triumphal procession. The whole population of the town was in the streets thronging round the marching men, walking beside them, breaking into the ranks, pressing on everyone Tasmanian apples, bunches of roses, cigarettes, parcels of cake, handshakes, kisses. It was a most marvellous burst of spontaneous welcome. When all had re-embarked the people thronged the wharves, still showering the men with gifts until, with the bands playing "Tipperary," the transports drew away, followed by burst after burst of cheering. A week later the New Zealand ships entered the waters of King George's Sound and found awaiting them the vessels crowded with men of the Australian Imperial Forces. From all this motley assemblage of ships came cries of greeting, shrill "coo-ees," and a roar of cheers and counter-cheers.
On the first of November the whole fleet put to sea, the Australians, twenty-eight ships in all, leading in three lines and the New Zealanders, still in two, covering the gaps, while the escorting warships, the Minotaur, the Melbourne, the Sydney, and the Ibuki of the Japanese navy, went before, behind and on the flanks. In this order the great procession of
The New Zealand troopships were boats that had been trading in New Zealand waters at the beginning of the war. They had been rapidly transformed by fixing up tiers of bunks in holds, smoke rooms and lounges by running long tables down the dining-rooms or at any convenient place between decks, and by fixing up horse boxes on the promenade decks. The main consideration was to pack as many men and horses on board as could reasonably be done. The result was that the free portions of the deck were during the day-time so crowded with men that it was difficult indeed to move about, and almost impossible for any serious training to be done. Now commenced that utter lack of all privacy that some truly social souls appreciate; that the majority learn to endure with tolerable equanimity; and that for some few is unending torment. From this time for one, two, three, even four years, a man could not eat by himself or sleep by himself. If he looked at his sweetheart's photograph there was probably an audience more or less appreciative; if he opened a parcel there was his own section at least to assist him; if he was cheerful his exuberance might be infectious or it might provoke the wrath of someone who was indulging in a fit of melancholy; if he was miserable he was regarded as a bringer of gloom, a wet blanket; if his mate was offensively drunk he could not do more than edge a few inches away from the odorous reality of the exhilarated
The nautical and military authorities did their best to prevent Satan finding employment for idle hands, but even their ingenuity could hardly cope with so great a problem. After all there was a limit to the brass work to be polished, the decks to be scrubbed, the boat drills to be gone through, the musketry courses that were possible in such limited space, the military knowledge that could be imparted by means of lectures, the odd jobs that could be found for orderlies, and yet there seemed no limit to the number of men. So for the greater part of the time the majority lay around in the sun smoking and playing cards, yarning and sleeping, but coming to life with a rush when the bugles called all and sundry to—"come to the cookhouse door." Despite the relative inactivity men developed amazing sea appetites which were most nobly catered for.
It was when well out to sea that the troops suffered the first of the many things that had to be endured at the hands of the Medical Corps. "No. X platoon will parade for vaccination at 9 a.m." And so No. X paraded, not altogether without misgivings and found itself moving in a long procession clothed in singlets and trousers. A Red Cross orderly dabbed a brawny arm with methylated spirits, another dropped a spot of vaccine on the clean patch, a doctor scraped the place three or four times with
The days passed one after the other. The sea became a deeper blue; the sky above was unflecked by clouds. Men stood by the hour leaning over the rail and gazing into the break of foam that trailed away from the bow or the propellers. There is an extraordinary fascination in watching water, that has been stretching ahead like levels of shining glass, suddenly broken and churned into tumbling white foam, swirling, leaping, cascading past, bursting with silver bubbles that split the sunbeams into gleaming rainbows. As the day wears on the sun dips toward the western horizon and draws to itself low fleecy clouds that gradually change from dull grey and white to vivid bars of gold flecked with crimson. And while the colours change, the sky to the east grows dark. As the boat rises and falls on the long even swell the sun disappears then re-appears again. For a moment it is like a ball of fire floating on a fiery sea. But from the east the wide grey curtain is falling fast. At last the sun dips beneath leaden waves. The light lingers for a moment and then all is dark save for the soft cold shining of the moon and stars. From the stern streams a phosphorescent pathway to the far off fairyland of home.
There was one supremely dramatic moment
"Sos! Strange warship at entrance! Sos! Sos!"
And then jumbled indecipherable messages. At 6.30 a.m. the Sydney turned and steamed away at full speed. The Ibuki tore round the head of the convoy her battle flags streaming crimson in the wind, black smoke belching from her funnels, and took up station on the exposed flank. The excitement grew intense. At 9.30 came a message that the Sydney had commenced action with the Emden. Two hours later came the news:
"Emden beached and done for."
The great raider had fought a valiant fight. Trapped against the reefs, by a faster and heavier foe she had fought until every gun was out of action; until the hull was but a broken, twisted mass of ironwork with hell glowing where fires had started; until one hundred and ninety men lay dead, and half the remainder wounded in the bloody shambles; and then before her flag came down her captain smashed her ashore on the coral reef. On board the transports the news was received with rejoicing. There was wild cheering, a great exultation. A few days later in Colombo when the Sydney steamed in there was no cheering, for with her came the Emden's wounded and the victors were chivalrous.
Three months later a reinforcement convoy steamed close in to the low-lying palm-fringed islands, where combers dashed in long lines of creamy foam against the coral reefs, and dazzling white beaches Emden like a child's toy broken and rusted and thrown away.
The ceremony of crossing the line was observed with full rites. Their Marine Highnesses visited all the N.Z. ships and the fun was fast and furious. Cheerful pandemonium broke loose and some 8400 men received the freedom of the seas per medium of the slippery poles, tanks of salt water and appropriate quantities of soft soap. Neither rank nor calling was sacred—colonels and privates, captains and batmen, padres and cooks, all went the same way. Conscientious objectors were summarily dealt with and were driven at the nozzle of the fire-hose to the greasy shave and the bears of the bath. Hilarity was unrestrained and for a couple of hours there was happy riot, while bucket brigades and hose parties made lavish use of Neptune's bountiful supply of free water.
The weather was swelteringly hot and many wonderful costumes commenced to make their appearance. There was no news, and in consequence the main occupation of all hands was to invent and circulate the most extraordinary rumours. Apart from roll calls and a few perfunctory parades there was nothing to do. So it was the most natural thing in the world for inventive minds to supplement the scanty scraps of wireless news with bold imaginings. The sea was filled with enemy raiders and British wrecks; the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were transferred from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean; Paris was lost and Berlin was captured; tremendous battles
For a while South Africa had a great following and on board one boat a major who advertised the fact that he was landing at Durban to conduct operations against the rebel Boers was besieged by hundreds of volunteers for the job. There was no little humility in the N.Z.E.F. in those days. The legend of Mons had cast a halo round the British regular troops, and there were not enough South African veterans to dispel the glamour by reference to the experiences of the Mounted Contingents. New Zealand was a young country not experienced in war, and her men were amateur soldiers. They could hardly expect to be flung into great battles alongside such demigods as the Guards. On the whole the majority were inclined to think that their task would be the humble one of setting free the wonderfully "disciplined" battalions of professional soldiers which were held in India and Egypt.
It was a far cry to the day when a great fighting N.C.O. of a crack N.Z. battalion was to come home to his company after a tour of duty with a famous
So the ships swept on their stately way, while on board was good fellowship and exuberant spirits. When night darkened the brilliant sky and the shining sea, the men crowded on the well decks, on the spars, on the promenades, anywhere that would command a view of the space of open deck lighted by the swinging arc lamps. There were boxing tournaments and gay concerts; sometimes choruses were taken up and sung by all the great company. By a strange irony one of the last popular songs that had come to New Zealand was:—
When you come to the end of a perfect day, And you sit alone with your thoughts. And the chimes ring out with a carol gay for the joys That the day has brought; Can you think what the end of a perfect day May mean to a tired heart, When the sun goes down with a blazing ray And the dear ones have to part?
The Southern Cross dipped down into the waste o£ waters to the south and the youth of New Zealand as they drew near to the fields of Armageddon sang with little realization of the finality with which an era in history was closing.
The fleet ran up the coast of Ceylon and felt its way through a swarm of small boats to an anchorage within the breakwater of Colombo. The harbour was full of ships that had taken refuge from Emden, and were now making ready once more to go about their lawful occasions. For the majority it was their first introduction to the wonders of the magic East: the scents, the colours, the glamour, the mystery and the witchery, the subtle and enchanting loveliness that is so strangely different to all that in New Zealand we regard as beautiful. At first it seemed that not many would be able to land but by a dexterous misunderstanding of orders nearly everyone finally managed to get away, pulling ashore in the ship's boats through swarms of golden butterflies that fluttered low over the water. No sooner were the men ashore than they were assailed by long robed vendors of all manner of merchandise:
"Cigarettes, master! Flowers, master! Rickshaw, master! Give it a penny master! Give it sixpence, master!" There for the first time was heard the plaintive war cry of the Oriental beggars, "Very poor man! No father, no mother! Sixpence please!"
The tribes of bright-eyed, cheeky young scamps who infested the streets were particularly difficult to shake off. They were brushed away like so many flies but were back next moment no whit discouraged. The shopkeepers left their booths and pursued likely looking buyers, brandishing their wares, pleading pathetically with their patrons to return and investigate the entire stock. Many of the men took rickshaws or carriages and drove out along the sea-shore past splendid club-houses, military barracks, and mission schools, the Y.W.C.A., Lipton's Tea House, Salvation Army Headquarters, and
It was a great day, and the tired men gradually fought their way through the crowd of bargain sellers and beggars to the boats loaded with silks and jewels, carved elephants, green-backed beetles, brazen Buddhas, and all manner of curious Indian handwork. There were heavy mail bags sent ashore for New Zealand.
A monotonous run across the Arabian Gulf brought the fleet to Aden. Then came the stifling passage of the Red Sea; up past the Twelve Apostles and Medina, sometimes in sight of land, at others in the midst of burning waters with the sun blazing pitilessly down, until the desolate and rugged shores of the Gulf of Suez were seen stretching on either hand. The N.Z.E.F. was approaching storied soil. Blue in the distance but clear, sharp, and distinct Mount Sinai rose majestically above the lesser heights of the coast range; at another point the ships passed the place where Pharaoh's chariots and horsemen were overwhelmed by the returning waves; somewhere on the right hand side was Solomon's port of Carchemish to which came the gold ships with the precious freights of Ophir.
In the Red Sea a wireless message was received ordering the Expeditionary Force to be prepared to disembark in Egypt. There was some disappointment but of course Turkey had by now entered the war and a heavy attack on the Canal was expected at any time. This was some solace to those who had expected to be flung without delay into the hard pressed line France or Flanders.
As the ships entered the Suez Canal something of the sheer rollicking good fun of the voyage gave place to a serious realization of the fact of war. The bridge decks were fortified with flour-bags as a precaution against Turkish rifle fire. Machine-guns were mounted on the exposed side—guards posted. But, alas for the eager spirits who had hoped to steam into the midst of a Turkish attack! All was quiet! The starlight fell coldly on the grey wastes to either side, the powerful headlights shone on the waters of the Canal. Dawn came flushing the sky, the sombre levels shimmered with haze, and then the desert gleamed yellow in the sunshine as far as the eye could see. The banks were patrolled by Indian troops representing all the fighting races of India—Sikhs, Gurkhas, Pathans, Baluchis. In many places they gathered in groups shilly cheering:
"Who are you?" shouted a voice from the desert, and continued, "126 Baluchis here!" "We're New Zealanders," was the quiet answer. "Hooray!" cried the Baluchi. "Advance Australia."
Their enthusiasm however went a long way to make up for their geographical ignorance. The Henri IV was lying at anchor. She was the first French vessel the New Zealanders had seen and so, as the troopships steamed past, the men mustered along the rails and cheered and cheered. The Frenchmen lined up and sang the "Marseillaise" with extraordinary passion and abandonment. The men of New Zealand were just commencing to feel the first stirrings of that sense of nationality that was to deepen and intensify as they marched from one battlefield to another. This outburst of French feeling for their homeland moved all hearts.
Chapter II
Of what Befell in the Land of Egypt
For physical beauty and nobility of bearing they surpassed any men I have ever seen. They walked and looked like the kings in old poems.
Masefield:
Gallipoli.
At dawn on the third of December, while the morning mists still lay on the smooth waters of the Mediterranean, a forest of masts lifted above the level of the horizon. As the sun gained in power the great brown line of a breakwater rose out of the midst of the sea. It was overtopped everywhere by the masts of what seemed innumerable ships. The transports entered the harbour and steamed slowly toward the gleaming white and yellow buildings of Alexandria.
Disembarkation commenced with all speed and by four o'clock in the afternoon the first train was moving out for Cairo. But there were many thousands to go, and so general leave was given to those who could not get away that night. The men went thronging into the city. And what a night they had! At midnight they came back to the familiar holds but not to sleep. They had seen marvels and must recount what they had seen. Excited men talked at the top of their voices. "No one listened to any Thousand and One Nights; veiled women and others whose draperies were of the most diaphanous sort. French, Greeks, Russians, and Italians, with the brown-skinned Egyptians and black Nubians from the south—all these they had seen and the spell of Egypt had taken hold of them."-—2/Auckland Regiment, 1918.
The train journey from Alexandria to Cairo through the heart of the Nile delta was an unforgettable experience. Past the reedy shores of Lake Mariotis with the fishermen busy mending their nets like Peter and Andrew and James and John beside Galilee; and then
to ancient Cairo. This highroad has been a greatly travelled one since the dawn of history. The great conquerors all passed this way. Rameses the Great with his chariots and horsemen; Nebuchadnezzar in the day of his power; Alexander with the heavy armed hoplites of the Grecian phalanx; Caesar and Antony with the legionaries of Rome; 'Amr Ibn-ElAs with the fierce followers of Mohammed; Saladin and the Saracen light horse; Napoleon and the Army of Egypt. And as each passed in the hour of his glory and his pride the patient fellahin paused for a moment to watch the gleam of the weapons in
Along the road paced strings of loaded camels with contemptuous tossing of their stately heads. Little donkeys ambled bravely along, almost hidden beneath piles of miscellaneous goods—or trotted beneath some stout Gyppo whose long legs almost touched the ground and whose voluminous robe certainly obscured the major part of his steed. The New Zealanders' sympathies were mainly with the "donk" and Abdul was vociferously exhorted to get off and carry it or to walk and put the "missus" up on top. However Abdul secure in the immemorial custom of the land continued aloft, oblivious of the chorus of disapproval. Sometimes a little flock of goats was driven slowly along by small boys who stopped and waved to the train, crying out what was possibly a welcome, but more likely the free and casual insults of their kind. Girls went by in chattering groups; red-tarbooshed Egyptian police on
On either side stretched the green, well-tilled fields divided one from the other by the irrigation channels that connected up with the Nile system. Here toiled the families of the fellahin, little boys driving lean bullocks round old-fashioned water wheels, the women weeding with their little ones about them, the men hoeing or digging or ploughing with a piece of bent wood reinforced with iron. They worked, slowly but steadily, from daylight to dark. The villages were picturesque warrens of dried mud in which the fellahin herded for the night.
Whenever the trains stopped at some palmfringed station there was an immediate invasion of long-robed vendors of "eggs-a-cook" and "orangies" all "very good, very clean, very sweet," who pushed their wares with plaintive zeal until the carriages were moving again. So the New Zealanders moved through the Nile delta until they reached Cairo and ran through the outskirts to Helmieh station where all disentrained.
The New Zealand camp was established at Zeitoun, four miles from Cairo, on a level strip of desert sand a few hundred yards from the Helmieh
Training commenced at once and it was as strenuous as it could be made. Arms drill, musketry and bayonet fighting, section and platoon drill, company drill, battalion parades, artillery formation, skirmishing, tactical schemes of attack, entrenching and defence for the infantry and all manner of subtleties for the remainder. And then for every one there was the route march with full pack up! Equipment, pack, and rifle made a heavy load, the sand was soft, the sun blazing hot, the pace a warm one, uniforms of stout New Zealand wool. For a week or so men, soft from the sea voyage, felt the strain of those marches. But gradually they sweated off the last ounce of superfluous weight, their muscles hardened, and lungs filled more deeply as they swung over the miles of desert with lengthened stride and firmer tread. They were the picked men of a hardy open-air people. They were desperately keen on their work, feeling that they were on trial, and that if in the end they made good the prize would be, not garrison duty, but the opportunity of battle. So day by day the splendid material was fashioned into magnificent regiments.
When the day's training was over the men were as a rule free for the evening) in consequence Cairo was thronged with sightseers and pleasure seekers. They found it that most marvellous of all places— a city of contrasts. The limitless desert, parched and dry, ran up to the very walls of the Citadel that commanded the town. Standing on the walls one could look across to the gleaming silver strip of the Nile emerging as it were from a horizon of sand, flowing through a strip of vivid green and losing itself in the luxuriance of the delta. The Citadel itself is an old-world castle on a hill, with strong walls and towers and enough space within its great courtyards to contain the beautiful Blue and White mosques—one of them with a cannon shot of Napoleon's still embedded in the masonry.
Below this place of ancient strength stretched the packed and reeking slums of the Egyptian labourers. Stately palaces, three and four stories high and of vast extent, stood in lovely gardens of palms, while almost within stone's throw one plunged into dark alley-ways that led into the crowded bazaars where there was not room for the shopkeeper in his tiny shop, and barely room to walk over him or round him.
The bazaar with its teeming life; its variety of merchandise, contaminated meat, Egyptian curios
In crowded, mud-walled class rooms Egyptian teachers passed up and down long rows of children, with pieces of kerosene tin as slates, who chanted in unison some mournful dirge, possibly multiplication tables, possibly texts from the Koran. The chant rose and fell according to the position of the teacher and the ferule. Across the way rose a splendid mission school with airy class rooms and modern equipment where bright alert children were taught by teachers from the best training-colleges of England and America.
But the real fascination of Cairo was its cosmopolitan population. Dignified Arabs in decorous black and white; English administrative officers in civilian clothes; gigantic coal-black Nubians from the
Perhaps nothing in Cairo staggered the imagination of the average New Zealander as did the sight of the Wasser district—that block of streets and tenement houses given over entirely to the prostitutes of the city. To men used to the relatively high standards of New Zealand life, the general decency and restraint, the high regard for the sanctity of home life and the honour of women, it seemed a thing almost inconceivable that women should be openly exposed for sale as freely as any other merchandise. Yet there was the plain open fact. They sat in rows in the street soliciting custom, beckoned from the windows, dashed out and accosted the passers by. There were all sorts of them from fresh and beautiful young girls to shapeless and terrible hags whose eyes revealed the horrible deadness of soul that one commonly sees only in professional gamblers and hardened prostitutes.
Now this state of affairs was not a breakdown of standards, the disintegration of a civilization plunging through a storm of war—it was the normal and natural. It resulted from religious conceptions that made woman to be without a soul; from economic conditions that denied her the right to labour; and from a social system that held no place for her other than daughter, wife or harlot. The Wasser, like all things essentially evil, had a terrible fascination. Many who thronged through it were disgusted, many simply marvelled that such things could be and passed by thanking God that it was not so in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin. But if truth be the first casualty in war chastity is probably the second, and there were not a few who fell into the snares so widely spread.
After a heavy day's training and a strenuous evening of sight-seeing men slept soundly on the hard, dry sand until aroused early in the morning by the small boys who descended in a swarm upon the camp to sell the morning paper. Their shrill voices rose in a dismal chant.
"Very good news! "Times, Egypt, very good news to-morrow!" "Very good news, Captain—dead again!"
These small boys were both credulous and quick and gave the troops many a hearty laugh. They learned swear words and the elaborate ceremonial of guard mounting with equal facility. Some of them, whose instruction had been particularly sound, could hold their own with a regular sergeant-
And so the days went on. Great days for "
For the infantry there was one brief dash of excitement. One evening orders to entrain for the Canal transformed the weary battalions into an excited crowd of enthusiasts. Ball cartridge was served out and handled, lovingly, reverently; field dressings were issued. So it was to be battle with death and bloody wounds! And the few simple preparations having been made the men threw the accumulated rubbish of the past weeks on blazing bonfires, and then sang and shouted and danced far into the night. The astonished Gyppos who assembled on the chance of baksheesh received fresh proof of the undoubted insanity of the infidels. They were chased and caught and tossed in blankets, sometimes one at a time, sometimes more. They fled out into the friendly darkness of the desert pursued by wild yells of laughter. Next morning the battalions were entrained, and moved down on to the Canal.
But alas! when they reached Ismailia the Brigade went into reserve, and continued training. A few went up and held front trenches for a brief period, and strained their eyes for Turks who did not come. One platoon had a shell burst near it and some were able to see the broken windows and the shot holes in
And so the infantry brigade returned to Zeitoun Camp. There had been little risk and no glory, and not even a respite from the everlasting training. Except as a means of impressing the Mounteds and the recently arrived 3rd Reinforcement, the infantrymen admitted that the expedition had been a disappointment. They did their best, however, and on the whole were successful, particularly with the reinforcements. There is no logic like that of experience, and the man who had seen a shell burst— even afar off—was irrefutable on any minor point, such as the probable duration of the war, or even the internal politics of New Zealand.
Again everyone settled down to the everlasting training, "Slope Arms! Order Arms! Fix bayonets! Present Arms! Form fours! By the right—Quick march!" and away they went slogging over the everlasting sand performing every evolution known to the barrack square enthusiasts, who were then at the zenith of their authority, and who were indeed still looked upon as rather marvellous demigods. The
It was about this time too, that the thirst of the troops became great. In the three or four years before the war, prohibition sentiment in New Zealand had been exceedingly strong, and indeed the liquor traffic had been existing on a minority vote. With such anti-liquor sentiment in the country it was not surprising that the strongest influences were brought to bear upon the Government to restrict very stringently the amount of alcohol sold to the troops.
Good women who had sent their sons to war for a patriotic ideal did not want them to be subjected to the temptations that are inseparable from the use of liquor. They might never see their boys again, and if they had to die they wanted them to die clean. In the sincerity of their loyalty and the passion of their renunciation, they did not realize that in giving a vote for the utterly immoral act of war, they themselves had undermined the very basis of morality; and that truth, chastity, and sobriety, were after all only the minor and inevitable casualties.
General Godley was in a quandary. On the one side was the pressure from New Zealand, on the other the custom of the British Army, the extreme thirst of the N.Z.E.F., and as a not unimportant factor the appallingly poisonous brews that were sold in Cairo. The general himself was probably in favour of restriction, but compromised by
And now there was nothing more that could be done to add to the superb physical fitness of the troops. The feeling of restlessness grew stronger. Training, training, training, always training—was there to be nothing but this everlasting training in the land of sin and sand, and smells and sandstorms? Sheer monotony made the very beauty of the land a repulsive thing. The everlasting stew for which they had daily to wage war with clouds of flies, became nauseating, and like the host of Israel in similar case they murmured.
It seemed as though orders would never come, and that the training, the endless training would go on for ever. But at last there came a growing rumour of an open beach and of hills beyond, and forts that were claimed to be impregnable, and beyond these again an open sea and the prize of victory.
The coming of
The "battle" was partly a thanksgiving, partly a protest against the current price of sundry filthy liquors, partly an endeavour to suppress the detested red-caps, and partly a very riotous bit of good fun carried too far. It was one of the very few occasions during the whole war when men of the N.Z.E.F. lost self-control, and did damage to civilians. Leave to the city was at once stopped, but it
The waiting went on for another week when at last final orders came, and the men of the Infantry Brigade entrained at the great Cairo railway station, and leaving their comrades of the Mounteds behind, went down to Alexandria and the waiting transports.
Chapter III
Of the Muster in the Haven of Mudros
The land of Lemnos was beautiful with flowers at that season, in the brief Aegean spring, and to seawards always in the bay, were the ships, more ships perhaps than any port of modern times has known: they seemed like half the ships of the world. … No such gathering of fine ships has ever been seen upon this earth, and the beauty and the exultation of the youth upon them made them like sacred things as they moved away.
Masefield:
Gallipoli.
The battalions embarked on the Lutzow, the Annaberg, the Goslar and the Katuna; the first three were German vessels that had been captured early in the war, and had been lying since in the harbour at Alexandria. By ones and twos the transports made what speed they could across the Mediterranean running up through the isles of Greece to Lemnos, which, according to the stories of the Argonauts was the original home of the suffragettes. The approach to the haven of Mudros is singularly like the entrance to Lyttelton Harbour; bare cliffs higher on the right hand side, a narrow entrance that only shows as the boat heads directly towards it, rock bound shore and then a straight approach of some length to the inner harbour. At Mudros, though, a sudden bend to the right opened up a very great and commodious anchorage which had been selected
During the month of April there assembled in the harbour the most amazing assemblage of ships that has come together at any time in history. There was a great armada of fighting ships because the expedition had been first of all a naval one. Here were the pre-dreadnought battleships, the Majestic, Triumph, Nelson, London and others too antiquated to be of use in the North Sea, but good gun platforms for land bombardment; and with them were their attendant cruisers and destroyers. A few submarines waited to dare the desperate chance of passing the nets and mines of the Narrows. From the Ark Royal the seaplanes roared up to make reconnaissance, or the great yellow sausage of a captive balloon rose slowly to take a more leisurely survey. There were French men-of-war of peculiar construction and the Russian Askold whose row of funnels quickly earned for her the nickname of "Packet of Woodbines." And then marshalled in ranks behind the fighting ships were the transports. Day by day the concentration grew as the men of the five divisions who were to attempt the landing came Gaby Deslys buzzed busily round with mail and orders. Greek sailing boats of antique rig slipped in with cargoes of "sheep and goats and fish." But mightier far than any other ship upon the seas of the world, lay the Queen Elizabeth, super dreadnought, the most powerful engine of destruction that the mind of man had yet conceived. Long, low, broad, with clear decks fore and aft her vast size was not at first apparent but as one drew nearer her eight enormous guns seemed to dominate everything else with a suggestion of terrible power. She lay unquestioned "queen of the strange shipping there."
In this floating city were Australians and New Zealanders from the southern Pacific, the regulars of the 29th Division, battalions of English Territorials, long-haired bearded Sikhs, smiling Gurkhas, blue-coated Frenchmen and big, black Sinhalese. All of them were magnificently fit from the long months of hard training. Cramped and crowded on the ships their superb vitality demanded
Soldiers of France and of the KingBefore us lies an adventure unprecedented in modern war. Together with our comrades of the fleet we are about to force a landing upon an open beach in face of positions vaunted by our enemy as impregnable. Let us prove ourselves worthy of the great feat of arms entrusted to us.
And now to all men it was plain that the hour had come. On the twenty-third there was a movement among the ships, and then during the afternoon of Queen Elizabeth commenced to move. She steamed majestically away. The battleships followed in her wake and then came the transports line after line. The whole harbour rang with the exultant cheering, as these men who had come from the ends of the earth went out to fulfil their purpose in the face of death and bloody wounds.
Chapter IV
Of the Battle of the Landing
The Anzac Book.
The task of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force at the Dardanelles was in outline simple enough. Possession had to be obtained of the hills that overlooked the Narrows on the European side. If this could be done the British fleet would be able to pass into the Sea of Marmora and so without check to Constantinople, the fall of which city would have immense effects both moral and strategical.
The Turkish position was buttressed by two hills, Achi Baba in the south to the summit of which the land rose in a gentle slope; and Sari Bair (Hill 971) in the north. The latter was a huge rugged mass of clay in which the torrential rains of centuries had worn innumerable valleys which radiated towards the margin of the sea. The sloping sides of these valleys had themselves been intersected again and again by the torrents and the whole area was thus a maze of knife-edged ridges running in a
The ships with the Australians and New Zealanders on board, assembled at a rendezvous some miles off Gaba Tepe. The first landing parties were transferred to boats and destroyers and crept silently in toward the shore. In the grey light of dawn they were perceived by the enemy and with a crackle of musketry the Battle of the Landing commenced. The Australians dashed in and quickly routed the battalion of Turks who had rushed along the beach to intercept them. They went straight up in fierce pursuit, and carried ridge after ridge. Sir Ian had counted rightly that the difficult country about Gaba Tepe would not be strongly held. The first thrust therefore, was rapidly successful, especially as the
And now the day had fully dawned! The sea was covered with vessels of every kind. Battleships, cruisers and destroyers glided slowly up and down, every gun that could be brought to bear belching flame and smoke as they sent broadside after broadside crashing into the Turkish positions; transports had closed in as close as they dared to the shore and were rapidly disembarking their men; long lines of boats were creeping into the shore drawn by tugs and launches from the men-of-war. On the beach itself men who had landed were flinging off their packs and then clashing away out of sight as they moved up at all speed to join the fighting line.
From the extreme right, Chatham's Post, came a ceaseless roll and rattle of rifle fire, for there the Turks were in great force and were containing the flank of the advance, and threatening to roll it up. Here the destroyers stood close in, and careless of safety raked the enemy lines with bursts of high explosive shell while the infantry forming a front fired and fired till the barrels of the rifles were almost red hot. Up in the centre and on the left the noise of battle was fainter and rolled away across the ridges, for the first desperate rush was still unstayed.
The Turkish reserves commenced to come into the fight. From observation posts high on the mountain their commanders were able to judge the limits of the landing and, knowing all the country, were able to send succour with speed and to contain
It was in the midst of this desperate soldier's battle in which colonels fought as privates, and privates led charges and organized positions, that the first New Zealanders landed. They were ordered to move out towards the left and support the Australians who were in desperate case. But even as they moved word came down that the storm raged most fiercely in the centre and so they swung across Plugge's Plateau and came down the slope toward Shrapnel Valley. The long line came under rifle fire and men commenced to fall. They entered the dry watercourse and here the units commenced to disintegrate rapidly.
A Captain might be leading his company in file. A vicious spatter of machine-gun fire, a nest of snipers concentrating on an exposed corner, a burst of shrapnel shell and without his knowledge the line was broken. He pressed on with perhaps a dozen men at his heels and turned up a gully which
There was now little plan about the battle. The conflicting pressures had formed a rough line which the Australians and New Zealanders could by no effort advance and which the Turks could by no striving quite manage to break. There was no possibility of control, and each man on his own initiative held the patch of ground on which he lay. The Higher Command down on the beach could do little more than send reinforcements up toward the firing and with them what ammunition and water were available. As the morning hours wore on the pressure became more intense as fresh masses of the enemy welled up against the Anzac lines. These were held by rifle fire and bayonet charge.
All through the afternoon the Turks pressed on the thinning line. A company of Turks which had come up under cover of some dry watercourse or
At times the rush carried a spur or gave observation or enfilade upon some ridge that had formed a not impossible firing line. In a few minutes the enemy machine-guns were in position on the flank. Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat-tat! The vicious bursts tore through the scrub, and thudded into the banks and smashed the bodies and brains of men. And word went back to the enemy field batteries and soon the fleecy puffs of shrapnel were bursting white against the perfect sky, and a rain of death descended upon the helpless men. They could do nothing but go back, taking with them what wounded they could while the enemy rose up out of the scrub and attempted to rush in upon them. But the retreating men turned upon the enemy and the threat was stayed.
Here and there amidst the tangle of unknown valleys, obscure men did deeds as valiant as those of Leonidas or Roland. Cut off and surrounded by overwhelming numbers with no chance of retreat and no hope of life except in surrender, they fought on with marvellous courage until all were dead. In the line itself men fell on the right hand and on the left. Sometimes a man as far as he could see was the only one still fighting. Around him were the dead and wounded, and from in front came the unending blaze and crash of fire. Yet still he fired and loaded again, and fired and loaded, and fired and loaded, taking ammunition from the dead, until after a space, men coming up from the beach straggled in beside him and so the line was held.
All day the Turks had been rushing reinforcements from Maidos and the Asian shore, all day they had been marching with speed from Bulair and late in the afternoon they massed in thousands on the high ground and swept down upon the reeling line to make an end before darkness fell. The firing crashed out with a new fury. The droning of the rifle bullets was like the passing of angry bees; machine-gun bursts flailed in men's faces; the hellish shrapnel rattled down from above. Man after man dropped in the scrub. The silent crumpled figures of the dead were hit again and again. Every man who could hold a rifle was firing, firing, firing. It was the crisis of the battle. If they could hold until darkness the line might be saved, but if the mass of Turks could drive home their thrust then all was lost. Nine battleships opened up on the Queen Elizabeth and her consorts ploughed the slope with high explosive. The short twilight deepened and the attack was still held. Night fell over the battlefield and for a while the fury of the fighting died down. The brilliant stars came out and shone coldly and peacefully down on valleys of torment and fear.
For a short space there was a little respite for the fighting men. Under cover of the welcome darkness they moved back from impossible places, straightened out the line and chose positions that gave a better field of fire. Picks and shovels were coming up from the beach and the first rough trench lines were hurriedly constructed. But there was no rest for stretcher-bearers. All day long the neverending stream of walking wounded came stumbling down toward the sea from the crest of Walker's Ridge, from Russell's Top and Pope's, from Quinn's, and Courtney's down Monash Gulley and Shrapnel Valley, from the Pimple and Shell Green and Ryrie's Post and Chatham's. They were roughly bandaged and packed off to the hospital ships and transports on launches and lighters.
For those who could not walk the ordeal was far more terrible. Their mates could often do nothing for them except to apply roughly the first field dressing before passing on. They lay out under the
Even when the dressing stations were reached there was still delay, for there had not been sufficient provision of lighters to make possible speedy evacuation to the hospital ships. The beach was crowded with stricken men who could only be got away very slowly, and even then with great toil by those who had to carry the stretchers into the sea and hoist them on to the swaying boats while bullets moaned and splashed into the dark water about them. They lay waiting with extraordinary fortitude; many a severely wounded man refused to be moved until someone worse than he had first been carried to safety. Many died there on the beach.
Most terrible of all were the sufferings of those who fell beyond the line, and lying in some bullet swept part of No Man's Land could not be reached. Some of them lived for three and four and even
Throughout the N.Z.E.F. there were sorrowing hearts that first night and with the sorrow there was anger and hatred and a bitter longing for revenge. Wild rumours flew round that wounded men had been horribly mutilated. It was untrue; but all that was known of the Turks made that to be expected, and so men swore that no Turk who came within reach of the bayonet point should live. This hard mood has been common to many fine armies that have suffered their first losses.
There was a new feeling of brotherhood between the New Zealanders and the Australians. Very strong differences of national temperament exist, and the association in the training camps had not always been a happy one. But now through a long day they had fought side by side, suffered and died inextricably mixed together, and out of the conflict there had been born a new comradeship. They could not fully understand each other, but they learned to trust each other in battle and this faith was not to be broken through four years of war and in battles more terrible than their first.
Deeper than all other feelings, though, was one of profound exultation. They had been tried and not found wanting. Twenty-four hours before they had been untried troops; now they had done a deed of arms that would go down in history. There was a thrill of exalted feeling running through the hearts of all. They had faced fire and they had not flinched. For the New Zealanders it was the
"Comrades, I am proud of you: hold on; reinforcements are coming."
The words of praise from the great fighter were like strong wine to the wearied men.
All night the work of consolidation went on. The transports which had been driven further out to sea by the Turkish shelling during the day now ran close in again and commenced to send on shore odd companies of men who had not previously been landed, and to discharge ammunition and supplies. Field-guns, of which there had been such a tragic lack during the day's fighting were now swung out on to lighters and towed into the shore. The ground was impossible for horses and so they were manhandled into position by teams of men dragging on long ropes while others carried the shells and dumped them ready for the morning light. Anzac Cove itself was the scene of feverish activity. It was imperative that reserve stores of food should be built up with the utmost speed because the weather was still variable and a sudden storm might leave twenty thousand men without food or ammunition, helpless in the face of their enemies. So the boxes of bully beef and of biscuits were slung off and stacked in great heaps. Over all the occupied ground there was a coming and a going of many men carrying supplies up to the front line, bringing wounded
"Dig! dig! dig! until you are safe."
The hours of darkness were full of wild confusion. In front the Turks could be heard moving heavily in the scrub, and all night long it was expected that they would charge home. At every movement on their part rifle fire crashed out and was taken up by the men on either flank until at last it extended along the whole line while the Turks replied with fury. The rattle and roar of musketry rose and fell and rose again in waves of sound that rolled from flank to flank. Sometimes for a brief space it died almost away, but again burst forth furiously. Mostly it was wild, aimless, misdirected; but it served its purpose, and although the Turk threatened he nowhere pushed home the attack that would have breached the line and led to irreparable loss. Once disaster seemed imminent, for an Australian colonel thinking his position was desperate commenced to lead his men out of a key position. He was met however by an Aucklander who in the darkness pretended that he was General Walker and
Wild rumours flew back and forth. At one moment it was said that the English had stormed Achi Baba and that in the morning all would go on together to Maidos; at the next it was whispered that the Turks were rolling up our flank. And all through the night the rain of bullets pelted into scrub and valley, and upon the open beach, and more men were killed and wounded.
At last the dawn came, and with it the boom of the New Zealand howitzers from Howitzer Gully and the sharper bang of 18-pounders. The line was safe.
Chapter V
Of What Befell during the First Week
Dig! dig! dig! until you are safe.
Sir Ian Hamilton .
Throughout the whole of the second day the Turkish fire slackened very little and they maintained the desperate attempts to break through. But the organization of the night had made the position more secure; one after another the batteries of fieldguns were coming into action, machine-guns were pushed up to the front, the trenches were dug deeper and in consequence the flow of casualties slackened. Units that had been scattered and broken commenced to draw together again. Generals of brigades and commanding officers of battalions were able to make their authority felt and the lack of co-ordination that had been inevitable at first gradually gave place to co-operation and action systematically planned. The New Zealanders were concentrated toward the right of the position from Courtney's Post to Walker's Ridge with the reserve battalion concentrated on Plugge's Plateau. For two or three days the men who in the fierce rush of the first day's fighting had scattered along the whole front came trooping back to their units. On the whole it was
No great movement was any longer possible at Anzac until the whole force was reorganized and the position consolidated. The Turks apparently realized this for they temporarily withdrew men and guns to Helles. Their great counter attacks ceased and they were content to hold their line. Digging and carrying were now the order of the day for all those who were not actually in the front line. In modern war the spade is more important than the rifle and almost as important as the machine-gun. Safety consists in burrowing well below the surface and having a solid wall of earth bayed every few yards or bending and twisting in such a fashion that enfilade is impossible. Although the winter storms were exceedingly fierce with torrential rains the clay surface and the steep slopes threw the water off with such speed that the sub-soil remained parched and dry and in the course of ages had hardened almost to the consistency of rock. Spades by themselves made no impression. Every inch had first to be picked and then shovelled and it required the most laborious effort to make the necessary depth.
Fortunately everyone was extremely fit and so the picks thudded and the shovels swung with a vigour that was in no wise abated by shrapnel bursts and snipers' bullets.
"Pit-pot! pit-pot!" and a bullet wheens overhead. "Crack!" and another smashes a shrub. "Phut! phut! phut! crack!" and the diggers subside
The work goes on again. Those at the exposed point have got a very naked feeling and listen with carefully disguised tensity for the distant report and speculate inwardly as to what it will feel like if Johnny Turk scores a direct hit with his next. The busy one high up on the hillside smashes a shovel handle, but now they are getting down to depth at last; the danger has passed and under cover the work goes on peacefully and pleasantly. The main topics of conversation now being by a natural association of ideas the men on board hospital ships and the charm or otherwise of the nurses. On the whole however the departed casualty is not envied. The war is yet too young and the men far too eager for
During the first few days especially, carrying parties were very busy. Wheeled transport was impossible and not very many pack mules had as yet been landed. In consequence everything had to be carried. Anzac Cove itself was the centre of A.S.C. activities and to this point came queues of men to obtain the supplies of ammunition, biscuits, bully beef and water with which and on which the army fought.
The Cove was subject to double enfilade fire from enemy guns on the ridges round Anafarta and from the Olive Grove at Gaba Tepe. It was often anxious work waiting round this dump. A short fierce "whizz," a sharp "bang" and then again "whizzbang! whizz-bang!" Everyone dived for the nearest cover. "Whizz-bang!" and there was a spatter and clatter of shrapnel pellets striking the pebbles on the beach or rattling into the ration boxes. "Whizz-bang! whizz-bang! whizz-bang!" and after each the whining scream of the flying nose-cap. Then all was quiet again save for the low moaning of a man lying bleeding and unconscious with a ghastly wound in his head. He is carried off to the dressing station—a few yards away—while his mates line up for the day's rations.
One man receives a fifty-six pound box of Huntley and Palmer's biscuits, another an equally heavy but not quite so unwieldy box of Fray Bentos bully beef, another again sandbags containing jam tins and other oddments. The remainder pick up precious tins of water. They stagger away under the blazing sun panting and sweating. In a big sap they meet a down coming party and there is a jam while they squeeze past.
Then they commence to wind up an open valley. A man with a very strong and steadfast face approaches leading a donkey with a Red Cross brassard tied round its nose. A wounded man is seated astride, his arm flung round the other's neck for support. All make way, for in three days "Murphy" and his mule have become famous and they have yet nearly three weeks to walk in Shrapnel Valley before they pass to become a deathless story.
The party carries on. "Phut! phut! phut!"— the dust flies up from the track and a splinter from the biscuit box. The first man who has been caught well out in the open rushes over the exposed ground; the next loaded with the biscuits shambles over. "Phut! phut! phut!"—and the remainder stop on the safe side of the bank. They wait a few minutes and then one ventures. A bullet whips the dust up under his feet and another sings past his ear. The sniper away up on the hillside will wait all day so there is nothing for it but to take the risk. Man after man nerves himself to it and makes the dash. Their luck is in and all get safely across with only a perforated water tin as casualty.
Five minutes later, though, the sniper gets a solitary signaller right through the brain as he stoops for a second to fix a wire.
Before dawn on 2 May a party from the Canterbury Battalion carried out the first New Zealand raid. Landing from a destroyer wide out on the left flank they crept up on the Turkish outpost at Nibrunesi Point and were right into the position before the enemy were aware. They destroyed everything possible and then returned without loss and with fifteen prisoners.
On the following day an attempt was made to capture the hill known as Baby 700. The attacking troops were the 13th and 16th Battalions of the A.I.F. and Otago. The latter unit allowed only two and a half hours to move round the three miles to the assembly point. As the long column wound up Shrapnel Valley toward the head of Monash it was delayed by heavy sniping, by the continual passage of stretchers and by a half battalion of the Naval Brigade who had not sufficiently cleared the track, and finally did not arrive until fully an hour after the attack was due to commence.
Through some inexplicable folly the charge was allowed to go forward without them. Why, it is impossible to fathom; the whole position was connected up by telephone and it was known by the Australians that the New Zealanders were not in place.
The 13th and 16th met with fair success; but when the Otago men were in position the supporting artillery was silent and the enemy were aroused: the Australian attack had lost its momentum, and
The rush of wounded during these days had been beyond all expectation. The few hospital ships had rapidly filled and were running to Malta, Gibraltar, or England. But the bloody drain went on without ceasing, and so, certain of the empty transports were ordered to take on wounded and run for Alexandria.
The Lutzow made two terrible trips. On the first the only man aboard the ship with any medical knowledge was a veterinary officer who organized a staff out of the grooms and clerks of Echelon B. The men died by twenty and thirty a day.
On the second trip there was certainly the skeleton of a trained staff but the conditions were terrible.
"Orderly! Orderly! Water! Water!" "Orderly, for Christ's sake, ease me up a little." "Orderly! I can't sleep." "Water! Fetch me a drink." "Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!" "Orderly, fetch me a drink." "I can't sleep! I haven't slept for three nights— give me morphia." "Oh God! you don't know how this hurts." "Oh thank you orderly, but can't you give me a whole cupful!" "Orderly! Orderly! Fetch me a drink!" "Look out there! They are coming! Take that you bastard!" "Oh, God! Oh, God!—the pain!"
And so through all the long night it went on, Lutzow until the poor wounded were disembarked. The hospitals in Cairo were like heaven to the men who made this voyage.
Chapter VI
Of a Field of Fair Flowers and the Crossing of the Daisy Patch
Sometimes, as the light failed, and peak after peak that had been burning against the sky grew rigid as the colour faded, the darkness of the great blasts hid sections of the line: but when the darkness cleared they were still there, fine after line of dots, still more, still moving forward and halting and withering away, and others following, as though those lines were not flesh and blood and breaking nerve, but some tide of the sea coming in waves that fell, yet advanced …
Masefield:
Gallipoli.
On the evening of 5 May the New Zealand Infantry were concentrated on the beach and embarked on destroyers. The sailors treated the men with enthusiastic kindness and gave up to them their own dinner and rum issue. After twelve days of bully beef and biscuits this friendly act was greatly appreciated.
The Brigade landed at V-Beach close to the stranded River Clyde and almost under the smashed and broken fortress of Sedd-el-Bahr. British Tommies, Scotchmen, French Territorials in blue, Zouaves in authentic scarlet trousers, big, black Sinhalese, and bearded Sikhs moved about the dumps on the beach or fraternized with the Australians and New Zealanders. Wheeled transport moved along
The country was entirely different to that at Anzac. Much of the ground had been cultivated and there were trees and green fields that in the early spring were gay with flowers. The land here sloped gently up toward the crest of Achi Baba which was distant about five miles from Cape Helles. The converging thrusts of the various landings had caused the Turks to abandon the tip of the Peninsula and fall back to the slopes of the hill itself on which they had strongly entrenched themselves, buttressing their line on the village of Krithia. In front of this however they had established a defensive zone several hundred yards wide.
The English and French held from sea to sea, a distance of a little over three miles, with a depth of some 5000 yards. The whole area was under direct observation from the Turkish position. It was vital to increase this depth if the footing gained at such cost was to be held. The battle that was to be fought was for the purpose of seizing as much of the Turk's forward zone as possible and if possible to capture Krithia itself. The New Zealanders were ordered to move up in readiness to assault the village on the morning of the 8th. They reached their assembly positions during the night, but through some bungled staff work these positions were nearly a quarter of a mile
From the assembly trenches the men went forward by platoon rushes to the front line. They were under heavy fire and many were killed and wounded before, breathless and with companies very much mixed, they tumbled into the front line held by men of the 29th Division. The Regulars who had been beaten back the day before were not encouraging:
"What! are you going to cross the Daisy Patch? —Then God help you."
"Yes, of course we are going!" And on the signal the men of the Wellington, Auckland and Canterbury battalions rose up and going down a little slope came to a field of scarlet poppies and great white
Yet men managed to get across somehow, somewhere—dashing a few yards from shallow cover to shallow cover; crawling inches at a time; changing direction slightly to avoid some place where the earth was visibly being torn to shards before their eyes. Turks in front took their toll, and then before the bayonets reached them vanished back into the scrub and from new hiding places fired and fired. The Daisy Patch itself was a tangle of Auckland dead and wounded. Even when there were no more who strove to cross, it was still swept by a hellish fire and helpless men were hit again and again and again. From the old front-line trench stretcher-bearers made gallant rescues and soon many men were lying behind the comparative shelter of the parapet. But from beyond came the moaning of scores of poor fellows lying helpless in pain. A brave doctor went out to them although the garrison tried to dissuade him:
"How do you think I can stay here and listen to those poor fellows moaning?" he said. So he went over the top and crawled round with his orderly, bandaging wounds, easing poor sufferers into more comfortable positions, giving precious mouthfuls of water to those who were tormented with thirst until he, too, was hit.
The attack had crept forward until some three hundred yards had been won and then it stayed, for the breathless, exhausted, disorganized men could, for the time being, go no farther.
At five o'clock in the afternoon the whole British line was ordered to advance from sea to sea. All the battleships and cruisers and destroyers ran in toward the land and the great guns roared and thundered and the whole ridge was a line of tremendous explosions. The batteries on shore were firing as rapidly as the toiling gunners could serve their pieces. The roar swelled into a pandemonium. The crest seemed lifted into pieces. It was shrouded with drifting battle smoke and it seemed that surely the Turks had been blasted from their secure positions. But hardly had the line of bayonets moved forward again, than the hellish machine-gun fire burst out in greater fury. The whole air was full of screaming missiles. Death fell everywhere— death and bloody wounds. The line went on for a hundred yards had been won and then it stayed, for of desperate men crept farther until at last flesh and blood could do no more. The survivors scraped out little hollows and lay still until nightfall. The line
The Auckland battalion had been cut to pieces and was relieved by Otago. The Brigade held on to what it had gained for another thirty-six hours and was then relieved. For a week they remained at Helles doing working parties and then re-embarked for Anzac
Chapter VII
Of the Holding of Walker's Ridge and of the Armistice
Beanin
The Anzac Book.
The men of the N.Z.M.R. landed at Anzac on 12 May and moved up at once to the trenches on the top of Walker's Ridge. They proceeded to improve the sector with great vigour and to remove the pest of the enemy snipers by counter sniping with periscope rifles.
Towards the middle of May the Turks made preparations for an attack that would "push the British into the sea." The point at which the main thrust was aimed was the trench system on top of Walker's Ridge. Here the line was in some cases barely ten yards in front of the sheer precipice that rose starkly above Mule Gully and Happy Valley. If they could smash through at this point the back of the Anzac position would be broken and there would be nothing for it but withdrawal or surrender.
The Turks brought down reinforcements from Constantinople. They withdrew men and guns
At three o'clock in the morning the enemy guns were firing heavily. The vivid yellow flashes of the bursting shrapnel shell tore the black curtain of the night. The enemy parapet winked with innumerable tiny flashes. At every point where the lines ran closely they flung bombs by the thousand until the night was full of the sound of countless explosions. And all this while there was not a shot fired from the New Zealand line. The fury of the fire died down and the sentries were able to make out dark forms moving dimly in the night. No Man's
Then at last the awesome silence was broken by a sharp command, the blowing of whistles, and a blast of fire that in an instant swept away the advancing files. At fifteen yards, at twelve yards, at ten feet, at point blank range the troopers were emptying magazine after magazine—each man firing as though the safety of the whole line depended upon himself. The Turks were coming on wave after wave. At the end of the left sap there was a desperate struggle. Three times the enemy reached the line and three times they were driven out at the point of bayonet. Before the pitiless sweep of fire the oncoming lines melted away; those who came within striking range dared not make the last final rush and face the cruel, cold steel. They lay down and commenced to shoot and so the advantage passed from them. New Zealanders were dropping now by ones and twos but in the fierce excitement the casualties were scarce heeded. The Whakatane troop fighting out in the open lost two thirds of its number in a few minutes but there was no faltering and the reserves eagerly pressed in and filled the gaps. For the most part the troopers fought silently but once in answer to
"Komate! Komate! Kaora! Kaora!"
But now the dawn was fully come. The rifle fire swelled in volume as the field of vision grew. The machine-guns rattled through belt after belt. Every field-gun that could be brought to bear was deluging the enemy slopes with shrapnel. From far out to sea came the boom of the guns from the warships. Fresh concentrations of Turks were caught out in the open and cut to pieces before they could reach their assembly trenches. Everywhere the attack had failed and everywhere the enemy were flying back seeking shelter. From the left of Walker's to Quinn's Post they had lost perhaps 7000 men.
Soon there was quietness except for the vicious sniping that broke out on both sides and the moaning of the poor Turkish wounded who lay out in the blazing sun plagued by flies and tormented with pain and thirst. Some were able to crawl painfully back to their own line. Many no doubt were rescued by their friends under cover of the friendly night, a few who lay close were brought into the New Zealand line, but hundreds lay out under the brazen sky and died, some of them very slowly— after a day, or two days, or three.
The firing gradually died down on the morning of the 21st. The Turks came out and under cover of the white flag asked for an armistice to bury their dead. Finally a suspension of arms from 7.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. on the 24th was agreed to by the Corps
There was some fraternizing. Hard biscuits were exchanged for loaves of Turkish brown bread. An Australian doctor who wore Turkish decorations was a centre of great interest to the Turks, a German officer asked about his friends in Sydney. For the most part the men stared curiously at each other and made signs of goodwill; but gestures and a few odd words of Arabic did not go very far as a medium for communication.
The ground was searched for wounded and several Turks were found still alive. One poor chap after living through the torment of four days under the blazing sun and four chill and lonely nights was carried down two miles to the beach only to die as the hospital was reached. The dead lay very thickly. On one space of about an acre there were over three hundred bodies. Some were those of men who had fallen in the Battle of the Landing; but the majority were those of the Turks who had fallen in the great attack. It was soon found to be impossible to carry all bodies back across the dividing line to their own friends as had at first been arranged, and so, by
In war, victory and defeat alternate strangely. From the time of the first landing the warships, transports and supply vessels had lain in perfect safety just far enough from the shore to be beyond the range of the Turkish guns. No danger was to be feared. There were no submarines behind the Narrows and it was not thought possible that German U-boats could reach the Mediterranean. But it had been done and U21 had been sighted on the 24th, running up toward Gallipoli. As soon as word came there was a tremendous scatter. The transports and supply ships zigzagged away at full speed for Mudros Harbour. The battleships went for Imbros and within an hour the sea that had been so full was empty save for the Triumph which with her torpedo nets out and an escort of circling destroyers steamed up and down off Anzac.
Next day the sky was a cloudless blue and the sea a shimmering expanse of shining water. The battleship moved slowly in her fancied security and the destroyers passing and repassing scarce left a track of white foam on the shining levels. The occasional popping of rifles from the yellow crags had lost the vicious sharpness of night and early morning and seemed to blend with the peace of the splendid day. In the trenches thousands of men
A great pillar of black smoke touched with white foam seemed to grow slowly up from the side of the Triumph. For two or three seconds it rose silently until it reached higher than the masts and then after a space of time came the dull and muffled sound of the explosion. The column slowly sank into the troubled water. The great ship had been torpedoed. Immediately the destroyers came racing toward her. Some tore wildly round in ever enlarging circles searching for the submarine, others closed in to pick up the crew. The Chelmer nosed in against her side and the sailors commenced to march off. The Triumph listed more and more heavily until her masts were almost level with the water. She gave a sudden shudder from stem to stern. The attendant craft pulled hurriedly back. There was a cloud of escaping steam and then rolling over she floated for a while bottom upwards, her red keel shining in the sun. She commenced to settle at the bows and at last slid gracefully into the depths below. Her men cheered gallantly but it was a great victory for the Turks. A single submarine had reduced the fleet of powerful battleships that had covered Anzac from the Landing on "to the status of fat bathers in a bay full of sharks."
Chapter VIII
Of the Holding of the Line
Ever the day, with its … death from the loopholes around. Ever the night with its coffinless corpse to be laid in the ground.
Tennyson.
After a month's furious fighting the British had won a foothold upon the Peninsula but were not able to do more than hold the ground that had been won. No fresh attack could be made until heavy reinforcements arrived. Both sides settled down to consolidate their positions and to wait. It was trench warfare as on the Western Front.
Trenches were deepened and fresh support and reserve lines dug wherever possible. Secret saps were made sometimes in front of the main line. Communication trenches were dug, wherever possible, to make for greater security. Sandbag screens covered many of the corners that had been most heavily sniped. Cunningly concealed "possies" were constructed for the machine-guns—especially for those that were never to fire except in the event of a great enemy attack. Snipers were hidden away in holes and corners and behind cleverly camouflaged loopholes.
At dawn a man in the line exposes himself a
But that night Hussein Aga, the Turk, receives bad news from his family. His brother's wife is dead and the brother conscripted. His daughter is in trouble and his own wife is pleading for money. He is preoccupied and allows himself to be drawn into shooting at periscopes, and this time his exact position is marked. A dummy head is exposed and then rapidly withdrawn. It goes up again cautiously. The Turk fires and then quietly collapses for a New Zealand bullet has caught him between the eyes.
"That will set some bint weeping in Constantinople," remarks the Sunday-school teacher who had waited for two days to kill a man. He cuts a notch
On great battlefields there are always points upon which the whole fury of combat seems to centre— where the war is always alive and the slaughter never ceases. Of such was the Dead Man at Verdun, Delville Wood on the Somme, Polderhoek Chateau on the field of Ypres, Rossignol Wood— the Copse 125 of Junger—and Quinn's Post at Anzac.
Quinn's Post had at all costs to be held for it covered Shrapnel Valley the vital artery of the Anzac position. The day of the landing the first rush had gone well beyond the crest, but the attackers had been thrust back until behind them there was only the steep cliff falling down to Monash. So close were the front and support lines that the earth from the parados of one was touching the parapet of the other. Tunnels were dug from trench to trench to make the passage secure. In places, these had been sapped through the bodies of the dead. The Post was noisome and pestilent. Loathsome and terrible vermin crawled about. The winds blew continuously from the Turkish trenches across No Man's Land where lay the unburied dead. The air was poisoned with the stench.
The Turks had pressed close up. At the nearest point their trench was distant only fifteen yards. Neither side would budge an inch. We held on for dear life—the Turks to retain a vantage point from which they might strike a blow at the heart. Attack and counter attack succeeded each other with
"During the day every inch of parapet was watched by the snipers of both sides. A second's exposure was instant death. Men stood-to all day, bayonets fixed, bombs ready, watching through the periscopes for the slightest movement. A bomb flies up from the enemy line. It is seen in the air. The nearest man runs to the spot and throws an overcoat over it as it touches the ground. Everyone rushes madly away, throws himself flat on the ground, feet toward the coming explosion and waits with set teeth and muscles tensed for the splitting crash. It comes —a blast of devilish noise, a cloud of smoke, dust and flying splinters. The owner of the coat investigates the tatters and finds a plug of priceless tobacco has been ruined. 'D———————the b———————b——————s!' And then, before the words are out of his mouth there is a shout of warning and another explosion. Now the jam-tin bombs, packed with explosives, old nails, odds and ends of various sorts are flying back in retaliation. For ten minutes the air is full of smoke and noise. There is a scream from the Turkish line: 'Allah! Allah!' and then quietness again. But there is a very still figure to be carried out to the little cemetery behind the hill and a couple of others to be helped down the steep track to the
"It is dusk. Between the lights is the most dangerous time and every man is standing-to. Darkness falls. The sentries are up on the firestep now, rifles ready, peering out into the darkness. At any moment may come a shower of bombs or a sudden rush of men, or a mine may be sprung and the whole Post blown out. The night passes slowly. Every now and again a burst of machine-gun fire sweeps the parapet or crackles viciously overhead. The double report of a Mauser rings clear and sharp; a bullet whistles past, or perchance finds lodgment in heart or brain. Dawn comes at last—another anxious hour—then 'stand down' the rum issue and breakfast, followed by another fusillade of bombs."—
2/A.R.
On the night of 5-6 June a hundred volunteers from Auckland and Canterbury attacked from Quinn's. Very quietly the parties of assault filed into the line. Bayonets were fixed and magazines charged. Supports were ready to take over the fire trench immediately the attacking parties had gone over. Carrying parties were standing by with loads of filled sandbags, picks, shovels, bombs and everything necessary for consolidation.
"It is eleven o'clock. The batteries from Plugge's Plateau and Walker's Ridge are firing on the Turkish communication saps. The howitzers on Ari Burnu Point join in; so does the little Japanese mortar and an Indian mountain battery. In so many seconds
"Thirty Turks surrender and are sent back. Fifty more are dead and their bodies flung out of the trench form a rough parapet in front. The carrying parties rush over with filled sandbags. Turkish bags are torn from the old parapet and changed over. On the extreme left men work feverishly to make a block. It is completed, and two riflemen fire continuously down the dark trench to keep back the enemy who endeavour to work back to bombing range. Three Turks emerge from a dugout and make a desperate attack on those they find nearest. They are very brave men and die fighting rather than surrender. By two o'clock the work is all complete, and if things have gone well elsewhere the position will be held.
"However, it is not to be, for the Australians have failed above Steele's Post and from there comes an enfilade of machine-gun fire. The Turks are reinforced. Their picked bombing parties are attacking up every communication sap. Dawn breaks and with the clear light the enfilade from Steele's became deadly. One man endeavoured to build up a barricade of sandbags, but the bags were blown from his hands by bursting bombs. Nevertheless he perseveres until he is wounded and can do no more. Men are falling fast The bombs rain in. The enfilade cannot be stopped. The raiders are driven back step by step. At last they were holding only thirty yards of the captured trench. At nine o'clock came the order to retire."—2/A.R.
Chapter IX
Of the Domesticities of Anzac
The Anzac Book.
Whenever possible, whether in the line or out of it, a man paired off with a mate and established a "bivvy." This was a structure of a very primitive sort. With pick and shovel a cut was made in a slope that gave protection from the bullets of the snipers, and if possible from the bursts of shrapnel. A couple of salvaged oil sheets pinned across with salvaged bayonets made a roof that would keep out the dew at night and the sun glare by day. Furnishings consisted of commandeered sandbags or old overcoats for softening the hardness of the baked floor, a cut down petrol tin for a "bath" and a whole one for storing water. As soon as the work was finished the flies and the lice—the permanent residents—took up their abode, while the casual boarders such as centipedes and soldiers strayed in from time
Day by day the sun grew hotter and hotter until it burned down scorchingly hot. There was scarcely any shade. The bivvies themselves were swelteringly hot. The ground was almost red hot. There was little stirring of air beneath the great cliffs. Men soon commenced to shed their clothing. Slacks were ripped off at the knees and the vogue of shorts commenced. Coats were flung off and then shirts. The "Tommy hats" in which the New Zealanders had landed were soon thrown away and replaced by Australian felts, pith helmets or the New Zealand issue of unfortunate members of the reinforcement drafts. The caps were never again worn throughout the whole war. As men felt more and more strongly the growing sense of separate nationality, as they became increasingly proud of the New Zealand name, the felt hat dinted to a point or creased, with its distinctive touch of colour in the pugaree, became more and more a prized symbol of what men felt very deeply, although it was seldom articulately expressed. Within six weeks of the landing the fashionable costume had become boots, shorts, identity disk, hat and when circumstances permitted a cheerful smile. The whole was topped off by a most glorious coat of sunburn.
The shedding of superfluous clothing was due not only to the heat but also to the fact that a man's
"What is the plural of 'louse,' Willie?" asked some fresh young miss of her best pupil. "Lice," came the prompt reply and on both sides there was utter lack of comprehension of what they were so glibly talking about.
When Willie first realized that he was lousy he tore his shirt off and flung it from him with a sort of shuddering horror. Nothing would ever have induced him to put it on again if it had not been that it was his only one—and the nights were chilly. And so for perhaps the next three years he and the lice were close companions. They were beasts of prey and of a most voracious and ferocious nature. They did not haste and they did not rest. They moved slowly, deliberately, surely. They could not jump or fly but they could crawl and they moved with a certain cold, passionless persistence in quest of blood. They throve on Keating's powder. They would not drown. They refused to die—except under great pressure—and they multiplied with amazing rapidity. One generation perished in the morning offensive, but at midday their descendants were foraging fiercely. They also died but their children were there to be massacred at the time of the "evening hate." At midnight a new generation was in readiness to carry on fighting the good fight. At any hour in any of the bivvies of Anzac, men with rapt and earnest faces could be seen with their
The heat brought the flies in swarms. They were a very venomous lot of brutes who seemed to have descended from those who plagued the unrighteous Pharaoh. They bit like young scorpions and savagely attacked every patch of bare skin. Every meal was a pitched battle. With one hand the soldier fought back the black swarm that threatened to descend upon his jam and his biscuit, and with the other thrust the morsel hastily into his mouth—with luck beating off the advance guard of pursuers. Any scrap of food or offal was soon black with them. They swarmed from No Man's Land to the sea, from daylight to dark carrying filth and germs and making sleep in the daytime almost an' impossibility.
From the heat and the lice and the flies there was one retreat, the blue sea lapping on the pebble beach. Men scrambled eagerly down to the margin and, temporarily abandoning their garments to the majority of the inhabitants, plunged into the cool waters and splashed and swam to their heart's content. They presented fine impressionist studies in brown and black and white. One man burnt almost black from shoulder to waist, would gleam whitely from the waist to the knee, and would then again go black except for a pair of white feet. Another who sported braces would show a back striped with a St Andrew's cross; another who wore a singlet was patterned
No one notices a tiny splash of white foam and then another and another. Shouts of warning from the shore and many commence to wade in. "Splash! Splash! Splash!" One of the swimmers goes down for a moment and comes up with his arm streaming blood. A mate helps him in and clothed in his identity disk he is rushed up to the Field Ambulance Dressing Station. The sea is empty now and just as well for scarcely has the last man picked his way across the pebbles than there is a quick "whizz-bang" and a space of blue water is splashed with white points where the shrapnel pellets have struck. Bathing is off for the next half-hour but then goes merrily on until another burst smashes a man's leg.
A corporal in Berkeley's The Lady With a Lamp remarks: "Bless my soul, mum—if you takes the British War Orfice serious you'll precious soon die of a broken 'eart and a sick 'eadache, you will." The men at Anzac had unfortunately to take the commissariat authorities very seriously and as a result died of dysentery and enteric. Looking back eighteen years afterward the whole question of the food supplies at Anzac seems even more appalling than it did at the time. There was never any lack of food but it was of entirely the wrong sort.
Immense quantities of bully beef, fat bacon and cheese were run ashore. These were of good quality, but after the first two weeks of tropical weather they became practically uneatable. The insanitary conditions and the swarms of flies made the outbreak and the spread of disease inevitable. The wholly
Later in the campaign meagre supplies of fresh meat, bread, vegetables, eggs and a very little tinned milk commenced to come on shore but never in anything like sufficient quantity. Why there was this stint it is hard to say. There were boats enough lying idle at Alexandria or even at Mudros. There were thousands of sailors practically idle on board the now useless battleships. England was not three weeks away and in any case systematic foraging along the Greek and Italian coasts would have produced quantities of food at reasonable rates. Did the great meat and bacon and rum manufacturing concerns have too much say at headquarters? Or was it just plain stupidity? Probably the latter. One shudders to think what must have taken place in some of the small wars of the nineteenth century. After the rationing at Anzac one commences to comprehend
Scorching heat, swarms of venomous flies, hosts of never-resting lice, thirst, the pervading stench of the unburied dead, and then a new experience—
But if it was hell to be an infantry man at Anzac —heaven was near and visible where two miles out to sea lay a great white ship with yellow funnel, green band and great red crosses.
Chapter X
Of the Great Battle for the Crests of Sari Bair
Tennyson:
Morte d'Arthur.
The desperate fighting of the first few weeks had fairly established the British in their positions at Helles and Anzac. But so strong and resolute was the defence of the Turks, and so heavy the losses that further attacks could not be made without heavy reinforcements. On the other hand the Turks had been unable to drive the invaders back into the sea. All their attempts had broken down with terrible slaughter among their attacking troops. Their morale was for a time broken. If a steady stream of reinforcements could have been poured in during June and July there is little doubt that the resistance of the enemy would have been broken and the campaign carried through to a victorious conclusion. Unfortunately however there were divided counsels in England and those who throughout had opposed the Dardanelles adventure, fought very hard to prevent the diversion of men and guns to the theatre
In planning the battle one advantage only lay with
To distract the enemy's attention holding attacks were to be made at Helles, and at Lone Pine on the
The most careful preparations were made. Water was brought from great distances, filled into thousands and thousands of petrol tins and concealed in dead valleys or under overhead cover. Stores of shells were accumulated and quietly piled away. Food was landed and hidden away in dumps, invisible to the Turkish airmen. Fresh men came on shore and were concealed in bends and corners and old saps and among the prickly scrub. And nearly all these preparations were carried out under cover of darkness because if the enemy once realized that the main attack was to come from the left of Anzac —then that attack was foredoomed to failure.
In the late afternoon of 6 August the English attacked with fury at Helles. They stormed the Vineyard, and for a week this little patch of ground was the centre of an unceasing struggle, so fiercely contested that no Turk was sent from Achi Baba; instead reserves were called in to beat off the menace. At Lone Pine the Australians stormed trenches that were veritable fortresses, loopholed and roofed
But in the darkness of the night the sea was full of ships gliding in toward Suvla Bay and the New Zealanders were moving toward the fatal slope of Sari Bair across a tangle of valleys and slopes and precipices that in any ordinary way would have been regarded as impossible.
Hill 971 is deeply indented by great watercourses that bend and wind toward the upper slopes. Of these, three—the Sazli Beit, the Chailak and Aghyl Dere ran out to the level of the sea not far from
For some nights before the attack the destroyer Colne had stood close in to the shore. At 9 p.m. exactly she had switched her searchlight on to Old No. 3 Outpost and bombarded for half an hour. Then the light was switched off. On the night of the attack the Auckland Mounteds with bayonets fixed and magazines empty crept silently up the Sazli Beit. A Turkish outpost was rushed silently, and then, while the beam of the searchlight was still intensifying the darkness and the noise of the guns drowning the sound of the movement, the troopers crept up to within twenty-five yards of the trench. Suddenly the light was switched off and the men rushed the trenches, dropped into the darkness beneath the overhead cover and fighting hand to hand quickly overcame the garrison and cleared the position.
The Wellington Mounteds following hard upon their heels, went up an almost impossible knife-edge ridge to take Destroyer Hill, and then after half an hour's hard climbing, during which they ascended by steps cut with bayonets in the hard clay, they closed
In the meantime the Otago and Canterbury Mounteds with the Maoris, had crossed from No. 2 Outpost and swept round toward the entrance to Chailak and Bauchop's Hill which guarded it on the left. The first obstacle was a great entanglement enfiladed by rifle and machine-gun fire. This was torn out by a party of Engineers. A machine-gun caused many casualties but it was rushed by a brave subaltern who was killed in the taking of it. In small groups the men pressed on upward and after stiff fighting the whole of the hill was carried and a burst of cheering proclaimed their success. By sheer boldness and precision and rapidity of movement the New Zealand Mounted Rifles had opened the road for the main advance. "Neither Turks nor angles of ascent were destined to stop Russell or his New Zealanders that night."
The night before the commencement of the battle the New Zealand Infantry Brigade had been taken from the line about Quinn's Post and swung over towards the left. Throughout the blazing heat of the day they had been concealed in the prickly scrub of Happy Valley where little rest was possible. As so many were to die it was a fitting thing that a large letter mail should be distributed there, and that before they went out into the awful storm of battle men should see again the writing of their mothers and sweethearts and wives.
As night fell the battalions mustered and moved in file toward the entrance of the Dere. Little
As soon as the work of the covering parties was done, Canterbury commenced to move up Sazli Beit, and Otago, Wellington and Auckland up Chailak. Progress was very slow. The ground was new and strange beside being exceedingly rough and difficult. Sometimes the leaders mistook small blind ravines for the main valley. When the mistake was discovered there was much confusion because of the lack of space and the consequent difficulty in disentangling the jumbled files. For a mile behind the column came to a halt. Tired men leaned upon their rifles waiting for a move that might come at any second. They waited for what seemed an interminable period. At last they sat down—not a very easy thing for men loaded up with equipment, rations, water, ammunition and weapons. But scarcely were they down than from in front came a movement and a clattering of equipment and the line was moving once more to be halted again after it had
And now bullets were commencing to smash venomously into the scrub and bursts of machine-gun fire hissed fiercely by. A man was hit and fell coughing and bleeding in the path. Those in front went on but there was a delay of a moment or two while he was lifted to one side and roughly bandaged. Only for a few seconds perhaps but the stoppage had opened up a gap of thirty yards, and then all the men behind had to rush to close it, and as soon as by extra effort they had caught up, the whole line stopped for another five minutes. Into the midst of the files the Turkish gunners firing at random put burst after burst and there was a sudden scatter to the right and left—then the leaders went on and there was another break. The walking wounded from Bauchop's Hill and Table Top were coming down and some more seriously hurt on stretchers—not so many but enough to make for confusion in the narrow road. Once past Table Top there was resistance too—not serious but annoying and all making for more delay.
It took the whole night and a little more for the Brigade to traverse the length of the Dere.
In the dim light of dawn Otago and Canterbury approached the slopes of Rhododendron Ridge and as the morning light strengthened they skirmished over the spur and drove the few Turks in possession
The weary New Zealanders snatching a breakfast of bully and biscuits in a patch of apparently dead ground were suddenly assailed by bursts of fire. This fire grew hotter moment by moment and the Aucklanders were ordered to advance and take the ridge. There was no artillery support and scarcely any machine-guns were in position. Experienced officers pleaded with Brigade to delay the movement for half an hour, twenty minutes even until the guns could be rushed into position and given a chance to beat down the ever growing volume of fire from Chunuk. The hopelessness of the assault at the moment was emphasized. But no change was made. The battalion was drawn up and informed roughly of the objective. It was clear enough and the vicious stuttering of the enemy guns left no doubt as to where they were.
Among the Auckland men were many who had survived the Daisy Patch. The majority had been long enough on shore to know something of the effect of machine-guns against advancing troops out in the open. They had a clear realization of what they were being called upon to do. They were all sick and unspeakably weary after the marching and climbing of the night. The moment came. The word was given and the whistles blew. For an instant there was an intaking of the breath, the tension as of one who nerves himself to leap into ice cold water.
What! were the leaders baulking? From the men behind came an indescribable growl and murmur. A major leaped to the front with a waved arm and a shout and then the whole line was moving. There were twenty yards of dead ground and then came a hail of fire, fire from a thousand yards of Chunuk; enfilade fire from Battleship Hill; rifle fire and machine-gun fire from front and flank. Two hundred and fifty yards to go and every yard of it raked and swept by fire. There was no faltering, every man went straight forward running up the hill as fast as he could go. Killed and wounded, they went down in heaps, but the survivors pressed on. They reached a small deserted trench like a narrow drain and flung themselves down, in, or behind it. There was no possibility of going farther. If a man stood upright or even rose on his hands and knees he was a dead man. The only possible movement in that terrible blast of fire was, while
The remnant dwindled hour by hour. All the way back to the Apex the ground was a tangle of dead and dying and wounded. The cool of the morning was past and the sun blazed pitilessly down on the field of agony. The helpless sufferers were tormented with thirst and then the flies found the victims. Nothing could be done for them until night fell; even then many could not be found in the darkness and confusion and lay out another day and night before the stretcher-bearers came to them.
After the slaughter of the Aucklanders the machine-guns were got into position. For an hour there was heavy firing and then they swept Chunuk Bair almost clear. If only the attack had been delayed! All that day the infantry endured on the slopes below the crest waiting for the crash of firing from the left that would show that the attack from Suvla was being pushed home. It did not come.
During the night the attacking force was reorganized and in the grey dawn the Wellington battalion and the Gloucesters stormed Chunuk with a fierce sudden rush and scattered the enemy who were holding the crest. Below them, gleaming like a strip of silver in the growing light, lay the Narrows, and as they watched a Turkish transport steamed in to land its troops. But there was little time to enjoy the semblance of victory! The men commenced to dig in, some on the far side of the crest in an old Turk trench, some just below it.
But it was little that they could do. The hill
Then, at some point the missiles came flying over in showers and with a crackle of rifle fire the enemy burst from the scrub and came desperately in with the bayonet. Again and again they were shot down or gave sullenly back before the close menace of the cold steel. But the hellish rain of bursting missiles never ceased and the Wellington line was thinning fast. The sun blazed down from a cloudless sky, scorchingly hot, the acrid fumes of powder filled the air and parched the throats of the straining men, the air was filled with the splitting reports of exploding bombs, the scream of the flying nose caps and the never ending rattle of the musketry. No
There was no power of command; in the nature of things there could not be; but every man on that ridge knew that the thin line of New Zealand men was holding wide open the door to victory, and that it must not close—it must not close. So they fought on to hold it wide for the host that should come up from Suvla and as they fought they waited for the crash of firing from the left that would throw off the intolerable pressure of the Turkish attack—but it did not come.
Out in the exposed front trench the drain of men went on through all the morning hours. Not for a moment did the death hail cease. Man by man they fell, until the majority lay still and silent or drew breath in agony which found no tongue lest the sound of their cries should distract those who still fought on. Men with ghastly wounds still loaded and fired, loaded and fired, while the life ebbed out of them. At last they were loading and firing in delirium, their bodies broken and spent but responding still to the stronger impulse of heroic souls. And in the end the rifles slipped from their nerveless fingers and the brave men fell in crumpled heaps. Man by man they fell until it was only here and there that a rifle cracked and solitary figures, grimed with sweat and dust and powder and blood, rose to meet the threatened rush.
At last no shot was fired from that trench because the only men still living lay broken and maimed, unable to lift a rifle or pull a trigger. When
So the direct observation on the Narrows was lost but the line behind the ridge, though reeling under the tremendous thrust, was still held; and while it was held the battle could still be won.
The Auckland Mounted Rifles and the Maoris were sent up to reinforce. To reach the line they had to pass through a drift of fire. In one patch of what seemed to be dead ground they were suddenly Ishelled. Instead of breaking they obeyed the order to lie quiet under the fire and in a few moments the guns switched off. They went forward again and about eleven o'clock entered the firing line. They endeavoured to dig in, but on that exposed slope movement brought death. They also took what little cover they could find and endured the storm of death.
All through the long hours of the afternoon their numbers lessened, for the attack never stayed and the hellish machine-guns never ceased their traversing, and the snipers picked off those who made any movement, and the crash of the hand grenades merged into one continuous roar. The sky above was brass. The air was full of fumes that choked and blistered the parched throats. They were giddy with fatigue but still they forced themselves to fire
So all day long they strove to hold wide the door. When the sun went down and the stars shone out it had not closed. But still from the plains below came no irresistible tide of triumph.
Under cover of the darkness the Otago Infantry reinforced the line. Hand grenades, ammunition and a little water were rushed up. But the night brought no rest and there was no cessation of the attack. The bomb explosions changed from puffs of white to vivid tongues of flame. The rifles cracked and flashed as viciously as before. The Turks crept up closer and jabbed savagely through the darkness but still they could not pass.
The great flanking movement from Suvla had now been definitely held. Twenty-seven thousand fresh troops had been baffled by three thousand Turkish gendarmes. In the centre the New Zealanders had stormed Chunuk and while they held the ridge it was still possible to go on down to Maidos. But time was moving on and the Turkish reserves were entering the battle. One last effort might still clear the ridges.
The attempt was made at dawn on the 9th. Three columns thrust upwards. The crest was reached and passed but in the very moment of victory a terrible thing happened. The naval guns played for too long on the ridge and the Gurkhas who were leading were torn to pieces by our own artillery.
And now the curtain was ready to be lifted on the last act of the tragedy. Four days had passed since the beginning of the struggle and during all this time the Turkish reserves had been coming in. Thousands had crossed from Asia and other thousands had come down from Bulair. All night they had been massing behind Sari Bair and in the morning the whole mass was in motion. The English battalions on Chunuk broke and fled. But the Turks were not satisfied with the crest. They swept on, and over, and rushed on, wave after wave. The whole hillside was brown with their charging battalions. On they came toward The Farm and the Dere and the blue margin of the sea. It was a bold stroke executed with determination and courage. For a moment it seemed that no power on earth could stop the moving mass. They came on three hundred men in a line, and there were twenty-two lines following at a little space one behind the other. They stormed forward crying on the name of God, calling aloud the proclamation of their faith; for them it was victory or the fields of Paradise. They swept down like an avalanche and apparently as
But there were cool and steady men on the lower slopes. Ten New Zealand machine-guns were trained across the line of the advance. They set up a zone of death into which the first line of Turks charged and went down to a man. The next line melted away on the same spot. But still they came on, line after line, and the leaden scythe reaped them in swathes. There was no hesitation and no faltering—the last line charged on with the same high courage as the first. They also fell. The artillery picked up the range and the great heap of death and agony was torn and blasted by the bursting shells.
This great Turkish counter attack was the last act in the terrible struggle for Sari Bair. Much territory of tactical importance had been gained. The Turks were shattered and beaten to their knees. Another blow, even a weak one, would have broken them utterly but the effort had been too great and it was impossible to strike again. The high places remained with the Turks. Again he brought up fresh troops and fortified the blood-stained hill, until at last opportunity passed for ever.
The sufferings of the wounded during these days of battle had been very dreadful. A man hit somewhere up on the slopes had as often as not to lie all day in the blazing sun, tormented with thirst and tortured by the swarming flies. To attempt to move him would have meant certain death. At night he might well be missed and so doomed to another day
When after a journey of at least three hours the shore was reached there was still perhaps a night or a day of waiting before the wounded man could be got off to a hospital ship. It took four men three hours to carry from the slopes to the beach, and stretcher-bearing is the hardest work and taxes the most powerful and most courageous men to the
Close to the sea was one sap much travelled by all who passed No. 2 Outpost. For nearly two hundred yards it was crammed with badly wounded men—all stretcher cases. For three nights they lay there without blankets, for three days they were scorched by the merciless sun. They had no food except scraps of hard biscuit and no water except what was given them by passers-by. The majority did not even ask for water because they knew that it must go first to those still fighting in front; but their eyes were eager, and they were touchingly grateful when someone spared a precious mouthful from his own bottle. There was little during the whole battle that was finer than the quiet bravery of these tortured men.
On the 12th
For the Mounteds there was to be yet another ordeal of fire. When Hamilton realized that he could not get any more reinforcements, he determined at least to carry Scimitar Hill and Hill 60, the pivots of the Turkish line in the Suvla area. The attack along the whole line was a ghastly failure except for the portion which was attacked by the Mounted Rifles under General Russell.
The approach to the enemy line was carefully reconnoitred and the officers and section leaders explained exactly what was to be done. The attack was to be with bayonet and bomb only. Promptly at zero hour the Canterbury and Otago men went forward although for some unaccountable reason there was no artillery barrage. A skilful use of cover brought them to within a hundred yards of the Turkish line. They rushed across losing men and bombed the Turks from the trench and held it against the counter attack that was speedily made
Six days later a further attempt was made to clear the whole hill and again all failed except the New Zealand Mounted Brigade. The men swept forward in a long straight line and without firing a shot, but with bayonet and bomb they cleared the first enemy trench, then rising up they went out into a shrapnel barrage and losing heavily cleared the second and then going forward again they took the third line. The Turks shelled their lost trenches with fury and as the guns had a perfect enfilade they caused very heavy losses. All through the night and well into the next day they attacked, bombing along their old communication saps. The New Zealanders were almost surrounded, exhausted by their efforts, reduced by casualties to a handful, heavily outnumbered and yet they held on with steadfast courage and would not retire.
This was the last pitched battle on the Peninsula.
Chapter XI
Of the Last Six Weeks and of the Evacuation
The Anzac Book.
In the intervening six weeks Anzac had changed very much for the better. The dreadful heat of the summer months was gone and there was a touch of keenness in the air. Most of the flies were dead. One plague was over. The lice however hung on with indomitable tenacity. They had flourished in the heat of summer and now they multiplied exceedingly in the cold of winter. Much work had been done. Trenches everywhere had been improved, communication saps dug, and about the beach rows of relatively good bivvies had been constructed. Anzac had all the appearance of being a "good home." The most extraordinary change however was a physiological one. Men found that they could look a tin of bully beef in the face again! Many of them had never thought to do so, and yet within
The success of Mackensen in his offensive against Serbia had opened up a clear road from Berlin to Baghdad. The Turks had been seriously embarrassed to obtain sufficient supplies of munitions. Their troubles were now at an end and from the great Austrian factories came heavy howitzers and supplies of shell. On the second day back the enemy planted one hundred and thirty big high explosives in Chailak Dere. Far away there was a muffled report, then for several seconds the great shell could be heard climbing up and up above the mass of Sari Bair with a sound rather like heavy locomotive struggling up a steep incline. When it reached its point of clevation the projectile seemed to hang for a second then turn. The puffing roar changed to a diabolic bloodcurdling scream, as the shell fell with ever-increasing acceleration to strike the hard ground as if it had struck a stone road. Almost at once it exploded with a smashing, tearing explosion, practically unmuffled by soft earth. They did no particular harm on this occasion for after the first few bursts everyone in the vicinity got well away from the danger zone but the Dere rapidly lost attractiveness for all those whose duty led them to go up and down in it.
The menace of these guns and still more the fear of the imaginary monsters that were to come caused a great epidemic of funk-hole digging. The stiff clay faces were splendidly suited for cutting tunnels, and serious attention was devoted to this kind of
The view from the hills was a glorious one. Every morning Imbros and Samothrace emerged from the morning mists and every evening the sun set in splendour behind them. On the left and far below the plain of Suvla stretched from the Outpost to the Chocolate Hills and Anafarta. To the front and on the right ran the ragged spurs of Hill 971.
"On the shining level of the sea, cruisers and destroyers were ceaselessly on the move. There is a great fascination in watching a destroyer on patrol duty. There is no beauty about her, no colour; she is drab, long and lean from one point of view— broad, low and squat from another. On a moonlight night she is a dark line barely visible. Night and day she never ceases to move. Always there is the ceaseless, tireless moving, the keen look out, the instant readiness to strike. She has the range of every trench and landmark to the yard. A Turkish machine-gun has been pestering Chailak Dere. It is thought that the Turk and his gun are concealed behind yonder screen of bushes. Rifles and machineguns cannot shift him. The shore batteries do not command the spot.
"Word goes out to the grey, weather-stained watcher on the laughing blue sea. She drifts backward and forward so easily, so slowly, so lazily as though every iron muscle was relaxed; as though nothing mattered; as though the day was too fine and the sea too smooth to do anything but drift.
"There are other craft to be seen. Sometimes a monitor creeps out from Imbros Harbour. She has a great 14-inch gun in her bow, and when she comes out there is something to justify the thunder tones in which she speaks. Perhaps the enemy are dragging a gun into position. As the ox-team toils patiently along the rough road from Bulair, there is a rumbling in the air gradually growing nearer, a thud as the projectile buries itself in the earth, a rending explosion and then men, machinery, bushes, rocks, debris rise slowly in the air, hang for a moment, while a pall of smoke rises covering all from sight. The smoke clears. The watcher from Rhododendron can perceive no change; but the Skoda gun, brought with such toil down the Danube, will never fire a shot."—2/A.R.
On the afternoon of 13 November a naval launch ran up to the little wharf at Walker's Ridge and a group of staff officers disembarked and commenced to walk up the mule track.
The air had had a nip in it for some time, and one morning men woke to find the ground everywhere covered with snow. Many New Zealanders had never seen snow before except high up on the tops or distant mountains—on Ruapehu or Egmont or the Southern Alps. Long slopes that had gleamed yellow in the sun, were shrouded with the mantle of white. The bushes were outlined in silver tracery. The frozen ground was hard as iron. The air was cold, the water was cold. For three whole days many men felt not the slightest inclination to be clean, or only very mildly so, when the sun shone with mild warmth at midday.
The despised bully beef was now at a premium. Stout eaters could now dispose of a couple of tinfuls plus assorted extras. Fat bacon had become a delicacy greatly sought after; even Huntly and Palmer's paving-stones were in great demand. The days of scanty clothing were gone.
Men no longer wandered about in identity disks, indecent apparel and wide smiles, but wrapped themselves up in as many layers of clothing as they could by any means come by. Fortunate was he whose mother, sisters and sweethearts sent many balaclavas, scarves and socks; still more fortunate was he who could salvage all these things from the careless.
On the high slopes of Rhododendron and the Apex the snow disappeared slowly. Amongst the New Zealanders there were practically no cases of frostbite. Lower down, however, on the Suvla flat, the trenches were flooded out by the melting snow. Men unable to move and take proper precautions were
Meanwhile Sir Ian Hamilton had been relieved of his command and ordered to report to London. His urgent representations, that heavy reinforcements should be rushed out and that victory should be forced through before winter came, were overruled, and a decision to evacuate the Dardanelles was reached.
The most elaborate precautions were taken to mystify and mislead the enemy. On one occasion there was a complete silence extending over two whole days during which no shot was fired from the Anzac position. New trenches were dug, positions were sandbagged, new wire put out. A great show was made of landing more men. Guns were moved round, and fired from new positions so that the enemy might think that the artillery was being strengthened. Rumours of a great new attack were put round. Kitchener himself was to land with a whole new army and was to attack in overwhelming strength on Christmas Day.
All this time preparations for the evacuation were proceeding steadily. Practically every man who reported sick was promptly dispatched to the hospital ships—no matter how slight his ailment. The stores on the beach were opened for free distribution and luxuries such as tinned fish and milk were to be had
"I am no lion-heart, but I would sooner go over the ridge in frontal assault with all its chances of death with honour than do this thing." "How it did go to our hearts after all we had gone through—how we had slaved and fought—fought and slaved again. … It was hard to be told we must give it up."
But there was nothing else for it, and so preparations went ahead. More men and guns were sent off. On the night of Saturday the 19th half of all the remaining men were got away. There were still enough men in the line to hold it against attack, although there were no reserves in case the attack was repeated. The Sunday passed quietly. The remainder were divided into three parties, A, B, and C. The A party were to leave at 6 p.m. If then all was quiet the B party were to leave at 9 p.m.; and C the last small covering party at two o'clock in the morning. It was generally expected among the men that
The men of this party were looked upon as being those who would die for the army. Scores of men begged for a place in this little band. Main Body men who had been right through the adventure demanded a place of right; others begged and cajoled and even attempted to bribe. Everything that could be done they did to secure a place in this fellowship of sacrifice. None expected them to come through alive—they, least of all, had any hope of life. It was a supreme act, made without fuss or show of emotion in a manner typically New Zealand.
At nine o'clock on the Monday morning the Turks commenced to shell Rhododendron with high explosive shells. Their ranging was very accurate, and shell after shell burst fair in the trench line, and if the line had not been so thinly occupied the casualties must have been considerable. The day passed quietly. At six o'clock the A party commenced to move down toward the sea. There were few men in the trenches now, and if the Turk had been so minded he could have carried them with one determined rush. The next three hours were perfectly quiet. Nine o'clock came and the second party fell in and moved away, while the rear guard stood to arms in the quiet, deserted trenches, and waited for the sudden shout, the rush of Turks, the last bitter struggle, and then death to whom they had given themselves that their friends might go free.
The Mounteds came down the Aghyl Dere and the Infantry down Chailak. The Dere had never been so quiet before. Scarcely a bullet fell in places where, on any other night, they would have been falling like the heavy slow drops that precede a thunder shower. In the brilliant moonlight every familiar feature showed clearly out, the angles, the bends, the bracken, the scrub and the graves of men. There were so many of these marked with rough crosses of boxwood—pencil marked. So many sleep on the bloody, bitter slopes of Sari Bair; so many beneath the frowning Outpost Hill; so many by the margin of the blue Aegean. These men elevated the Cross. They blazed a great trail. The long file of men passed by the graves of their dead with no spoken word, but with a reverence that needed no words. The lighters were ready. In half an hour all were aboard.
At two o'clock the rearguard withdrew. Just before the time was up a shout ran along the Turkish lines. Surely the enemy were coming now? They must have seen the transports in the moonlight, and the boats moving to and fro between the ships and the shore. The rearguard "stood to" ready to die like men. The slow minutes ticked past. They had offered themselves, but the offering was not taken. Nevertheless their heroism is not lessened. In their turn the rearguard also came down from the high places. The great wire gates were closed behind them. They came with quietness to the level of the sea. The lighters moved out from the shore. For a while the dark mass of Sari Bair stood out
It was the last of Anzac.
The Anzac Book.
Chapter XII
Of Sundry Reflections on the Campaign at Anzac
I began to consider the Dardanelles Campaign not as a tragedy nor as a mistake but as a great human effort, which came more than once, very near to triumph, achieved the impossible many times, and failed in the end, as many great deeds of arms have failed—many great things and noble men have failed.
Masefield:
Gallipoli.
No doubt professional soldiers will for many years debate the wisdom of this and that detail of the strategy and tactics of the campaign. But all this will have less and less interest for the average man who is concerned far more with the feelings and sufferings of men, with their valour in face of the imminent death, their steadfastness in the hour of uttermost trial, their patience when helpless in weakness and agony, and their brotherliness toward each other when all hope of comfort in material things had passed, and their shaken souls had no refuge save in God and in each other. For us of New Zealand the fighting at Anzac must always remain in the nature of an epic. It was a tragedy that moved through terror and exultation and triumph to failure and defeat. And now nearly twenty years afterwards we are realizing that the failure, after all, probably did not make very much difference. The
The historical process is a continuous one, stretching from the dim past through the present to the most distant future. How men were to die on Chunuk was determined largely by how men and women had lived on the farms and in the towns of New Zealand for forty and sixty and eighty years before. But it was affected also by the way men of our race had died from Aylesford to the little tent on the frozen waste of the Antarctic; and for our Maori brethren by the deeds of their ancestors stretching from the remote past to the earthen parapets of Orakau and the three days of valour. But the way men died on Chunuk is shaping the deeds yet to be done by the generations yet unborn who will fill this land of ours in the great days to come. There can be no greater test of the worth of their national feeling than that they should, for sufficient reason and a good cause, be ready and able to die bravely. Such, after all, is the supreme virtue; because, where it is voluntarily embraced for the sake of others it is the finest manifestation of brotherhood; and brotherhood in action is of all things the highest and most beautiful thing that we men can attain to. Anzac was an epic of valour, and the seed of valour sown on those barren hills of death was to blossom redly through the murky darkness of the years of battle.
When the New Zealanders went to war, they were ignorant of its causes, and innocent of its meaning. No alternative was suggested by the politicians, or the Press, or the parsons. To crowds of ordinary boys there seemed to be no other possible or decent thing to do but to go and fight. And yet blinded though they were, they clung at least to the belief that the way of sacrifice is the way of life—at least for others. And so, however shocking was the disintegrating effect of war upon many of the finer virtues of life, this clinging to the necessity of valour has left, as it were, a remnant which can be made the foundation of greater things in the life of a people still young enough to be plastic to great experiences.
Before the war it might be said that the men and women living in New Zealand were unaware of the fundamental underlying unities which bound them together as a people. They had no definite sense of nationality. They were "colonists;" Englishmen, Welshmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, who had left their homelands behind them but still felt that they belonged to the old lands. After the Maori war the settlement had gone on so quietly and steadily that men had not perceived in the busy life of the colony with its rapid material expansion, the subtle blending of blood and culture, the almost imperceptible establishment of an environment different from anything existing in Britain and yet growing naturally from it, any difference to the things they had known. And yet these differences had developed, and it needed only some catastrophe, some great suffering, borne
This developing sense of nationality gave to the New Zealanders a more critical outlook upon the deeds and doings of other peoples. It was, of course, inevitable that comparisons should be drawn with regard to the English battalions. As these were in the main unfavourable, it is difficult to say those things which would be of most value, because on the one hand it may be considered arrogance, and on the other a lack of courtesy and of charity. Most of the British troops at Anzac were Territorial or New Army battalions. These were in the main composed of volunteers who had received much the same training and had had much the same experience as the New Zealanders.
But the difference between the English and New Zealand troops was marked. Our men were taller and stronger, deeper-chested, better muscled, capable of greater and more prolonged physical effort. They were better able to withstand the fatigue of marching and digging and fighting. They were more resolute in attack, stronger in defence. Their general standard of intelligence was much higher. Among the New Zealanders it was difficult except on close acquaintanceship to pick out a man of university
Beside them the English looked like adolescent boys. As soldiers the English failed repeatedly. The disaster at Suvla Bay was partly the result of weak leadership on the part of the Corps Commander; but it was also due to inability on the part of the troops to stand up to the demands made upon them by the exigencies of the situation.
Now why was this? After all, Englishmen and New Zealanders were of one blood. Very few of the men from the Dominion were three generations from the Old Country—not so very many were even two. The majority were probably only one. It might be argued that the original colonists were above the average. Many of them were certainly extraordinarily fine men and women but it is doubtful whether the rank and file were greatly superior. The climate of New Zealand is not dissimilar to that of the British Isles. To the writer, the difference that has developed would seem to be mainly due to the following factors:
Practically all New Zealanders are well fed from infancy. We are a food-producing country, and even under the worst economic conditions we have experienced, there has usually been food—and good food —available in sufficient quantities. Housing conditions, even when somewhat rough, are at least
In England, on the other hand, the steady process of industrialization under the prevailing conditions of capitalism has tended to make an environment, destructive to the possibility of developing the best life possible to the community at large. There seems recently to have been much serious thought among Englishmen concerning the problem. A great authority has even gone so far as to say that one man in every ten is useless from the point of view of economic efficiency. If the reasons that have been advanced for the high standard of the New Zealanders are valid, it would appear that the substitution of
For nearly a hundred years we have been fortunate, and the courage and steadfastness and foresight of our pioneer fathers have given to us foundations of national character and strength, but to-day we stand at a critical point in our development. The level that has been fairly easy to reach so far, will become increasingly difficult to maintain in the future, and we can only continue to grow if we have a great development of the spirit of brotherhood that was so marked a feature of our life at Anzac.
Chapter XIII
Of the Rest Camp at Lemnos
The Anzac Book.
At last on 14 September the New Zealanders were ordered to concentrate in the Chailak Dere. "Hallelujah," the spell had come at last! A few more days, and there would not have been anybody to relieve. The men staggered down the Dere, past the Outpost and along a weary way to Anzac Cove. Here they were packed on board lighters and taken off to the Osmanieh. They had left New Zealand in ten large transports, and now the remnants were taken off from Anzac in one small steamer. With the reinforcements over ten thousand men went ashore at Anzac. About eight hundred embarked for the spell.
In Mudros Harbour an ancient paddle steamer that had all the appearance of having been abandoned after the Crimean War wheezed alongside and commenced to take men and stores towards the "wharf." As the old craft neither sank nor capsized on the way everyone landed safely after successfully negotiating an ingenious obstacle that had been erected by the
Although the weather was threatening and black thunder clouds were sweeping overhead, no one could summon the necessary energy to dig trenches round the tents. In the morning a thunder storm burst over the camp and the rain poured down in torrents. In a few minutes the whole hillside was running with water. The flood rushed in under the tent flaps and the floor space was soon a running stream. The miserable men stood up holding their more valued possessions in their arms, and so remained for the best part of an hour, until the rain ceased, and then, galvanized into action, went outside and dug ditches round the tents. Naturally, after this there was no more rain while the spell lasted.
That afternoon was Christmas Day and a birthday rolled into one. There was an issue of fresh meat as much as anyone chose to take, fresh eggs and new bread. Little groups of men sat happily round cooking-fires, with steak and eggs frizzling merrily and
For the next fortnight the men did little except eat and sleep and rejoice in the good food and the easy time. Everyone, almost, seemed to be of the opinion that the New Zealanders had done their bit and that they would almost certainly be sent away to India or Egypt or some such pleasant land to do garrison duty. It was even considered by some that a grateful Empire would be sending the remnant back for a trip to New Zealand. These pleasant day dreams were very soon shattered. On the first Sunday a church parade was held. The eight hundred, still a disreputable, emaciated collection of skeletons, shuffled out into some sort of order, expecting comfortable words. To their astonishment and disgust the padre preached a sermon to the effect that no man had done his bit while he had a leg left to stand Osmanieh. At the parade he endeavoured to cheer the troops by making the startling announcement that the war had only just begun.
"Just beginning! Oh hell! the silly old b_____ is mad."
The 6th Reinforcement arrived, bursting with health and high spirits, and very nearly as fit as the Main Body had been before the Landing. They did not receive the most cordial of receptions. The old hands looked upon them at first as the most out and out "leadswingers"—men who had been pushed out of New Zealand by the sheer weight of public opinion. Like all aristocracies, the Main Body took themselves very seriously and endeavoured to hedge their (to them) obvious superiority with a certain divinity, as it were. They were a separate caste. Not only had they done great deeds, but they let it be fairly clearly understood that no such deeds could be looked for from the degenerate class who had just joined now that the war was practically over. On their part the reinforcements were torn between two feelings. The fame of the Anzacs was very great and their doings had been noised round the world:
I'd count it the greatest reward That ever a man could attain, I'd sooner be Anzac than—Lord! I'd rather be Anzac than Thane.
But it was very difficult to connect honour and fame and high, heroic deeds with the handful of decrepit, homesick, thoroughly verminous and blasphemously fed-up scarecrows who paraded in the place of honour.
Training started again and the barrack square people came into their own once more. Commencing their ritual in the ordinary manner they worked up from right and left turn, through sloping and ordering arms, and fixing and unfixing bayonets, to the various ceremonial evolutions of squad platoon, company and battalion drill. They seemed to have realized surprisingly little of the fact that there was a very considerable technique of war to be learned and that modern conditions demanded of the individual soldier initiative, resource and knowledge, such as was not contemplated in the training manuals. There is no manner of doubt that the Anzacs badly needed to be straightened out again, but recruit drill went very much against the grain. After all, they were relatively new to war, and they still had to learn that soldiers can never graduate to courses of instruction beyond those that are comprehensible to their instructors. Reasonable exercise in the open air, however, was of considerable value, and by slow degrees the sick men came back to something like normal health.
Life was good without being especially exciting. Leisure was plentiful. Many men climbed up into the hills to the little village of Thermae where there were hot springs known to the ancients, and not a few went beyond to the considerable town of Castro
The water-supply was somewhat scanty and was obtained by hand-pumping. As a result there was nearly always a long queue at the wells. Crown and anchor boards were established here by certain extremely hard-looking personages, evidently of the professional type with faces of brass, eyes as soulless as those of a stingaree, raucous voices and a wonderful command of the Australian language. Huge sums in all manner of coinage went on to the boards and thence into the pockets of the hardened rogues who ran them.
The time passed pleasantly enough. There were a couple of camp-fire concerts. No one who was present will ever forget the glow of firelight, the darkness and the stars and a man with a splendid
By this time with the reinforcements and the return of many sick and wounded, the units were up to about half-strength. The news of Loos, proclaimed like Suvla Bay to be a great British victory, caused some of the reinforcements to fear that the war was over—and some of the old hands to hope that it was. Needless to say both hopes and fears were groundless. There was a tremendous deal of speculation as to where we would be going next: some were for Egypt and the Canal; some for Salonika; some for a fresh landing on the Turkish coast, and many of course for France.
But shortly before the move was made a very strong rumour amounting to a certainty got round that the New Zealanders were going back to Anzac. In consequence the canteens were rushed and the men fell in, carrying enormous packs stuffed with every delicacy that could be procured, and so staggered down to the rough pier and embarked. On a grey afternoon they ran out through the boom and swung round on the well-known sea-road to the Peninsula. When night came the great crag of Walker's Ridge showed black against the sky. From the heights came the occasional crack of rifleshots, and the "pit-pot" of the Turkish Mausers. As the barges moved in toward the Landing, the occasional whine of a spent bullet, the splash and hiss in the water near by, showed that the Anzacs were nearly home again.
Chapter XIV
Of the Reorganization in Egypt, the Formation of the N.Z. Division, and Good-bye to the Mounteds
We are at rest … miles behind the front … Reinforcements have arrived … Some of them are old hands, but there are, men of a later draft from the base.
Remarque:
All Quiet on the Western Front.
After the evacuation the troops assembled in a tented camp outside Mudros. The "diehards" of the last party were welcomed with great joy. But the greatest welcome was reserved for the two Australian battalions that had held the Old Anzac Ring and that had been the last to leave. The road by which they marched was lined with cheering men for the brotherhood of Anzac had been a very real thing. It was there that Australians and New Zealanders learned to appreciate each other as never before or after. And these men who were marching in without rifles had been the last garrison, the men who had looked down from the crags to see all others in safety before they at the very last moment withdrew to the boats.
There were no wild excitements about Lemnos. Mudros itself was a commonplace and dirty village. The only building of any beauty was the church,
Many of the units actually embarked on Christmas morning. There had been very little for breakfast but the tents were struck and the packing done with the utmost cheerfulness because of the promised dinner that was supposed to be even then in preparation on the transports. Everyone was soon on board in a state of happy confusion waiting for the coming feast. Time passed and nothing happened but for a while the mood of optimism prevailed. The hours went by. The officers assembled in the saloon and savoury dishes were borne in before the eyes of men now growing ravenous. Appetites were further whetted and eagerness became almost wolfish. There could not be very much more delay. There was not. Some boxes
Once more Alexandria rose up out of the sea and the boats were soon berthed at the quays. There was to be no leave. Trains were waiting and almost at once the files were moving down the gangways and along the wharves.
Right on the main wharf was a little tea buffet for the convenience no doubt of the soldiers whose duties brought them on and about the water front. Framed in this little booth like a picture was an English girl dressed in a spotless Red Cross uniform. Very fair and sweet and clean she looked to men who for nine months had seen no woman except withered-looking old Greeks and a few nurses in the far distance. They felt like little boys in the primers, young and very shy, worshipping one of the goddesses who preside in those regions. And she was so utterly unattainable! They had no Egyptian money, so couldn't buy tea or chocolates or cigarettes to give them an excuse actually to speak to her. There happened to be no others buying at the moment, so they couldn't just stand and stare as they would have liked to. She looked far too much like a nice New Zealand girl for anyone to dream of striking up a casual acquaintance. All that could be done was for them to walk past once or twice and look as though they were not looking
In an hour or two the trains were rattling down the Nile Delta. Very homely and pleasant it looked after the barren hills. Old Egypt seemed just the same any way, war or no war, and everyone's spirits commenced to rise. Two or three indeed got so exhilarated that they fell off the train and damaged themselves rather seriously, but otherwise nothing happened to mar proceedings until at Benha Junction the trains turned east to Zag-a-zig and so through Tel-el-Kebir to Moascar Siding a mile or so outside the Canal town of Ismailia. The men detrained on to the desert. So it was not to be Cairo. Bivouacs were formed on the desert sands and in a few days tents arrived.
At Alexandria the infantry and the mounted troops parted company—the latter going to the old camp at Zeitoun and from there to the campaign in Palestine. Here they must pass out from this story and their deeds must be told by some other chronicler.
To Moascar came the newly formed Rifle Brigade whose first battalion had been in action against the Senussi, and also the men of the 7th, 8th and 9th reinforcements. In addition many hundreds sick and wounded from Gallipoli were now fit again and ready for duty. It was possible
It was during this period that feeling with regard to promotion first became very acute. There were in all the units men who had served through the Gallipoli campaign with great distinction and who were in every way qualified for promotion to commissioned rank. When a depleted brigade suddenly grew into a division scores of new officers were needed and these men naturally expected to receive their commissions. Moreover, in many cases their commanding officers were most anxious to have their services in positions where they would have been of the greatest use.
But to the dismay of all it was found that each reinforcement brought a quota of officers more than sufficient to meet all requirements. These men had no particular qualifications except that they had passed a not very difficult examination in the New Zealand training camps. Many of them indeed were of the number who were less eager to get to the front, and who, by signifying their desire to do the special N.C.O. and then officers' training courses, thereby delayed their departure from New Zealand for upwards of six months. In very few cases could any special reason be advanced for these men receiving preferential treatment. Nevertheless, they were arriving reinforcement after reinforcement at a rate that bade fair to stop all promotion from the ranks. Men inexperienced in war and
In Egypt protest became strong. Some of the senior officers waited upon General Godley and urged the discontinuance of the system. The General agreed that there was definite injustice but said that he was powerless to act, for despite his protests the authorities in New Zealand insisted on sending the men away. Nothing more could be done, but there was much soreness.
Amongst the men who came away with commissions were some who turned out extremely fine soldiers; the majority were men of average type and filled the positions in a not unsatisfactory fashion, while a minority were utterly inefficient, incapable and cowardly. The system provided for a succession of mediocrity which continued from the beginning to the end.
Throughout the whole war there was seldom a time when the average New Zealand company could not have selected from its ranks men who would have officered it better than those who actually held the commands. There was a very even diffusion through all ranks of the qualities of initiative, personality and intelligence. This gave a certain solidarity which made it difficult for things to go utterly wrong, for there was nearly always some N.C.O. or private who could rise to a crisis and save a situation. But it did mean that units were continually hampered in constructive endeavours by relatively uninspired leadership and also by the fact
There was little to break the monotony of training. Ismailia, though a beautiful place enough, was small and there were not many attractions, and yet as there was nowhere else to go it was usually thronged. The main diversion was bathing in Lake Timsah. Every day when training was finished, thousands of men stripped off and plunged into the water. Behind lay the gleaming, shimmering line of sandhills broken in two or three places by green patches of vegetation. The wide expanse of water was blue beneath the cloudless sky. Out in the channel warships patrolled slowly through and then along the line of the Canal, while great transports went by crowded with battalions from India, or reinforcements from Australia or New Zealand. The bathers splashed and shouted, their beautiful white and brown bodies flashing and gleaming in the sunlight.
The most exciting incident of the period was when one day a few exhausted Australians staggered into the camp with the news that they were all that remained of a brigade which had set out to march from Tel-el-Kebir to Moascar. Their water had given out, the distance was considerable, march discipline had collapsed, and the men struggled on, more and more falling out as the sun increased in
It was at Moascar that the N.Z.Y.M.C.A. made its first appearance among the fighting men. Two marquees were put up and were of course crowded.
And now the New Zealanders were strong again. They had grown from a single brigade to a great company of men, a full division. No heavy fighting was likely to take place on the Canal and it was obvious that before long there would be a move. Again rumours of all sorts commenced to circulate. Salonika, Mesopotamia and France were all talked of. As the Gallipoli campaign had definitely failed, it was more than ever certain that the heaviest fighting of the war would now be in the west. It was the strong desire of the New Zealanders to proceed to France—and to France they went. Embarkation orders came early in April and soon the N.Z.E.F. was running the gauntlet of the German submarines as the great ships ploughed across the Mediterranean towards Marseilles.
Chapter XV
Of how the New Zealanders Came into The Land Of France
The Land of France! Alleyne's eyes shone as he gazed upon it. The land of France—the very words sounded as the call of a bugle in the ears of the youth of England. The land where their fathers had bled, the home of chivalry and of knightly deeds, the country of gallant men, of courtly women, of princely buildings; of the wise, the polished and the sainted. There it lay so still and grey beneath the drifting wrack—the home of things noble and of things shameful—the theatre where a new name might be made or an old one marred.
Conan Doyle :
The White Company.
Green hills rising from the sea! The Chateau d'If! On the hillsides above the sea churches and buildings of ancient grey stone! The city of Marseilles and the storied land of France!
Alas, there was no delay! A few who slipped up the wharves were stopped at the great iron gates and got but a glimpse of a street and shops and crowds of French civilians. The trains were waiting, and the men marched straight to them and crowded into the third-class compartment carriages with little realization of what luxurious state they were for once travelling in. The fair land of France was very beautiful in the spring sunshine. After the sand of Egypt and the dusty brown of Anzac, the green fields were very pleasant to the
At all the stations and crossings groups of French boys and girls greeted the troops with shrill exclamations, and with an idiom so chaste and classical as to make it clear that the Australians had been before us. Every here and there fatigue parties had dixies full of tea heavily dashed with rum to serve out to the men. When this was not available at a stop emergency rations were often broken into and the company's linguists would interview the engine-driver and by a weird mixture of alleged French and pantomimic gestures request that functionary to supply boiling water. Town after town was passed—Avignon, Orange, Lyons, Dijon, Aries with the Vercingetorix statue crowning the hill slope. At Versailles the trains side-tracked Paris, and ran up into the Department du Nord through Rouen, Abbeville, Etaples; past Calais, through St Omer, and so to the detraining point at Steenbecque outside Hazebrouck.
The men were immediately marched off to their billets, which were found to be the barns and outbuildings of the local farmhouses. French farms
Nevertheless, from the point of view of those who were not too fussy these farm billets were often good places. If the barn was in fairly good condition it was snug enough; and if the farmer was generous enough with his hay and straw it was extremely comfortable to snuggle down in the soft cover after the baked clay of Anzac, the hard cold sand of the desert, and the iron or wooden decks of the transports. For an hour or so at night the darkness was broken by flickering candles; there was a cheerful hum of conversation from the thirty or forty good companions. Some one commenced to whistle or sing and soon the others joined in. After a while lights went out and soon all were fast asleep—and there was silence punctuated by the hearty snoring of one or two and the grunt of a pig
New Zealanders are in general adaptable people, and it was not long before they commenced to make friends with the French folk. The language difficulty was solved by the use of a few words often repeated, by strange and wonderful gestures and by the broadest of broad smiles. At first of course there were some misconceptions. The manners of French peasants towards their womenfolk are in general, apparently, non-existent and madame and mademoiselle were at first somewhat taken aback by men who pumped their water for them, or carried buckets, or opened doors or performed any of those small courtesies which in New Zealand are the general rule. For a while they were a little suspicious but courtesy passes current in all languages or in none and the result was the growth of a very real friendship.
For the first fortnight intercourse was somewhat limited by the fact that the men were all bankrupt. It was during this period of financial stringency that the French formed the opinion that the New Zealanders were a nation of abstainers. They bought deux sous—per glass, or coffee or omelets. However, when the long looked for pay day arrived the villagers were completely disillusioned. The drought broke.
One idiosyncrasy of their visitors that greatly intrigued their hosts was the extraordinary craze they had for bathing themselves—a craze which had no attraction for the French especially so early in the year as the spring. In one billet some officers demanded of their "madame" a tub and much hot water, "Mais oui, messieurs, certainement!" and the hospitable old lady bustled round to fulfil this extraordinary order. The tub was placed on the stone floor of one of the rooms. The hot water was poured in. The family was warned off, the officers stripped and the bath commenced. But as it was Good Friday, the family had concluded that the proceeding was a solemn religious rite in honour of the season; and so, entering from the communicating doors, they gathered reverently round and gazed with awe on this ceremony of purification. Surely these men took their religion seriously and sadly. "Mon Dieu! Fancy exposing the body to such cold!" The mere pursuit of cleanliness could not be sufficient reason for undergoing such unease. When their enraged and outraged guests had driven them forth, they probably speculated on the truth of the old saying that all Englishmen were mad.
Chapter XVI
Of Armentieres, a Quiet Sector, and How It Became Hot
c'est la guerre."
pave,
Pauvre petite: mats c'est la guerre."
New Zealand at the Front.
When the New Zealanders took over Armentières it was looked upon as being one of the quietest sectors on the whole front, a glorified rest camp. The advice which the Tommies gave, "Doan't ye fire at 'im, choom, and 'e woan't fire at ye," seems to have been the principle on which the war in these parts was conducted. The trenches were old and had been neglected and in consequence there was much work to be done digging, constructing
No Man's Land, that two or three hundred yards of sinister waste that stretched from one front line to the other, came in for the closest attention. Every night patrols crept across the parapet and explored its dangerous mysteries. They examined the enemy wire and searched for gaps; listened for working parties, and went back to turn the machineguns or artillery on them, they lay flat while bursts of fire swept bare inches above their heads and the German flares burned green and gold through the blackness of the night. From "stand to" before dawn till nightfall eager eyes searched the enemy trenches for the slightest movement.
Much objection was taken to the Germans displaying periscopes. One day "our snipers smashed five of them." On another day "they smashed three."
A certain "red house" came in for much observation. "Washing is hung out" therefrom. "A woman was observed in the red brick house." Who was she, this woman—mistress or slave, or just feld-lazaret if not for a burial party. As time went on the deadly New Zealand sniping caused gentlemen with blue and gold round their field-grey caps to make themselves less conspicuous. "A dummy gun and a dummy man were perceived on the opposite parapet." And so on for scores of entries in the battalion and brigade diaries. Little things all of them, but representing the concentrated attention of hundreds of men; and in the aggregate, pieced together and sorted out, not without meaning. Among the new means of frightfulness served out to the infantry was the light trench mortar—the Stokes mortar. This was simply a metal tube into which cylindrical-shaped bombs were dropped with great rapidity and discharged at ranges of between two and three hundred yards. The bombs were extremely unpopular with the Germans, who nearly always rang up for artillery retaliation whenever they were deluged with these unpleasant missiles. As the L.T.M.Bs, after committing their
The German "Minenwerfer" was a heavy trench mortar which flung projectiles of the size of a small oil drum. Their flight was clearly visible, and their panting 'song, "Where's your bivvy? Where's your bivvy? Where's your bivvy?" went to all hearts. If you kept sufficiently cool, the right technique was to observe them until you were sure that they were tumbling right down on top of you—then without waste of time you doubled round the next traverse. The "minnie" burst with an appalling noise and dug a huge hole in the ground. Providing you were not where the hole happened you would probably be all right apart from the shock to the nerves—which usually was considerable. The Germans had great faith in the disintegrating, nervous effect of horribly loud noises—and in this they were unquestionably right.
The enemy had guns and were prepared to use them and these small bickerings with trench mortars usually ended in an artillery "strafe." A German battery would open up on the position from which the Stokes gun had been shooting. The New Zealand gunners waiting eagerly for the chance of a shoot, and revelling in what seemed after the pitiful dole available at Anzac, to be an unlimited supply of ammunition, accepted the challenge and fired back shot after shot. For fifteen minutes or so the
But the offensive was not with artillery only. On 16-17 June a 2nd Otago company raided the "Breakwater" north-east of Houplines. Eight days later men of the 2nd Battalion Rifle Brigade rushed the enemy line at Pont Ballot and did much damage returning with prisoners and plunder. First Wellington were equally successful a week later at Pigot's Farm. But the 2nd Battalion were foiled next night at the Frélinghien Brasserie, although they coolly and skilfully beat off an enemy attempt to follow them back.
On the 3rd the Germans attempted to obtain their revenge, and came over against the l'Epinette, then held by the 1st Auckland. At 10.30 p.m. hell suddenly burst loose. Every kind of missile rained down upon the front and support lines. The parapet was blown in, dugouts smashed, men killed, wounded, and buried alive. For an hour the uproar continued, the detonations filling the night with a roar of sound, and sheets of vivid flame. The air was
But the Aucklanders lined their broken parapet and each man shot or bombed straight ahead at the shadowy figures moving in the wire. At last the Germans fell back, leaving one dazed man wandering in our line. They had lost heavily. A few days later, after a bombardment that blew the front line to pieces, they rushed the Mushroom. Their first attack was beaten off by a sergeant and a few survivors of the garrison, but after a further bombardment they bombed their way in, drove the survivors back, and secured three prisoners, but at a great loss to themselves. The men who fought them here were 1st Canterbury.
On the night of 13-14 July 2nd Otago attempted to raid at Pont Ballot. They assembled in No Man's Land before the barrage opened, faces blackened, lightly armed with rifle and bayonet, or knobkerry and bomb, and with all their identification marks removed. But the very instant that our barrage fire opened, No Man's Land was swept by a tremendous
Next night 1st Auckland went over to find only dead and debris, but the 1st Battalion Rifle Brigade at the same time did much damage and brought back ample identifications. A German attempt on the same night captured three men in a listening post, but was then beaten back without having entered the front trenches. On 12 August, 2nd Auckland raided the Breakwater and captured a machine-gun and two prisoners. In all, over this period eleven raids were made by our men upon the Germans while they carried out four upon us.
After the barren life of Anzac and the isolation of the desert Armentières was a good place. It was a quaint old world town built almost entirely of red brick. The churches, the religious foundations, and the schools were the most prominent buildings. Except for certain parts, it was a city of silence. Street after street was empty and silent. The glass in the windows had in many cases been smashed by the detonations of the bursting shells. Every here and there a house had a shell-hole in roof or wall. Some, the shells had burst open, and the pitiful relics of pavé roads.
The majority of the population had fled long before the arrival of the New Zealanders, and those who remained, mainly women and children, were the most courageous among the poor folk who clung at great risk to their humble homes. There were perhaps some three thousand of them altogether—scattered thinly from the Barrier at Nouvel Houplines, to Barbed Wire Square, and the Place Victor Hugo; in greater number about Half-past Eleven Square (so named because the town clock had stopped at that hour), and more still around l'Ecole Professionnelle and the Blue Blind Factory at the back of the town.
During the night a battalion moving back from a trench spell after days of watching, damp dugouts, heavy shelling, wiring, patrolling, and the full experience of trench warfare in a hot sector, would take up billets in, say, the Blue Blind Factory. In the morning the men were roused by a troop of mademoiselles and gamins who entered the dormitories chattering, singing and joking to sell the morning paper, eggs and chocolate. Mademoiselle was an adept with her tongue and jokes flew thick and fast.
After breakfast the men would fall in and be marched by platoons back over the Pont de Nieppe to the brewery baths—the most famous in France. Filing past long partitions of sacking, men shed first their hats and valuables, then their coats and mademoiselle française whose soldat anglais had parti to the death-dealing qualities of the soixante-quinze, the famous French field-piece.
That afternoon, clean and well swanked-up, the soldier would be buying picture post-cards of the town to send back to New Zealand or cracking jokes with plump and jolly Marie in the coffee and pastry shop near Half-past Eleven Square. Then, too, until "eight o'clock fineesh" there were the estaminets of innumerable madames and mademoiselles, Simone, Louise, Darkie, Ginger, and many another less known to fame where there was much real good fun and sociability. In the estaminets and chip shops there were great revellings and many tall stories were told in a dialect which consisted of distorted French mixed with English of an elementary and often sulphurous sort, accompanied with much gesture and more laughter.
Chips, eggs, coffee and beer were all good in their way; but brave, cheerful, generous, good-natured jamais fâchée, jamais vexée; very willing to promenade avec monsieur après la guerre or to go back with him to New Zealand "after de nex warr per-r-r-aps." Mademoiselle from Armentières, you were a good friend to the New Zealanders. You and they went through some hard times together. You said that the soldats de la Nouvelle-Zélande étaient beaucoup bien aimés. They thank you and do not forget.
At three o'clock in the morning a man might be on a wiring party in No Man's Land, standing stock still, in the light of a flare, pretending to be a broken tree, or lying flat on his tummy to escape bursts from Parapet Joe, whose favourite tune was reported to be, "Where is My Wandering Boy Tonight?" Coming down the sap in the grey dawn his platoon might be caught at a nasty corner by a sudden salvo of whizz-bangs. One of his mates goes down with a smashed shoulder. The wounded man's face is grey and twisted and there is bloody foam on his lips but he manages a faint smile. A field dressing is ripped open and stuffed in the ghastly wound, another goes over it, and then in a couple of minutes he is on a stretcher and ten minutes later is being handed over to the field ambulance bearers. A quiet hand-shake: "Good luck, old chap!"
Our man reaches billets, has a wash and a shave, breakfast and a sleep and after a lunch of bread, butter, jam and cheese, wanders into the town and spends half an hour picking out picture postcards of estaminet. In the evening they go to the divisional picture show at the Ecole Professionnelle and laugh at the doings of
Days like this make old timers seriously query whether after all war is always war.
Yet tragedy always lurked beneath the gay surface. A famous egg and chip shop was crowded with good-natured "patrons." The warm afternoon sun came flooding through the small leaded panes of the old-fashioned windows. There was cheerful clatter of plates and rattling of forks. From behind the scenes came the cheerful sound of frizzling and frying. A dark-haired, browneyed girl, "très chic," bright and merry and amazingly efficient, moved about alertly, the centre of a barrage of questions and orders and invitations:
"Deux oeufs, monsieur? Et trois pour vous? Votre omelette est servi, Monsieur Jeem! Billee you no bon, ask me promenade avec vous, Charlie say you marrit in Nouvelle-Zélande! Iei v—s oeufs monsieur! Deux francs four tout! Yez, boy! me promenade wiz you after de war! Encore du café! Jeem, vous êtes gourmand—you eat too Allemand shoot you facilement."
Outside a whining scream, a bang, and a limber mule goes down kicking. The girl is at the door:
"Oh, la la! La pauvre bête! C'est triste!"
Again the whining scream, nearer this time. Splinters fly from the door, and the girl is down, unconscious and moaning, with three shrapnel pellets through her dainty body. There was gloom throughout a brigade as the news got round.
Ten o'clock at night, and all quiet save for the rumbling of the limbers bumping over the pave. All lights out and the streets silent and deserted save for a few gas guards outside the billets! Faint flashes in the distance blinked across the dark sky, and the far off reports of great guns and then the shells came rushing down upon the town. For a few moments all was uproar. A house caught fire and a column of flame shot up into the air. There were cries for stretcher-bearers. A few men from the field ambulance rush out. They find some wounded and hurry them in and then out again into the storm. Again come the cries and a frantic girl calls out from a tall house. They rush in to find a woman bleeding from terrible wounds.
As they bend over her there is a demoniacal shriek and a dreadful missile crashes on to the road outside. There is a vivid leap of flame, a tremendous explosion. Glass falls tinkling from fifty windows. The plaster ceiling falls in a rain of dust The walls rock and shake. For a moment all nerves are on edge and then one man with a
All through June a mighty prelude was played on the whole line from Nieuport to Verdun. The artillery fire grew more intense and the raids more frequent. There was tense feeling in the air—the expectation of battle. In the darkness of the night men looked southward to see if the sky were yet red with leaping flame; in the quietness of the long night watches they listened for the rumble of massed guns beating on the German lines. On 1 July the British went forward to commence the battle of the Somme. For six weeks the battle waxed and waned and then, towards the middle of August, the 51st Division marched into Armentières with German
The battalions fell in and marched away. "Goodbye, madame! Good-bye, mademoiselle! Goodbye, piccanins! Nous allons kill beaucoup Bosches; come back promenade with you!"
"Au revoir, messieurs! Dieu vous aide!"
Chapter XVII
Of the Battle of the Somme and of How the New Zealanders Were a Tower of Strength on the Right Hand and on the Left
We entrained at Savigny and at once knew our destination. It was our old blood-bath the Somme.
German Soldier.
It is indeed fair and just to say that throughout those battles of the Somme our men fought against an enemy hard to beat, grim and resolute.
Sir Philip Gibbs .
The New Zealand Division was a tower of strength on the right hand and on the left.
Report of the Battle of the Somme.
The New Zealanders entrained at Steenwerck and for the first time travelled in the famous trucks of 40 hommes et 8 chevaux en long. How the eight horses en long fared on these journeys it is hard to say, but the quarante hommes have made their sufferings vocal on many occasions since. The trucks were of the box variety without windows and fitted with sliding doors in the centre. The unfortunate forty were herded in and found that with packs up there was just about standing room. The real problem was how to sit and lie. This was never really solved except by the fortunate few who, when the weather
They detrained gladly enough, and marched away to pleasant villages about Amiens. The red-roofed, white-walled houses clustered together in lovely valleys among the wooded hills. Any barn was comfortable in the beautiful autumn weather. The French were friendly and kind, and loved their new guests well. When there are only a few days for the business, and death looms not far ahead, friendships are formed wonderfully quickly. Years afterwards there were soldiers who had beaucoup correspondance with the village maidens.
Early in the morning men swung out on the march to their training grounds, drilled and manoeuvred and practised the new evolutions of the shock battle; and then, still fresh and fit, marched back to their billets for a real good night's fun. Everyone ate well, drank well, and slept well. These days were perhaps the pleasantest spent in France,
At the beginning of September the division was on the move again, and day by day the men drew nearer to the battlefield. From the hills above Picquigny the German flares could be seen rising like
This moving without haste but with deliberate purpose to a great storm of conflict in which life is the hazard, is a stern and yet a joyful thing. It is the nature of men that they match themselves with fate and chance and circumstance, and find their most profound satisfaction in deeds that call for heroic venturings.
They marched on, and each night the flares burned more brightly and the sky winked and flashed with flame, and the long roll of the guns rumbled like giant drums. The artillery went into the gunpits on 5 September, and three days later the infantry battalions bivouacked among the sheaves of wheat in fields not far behind the batteries of 12-inch naval guns that marked the beginning of the battlefield. Along the Albert-Amiens road that ran straight and tree-lined through wide unfenced fields, went one continuous line of guns, of motor lorries full of provisions, and wagon loads of ammunition, all moving in; Red Cross cars, worn guns, broken and empty limbers, moving out. Men gazed for hours at the unending cavalcade that moved up and down the great highway of war.
On 9 September the New Zealanders marched on to the battlefield leaving Albert and its hanging Virgin on the left, and moving up through Fricourt, Bazentin and Contalmaison to Mametz Wood. Men marvelled as they went through broken villages and
The Rifle Brigade took over a line that was merely a series of disconnected posts several hundreds of yards from the Switch. They immediately dug a connected line and pushed up to close the gap. Second Auckland and 2nd Otago took over the front line, and during the afternoon of the fourteenth dug assembly trenches within striking distance of Crest Trench. Night came with a chill drizzle; but all through the New Zealand Division there was stern elation, for it was known that the attack was to go forward at dawn. All night there was the ceaseless mutter of guns and the flickering in the sky. All
Towards morning the gun fire grew more intense. At six o'clock there was a considerable rattle of machine-gun fire, and a constant sighing and droning in the air as the big howitzer shells rushed down to make the stationary barrage that was now falling in the rear of the enemy line. The infantrymen tightened their equipment and lay gripping their rifles staring toward the ridge which now showed dimly against the lightening sky.
At 6.20 a.m. in a wide circle of flame and a great crash of sound the "creeping barrage" fell on the German trenches. They disappeared in smoke and dust through which rose dark columns of spouting earth. From the midst of these shot up the S O S rockets in frantic appeal. In the light of dawn the German outposts saw, as it were, the whole earth full of moving men. Aucklanders and Otagos were moving forward in four long lines of assault with fifty yards between each wave, and behind them, as far as the eye could see, were the battalions of the Rifle Brigade in sections in artillery formation. To the right and left were the files of Guardsmen, South Africans, Irishmen, English Territorials. Here and there, not quite keeping pace with the infantry, were the tanks, the mysterious new weapons of war, of whose advent there had been a confused rumour.
This whole mass was surging forward like a tide at flood. For perhaps ten seconds hardly a man verdammt Engländer would be mown down again as they had been time after time during the last weeks.
But all along the line platoon commanders, section leaders, private soldiers, took the initiative, and even as the barrage lifted the wave broke and flooded over the German line. Some of the enemy died fighting very bravely; some were shot down as they ran back; some were bayoneted screaming' for mercy —but all died except the wounded. So Switch Line was carried and the victorious battalions of the 2nd Brigade commenced to dig in farther down the slope.
Close behind came the 4th Battalion of the Rifle Brigade deploying out to cover the whole divisional front. They moved down the gentle slope and penetrated almost another half-mile, and by 7.50 a.m. (their scheduled time) were digging in on the Brown Line. Behind them again came their 2nd and 3rd battalions whose first task was to capture Flers Trench and Flers support, after which they were to enter the north-western corner of the village and mop up various trenches that lay beyond. For this movement there was no barrage. There was heavy fighting in and about Flers Trench because here the men ran up against uncut wire from behind which came the rapid rattling of machine-gun fire. On the left they were held, and waited sullenly for some happening which might give them opportunity. Bombing attacks up the communication trenches made progress, but were held. A movement across a bit of dead ground made some further advance, but was unable to force an entry. A frontal rush failed before the volume of fire.
Then at last came two caterpillars that had crawled over the ridge and lumbered slowly down the slope across a wilderness of shell-holes. A rain of bullets glanced harmlessly from their iron sides. They lurched up against the rusty masses of wire, their blunt snouts rising high and then crashing down from the height, smashed and flattened the obstacle and rolled on toward the enemy line. The Germans, helpless before these new dragons of war, ceased firing in terror. Some put their hands up; some ran. And then behind the iron monsters came the
The newly won ground was a scene of strenuous activity. To the rear of the Switch the field-guns were being rushed forward and manoeuvred into new firing positions; lines of mules were coming up with shells; carrying parties were going forward with rations, and ammunition and wire. Men everywhere were digging for their lives the new trenches, shelter from the storm of fire that would beat upon them when the German field-guns had been moved back, and from which they could beat back counter attacks. The Maoris were pushing a great new communication sap from the Switch to Flers Trench. This was the famous Turk Lane.
Behind the line the whole sky was hung with captive balloons, and although the fury of the artillery fire had died down, the guns were firing constantly and steadily upon the German positions in rear. Aeroplanes wheeled and circled over the battlefield. As the morning wore on the Germans got more and more of their field-guns back into new positions. The balloons which had been chased down earlier in the morning went up again. Their standing barrage of heavy shells went down along the crest of
A doctor established his aid post on the lip of a big shell-hole. Soon the walking wounded were streaming back, making little of their wounds and very exultant. It was the same feeling that had run through the old Main Body on the night of that 25 April which seemed now to be of another age. The stretcher-bearers came in with the badly wounded. The doctor and his assistants work at top speed. A dab of iodine on a torn scalp, a pad of lint, a bandage tightly twisted round, and the casualty ticketed up, goes cheerfully off on the road to Base Hospital and Blighty, and a jolly good time. Next comes a poor chap with a smashed hip and a broken leg. He is faint from shock and loss of blood, and only just sufficiently conscious to keep silent and force a smile. His trousers are ripped up, the wounds covered, a rough splint tied from armpit to ankle to steady the limb as the lurching stretcher is carried over the torn ground. He has a haversack placed under his head and a waterproof sheet wrapped round him. The stretcher is lifted into the shade until the Red Cross bearers come up. Next comes a sergeant with a splinter of steel in his head. The tiny cut is hardly worth bandaging, but he is quite bewildered and repeats in a slow solemn chant and over and over again, "I—shot—three—of— the—b——s." A moment later one of his friends
All the time shells burst in front and behind and to the sides. A party of German prisoners come back in a compact group. They are stopped and ordered to take up the waiting stretcher cases, and obey with docility and every sign of goodwill. A German balloon in front of Bapaume picks up the group round the aid post and in a moment a whirlwind of shells tears up all the ground about. Explosion after explosion, dust and acrid smoke.
When at last night settled down on the battlefield the flares rising from the enemy posts showed how a salient had been formed by the very success of the New Zealand advance. There was continual firing. Often and often the green and red rockets going up
Next morning 1st Wellington attacked through a heavy barrage and took the greater part of Grove Alley. During the evening the weather which had been warm and dry broke, and the battlefield was turned into a quagmire. The heavy shelling had ploughed the earth to an average depth of perhaps three feet. The surface soil was loose and with little cohesion. The water penetrated deeply. The newly established tracks were not duckboarded, and the movement of the carrying parties continually churned the earth into a thick slough of sticky, clinging mud. A night move over the wide morass was a terrible ordeal. The men going in were loaded up, not only with their arms and equipment, but with sandbags of rations, extra ammunition, spare machine-gun panniers, and all the numberless essential things that might be required.
Progress is very slow for the sap is six inches deep in mud, with bad holes every here and there. Files of men are coming out. There is a stop every fifty yards or so while lines of dirty, tired, cursing men jam past. Again there is a slow movement forward until the sap gets so bad that all climb out and move along the top, stumbling and falling over wire
After three or four hours, during which time they have gone perhaps a mile, they come nearer to the line of brilliant green flares that mark the far side of No Man's Land. Machine-gun bullets whizz viciously overhead. At last the parados of the support trench looms up, and there are whispered welcomes from the wearied watchers who immediately hand over and vanish back into the darkness. The relief is complete.
Under these conditions the artillery had the utmost difficulty in moving up the guns. In one case a battery going beyond Flers, harnessed twenty horses to each gun and then, by desperate toil and after a nightmare of effort, got two of the guns in position. The pack mules taking up loads of shells floundered through the swamps, making terribly slow progress—very often the loads had to be abandoned
The only approach for wheeled transport was along the Flers-Longueval road, which had been pulverized by the barrage fire of the 15th. The constant movement had turned it into a river of mud, patched at the worst points with any firm materials that could be salvaged and flung in. Along this road the limbers crawled at night with all the essentials for the front-line troops. It was heavily shelled by guns that ranged very accurately upon it. Every now and again a projectile screamed down and landed fairly on the road. Horses and mules were killed or, worse still, fell wounded—kicking and screaming. Then they had to be shot, and, in the darkness, disentangled and dragged to one side and the limber itself tipped off the track. Throughout the delay the whole line was halted and men sat in the chilly drizzle with teeth clenched and muscles tensed, waiting for the shock of the next explosion and the whizz of the flying fragments. After what seemed an age, the line of vehicles crawled forward again, to be halted once more when a limber was smashed by a direct hit. At last the unloading point was reached and the supplies rapidly dumped. A few wounded were hastily loaded on the carts and thankfully the drivers, at a faster rate now, made haste to get clear away before daylight should leave them nakedly exposed to the German guns.
On 18 September the 2nd Brigade moved up into the front line. The trenches were ankle deep and sometimes knee deep in clayey mud. There were no dugouts and men sat miserably on the wet fire-steps or huddled in little scrapings in the sodden walls—with sandbags wrapped round their legs and oil-sheets round their shoulders. There was scarcely any hot food, and for the most part men subsisted on cold pork and beans, bread, and cold tea. To make matters worse the German field-guns plastered the parapets with bursting shells. The air was filled with whizzing fragments. Men stood stoically with their backs to the parapet, one here and there crouching behind it and occasionally, at the risk of his life, glimpsing over to see if there was any movement of German infantry.
From miles away came a distant "pop" like the sound of a child's gun, and then the puffing roar as an 11-inch shell slowly climbed the sky. A moment's pause and the immense projectile plunged downward shrieking and screaming and whistling horribly as it rushed nearer and plumped into the mud ten yards in front of the trench with a shock that shook the walls. A muffled explosion—and then a column of mud and black smoke rose thirty feet into the air. Again and again and again at regular intervals came the distant report and the roar and rush and scream. While the great shell was still perhaps three hundred feet in the air men were able to tell whether it would land beyond or behind, to one side, or right in the trench itself. Phutt! The earth shook but the projectile buried itself ten yards
Even while he is being fixed up there is again a roar and a scream. It is coming right in! Every man is stock still! The group might have been carved in stone. Again the earth shakes! For a second, two seconds perhaps, there is no movement, for all are awaiting the shattering explosion. Then one man sighs as the pent breath whistles through his teeth. A dud!
When the New Zealanders took the portion of the Flers system assigned to them, English troops had failed against that which lay outside the New Zealand sector. A communication sap known to us in part as Drop Alley and in part as Goose Alley crossed the trenches here and had been transformed by the Germans into their main line of resistance. As it lay on a higher contour, our men had the enemy on the flank and above them rather than straight in front. Two more English attacks on this position failed. The following day they were beaten back once more, although 2nd Auckland bombing parties worked up their trench toward Goose Alley and were only stopped by our own barrage.
On the night of 20-21 September, 2nd Canterbury attacked Goose Alley. They went out in the darkness without barrage and worked up to within fifty yards of the enemy without being perceived. Then the machine-guns opened on them and
The 1st Brigade went into the line on 24 and 25 September. For ten days they had done little except working parties. Now their time had also come. The army was ready to exploit the successes of the previous day's fighting. The new positions had all been consolidated; the guns were forward; new dumps of ammunition had been piled up. Masses of cavalry were concentrated in the rear. To the excited imagination of the infantry and of the higher command alike it seemed that the hour had come for the break through. Rumour grew. The
From the Flers to the Gird system—the next German line of resistance—was a distance of between fifteen hundred and two thousand yards. On the 25th in preparation for the main assault which was to take place two days later the 1st Brigade, with Canterbury, Auckland and Otago in the line, attacked on a front of seventeen hundred yards. The day was beautifully fine and the lines of assault went forward at midday following an excellent barrage. There was practically no resistance. A few prisoners and machine-guns were taken, and assembly trenches for the main attack were speedily dug. The howitzers fired steadily on the German wire. Zero hour was at 2.15 p.m. on the 27th. At the appointed time the enemy trenches were smothered in high explosives. The steady lines of infantry moved forward across No Man's Land. The German counter barrage fell heavily. Men fell, but the attack went forward. Canterbury swept on and into the enemy trenches and rapidly captured all their objectives.
But Auckland and Otago were faced by uncut wire. The barrage passed on and left them struggling to penetrate the rusty masses. The Germans manned their parapets, shooting and bombing. Desperate efforts were made to rush in through the few gaps that had been torn here and there, but the enemy machine-guns were trained on these and the men went down in heaps. They were forced into shell-holes, sniping where there was a chance, bombing when they were in range. Two or three Lewis-guns came into action. But it seemed that the attack had been held, when a few men with desperate courage bombed a machine-gun into silence and, rushing in through the gap, made a lodgment. The German nerve commenced to fail and the tide to turn. Some ran. An officer rallied his men, but he was shot by a lipless man lying out in a shellhole. Then they gave way all along the line. The Lewis-guns were rushed in and the fleeing enemy mown down. The position was taken, but Auckland lost six hundred out of their eight hundred men. The Otago losses were, if anything, more severe.
The 3rd Brigade relieved the 1st Brigade on the night of the 28th-29th. The German artillery fire was very heavy on all the roads and communication tracks. A runner sets out from the regimental aid post to battalion headquarters, a distance of perhaps a hundred yards, along a straight road. "Whizz-bang!" A shell crashes into the bank at his side. "Whizz-bang! Whizz-bang!" Shells bury themselves in the ground at his feet. "Whizz!" Right past and over! "Bang!" And the mud flies.
In the dusk of the evening a wounded German lay at the door of the aid post waiting for a bearer party. Again comes the scream and whistle and explosion! A bearer who had been seated alongside the stretcher was untouched; there was a small hole in the stone road, and as for the German "he was not." On the following evening another German lay at the entrance to a deep dugout, an orderly was seated a few steps farther down, a doctor and two other men at the foot of the shaft. Again comes the rush and scream, and then an explosion, exaggerated by the confined space; flying splinters, a rain of earth, darkness as the guttering candles are extinguished, and then a silence broken by the groaning of a wounded man. The German was dead. One man was wounded, another shell-shocked, and the
On 1 October the men of the 2nd Brigade made the last New Zealand attack on the Somme. They were supported by a tremendous artillery barrage and also by thirty-six mortars which hurled liquid fire. Despite heavy machine-gun fire from the flank and a well-directed enemy barrage they went forward with decision and seized all objectives. Then the weather broke. The battlefield which had dried during the better weather was once more turned into a quagmire; the carrying parties toiled with incredible labour to get rations to the front line, and the men of the Rifle Brigade who went in to relieve the 2nd Brigade in pouring rain consolidated the last New Zealand position.
On 3 and 4 October the New Zealanders were relieved and went back. They had been fighting for twenty-three consecutive days. They had done all they had been asked to do—and more, and had been a tower of strength to those on the right hand and on the left. They had gone in many and come out few. Sixteen hundred of their comrades were left for ever on the battlefield; thousands more were wounded. There were strangely mingled feelings. Congratulations and praise were flowing in from all sides. They had done well and the name of New Zealand had been lifted high. It had been almost the last deed, the last suffering required to make New Zealand a nation. There was a quiet intense pride, a certain elation and exultation; but over it all deep sorrow for all the dear friends who were
As they marched through the beautiful countryside of the Somme Valley the mood changed. The horrors of the battlefield had been left behind. There would be estaminets and mademoiselles—quite certainly hot meals and sleep. As they tramped on some commenced to sing and others picked up the refrain:
So pack up your troubles in your old kit bag And smile, boys, smile.
And then occurred a beautiful thing. The battalions did not go back to the same billets although they were in the same area; but as soon as the news flew round that the New Zealanders were out of the battle the French people walked for miles to get news of their friends. There was laughter and rejoicing, but tears also and sorrow for this one and that. "Les pauvres enfants," said madame. "La guerre est triste four les mères." And so thought broken-hearted women in New Zealand as day by day the long lists of dead and wounded showed how terrible had been the battle of the Somme.
Chapter XVIII
Of the Winter of 1916-17 when the Snow Lay Round about
—"Good King Wenceslas."
The 1st and 3rd brigades went into the Fleurbaix-Sailly sector which was based on the little town of Estaires, some eight kilometres south of Armentières, while the 2nd Brigade returned to Armentières where they were welcomed with great joy by the madames and mademoiselles, and the piccanins. Here they stayed until the beginning of December and then rejoined the remainder of the division at Sailly.
The French winter set in with grey skies and a steady drizzle sometimes not much heavier than a thick mist, but very constant. During this time everything was very wet and miserable. The trenches were in poor condition and much hard work was necessary to get them into reasonable order. The little streams that ran back across the lines towards the Lys were swollen with the constant rain, and
At the end of November the drizzle ceased and the snow commenced to fall, and for the next three months the ground was white. The scenery was magnificent. Branches of trees were all delicately outlined with white, the roofs of the houses were white, the wide expanse of level field was white and gleaming, broken here and there by the dark line of a hedge or a trodden road. But it was cold! The inhabitants said that it was the coldest winter that they had had for something like a generation. The New Zealanders were inclined to think that this must indeed be so. Many of them had left after two or three months of summer; had gone to Egypt, where even the winter seemed hot enough; had been scorched at Anzac; had sweated again on the desert sand at Ismailia, and then had enjoyed the pleasant sunshine of the French summer. Their blood had grown thin, and the freezing cold was intensely bitter. Snow has an unfortunate capacity for sopping through boots, and cold feet are almost the limit of torture. Cold wood and cold iron seem
Yet despite the cold, this winter was the most sociable one the New Zealanders "enjoyed" during the war. At divisional headquarters at Sailly the N.Z.Y.M.C.A. had re-established its activities. Large huts were opened, and these became the common meeting-place of the men when off duty. Hot cocoa and biscuits could always be obtained at very reasonable rates. Writing material was always available, and much letter-writing was done in the warm and cheerful interiors. Papers, periodicals, illustrated magazines, and even some books were readily obtainable. The warm huts were pleasant places for the unending gossip of good friends who came together to enjoy each other's company, to revive the memories of great days at home, or to solve the major strategical problems of the war. Concerts were frequently held. Sometimes the programmes were provided by the talent available in the division itself, and it was from such beginnings that there sprang the germ of the divisional troupes of later date. Sometimes programmes were given by artists who had placed their services at the disposal of
Naturally of course the unofficial religious life tended to centre round the Y.M.C.A. The New Zealand soldier in general was not a very religious person, yet, being of a charitable nature, he was generally prepared to respect and even admire religion in others. He was indeed singularly tolerant on all matters of individual character and conduct. One man's little peculiarity was to get drunk; another's was an absorbing passion for "two-up"— the sport of kings; still another had an alarming fondness for patrolling No Man's Land; while one here and there was religious. But what would you? They were all good fellows and one had to treat these little failings kindly. So from the Y.M.C.A., with its regular home-hour teas and Sunday evening services, there was some revival of services other than the detested official church parades.
A huge barn littered with farm implements was the billet for a whole company. Glowing braziers scattered here and there showed groups of men lying around, playing cards, reading, writing. The red light danced fitfully but could not pierce the darkness so far as the high, rough-timbered roof. Outside
At this time an important change took place in organization. The 1st Brigade was now composed of the 1st and 2nd Auckland, the 1st and 2nd Wellington battalions, and the 2nd Brigade of the corresponding Canterbury and Otago units.
December passed very quietly. In January the armies were still frost-bound; but with the beginning of February came the thaw and the first rumble of the gathering storm that was to burst in fury ' with the coming of the spring. The New Zealanders were ordered to move on to the Messines sector, but before they left their winter quarters it was decided to round off the numerous small raids with a smashing blow. Second Auckland were chosen for the operation.
The most careful preparations were made.
The men, lightly armed with rifle, bayonet, bandolier and bombs, moved quietly up past Wye Farm through Gunner's Walk and Bay Avenue to the front line. For half an hour they waited quietly, the minutes passing very slowly, until at last, a minute before zero, the first line formed up on the parapet, looking backward for the flash of the signal gun. The circle of flame shot up around the horizon. The first wave were in their own wire before the roar of the discharge shook the air and the German trenches burst into gouts of flame. They floundered across the muddy expanse of No Man's Land and into the broken wire. A brave German sent up an SOS rocket from beneath their very feet and almost at once the barrage fell on the New Zealand line. The storming parties rushed into the enemy front line and then into the supports. There was bombing and shooting and bayoneting in the broken shambles that had been made by the artillery fire. Time was up, and in the darkness the men commenced to withdraw with their prisoners and such of their wounded as could be seen in the poor light. The German artillery fire was heavy in No Man's Land and many fell.
And now occurred one of those very splendid human happenings that now and again lightened with a rare gleam the sordid background of pitiless killing. The German counter-attack must have swept back into the front line almost on the heels of the New Zealanders, for within a few moments they were sniping heavily across. The stronger light showed wounded lying below our parapet and out in No Man's Land. A man crossed at the risk of his life to one of these. Two or three others followed with nerves tautened, knowing that the Mauser rifles were levelled at heart and brain. But no shot came! A German stood up on his parapet with his hands held high. Up beside him came another and another, and another, until a whole line stood there. Quickly now the stretchers went over and our wounded were brought in. An enemy machine-gun commenced to fire from some distance in the rear. A tall German waved back to the gunners and they ceased firing. When all was clear, a shot was fired in the air. Both sides took cover and the war went on. But the action of those chivalrous Germans is not forgotten in New Zealand. It was a very fine and splendid thing for men to come back into a broken line in which lay two hundred of their dead and then, still in hot blood, to show mercy to those who had slain their friends.
Chapter XIX
Of How the New Zealanders Came to Le Bizet-Ploegsteert and Hill 63 and Made Ready to Storm Messines
inK. L. Trent
New Zealand at the Front.
The Le Bizet-Ploegsteert sector adjoined the old Houplines one, and as the River Lys was bridged in two places there were not a few who endeavoured to renew acquaintance with "Mademoiselle of Armentières." The new trenches were in shockingly bad order and apparently no work had been done upon them for months. The wire was in shreds, the parapets tumbling down. In many cases there were no proper firesteps, the trenches were not drained, and were blocked with debris. The Germans had evidently established a complete moral ascendancy. The snipers were busy, and it was rumoured that they were even in the habit of coming over at meal times and taking away the dixies of hot food. Work was immediately started on the trenches, and very great improvements made. The plague of snipers was
At the end of March the New Zealanders moved farther to the north and went in at Hill 63 opposite Messines. This hill gently sloping and beautifully wooded was a main buttress of the British line covering as it did the railhead at Steenwerck, the town of Bailleul and the great main road that ran from Armentières to Bailleul and thence to St Omer. Behind it the fields were level for many a mile. The road ran from Canteen Corner on the main highway, to Romarin and Red Lodge on the left of the Hill to Hyde Park Corner and Charing Cross dressing station and so to Ploegsteert Village. From the slopes and from behind and then for nearly a mile Ploegsteert Wood stretched pleasantly away to the right toward the Lys. On the left the ridge dropped for a while and then rose again to a high crest at Neuve Eglise. There were few villages in the back area, and in consequence, when out of the line, the men were for the most part billeted in various hutted camps. Hill 63 itself, however, gave such excellent cover that there were always several battalions lying beneath the crest either in tents or in the Catacombs. This last was a huge dugout tunnelled right into the hill with two main entrances and numbers of transverse passages linking up sufficient excavation to accommodate almost a brigade of infantry. It was a foul place to live in; badly ventilated, badly lighted, in some places damp, and permeated with sufficient German tear gas to be decidedly irritating. Dugouts of this nature, while usually very safe,
Below the farther slopes of the Hill ran the little stream of the Douve. On the farther side a long slope ran up to Messines which crowned the crest. The great church towered over the lesser buildings, a high, conspicuous landmark. The fields below were green and not greatly pitted with fire. In the weeks that were to come the Hill grew into the very consciousness of the New Zealanders. It challenged them, lured them, mocked them. The German trenches stood boldly out as though arrogantly defying all attempts against them. The New Zealand Division was now conscious of its separateness, of its identity as a national group, and in the strength of this feeling was seeking for some great deed to give it expression. At "stand to" the Hill emerged stark and menacing to the watchers in the line. At "stand down" in the evening it faded into darkness, mysterious and unapproachable. As the weeks passed the feeling grew that it would not always be a German hill, but that one day New Zealand bayonets would go up and over it.
Hill 63 was the social centre of the area. A big Y.M.C.A. hut was built amongst the trees on the rear slope, and this was patronized by hundreds of men every day until the German artillery picked it up and riddled it with shrapnel—an utterly heartless proceeding when one considers that it was the only place from which hot coffee could be obtained.
The most popular diversion, however, was the huge "schools" organized by the "two-up kings." religio illicita. Whatever the reason, the ban was pronounced and some halfhearted attempts at suppression were actually carried out. They were not very successful.
Actually gambling occupied the men's minds under circumstances where otherwise an opportunity would have been given to that deadly foe of all good discipline, mental depression, to do its deadly work, sapping away at those foundations of faith, hope and courage, without which an army cannot be. Commanding officers occasionally endeavoured, not very whole-heartedly, to point out that gambling caused men to run into debt. The absurdity of this, however, was plain when it was realized that all army gambling
From the point of view of military efficiency a much stronger case could have been made against smoking than against gambling, for the heavy smoking that was so frequently indulged in had an exceedingly harmful effect upon the nerves. Yet no man in his sane senses would have issued an order for the abolition of smoking. Both of these "vices" had immense psychological effects which, from the "win-the-war" point of view, were wholly beneficial. There was a certain humour in army methods of inculcating morality, for where they strained at gnats they swallowed immense camels with the most cheerful good humour.
From the time of General Godley's Gallipoli manifesto to the effect "that there was too much swearing and that saluting was conspicuous by its absence," until after the cessation of hostilities, the matter of saluting was continually being brought up. It was widely held in Imperial Army circles that the surest test of discipline was the way in which the rank and file saluted officers. The New Zealanders, in general, did not salute any except their own officers, and were not over-generous even here. Therefore, it was argued, their discipline was poor. But poor discipline should result in poor fighting and scamped work. And here the argument broke down; for the
The truth was, of course, that in a democratic age and in a war different to any other, old ways were changing. The close order fighting of the Napoleonic wars, in which a general surveyed his whole field, and everything depended upon rapid, unquestioning, mechanical obedience, was giving way to methods of fighting in which the initiative and intelligence of the private soldier were becoming more and more factors in the gaining of victory. This tendency alone, to some extent, closed the awful gap that was supposed to exist between commissioned and noncommissioned ranks.
The old assumption, too, was that unless there was superimposed pressure from above working through a hierarchy of officers armed with plenary powers the mass could not hold together. It was the relic of an age of authority in which a landowning aristocracy had moulded a peasantry to their will for their own enrichment and profit. In New Zealand this vicious tradition had been broken for •nearly three-quarters of a century. Leadership was readily recognized as necessary, but it did not carry with it outstanding privileges—especially of a social sort. In New Zealand no man took off his hat to any other man—even if that other were the Prime Minister. It would have been the recognition of a class distinction utterly abhorrent to most colonials.
A salute was felt to be in the same category and was, therefore, most grudgingly given. Officers were necessary and useful; but they were not the authority
There was a good deal of the healthy Ironside spirit which gave implicit obedience to the LordGeneral on the day of battle, but on the day after laid him open to the rebuke of a trooper who disagreed with him upon a point of exposition of the Word. There was, too, a deal of real arrogance springing largely from the rapid development of national feeling and from the lengthening record of successes in the field. A New Zealand private was, in his own opinion, fully the equal of an English subaltern— therefore, why salute him? He got too much of it from his own men anyway. The average New Zealander might be sufficiently vague about just what he was fighting for, but he was absolutely definite upon the point that the establishment of a military autocracy was not one of his aims.
Time not actually spent in the line was employed in preparing for the coming battle. There was little or
These tasks were mainly carried out by the infantry at night. Falling in at De Seule in light order —rifles and bandoliers—the men as soon as it was dark marched the six kilometres up to Red Lodge; picked up shovels, crossed the crest and were then delivered over to the engineers. Each man was given a couple of yards to dig down to the required depth. No time was wasted and the earth was soon flying. The hillside was bare and the moonlight was bright. "Zirr——crash! Zirr—— crash!" A couple of shells bracket the digging. There is a pause—again comes the rush and crash and the whine of flying fragments. All the diggers are flattened out now, hugging the earth close. A few more bursts and the guns switch off on to another target. A man with a "buckshee" in his foot limps off with a stretcher-bearer. Another curses softly to find that the last shell has filled up the four feet that he has dug after an hour's hard toil. Another hour's digging and the job is done. The shovels are dropped at the dump and the party marches back to De Seule and so to bed at perhaps 3 a.m.
The next few nights they spend wiring their new trench, and after that are put on to the
During May the New Zealand brigades went
"Que voulez-vous?" says madame. "C'est la guerre" And the same thing would be said in New Zealand under the same conditions.
Occasionally, men were able to get into the old world town of St Omer, where the main evidences of war were the extraordinary number of officers who were billeted there, the huge aerodrome that lay just outside, and the hundreds of spare Germans kindly lent by the Kaiser's army for road repairs and work of a kindred nature. Being well outside the danger zone the life of the town was much more normal than that of Armentières, Estaires, Bailleul —or even Hazebrouck. Walking past the ruins of the old Abbey of St Berthin, in which Hereward probably attended church parade, they went up the hill past proper French shops and so to the great church and the old-fashioned market. In a big square there were placed rows and rows of tables— sometimes with overhead cover. Here on market
The pleasant days of training passed all too quickly and the battalions made ready for the long tramp back to the battle sector. The Australians had been fighting on the Somme. They had taken Bapaume and their patrols had pushed on to the Hindenburg Line. At Arras the storm had burst and the Canadians had crossed Vimy Ridge. It was time for New Zealand to pass "onward" again.
Chapter XX
Of the Storm That Burst Upon Messines
New Zealand at the Front.
The battalions marched back on the first day through Arques and the Wallon-Capel area. Another hard day brought them past Hazebrouck and the Forêt de Nieppe to the villages about La Motte; and thence it was but a short distance to the Bailleul road and so to Canteen Corner.
The final preparations had all been made. Red Lodge and Kandahar Farm had been heavily reinforced with thick walls of concrete and converted into forward dressing stations. A strong concrete dugout had been made at Charing Cross for the same purpose. Routes were clearly marked out for the walking wounded. At the rear were large wire cages for the prisoners, for whom special tracks were also provided. To prevent any confusion among the infantry moving up W., X., Y., and Z. overland routes were cleared and pegged from the
Day by day the firing increased in intensity. The trench mortar, the flying pig, the 18-pounder, the 6-ineh howitzer, the 9.2, the 12-inch, the 15-inch, the long-range naval gun, all pounded, hammered, and searched the enemy lines. Every day the creeping barrage moved up Messines Hill. The green slope was gone, the clean outline of the trenches blotted out. The great church was blown apart, the buildings disintegrated into shapeless heaps of broken bricks. From the middle of No Man's Land to far on the reverse slope was a brown waste.
The Germans were determined to keep their hold upon the town. Beneath the crumbling buildings they constructed concrete works strong enough, they hoped, to withstand the fire and give shelter to the machine-gun crews. They brought in fresh troops and more guns. They steadily blew in the front line and practised their counter-barrage across the valley of the Douve. Their shelling grew very heavy.
Men crouch up against the sandbags or squeeze into the safe corners, or lie at full length beneath the firestep to obtain a little overhead cover from the flying splinters that come zutting down upon the duckboards. "Bang! Crash! Bang! Crash! Whizz-bang! Zirr-zut!" for half an hour at a time the air is full of splinters, flying debris, dust, smoke and infernal noise. The parapet comes crashing down on top of a couple of men and the platoon sergeant who has been glimpsing across No Man's
The sergeant, disdaining what cover is to be had, moves along the line of his men with a word, a gesture, a smile, bringing good cheer to the overwrought, the trembling and the much afraid. In some indefinable fashion virtue goes out of him, and the weak, seeing him, become strong. Afterwards he may do great deeds but the men in the crumbling trench know that the supreme hour of his valour was in that time when nothing could have been written of deeds done but when shaken men could say, "He gave us the courage." Men sit or lie quietly, nerves and muscles tensed up, ready to roll away if the bank above them comes tumbling in or to spring to the firestep if there is an alarm. They think of many things. The minds of some are clouded with fear. As each shell shrieks towards them they feel the agony of wounds and suffer many times all the bitterness of death. Fear can be terribly present in such times. It has
Others with some sort of scientific detachment speculate on the probable point of impact of an approaching shell and then from the explosion deduce the calibre of the enemy gun. Some force the sensations of the present back into the fringe of consciousness and focus upon past pleasures and future hopes. Some cheerful ones jest in the midst of terror. To the noble souls comes a certain exaltation because in the quietness of their own souls they have overcome the fear of imminent death. Not that they have come to consider themselves invulnerable—far from it—they are acutely conscious that the next rending crash may leave them headless or limbless or bereft of sight. But they have faced fear with open eyes, and the monster has grown powerless and all his feverish urgings are of no avail before the greater urgency of duty and the necessity of self-sacrifice. "Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil," They are lifted beyond the
The German guns ceased and those of the British opened up on the hill in front. Messines vanished in smoke and drifting columns of dust. The fiery hail rained down on trench and dugout. Nothing on the surface was safe, and twenty feet below ground the flying pig rooted and tore. German ! diaries give some glimpse of what a hell it must have been for them. "This everlasting murder." "The casualties increase terribly." "All the trenches are clodded up." "No shelter left." "They blow up the earth all around us." "To look on such things is utter misery." As in Dante's Inferno:
O'er all, the sand fell slowly wafting down Dilated flakes of fire.
As dugout and trench collapse in heaps of smoking debris, little groups of fear-stricken men endeavour to run back across country seeking some secure shelter, but the Lewis-gunners are on the look-out for just such an opportunity. "Br-r-r-r-rt-t-tt! Br-r-r-r-rt-t-tt!" The runners fall: some killed, some wounded.
"Throughout the afternoon and evening before the battle there was a great coming and going of men moving into their battle stations. Perhaps in no other battle of the war did the private soldier carry quite so much: steel helmet, rifle, bayonet, Webb equipment, full pouches of S.A.A., and an extra hundred rounds in bandoliers, entrenching 2/A.R.
So careful and thorough indeed was the preparation that every officer and even every section commander was issued with a map showing in detail the German trench system to be assaulted.
The main saps were crowded and stoppages were frequented. German gas shells were bursting continually on the long slope. "Plop! Plop! Plop!" Gas-masks were donned hurriedly and the long line stood for half an hour until the reek drifted away. Men shuffled on again. There were casualties. "Plop!" A shell slid gently into the earth as two men passed by. There was a slight odour of phosgene gas. They paid no heed, but twenty minutes later one of them was choking and vomiting on the floor of the trench. A very brave man, he refused to be carried out until his mates forced him on to a stretcher. For a couple of months he lay between life and death. One lung went completely and he was recommended for discharge. Then for months he bluffed, cajoled, wangled points until he fought his way, doctor by doctor, orderlyroom by orderly-room, back to his own company.
The British guns were silent, but a few machine-
On the very second there came a shaking of the earth. Tongues of leaping flame stabbed through the greying darkness. Columns of smoke and debris rose dimly in the first light of dawn. A muffled roar like thunder in the far distance. The mines had gone up blowing great gaps in the German lines. A brief pause, a sudden rattle of thousands of machine-guns, a red flash round the horizon, and then with a thunder blast of sound the great barrage fell on Messines. The long roll of the heavy guns, and the quick, stabbing, bang-snap-bang of the 18-pounders merged into one tremendous volume of sound. From the stricken lines and far to the right and the left the SOS rockets went flaring whitely into the sky, bursting into green stars. But the reply was thin and broken, for the German guns had been drenched with gas and smothered with high explosive.
Behind the moving wall of steel and flame the infantry flung themselves on the demoralized enemy. A few scattered groups made some show of
Think of their case. For days they had been shelled with intensity, losing heavily, seeing their fortifications steadily crumble, unable probably to get any hot food, knowing that the British would come but not knowing when. Each morning they stood to, waiting for the awful crash of fire that would herald the assault, and then all day long enduring the agony of another long wait for the fateful hour. Then at last it had come. To the right and left of them their comrades of the same regiment had been blown up in eruptions of flame, and after this the storm of destruction had fallen upon them. All about the earth was no longer firm and solid but moving like the waves of the sea, opening and closing again, throwing up masses of brown and fiery spume against the sky. There was a continued vibration as though the hill itself was shaking in some dreadful palsy. A ceaseless roar of sound smote upon their ear-drums, and within the general tumult each separate explosion carried its own individual menace. Minutes that seemed like hours lengthened out into more minutes, and they into an eternity, until personality oozed out into the dreadful ocean of sound and men were so shaken and dazed that they were no longer capable of initiative or resistance. The sharpness of terror changed to a numbness in which fear vanished, but in which there was neither hope nor desire. And then, just when the blast and roar of destruction
"Kamerad! Kamerad!"
They dropped their rifles and bombs and threw their arms into the air. Sometimes the surrender is accepted and they stumble off to life that of a sudden enlarges and becomes intoxicatingly sweet, But there is hysteria among the attackers also and deadly hate. A man whose comrade had been killed in No Man's Land goes mad with sorrow and bloodlust and leaps upon a little group that stands pleading for mercy and life.
The New Zealand waves swept on with scarcely a pause across the Steenbeek Creek, over the broken debris of Oyster Trench, and Uhlan, and Ulcer; up the hill to Moulin de I'Hospice, and the Bon Fermier Cabaret and Ulcer and Uhlan support; through the heaps of broken bricks that had been Messines and so through and round to Unbearable Trench and Ulcer Reserve and Ungodly Trench and across the La Basse Ville Road and Hun's Walk until the crest was well behind and the front posts could look down the long slope towards the Lys, towards the green unbroken country that lay beyond. Occasionally, a German machine-gun,
The Germans were still paralysed. Their whole system had been swept away. The advance had penetrated as far as their foremost artillery positions and their immediate preoccupation was the saving of their guns. This they could not have effected if the New Zealand battalions, which had suffered few casualties and were still fresh, had been thrust forward yet again with speed and determination. Corps and army orders forbade the venture and when the cavalry came up, and later still the Australians, the opportunity had passed and there was nothing to be done except consolidate.
As the day wore on the Germans got more of their guns back into new positions. They rushed up reserve batteries. Their balloons and a few daring airmen picked up the new British positions, and they commenced to search the hillside with shell-fire. Their infantry took heart of grace and filled the wide gaps sniping and machine-gunning. The Australian attack broke down and their men streamed back through the New Zealand line. Movement was seen behind the enemy lines and our men made ready for a counter attack. The New Zealand batteries were being rushed across on to Messines. Thirty-six heavy machine-guns were placed in position in front of the village, but the counter attack was not pressed home on the division's front. The
All that day and the next consolidation went on. Batteries moved up into position. The roads were repaired so that the wheeled transport could come right forward into the village itself. The signallers connected up their wires and under their direction working parties of the infantry buried cable in all directions. The infantry dug and dug until the hill was girded with a ring of trenches. The German shelling increased in intensity and there were many casualties. There was nothing for it but to stand the storm. The battalions on the forward side of the hill commenced to waste slowly away under the persistent fire that fell upon them. A platoon of thirty men—six or seven had fallen in the attack —dug themselves in on a contour that gave a fair field of fire towards Warneton.
The new digging was picked up by the German observers. For ten minutes a battery concentrated upon it while the men stood with their backs to the wall. Flying fragments came zipping in, rattling on steel helmets and rifle-butts. Zirr-zip! and a man rolls over with a smashed shoulder. He is bandaged up roughly and put in the most secure place. The loose earth slides back into the trench in three places. Then the battery switches on to another target. The stretcher-bearers pick up the wounded man and carry him away. The remainder get to work with the spades and fling out the earth and settle down again, but at intervals all through the
And so it goes on, until after lunch a great shell roars in on one extremity of the trench and kills two men. There is no excitement; just this nerveracking standing still and being shelled and wounded and killed. It's a dangerous moment. A single gun commences to shell the trench steadily, a shell a minute perhaps. One burst buries a man. He is dug out in time but is badly shaken. His condition commences to affect others about him, for burst after burst comes shrieking over. Then a section leader gets right out of the trench with a spade and sits on the top of the parapet. As each shell lands he signals towards the German gun. "Short! Over! A miss!" A shell lands a few yards away and covers him with flying earth. He jocularly signals a hit and then waves the next one an "over." It doesn't matter whether the Germans see him or not—they have the range anyway, but it is most important that his mates should:
"Come down, you silly b——!"
But he stays and does some more signalling with the spade. After a while the men in the trench commence to laugh at his foolhardy antics. The position is saved, for laughter is a good release for strained nerves. And the men are themselves again. He comes down—his purpose served and his
The continuous strain of the last three days had told heavily on all ranks and the order to go back was very welcome. The long files move across the Steenbeek back to the old front line and so up through the familiar gaps to the crest of Hill 63, where each man was checked off at his brigade headquarters. This, at any rate, was a rest, and tired men dozed off leaning up against the trench walls or lying flat upon the duckboards. "On the far side they moved through the mass of heavy guns. Brilliant green and yellow flashes suddenly stabbed through the darkness to be followed by a bellowing crash of sound. 'Cr-r-r-ash!' Twenty yards away another monstrous weapon explodes with a hideous clamour. There is a moment of intense blackness and then once more the flame of fire and the shock of the discharge. For half a mile on both sides of the track batteries are in action. It is a terrible ordeal for men who have been shelled for three days to pass through this hell of noise. A battery just ahead has the muzzles of its guns almost touching the road. It fires a salvo and the file of infantry sees what is ahead. Can they pass before the next discharge shatters through the night? No. 1 gun is being screwed up to its right elevation. No. 2 is ready but still silent. Perhaps they may just clear. But no! The battery commander is 2/A.R.
At last the guns are passed and the men stumble farther along the good road and at last reach camps, where they fling themselves down on the hard boards and sleep and sleep and sleep.
Chapter XXI
Of the Aftermath of Battle
But our comrades are dead, we cannot help them, they have their rest—and who knows what is waiting for us? We will make ourselves comfortable and sleep and eat as much as we can stuff into our bellies and drink and smoke so that the hours are not wasted.
Remarque:
All Quiet on the Western Front.
The weather was beautifully fine and the few days spent out of the line in Regina, Kortepyp, Bulford, Neuve Eglise and the various camps about Romarin and De Seule were very enjoyable. The battalions were re-equipped and reorganized. At this time the strength of the division was increased by the addition of the 4th Brigade which during the battle had been in corps reserve doing working parties.
When the New Zealanders first went into the trenches at Armentières there were many alarms and much sounding of Strombus horns but no gas. After sweltering and choking a few times in the slimy, evilsmelling P. H. helmets the gas alarms came to be looked on as rather a bad joke and nothing more. On the Somme the artillery and the infantry in the support areas had encountered lachrymatory gas, but this although sometimes a nuisance had no harmful results except a temporary irritation of the eyes.
Goggles served out to combat the effect of this gas were quite effective. Throughout the winter little use was made of gas. "Cloud gas" had not been a great success. The cylinders from which it was discharged were clumsy, difficult to assemble in the front line and very dangerous owing to the possibility of enemy shell-fire damaging the cylinders and thus swamping our own line. Even when a "cloud" was successfully discharged the wind might blow it aside or a sudden change drift it back from whence it came. It was relatively useless as a barrage to cover attack because the attackers, having of necessity to wear masks, had no advantage over the trench garrisons and indeed would be utterly exhausted after crossing the width of No Man's Land. The evolution of the gas-shell however changed everything. From being rather an expensive and ineffective novelty gas immediately became one of the most dangerous weapons of modern war.
There were many gas casualties at Messines, with the result that much greater attention was paid both to the proper care of helmets and to their quick and effective use. The "small box respirator" issued shortly after the Somme was an absolutely safe protection against any gas then used. A rubberized mask with eye-pieces, nose-clip and expiratory valve fitted over the face. A rubber tube led from the mouthpiece to the tin canister containing chemical preparations which neutralized any harmful gas in the atmosphere. Only pure air passed through. When in action the brown canvas haversack containing the apparatus was carried hung on the breast and at other
The New Zealand Division withdrawn from the sector of Messines took over the La Basse Ville-Warneton one, which stretched from Hyde Park Corner and La Basse Ville over a wide expanse of torn fields sloping gradually down to the village on the banks of the Lys River. Here the Germans were at a great disadvantage and during the next six weeks they were gradually thrust backwards until they were forced to cross the river. There was a
Sometimes the location of the working party was picked up by the enemy and heavy shelling commenced. As long as this began early in the proceedings the infantry were content, for it gave them the excuse to abandon the job without shame and to get home to billets two or three hours early. The really annoying thing was to be shelled on the way home. A company might be going back through the middle of a torn stretch of debris, stumbling over the broken track towards the security of a length of communication trench. Even as the mouth of the sap looms up it is deluged with a sudden burst of shell-fire. It would be suicide to go forward and the men sit down in the damp shell-holes and wait for ten minutes until the shelling ceases. The explosions tear the darkness with red and yellow flame and bits
"Plop! Plop! Plop!"—Gas shells slide quietly into the soft soil. "Gas!" At once with surprising speed the helmets are adjusted and the men sit down on the duckboards to wait until the air clears. But the enemy seem to have thought of everything and commence to burst big "coalboxes" overhead. The flying fragments patter viciously down. It's no use waiting. The files go on puffing and grunting and semi-suffocated until at last they get beyond the gas. Off come the helmets and men breath deeply with sighs of satisfaction.
Patrols were continually pushing out into No Man's Land to make contact with the enemy and to establish new posts. A patrol would creep out, moving cautiously toward the flares that rose from the German posts—a hundred yards, two hundred yards, three hundred yards and still the flares rise well beyond. The patrol creeps on from shell-hole to shell-hole. Machine-gun bullets whizz overhead but they are coming from far beyond. A trench looms up and the patrol lies still and quiet. There is no sound and the flares rise still at some distance. They wait for half an hour and then creep in through a gap in the broken wire. It is empty. Other patrols go out and come back with much the same news.
Here and there they have been fired on, but it is evident that the enemy are in no great force. Next night a battalion goes over and occupies the deserted line with little loss. The patrols push forward again towards Loophole Farm, Trois-Tilleuls Farm, au Chasseur Cabaret, Sunken Farm and the Ferme de la Croix. The ground here is not so greatly torn and very soon they establish contact with the enemy posts. There does not seem to be any very clearly defined trench line. A patrol creep toward a point from which flares go up every moment or so and unexpectedly run on to new wire. They move out and try a hundred yards lower down, to be greeted with a burst of machine-gun fire from a broken hedge—farther on still half a dozen bombs are flung. It is difficult to say what strength the enemy are in.
Then come days of bitter fighting in which companies of men from all units of the division gradually wrest from the enemy their strong-points and force them back toward the Lys. In the middle of the night a barrage goes down upon a German strong-point. The light trench mortars deluge it with bombs. The German machine-guns from the shelter of concrete emplacements sweep their front. Bombing parties creep closely in on the front and flanks and rush in as the barrage lifts. For five minutes the bombs fly back and forward. The New Zealanders close in. One brave German stands with his back to the wall of the pill-box and shoots every man who tries to rush in. At last a man springs in with a bayonet—the German falls and the tide pours in. And so all along the fine.
Patrol activity was kept up strongly and a week later large raiding-parties broke into the enemy's defence zone and did much damage. The front line was continually thrust forward, sometimes as a result of bitter little fights—sometimes by more or less peaceful penetration. There was much rain and the battlefield became a quagmire. Posts filled with mud and water. Men were wet, chilled to the bone and unable to sleep. Even when parties carried hot food up through smashed trenches where the duckboards were afloat in three feet of water or sunk under a like depth of mud, the food was often so coated with filth as to be half useless. Men stood in narrow ditches facing the front, their feet buried deep in the slush, at first numbed and then hot and burning as the first symptoms of trench foot made their appearance. Their clothes were wet through and stiff with clay; their fingers chilled and useless; their rifles choked with mud. They stood and waited with little food and without sleep. The enemy artillery shelled heavily.
"Whizz-bang! Whizz-bang! Zirr-zut-zut." A man slumped down and rolled over badly wounded. If the wound were merciful he relapsed at once into a blessed unconsciousness of all his misery, but if not he suffered the torment of the damned. The stretcherbearers could not come until after dark and then it took hours of heart-breaking efforts to get him to the light train-line and so on a journey that jarred and jolted agonizingly to Charing Cross. Even in the naked horror of such experience flashes of selfsacrifice—acts of almost womanly tenderness run like
After bitter fighting on 27 and 31 August, 2nd Wellington captured La Basse Ville. This was the beginning of the Third Battle of Ypres and the British line was aflame with fire from La Basse Ville to Dixmude. The new line was consolidated with great difficulty and for the next three weeks the men holding the fine suffered severely from the enemy fire and from the wet and mud. The British guns and aeroplanes were being rapidly withdrawn for the fighting to the north and the command of the air and superiority of gun fire passed to the enemy.
In the darkness half a dozen men would move out and relieve a post somewhere close down to the Lys. They found that the post consisted of a large shell crater with a little pool at the bottom and a short trench leading therefrom. At night there was room to move and the men took their ease round the lip of the crater. Two or three crept out and patrolled the bank of the Lys. Before dawn however they all assembled in the little trench and packed themselves uncomfortably into the little space, covering themselves with a piece of camouflage netting. Soon
The infantrymen have an extraordinarily naked feeling. The aeroplanes fly slowly by, wheeling and turning just overhead. Often the observers can be seen leaning out, gazing below. Every now and again the nose of one goes down and bursts of machine-gun fire sweep the ground. Sometimes a bomb comes hurtling down through the air. And as all this goes on hour after hour, men could hardly keep from leaping out of their narrow hiding-places and hurling clods of earth at the hovering war birds. And there was another buzzing in the air; the mosquitoes that bred in the swamps of the Lys were of an enormous size and attacked with the utmost savagery. The enemy guns fire very heavily on any movement. A carrying party with the rations tries to get out too early and are spotted. After an hour's wait they come through when it is properly dark, but a chunk of shrapnel has holed the dixie of hot tea that they have carried up with enormous labour. The men in the post take pains to point out
In the morning, after an all-night vigil, the German barrage crashes down with such intensity that all stand to, bombs uncovered and lying to each man's hand, Lewis-guns and rifles ready, all waiting for the wave of enemy infantry and a desperate fight against impossible odds. This time it does not come. One night a German patrol blunders upon them and is fired upon and bombed. The Germans get away but leave one man dead ten yards from the parapet. After six days the post is relieved and all go back to the canvas camps near De Seule.
Every night the German airmen come over bombing billets, stables, dumps and railheads. Back from the Y.M.C.A., from the pierrot show, from the estaminet or from a walk to Bailleul, miles behind the line and feeling unusually secure, men would go to sleep in comfort, taking off their boots and clothes and settling in luxuriously for a night of uninterrupted slumber. Lights out and the only sounds to be heard are a few whispers, coughs, the snores of the musically minded and the muffled report of a distant gun. There is a droning in the upper airgradually coming nearer and then the unmistakable beat of a German engine. A sleeper awakes.
"Hullo, boys! there is a b—— Fritz overhead!"
"Shut up, and go to sleep, you windy beggar," comes the unsympathetic response.
"Cr-r-r-ash-sh!" from somewhere a mile off. The whole tent is awake now and speculating.
"The blankety-blank something has dropped an egg!"
"Cr-r-r-rash-sh!" This time the explosion is half a mile nearer and in a direct line.
"Cr-cr-r-r-r-r-ash-sh!" still in line and noticeably nearer.
A nervy individual picks up his boots and flies out into the darkness. Nothing is to be gained by so doing for he is as likely to run into the danger that he is seeking to avoid as to escape it. By this time the searchlights are flashing across the sky and the anti-aircraft guns barking furiously. The converging beams fail to pick the raider up and the crashes come nearer. Some find the strain of lying still too much for their nerves and get out and walk about. Others lie still but curse savagely. Many wait quietly but with muscles taut. No one sleeps, and even the quiet, cool men who show no slightest sign of strain, are desperately afraid. "Crash! Crash-sh! Crrash-sh" behind, level, and then there is a big sigh of relief for the last explosion is clear of the camp and the danger has passed. Perhaps no great material harm has been done; nevertheless it is just this kind of thing that in the long run breaks men's nerves and renders them useless for the moral strain of war. The Germans placed much faith in the "loud noise theory" and undoubtedly they were right. Frightful, crashing detonations have a demoralizing effect on even the best troops.
By the end of August the division was heartily sick of the whole area from De Seule and Canteen Corner to Messines, La Basse Ville and Ploegsteert.
There had been one tremendous day of moving excitement, then three months of hard work, miserable conditions, heavy shelling, gas, and a continual drain of killed and wounded. The divisional relief was welcomed with joy and the men gladly entrained for the rest area on the St Omer-Boulogne road.
Training was commenced at once and as it was of a most practical nature it was very obvious that the spell was for the purpose of preparing for another great battle. The "taking of pill-boxes," "wood fighting," and the preparations for counter attack, were sufficient indications of what was coming. However the "stunt" was probably three weeks away and three weeks is a long time. Much living can be done in that time with Death on the horizon.
Chapter XXII
Of How Some of the Troops Went On London Leave and Others Trained for A Great Battle!
Bakerin
New Zealand at the Front.
A man was told that he could go on leave. He paraded at the quartermaster's store and drew a new uniform, went to the baths to get rid of the permanent boarders and to receive new underclothing, and then in a haze of happy anticipation, drifted down by stages to Boulogne. Perhaps one night was passed there in the huge empty store-rooms of a great warehouse where they slept on "bed-boards," a device used in gaols and the British Army to overcome to some extent the hardness and the cold of concrete floors. Some little while before dusk, the leave men were paraded and marched down to the
The leave boat—one of the old Channel packets—was crammed with men: English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Australians, Canadians, South Africans and New Zealanders; officers were packed on a little promenade deck with some nurses; the men wherever they could be pushed. No one worried. In an hour they would be in England. Just before dark the little boat slipped through the boom and raced out into the grey Channel. A couple of destroyers took up station and the three zigzagged through the stiff swell. All on board wore lifebelts for the submarine menace was at its height and a thousand good fighting soldiers would be well worth a torpedo. Within the hour the packet runs into Folkestone harbour and without a moment's delay the men file off and on to the waiting trains, which rush through the darkness to Victoria Station and London Town. Some few lucky ones who had relatives or friends in London were met and rushed away—a few made connections and went off to some other part of England.
The majority, who were a little bewildered, were only too pleased to pile on the N.Z.Y.M.C.A. bus and be run up to the Shakespeare Hut. Here most of them dumped their packs, booked a bed for the
Next morning after a luxurious lie in, hot shower, and a good breakfast, they Went out to see the. sights. Some followed the guide-book routes or went out with the parties that were continually being arranged by the Y.M.C.A. or the friends of New Zealand. The majority wandered about in a more aimless fashion, enjoying their freedom and not anxious to compromise this new intoxicating pleasure by identifying themselves with large groups of any sort. Timetables were for the present abhorrent to men who for a year or more had lived rigidly by them. So they strolled about looking at shops, marvelling at the traffic, accidentally discovering Westminster Abbey or the picturesque person on guard at Whitehall; soaking themselves in the crowd, listening to the murmur of English speech from the unending stream of civilians, admiring pretty girls. They jumped on to buses, climbed on top and told the conductor to put them off at the terminus, and after miles of moving
The daylight commenced to fade and the lights came out in the misty dusk—not many lights or very bright because those were the days of air-raids—but still lights enough to make a magic atmosphere for men whose nights had been dark except for gunflashes and German flares. Still the river of life flowed on, changing its course somewhat to London theatre land. Men booked up for shows of all sorts. Some went to music halls; others to see Romance; and after the theatres supper and more bed.
But London had an attraction deeper and more powerful than beds and meals and theatres. In France there were girls who were young and beautiful and full of life, but they were few and lived
And young girls also were eager and reckless. They wanted love and romance; and in France the boys of their generation were being massacred by thousands before the German pill-boxes and on the uncut wire. On the great battlefields it sometimes seemed that under the blast of the great barrage the very earth heaved and shook. In London, where the hopes and fears, the hatreds and passions of our race surged in great waves of feeling, it was as though the very fabric of our civilization was
Back in their villages the New Zealanders trained hard for the coming battle; spent their spare time in estaminets or in the Y.M.C.As that seemed to have sprung up like magic, almost everywhere; lorry-hopped into Boulogne; besought mademoiselle to "promenade," and as usual fixed up a problematical date after the next war; went for long walks across the pleasant rolling country hunting up relations and friends in other units—on the whole a pleasant and sociable time. One day
Chapter XXIII
Of the Battlefield of Ypres, of Gravenstafel and Abraham Heights, and of the Black Swamp Below Belle Vue Spur
Everard Owen:
Three Hills.
From the Lumbres area the battalions came to Renescure and Wallon-Capel and so to the Watou area. After two days they marched along the crowded highroad from Poperinghe to Viamertinghe and so into and through the famous town of Ypres. The broken tower of the ruined Cloth Hall had its appeal even to the most unimaginative. It stood foursquare, battered but still standing—the wall against which the old army had set its back and fought to the death. In its glory of desolation it typified the valour and steadfastness of a war that was now become so old that disputed barricades of 1914 had become legends of long ago, and the men who had fallen in the first fights seemed heroes of another age. Through the broken town the men
Ridge after ridge the wilderness stretched back from St Julien and Pilkelm to Polderhoek and Passchendaele and from Messines on the one side to the Forest of Houthulst on the other. All the beautiful woods were dead and the skeletons of trees stood gaunt and stark against the skyline. The pleasant villages were heaps of filthy rubble. The gentle streams that had meandered through smiling valleys were flattened into horrible bogs and slimy quags. The green fields where the poppies had grown redly in the summer-time were a wide expanse of dull and dreary brown. For mile after mile shell-hole touched shell-hole with here and there a great gaping crater torn by a mine explosion. One could hardly follow the line of the old German trenches so ploughed and torn was all the earth. Line after line their pill-boxes crowned every height, swept every slope, enfiladed every approach. Solidly and with much labour they had been built with walls five feet thick of ferro-concrete, but a frightful storm had burst upon them rending and smashing and cracking the stout walls or covering the machinegun slits with heaps of upflung earth. Most of them were charnel houses, from which the garrisons bombed or crushed by falling ruin or suffocated by gas or killed by the frightful concussion of huge shells had never emerged. They had been costly to build but ten times more costly to destroy—and outside them lay the rows of British dead.
"The debris of the battlefield was everywhere; tangled heaps of rusty wire, broken rifles, smashed field-guns, rotting equipment, torn and filthy clothing, empty shell-cases, old tins, riven helmets, and all the ruined litter that makes still more hideous the ugly desolation of an old battlefield. Here and there along some corduroy track leading through the morass is the via dolorosa of the horse and the mule. One sees an upturned wagon; then one is wheelless; and after that the poor brown carcasses sometimes singly, sometimes in twos and threes, covered with a little earth, a few handfuls of quicklime or altogether uncovered. The tanks look like huge, terrible, uncouth monsters of a prehistoric age, that have had the life blown out of them or that have choked in a frightful struggle to flounder through the quaking slough. Everywhere there is desolation, destruction, and the visible signs of death and decay.
"On one side of the wilderness are the cemeteries of the British; on the other, from the Butte of Polygon and beyond, those of Germany. On the one side is 'Rest in Peace,' on the other, 'Hier ruht in Gott.' But above all is the common cross. In the central wilderness itself lay a tangle of the dead of all nations in graves which for the most part no man had marked. Here and there a few had been gathered together and there was a cross rudely shaped and pencil-marked, or perhaps an upturned rifle or broken helmet to mark the spot. Here lay 'Ein unbekanter Engländer,' there an 'Unknown German Soldier,' "—2/A.R.
The succession of low hills that stretched back from Ypres to Passchendaele buttressed the whole German line in the north and it was thought that if they could be taken and observation gained on to the level plain of Flanders that lay beyond, the whole enemy line would be forced to retreat. He would lose his hold on Ostend and Zeebrugge and so the war that was being lost on the sea might be saved. As on the Somme there was not much in the way of strategy. It was a shock battle pure and simple. During August and September blow after blow had been struck, and slowly, after a tremendous slaughter, the last range of hills was coming within effective range. It was hoped that one more thrust or perhaps two would break this line of resistance. An enormous mechanism of battle had been built up. A mesh of railways, heavy and light, of roads, of tracks, enabled troops and ammunition to be rushed forward at high speed. Masses of artillery, especially 6-inch howitzers, were placed in rows, axle to axle, over the wide front, huge dumps of shells were run in as close to the guns as was possible. Parks of tanks were assembled in little patches of dead ground. Long lines of kite balloons were flown to observe the movements of the enemy. The sky was full of aeroplanes. Some flew backward and forward, guarding the balloons; some bombed and machinegunned the German line; some observed and photographed the enemy positions, or spotted for the big guns wirelessing back the effect of the shooting. High over all flew the champions of the air, ready
The first objective of the New Zealanders was to be the Gravenstafel-Abraham Heights section of the Broodseinde Ridge, and for this attack the 1st and 4th Brigades were selected. 1st Auckland, 1st Wellington, 3rd Auckland and 3rd Otago went into the front line and 2nd Wellington, 2nd Auckland, 3rd Wellington and 3rd Canterbury in close support, ready to move forward through the first wave and pass on to the final objectives.
After the men had assembled on the night of 3-4 October a drizzling rain commenced to fall. Through the miserable hours of waiting men huddled together in the shell-holes waiting for the dawn, shivering under their oil-sheets. All night the German guns searched the slopes, and towards morning their fire became very intense. In the darkness officers and N.C.Os moved round seeing that all was in place and giving the last instructions. Breakfast was an unappetizing meal of bully beef, dry bread and water. It is in this chill hour before the first light breaks that vitality is very low. Men stand quietly about, nerves on edge after the ordeal of the night, very tired, counting off the moments until the barrage, half-eager for it to come, yet fearful of the coming, for all know that many must die when the hour strikes. On the other side German soldiers were also waiting to attack.
Zero hour was at 6 a.m.—ten minutes before the hour fixed by the enemy for their great counter
The infantry moved forward as the German machine-guns from the unbroken emplacements rattled out in burst after burst of fire. First Auckland swept over Aviatik Farm and Dear House, and, swinging over on to the sector of the flanking division, stormed Winzig after a desperate fight. First Wellington captured Boetleer, spread out over the brigade front and went on up the hill. Third Auckland and 3rd Otago overwhelmed River Side and Deuce House and Otto Farm. The battalions of the second wave were close on the heels of the first. The little brook of Hannebeek lay across the greater part of the front. The continual heavy shell-fire had turned the running stream into a wide bog through which ran winding paths along which men could pass only very slowly and in single file. The sections converged on three tracks and long continuous lines soon formed. On these narrow paths the German barrage fell with remarkable accuracy. To either side and clear in view lay dead men blackened by the explosions. Shell after shell shrieked down and burst a few feet on either side, flinging columns of black mud into the air. The
Across the swamp resistance was met with at once. The shell-holes on the slope were full of Germans. Many had been killed in the barrage and others were demoralized and surrendered at once. But many fought desperately. A section moving forward in file commences to lose men. One man lurches forward into a shell-hole and lies a crumpled heap; another falls with a cry, clutching at the breast of his tunic; still another stumbles to one side and gazes stupidly at a spreading red stain. The remainder spread out and take cover. Fifty yards ahead is a line of Germans, their helmets scarcely discernible against the brown background. Rifle fire is opened at once but even at such absurdly short range it is amazing how many shots miss the mark. The morning mist, the battle smoke, the excitement all have a part in this. One or two of the more venturesome walk or crawl or run forward and by good fortune reach the flank or rear of the enemy. Under fire from two sides the centre of resistance commences to crumble. The attackers rush in from front and flank, and the enemy, realizing the hopelessness of their position, put up their hands and cry for mercy. Sometimes quarter is given; at other times there is only a shriek of agony as the bayonet is driven home.
A pill-box, scarred and torn with shell-fire, rises in the path of the advancing men. The machinegun crew are resolute and daring men. Their gun rattles and blazes from the embrasure and men fall rapidly. There is an immediate check, but again brave men run out on the flank, and taking desperate chances, get round to the rear and fling bombs in the open door. The bursts of fire cease but the attackers fling more bombs. No one emerges and, after a glimpse into the interior, no one wants to enter among the dying and dead. In another place a group of pill-boxes is one blaze of fire and riflemen on the flanks shoot down all attempts to surround them, but a trench mortar section comes up behind and deluges the flanking party with bombs until they run and the attack sweeps forward again.
On the crest of the ridge there is a desperate struggle, not so much for the few broken bricks that had been the hamlet of Gravenstafel, but for the group of pill-boxes that had been constructed nearby. There are brave men here and they resist J stubbornly, sniping from shell-holes, flinging their bombs, traversing with their guns. They are still fighting when the second wave comes up. It sweeps around them and over them and the wicked Mills bombs are hurled into the doors. They burst in the confined space with a ghastly effect. When the smoke clears our men cautiously look in and drawback, for the floor is a bloody horror. In the largest pill-box of all perhaps thirty men welter in their blood, and, even as the New Zealanders prepare to enter to do what can be done for such of
All night the attackers had lain miserably in the drizzling rain, heavily shelled, plagued by machinegun fire, cold, sleepless, with vitality running low. But as the barrage opened they had moved forward. At once there was a transformation, a glow of feeling as the immensity of the thing entered into and lifted up a man's whole being. They passed the swamp and the German barrage with loss. They encountered the first opposition and saw comrades killed before their eyes. Scarce pausing in their stride they shook hands with friends of old times whom they found suddenly dying at their feet. Rage entered in—a cold, silent, terrible rage. Men stalked on up the torn hillside conscious of danger, aware that the whole air was moaning and shrieking with death in a dozen forms, but disdainful of it. They felt that their strength was the strength of ten and that their advance was inevitable and irresistable—and it was so.
There was a great exaltation of soul, a wonderful consciousness of power. So Hector must have felt when he led the Trojans to the storm of the Grecian wall and carried fire through the camp and to the
Many of the Germans had been demoralized by the storm of fire that had beaten down upon them. In the faint dawnlight they had seen the waves of assault sweeping forward. Isolated in scattered shell-holes, they felt helpless, hopeless, lost. The wave came up surging slowly towards them. They fired a few shots with fingers that trembled on the triggers and hands that shook. Perhaps a hundred yards away a man dropped here and there, but there was no slackening in the steady thrust forward of the attacking host. Nothing seemed able to stem that resistless tide. No supports were coming from behind. There was still time to run; but in the path to safety thundered the British barrage. The dull gleam of the cold steel came nearer. Men looked backward—and a few, with the courage of despair, ran into the inferno of fire to be caught and flung broken to the earth. The others saw their comrades' fate and their knees weakened so
The battalions of the second wave swept on at the heels of their barrage down the reverse slope, mopping up small parties here and there, and in some cases suffering heavy loss from machine-gun fire. In one place when the barrage halts a pill-box is seen standing within it. Silent, and perhaps deserted, but perhaps also full of men who are waiting for the moment to swing out their machineguns and mow down the attacking line. Two N.C.Os go coolly through the bursting shells and approach it from the rear. One bomb and the garrison come pouring out and run back with their hands up. Kronprinz Farm, Calgary Grange, Waterloo, Fleet Cot, Berlin, and Berlin Wood all fall and the attack sweeps on to the final objective at the foot of Belle Vue Spur. The men in the lower trenches of the system surrender readily and the whole spur could probably have been carried even without barrage if another battalion could have been flung in without delay.
The battle was won. It had been a clean sweeping success and while the artillery still deluged the enemy trenches with fire the infantry dug in and consolidated the ground they had gained. On the night of the 5th-6th they were relieved by men of another division who failed in an assault on Belle Vue Spur three days later.
From the afternoon of the 4th heavy and continuous rain fell on the battlefield. The torn earth rapidly relapsed into a morass over which movement of any kind could only be made with extreme difficulty. Carrying parties floundered forward sometimes waist deep, taking perhaps two or three hours to move forward across a mile of ground. Pack mules were bogged and their loads had to be flung away to get the bearers themselves clear—one at least was drowned in the Hannebeek. The task of making passable tracks and restoring smashed roads was an almost hopeless one. The artillery men had an Herculean task in moving forward the fieldguns, and yet somehow they dragged their pieces not so much over but through the slough. But when with almost incredible labour they had the guns in position, they could find no stable platforms for them in the mire. After each discharge they kicked back and it took perhaps hours of effort before they could be found again. Dumps of ammunition could not be pushed forward because it was almost impossible to extend the light railways and the tram-lines, and so the shells had often to be carried forward by the men themselves. As for the heavies, they could not be moved at all. The result was that
There was not the slightest chance of any great result following, even if the attack were successful. Corps and army were aware that the wire was not cut and thus no sufficient barrage could be provided. Yet they determined to attack. It was a gamble— and perhaps a justifiable gamble. The Germans had shown signs of demoralization, and it was possible that before a bold face they might abandon their impregnable position and run. Such things had been known to happen. Or perhaps there might be gaps in the wire which patrols, moving stealthily at night, could not observe and which could not be perceived even with the help of field-glasses. The men in the front line, however, had no illusions about the wire.
Once more in the grey dawn the guns opened, but their discharge was thin and ragged. The thunderroll was absent. Few batteries could maintain half their guns in action. Poor as the barrage was, the infantry could not keep within. They had before them, in some cases, upward of six hundred yards of black swamp. Progress through this was painfully slow, and before they had gone many yards the German machine-guns were firing vicious bursts. Men fell in the swamp and some were drowned in the brimming pools, others choked in the foul ooze,
In one place a road crossed the belt, and heroic men rushed desperately along it, only to fall before a blast of fire. On the extreme right the remnants of a platoon found a possible gap and so thrust their way in and compelled a garrison of eighty to surrender. When their prisoners had gone back the officer in command was left with a single follower, and this man was killed as he went back for reinforcements. Rifles and Lewis-guns were clogged with mud. The wire belts twenty-five and fifty yards in width were too wide to bomb across. The attack was held. Yet no man thought of retreat. Baffled, they held on to the slight gains that had
The English Division which had been relieved by the New Zealanders had left scores of their wounded behind them. These had been collected and got as far as the regimental aid posts, but many were still to be cleared when the casualties from the battle commenced to come in. There was a frightful congestion at Kronprinz and Waterloo. The conditions for carrying were unbelievably bad. Sometimes six and sometimes eight men were necessary to fight through with a single stretcher, and even then they slipped and staggered and stumbled very slowly, taking three or four hours to cover the single mile that took them back to the advanced stations. And then there was another three miles of mud and heavy shelling before they reached the Red Cross Station at Spree Farm. On the 12th four hundred men from the 4th Brigade were put on to clear the aid posts, but they could not cope with this tide of human wreckage. Next day twelve hundred men were sent forward with stretchers and they worked manfully clearing a great number.
There was an informal armistice all over the stricken hill slopes. The Germans were carrying back their own wounded and they fired no shot at the stretcher squads that searched the swamp and came even up to the wire in search of poor wretches
Consider the case of a man who fell on the edge of a great shell-hole almost brimming with water. For a space, an hour perhaps or two, the pain of his smashed hip might not be so great as he would be numb with shock. But gradually sensation would come back, and with sensation pain that became a throbbing torment; and then with the growing agony of the wound came thirst that grew until it was a separate torment. When after an infinity of time, as it seemed, he managed with one hand to reach his water-bottle and draw it from the web equipment, it was to find that the shell splinter that had crippled him had torn a hole in the water-bottle also, and that it was empty. The bitter tragic disappointment almost made him cry. Time passed— ages of time—and he sank into the soft mud, so that gradually his clothes became saturated, and he was very cold. "Oh, God! Oh, God! Stretcherbearers! Stretcher-bearers!" But his voice was only a husky croak. Late in the afternoon a party of bearers staggering and stumbling under a loaded stretcher rest for a moment beside him. Before they move on they give him a drink of water, put a
But there were six hundred and fifty of our dead who never came back.
Chapter XXIV
Of the Desolation Beyond Ypres and the Winter of Discontent
Our men were too sorely tried. For the first time the British Army lost its spirit of optimism and there was a sense of deadly depression among many officers and men. … They saw no ending of the war and nothing except continuous slaughter such as that in Flanders.
Sir Philip Gibbs .
From the middle of November the New Zealanders were on the sector that fronted the Polygoneveld, holding the line at Cameron Covert and the Reutelbeek in front of Polderhoek Chateau and the division was disposed in depth from Dickebusch, up through Belgian Chateau at Ypres in Walker Camp and Halifax Camp, West Farm and Montreal, Forrester and Howe and Micmac, in the railway dugouts at Zillebeke, and from there to Polygon Wood and the Racecourse and the Butte and so to the forward areas, Jubilee Croft, Jolting Houses, Joist Farm, Cameron House, Blackwatch Corner, Jut Farm, and Veldhoek.
Skies were grey and the damp mists hung low. Ugly dreariness was the prevailing feature. Even the back areas were broken and very desolate. Dickebusch was half ruined and wholly dilapidated. What had not been smashed was all befouled by war. Men
There is a limit to what men can endure and during the winter of 1917-18 this limit was very nearly reached. The morale of the British Army was very low. The Third Battle of Ypres after frightful expenditure of life had petered out in the muddy swamps that our own guns had made of the Stroombeek and the Hannebeek and the Reutelbeek. The Russian debacle had set free hundreds of thousands of German troops for the Western Front. The Italians had been routed with frightful losses. The battle of Cambrai which had begun so brilliantly had closed in defeat and nasty stories ran about of how it had been lost. And above all the German submarines were sinking the food-ships and the ships full of munitions and unless this drain was stopped the war would certainly be lost. Victory was very far away but defeat was near and possible. Mentally,
Nevertheless even in the Ypres salient there were men whose resolution no hardship or danger could shake. Mud, filth, ugliness and the sordid squalor of the wide waste could not sour them. The naked, dirty horror of the whole bloody business could not break their spirit. They fought down the longing for home and the desire for beauty and freedom and life and set their faces steadfastly towards death if that should be the price of victory. In the darkness of the time they kept alight the flame of valour.
The main features of the winter were working parties and schools. The greater part of the sector consisted of territory won from the enemy in the fighting of the previous months and immense labour was devoted to the organization of defence systems, as it was almost certain that the enemy would attack with the coming of spring. Railways heavy and light were pushed farther forward and linked up with the tram-line sections. Plank roads were run in over the broken slippery surfaces, and miles of duckboard put down and netted. Reserve lines and switch lines were dug wherever there was sufficiently solid earth, and great tangled masses were cunningly strung in hidden valleys and blasted woods. Parties were continually out salvaging, for after much wastage the most rigid economy was now being exercised and even horseshoe nails and little scraps of rubber from
An hour before dawn the company sergeant-major would be up and stirring the working party for the day out of bed. This was no easy job for the old gunpits were snug and warm and outside it was very black and freezing cold and human nature has always the tendency to roll over on to the other side despite sergeant-majors. At length by threats, cajolery, persuasion but mainly by the lure of pork and beans and bacon, the toilers of the day were mustered. They fell in with balaclava caps under their helmets, leather jackets over their tunics, mittened hands deep in great sheepskin gloves, small box respirator on chest, rifle and bandolier. They stamped up and down, their boots ringing on the frozen board until the light railway train came puffing and rattling along. All aboard! And away past Ypres, Birr Crossroads, and so on to the battlefield. A tramp of two or three kilometres along a corduroy road and then duckboard brought the party to its task for the day, which might be perhaps the running of a belt of wire between two little woods. At an engineer's dump the men halt and pick up bundles of iron standards or coils of barbed wire, and with these unwieldy burdens move to the line of the fence. The standards with their corkscrew ends are fairly easy to handle, and they are soon standing in long rows ready for the wire to be strung on.
Wire is abominable stuff to handle at any time, but especially so in the bitter cold, in mud and amongst tangled debris. It seems to possess that
No one was ever particularly enthusiastic over working parties, which were looked upon as unmitigated evils to be avoided on all possible occasions. There was usually a good deal of "go slow" policy in evidence. Occasional black "coalboxes" bursting overhead, or the temporary activity of a German battery, caused an immediate scatter. Men very well known for their cool nerve in the line became surprisingly apprehensive of the possible effect of desultory shelling when out on working parties— particularly if a new and nervous officer showed signs of being sufficiently impressed to order a return home. At about half-time the officer in charge and the senior N.C.O. go the rounds with an issue of rum, and the workers thus refreshed carry on until midday when the work being finished, they march off in the direction of home. The most energetic or those who are very cold tramp all the
Before dark all are back. The braziers glow redly in the black pits and the yellow candle flames twinkle on packs or bunks. Hungry men rattle their dixies, waiting for the mess orderlies' call: "Come on there, tumble out!" And at once there is a joyous scramble to be first in the queue. "What is she to-night? How is she holding? Any chance of coming the double? What about a spud anyway? Go on, push on there! You've got your issue!" And so the jostling, goodnatured crowd are soon served. For a while there is quietness while the hot stew goes down, and then the conversation starts again over the bread and butter and jam.
After dinner men settle down for the evening. One, a black and white artist of some parts, works busily by the light of a guttering candle touching up a sketch of the "Crucifix of Polygon," near which he has been working for the last few days. It is a drawing somewhat crude in execution but full of power because of its utter realism and its accurate and detailed portrayal ugliness, the horror, the sadness, and the underlying hope of better things that, Daily Mail has come up with the rations. It is read eagerly, and believed—with reservations. One man declaims a sonorous passage from John Bull. Another group sniggers over a stray copy of La Vie Parisienne that has been smuggled in from the officers' mess by a batman. One or two have pocket Testaments, and, strangely enough, there are even copies of the Labour Leader, Herald, and, strangest of all perhaps, Dr Orchard's Crusader from Kingsweigh House Chapel. The pacifist parson and the Christian socialist have little following, but after the Daily Mail and John Bull it is refreshing to know that ideals have not utterly perished from the earth. Novels are in great demand, and it is a poor author who cannot get a reading. In one corner a couple of men are wrestling over a pocket set of chess. Many are playing cards, some writing letters, others squatting round the brazier smoking and yarning. An N.C.O. comes in with "orders" for the next day— and with the rum issue. The orders are listened to with attention, containing as they do the names of the working parties for the next day, while the rum is received with joy and drunk with eagerness. There is nothing now to wait up for. The brazier is smoking abominably, and everyone's eyes are full of smoke. Outside it is freezing hard, and if the crazy door is opened for more than a moment or two the cold night air rushes in and the pleasant heat
Those not on working parties were mainly at the brigade schools where intensive courses of all kinds were conducted in bombing, musketry, gas, Lewis-gun, bayonet fighting, wiring, map reading, platoon and company drill, arms drill, some elementary tactics, and recreational training. The snow lay thickly on the hard ground. Men shaved before breakfast with, in many cases, extreme discomfort—and washed gingerly. The bugles blew for the fall in and they doubled to their places and stood for five minutes, ten minutes perhaps, while the CO. inspected the ranks—snow soaking into their boots, hands stiff with cold. Then, commencing with Slope arms! Order arms! Present arms! they proceeded through the usual ritual up to the most sacred rite of all—the mounting of a main guard. In the afternoon period work of a more practical nature was done.
At this time recreational training was coming into vogue. The reason was twofold. First the higher command had evidently noticed the growing war weariness of great masses of men and were anxious by any means possible to counter the depression. It was thought, and rightly so, that if the men could play more, the psychological effect would be good.
The games introduced were partly for this purpose. If men were running about and laughing the growth of morbid feeling was likely to be checked. Then, too, many of the men were growing exceedingly clumsy even although they were perfectly fit and well. Nothing in trench warfare had to be done quickly. Men lay out in listening posts or stood sentinel in the line with little movement. Even on patrol they moved slowly, often with infinite care. All day they lounged or sat round. When in support or reserve they trudged backward and forward in heavy boots, carrying heavy loads through stretches of mud or along slippery miles of duckboard. So they did "round me nip" and played children's playground games often with surprising zest. Men's reactions to "school life" were very different.
Some of the best fighting men were exceptionally keen on the parade ground. The work was often not very practical, but it appealed in their case to and deep-seated love of ritual and ceremonial that is so deep seated in the race. Guard mounting with the right atmosphere can become an amazing ceremony when performed by those initiated not merely into its intricacies but into the spirit. It is the High Mass, the Sung Eucharist of the professional soldier. Other men, however, were not able to worship at such shrines and abhorred all endeavours to make soldiers of them. Many a man who in a hot corner would not hesitate to assume by sheer right of personality command of a platoon or company over the heads of all manner of superior officers showed a
On 3 December 1st Canterbury and 1st Otago made an attempt to storm Polderhoek Chateau. Here the Germans had reinforced the cellars with an extraordinary thickness of concrete and turned every building into a fortress. The British guns had blown the chateau to pieces, but the only effect of this had been to heap the piles of loose bricks over the concrete and thus strengthen the defences by the addition of an excellent bursting plate. In medieval times maybe a great castle with massive walls and frowning towers had topped the height and dominated these ridges and hollows—but no fortalice of olden times had the strength of this mound of earth crowned with the shapeless heaps of smashed masonry. For the splintered trees of the park were laced with strands of wire, and though the surface of the heap was daily churned into a fresh outline by salvos of huge shells and a deluge of bombs, the concrete cellars were strong and unbroken and the machine-gunners, secure and unharmed, waited, alert and anxious, their fingers on the buttons of their guns, not knowing at what hour hell might be loosed against them.
It came at midday without warning. For, even as the barrage storm thudded and crashed overhead, the enemy saw the attacking waves sweep forward.
From Polderhoek itself, from the ridge before Ghulevett, there burst a devastation of machine-gun fire. The smoke barrage that was to have screened the flank was blown away. Men fell rapidly, and most of the experienced officers and N.C.Os went down. The remainder were brave but inexperienced, and once the momentum of the first charge was lost the machine-guns gained the upper hand and there was no chance of further movement. The attack, despite some slight gain of ground, had failed, and its failure tended to intensify the gloom that was settling down on this ill-omened battlefield. The weary weeks dragged past with interminable working parties and occasional spells in the line. The frost broke and the rain came, and still the weariness continued, the everlasting trudging along weary miles of duckboard, the endless wiring and digging and carrying; miserable periods in sodden posts and filthy dugouts; and the increasing certainty of tremendous enemy attacks to come in the spring. The 4th Brigade was broken up, and the English divisions seemed to be smaller in number also. It seemed as though reserves were giving out and all the time men knew that crowded troop trains were moving across Germany from the east to the west, and that in a few weeks the storm would burst.
Chapter XXV
Of How The New Zealanders Came to Mailly-Maillet and Barred the Road to Amiens
Ils ne passeront pas!
The French at Verdun.
When the springtime came at the beginning of March the New Zealanders went back to pleasant villages about Cassel. The grey skies had turned to blue. Hedges and trees were green and alive, the grass was springing underfoot. The men were billeted again in pleasant barns and among kindly folk, who laughed and jested and went singing about their ordinary work and were friendly to weary men. Training went on in the mornings and in the afternoon there were games and recreation. Great efforts were made to smarten the men up. Web equipment was taken to pieces and scrubbed, buttons were polished, even the dull steel of bayonet blades was furbished up with emery paper. And all this cleaning had its effect. As clothing and equipment became spotless and shining, the stain of the mud and blood of the autumn and winter from the salient commenced to fade from men's minds. Ten glorious days of sunshine, of returning health and spirits, and
Then late one evening came news of disaster. The tremendous rush of the German Army had broken through on a wide front. The Fifth Army was falling back on the Somme and the Germans following on its heels were surging on towards Amiens to cut the railway communications, isolate the Channel ports and destroy the British Army. The division was ordered to entrain for the Somme.
As the men marched to the railway siding the village people came out into the streets to bid good-bye to the guests who in so short a while had become their friends. Rough jests flew round.
"Bonsoir, mademoiselle, you promenade with me?"
"After de Prochaine war, per-r-r-raps!"
"Hullo, Marie! How's the beer standing?"
"Allons, gourmand! You have drunk all de bière—no more left for nex soldat!"
"Au revoir, madame! Encore six oeufs when we come back—and beaucoup chips!"
"Ah, Madeleine! You embrassez-moi for bonne chance!"
"Allons! Brigand! You kiss too many mademoiselles—me write your fiancée t tell her you no good!"
"Au revoir, petite! Au revoir, madame!"
"Ha, Bârthe! Me see you promenade with officier last night!"
"Allons! Sclérat! You beaucoup zigzag las' night—too much vin blanc."
But under all the merry badinage ran a deeper tone, for after all this was a supreme hour in the agony of France. Who knew what might befall if these men failed to stay the onward rush to Amiens? In a few days other battalions might march along these roads—battalions of men in grey-green uniforms, the enemies of France. The men who marched away were not Frenchmen, but they were the friends of France, and in a few hours they would step into the breach and hold for France.
"Dieu vous aide, messieurs! Dieu vous garde! Vous combattez pour nous! St Jeanne d'Arc vous aide! Nous Prions pour vous!"
And so amid laughter and prayers the men marched away to the Second Battle of the Somme. All night the trains were running through St Omer, and Etaples and Abbeville till they reached the little station of Hangest-sur-Somme, familiar enough to the men of 1916. Each battalion as it arrived dumped its heavier stores and set out at once on foot or by motor lorry for the divisional concentration point in the direction of Pont Noyelles. The day was clear and fine and a cool breeze was blowing so rapid progress was made. For the first few kilometres the road was unfamiliar, but then, as they descended a slope and swept round a corner, old hands recognized a familiar estaminet, and half
Once through the town and marching along the highroad refugees commenced to pass. Some rode on wagons piled high with their household stuff; others trundled handcarts in which they had hastily flung what could quickly be moved; some had little else beside the clothes they wore. They were worn and tired, frightened and hopeless. Behind them lay the little well-loved homes and before them they knew not what! A world tumbling into ruins it seemed! They hardly knew where they were going, but there was terror behind and they stumbled on.
The sight of these poor folk hardened the resolution of the marching men. All that day they pressed onward. The sun shone brightly. Sweating and footsore they tramped on. Many were still soft from the winter at Ypres, and the pace commenced to tell, but no man dropped out. The strong took heavier burdens upon themselves, carried extra panniers, bags of rations, took a comrade's rifle or his spare bandoliers of ammunition. Platoon officers and sergeants walked up and down the lines of their men giving encouragement, cracking jokes, anything that would help weary men to keep the pace. Some of them were loaded up with the equipment of men who could only just stagger along. At last late in the afternoon the men bivouacked under trees, and here they dropped their packs and greatcoats and endeavoured without much success to sleep. At midnight motor lorries ran up and they climbed on pave roads through Amiens, and so on to Pont Noyelles. There was no stay. The march recommenced, and dawn found them still marching on. Hour after hour the steady tramp, tramp, tramp, ate into the tale of kilometres. There was a short spell while they ate a cold breakfast, and then again came the steady move forward through a country-side that appeared to be curiously deserted. The houses were empty. There was no smoke rising from the chimneys, and yet the pleasant country-side was unmarked by the ravages of war. Albert was passed some distance on the right.
Once the road was blocked by a 6-inch howitzer whose gunners said that they had been retiring for days. A few wandering Tommies and Scotchmen were met with, but there was no sign of an army, nor of any organized resistance. Just outside H$#x00E9;dauville a naval-gun was firing at intervals on some distant target. It seemed a lone survivor of a war that had been. By midday perhaps two-thirds of the division had concentrated in a large field some twenty kilometres from Amiens and about the same distance from Doullens. One thing was clear. The New Zealanders had marched straight into the gap that had developed between the Fourth and Fifth corps. At all costs this gap had to be closed, and closed without an hour's delay. The crowded happenings of the last few days had worked something like a miracle. The cloud of depression had lifted. The English line had been broken. Our flanks were probably in the air. The triumphant enemy were
The general plan of battle was for the 1st Brigade consisting temporarily of 1st and 2nd Auckland and 1st Rifle Brigade to advance through MaillyMaillet along the Puiseux Road, in the direction of Serre, while the 2nd Brigade on the right were to go through Auchonvillers and, if possible, to Beaumont Hamel.
The Germans, flushed with victory, had crossed the old battlefield and were pressing on eagerly to complete their task. They passed their old front line, they passed the British line of 1916, and in high spirits set foot on what for four years had been inviolate soil. Amiens was before them! Amiens which meant victory for the German arms. Amiens which would give the supremacy of the world with Deutschland! Deutschland über alles! and peace, peace, after all their bloody strivings. They were not far from the city of their desire. At any moment, as they topped one of the rolling ridges, they might catch a distant glimpse of the spires and belfries of the famous town. For four days their advance had never ceased. They had brushed aside the thinning opposition with ease. They were marching into the blue and had almost crowned the last ridge. Another kilometre or perhaps two and the war was won, because that distance would give observation on the great arterial railway upon which the British Army depended for its communication. So they swept on
The Germans were driven in and the Rifles formed an outpost line in front of the village. Now it was a race for the ridge running roughly from in front of Beaumont Hamel to Hébuterne. If the enemy could gain it they would be in an excellent position to push further attacks. If it were taken by our men, we would have observation far up the valley of the Ancre. The Germans won, but they could not hold it all for the 2nd Brigade on the left moved forward and swept them back to the left of La Signy Farm, while the 1st Brigade, moving at first in column of platoons, deployed out into artillery formation until they reached the apple-trees and a long hedge where they commenced to encounter intense fire. They were temporarily checked, but just as evening fell they made an irresistible rush and carried the ridge in front of them. The darkness deepened, and in strange contrast the sugar refinery that lay to the centre caught fire and blazed luridly throughout the night. Only in the centre in front of La Signy Farm and toward the Serre Road did the enemy hold the high ground. The race had been a close one and the result was by no means certain.
The night was bitterly cold. The reserve
In the first dim light of dawn men straining out into the gloom ahead could see the enemy streaming up the road towards them, boldly walking across to their front line without the slightest attempt at concealment. Even after the first shots rang out they took little heed. They were evidently stormtroops who had become so used to victories that they held their opponents in utter contempt. There was an amazed shout from the sentries:
"Look at the b——————b——————s coming up the road!"
In a second the parapet was lined with excited men firing magazine after magazine. Such an opportunity had not come to most of them during the whole war. The self-confidence of the enemy was rudely checked, but they still came on. When they found that it was impossible to walk up leisurely with their hands in their pockets, they tried running, and then crawling, but with little success. Along the line the ascendancy rapidly passed to the New Zealanders who, although the German line was in
The enemy were, however, determined to thrust aside the vexatious opposition that had developed at the last moment. All through the morning they brought up their men under cover of the La Signy Ridge. By noon the guns that they had rapidly pushed ahead were barraging heavily behind the various battalion headquarters. Their trench mortars and light anti-tank guns commenced to search the trenches, and their machine-guns opened up a heavy and continuous fire. The whole position was a tangle of old saps which connected to form what was originally a British front line system. The Germans did not rush bodies of men across the open in the face of our machine-gun fire but coolly, scientifically, and with determination they worked forward, taking every scrap of cover, bombing down saps, and seeking for weak spots that they could overwhelm, and so work in on the flank or to the rear.
The New Zealanders had no bombs. The Germans were well supplied. In consequence they were able, in perfect safety, to creep up within a few yards of our posts and shower in bombs while our men were powerless to retaliate. A German scout appears round a traverse. For a fraction of a second he fails to focus rightly. The enemy he expects to be standing at least breast high is lying flat. In that little space of time a rifle cracks and the pioneer falls, killed so suddenly that the half smile is still upon
In some places the enemy came overland in determined rushes, but before the steady rifles and the rattling bursts of the Lewis-guns these attempts also failed. In one place as it was growing dusk they filed down a sap clad in British helmets and greatcoats and calling out in English. But the trick was seen, and they, too, were shot down. From our observation posts it was easy to see their battalions moving up in preparation to attack, and again and again the machine-guns found excellent targets and rattled belt after belt down the valley. Throughout the 27th, 28 th and 29th, the enemy continued to search for a gap through which he could pour and so bring us to ruin, but with every passing day our hold grew firmer. The resolute defence, although it was not tested to anything like the breaking-point, was too strong for the attack. During the afternoon of the 27th the first batteries of the New Zealand artillery came up through Mailly-Maillet, and were in action before evening.
Lying in front of the New Zealand position, and in some parts dominating it, was the ridge and farmhouse of La Signy. Possession of this would not only greatly strengthen the line and drive the enemy elsewhere into the valley below, but would also give observation for some miles to the eastward. The 4th Rifles with 2nd Auckland in the centre and 1st Wellington on the right were chosen for the operation which was to be attempted at 2 p.m. on Easter Sunday, 30 March. There was no preliminary bombardment but a shrapnel barrage went down just on zero hour.
The German sentries were extraordinarily careless. They evidently had not the slightest fear of an attack, and especially of an attack in daylight across the open, and so when the first shells burst they stood down until the little "strafe" should be over. Their comrades in the line had finished dinner and were taking their ease. Many had flung off their equipment and were peacefully asleep. Others were in the comfortable concrete dugouts writing home on captured British Y.M.C.A. paper. They were' careless and secure, in great numbers, and with machine-guns enough to stop an army. The idea of an attack over those two hundred yards of level grass never entered their heads.
And so 2nd Auckland were half-way across before there was a shout or a shot. While the bewildered Germans struggled into their equipment, crawled slowly through the narrow dugout doors or sprang towards their guns, they crossed the remaining space to the enemy wire, scrambled over and through it,
During the next few days there were frequent bombing fights and incessant patrolling, heavy work endeavouring to consolidate the new line which was now wet and muddy, much firing by the artillery on the enemy communications. On 5 April the enemy made his final attempt against the Rifle Brigade and the 2nd Brigade, who were then holding the line. They brought up a considerable power of artillery and shelled with intensity front and back areas alike. All communications were cut. For three hours the storm continued, and then they flung in their infantry. The first attack broke down completely thirty yards from our line. Two hours later they came again in great force and overwhelmed the advanced post to the east of La Signy. This gave them some room in which they could deploy and bring their trench mortars into action. They sent bombing parties up every sap, but were stopped
Chapter XXVI
Of a Summer in Picardy That was Quieter Than It Might Have Been
Cameron Wilson.
Throughout the months of April, May, June and July the New Zealand Division held the line on the sector from Auchonvillers to Rossignol Wood. During this time extremely heavy fighting took place round Armentières in the north and Rheims in the south. The enemy drove deep salients in our line, but always they were stopped just short of victory. The New Zealanders would probably have been withdrawn and flung into one of these great battles but for the fact that a renewed German offensive was continually threatened against Amiens. Unexpected successes, however, elsewhere opened up new and dazzling possibilities to them and they diverged from what was perhaps their true line of strategy. Still, on more than one occasion, attacks were expected and all were in constant readiness for an enemy move.
There was New Zealand leave now, "tour of duty," for Main Body men and the early reinforcements. Some took advantage of it; others refused and carried on. "Old soldiers never die, they only fade away" is not true of good soldiers; but only of those who, having by good fortune come through terrible times, secretly determined to take opportunity as it presents itself and to slip inconspicuously into the various "safe" jobs on the lines of communication, in base camps, canteens, as drill instructors, clerks, as specialists in technical lines, or even as military policemen.
One does not wish to blame them. Life is sweet to us all and death very strange and dreadful at a time when body, mind and soul are calling for adventure, expression and experience. Men, not seldom, were able to determine their own fate within certain limits. Probably there were few men who were so fortunate as to survive six months of frontline service who did not have some chance of at least greatly lengthening the time they were away from the trenches. A wound that took a man to England, a call for experts, sometimes a school; indeed numberless opportunities arose by means of which men could go back and stay back. Of course these "cushy" jobs did not always last. One remembers the state of angry exasperation in which numbers of "dugouts" came back to France when, after the German offensive, the base camps were combed out and men who had been away for two years got what they deemed to be a resurrection back to hell.
Sometimes, too, paradoxical as it may seem, men
The army machine worked blindly and somewhat haphazardly, but left to its own volition it tended to throw men up into the furnace and to keep them there until they became casualties or managed to "wangle" back. At the front Death swung a great scythe. He came to the brave man and to the coward alike. Sometimes he reaped his harvest in wide swathes and at others he took men one by one as a gleaner picks ears of wheat. But always it was the best and bravest who were most like to meet the dread reaper. Among the old Main Body and the early reinforcements there was a minority of great-hearted men who had refused every opportunity of leaving their units, and who when wounded had taken the first chance of rejoining. Some survived for a year and were then killed; some by extraordinary good fortune went yet a second year; a small band by some miracle were still fighting at the end of the third. They were marked men about whom gathered a tradition as of older times. They were living symbols of the terror and tragedy and triumph of tremendous years. In most of the battalions there were at this time a very few, one could count them usually on the fingers of one hand, who had been present at the Landing and who had
In the waste of war the valour of such men is the one availing thing. For the most part they left no heirs of their flesh, but it may be that there is a procession from them to men of another generation. In the Pilgrim's Progress we read that when Mr Valiant-for-the-Truth came to the river he gave his sword to whosoever should come after him and his courage and skill to those who could catch them. If anything is to come to us of New Zealand from the years of bloody ruin, it can only be because we catch something of the marvellous valour and steadfastness and devotion to a high ideal of conduct that led men in however mistaken a cause to keep rendezvous with Death at a hundred disputed barricades.
The country-side of Picardy and Artois was different altogether from that around Armentières and Ypres. Instead of level flats stretching mile after mile there were here rolling hills with beautiful valleys in between. Stretches of grassland were broken by fields of wheat and frequent patches of pleasant woodland. From Hébuterne which remained roughly the central point in the line the road ran back to Sailly-au-Bois which, before the war, must have been a pleasant place nestling amongst its estaminets, and also a first-class natural amphitheatre which served excellently for the numerous concerts given by one or other of the divisional troupes.
There were various social functions; brigade horse shows and transports competitions; and finally a divisional show and sports, which was very largely attended by civilians and some New Zealand nurses, who lent a bright touch of colour to the mass of khaki-clad men. Not the least interested spectator Was an enemy airman who flew leisurely over and
It was here that Mr Massey and Sir Joseph Ward took the opportunity of visiting the men in the field.
Their first appearance was at the pierrot show in the open-air theatre at Authie. It was perhaps regrettable but nevertheless a fact that the politicians were not taken very seriously, and were regarded more in the light of an extra humorous turn than anything else. Something of the same sort happened a few days later at a church parade. The politicians were not of course allowed to preach and so enliven the proceedings a little, but were given an opportunity after the service. The congregation became somewhat ribald. There was a considerable body of opinion that New Zealand was something finer than her political representatives. The men in the field felt that New Zealand was more than a geographical expression, and that they were more truly representative of their people than the politicians of a generation that was dead, but which, in the rush of war, there had not been time to bury. If the men of the Expeditionary Force had been given representation at Versailles their choice would have fallen on neither of the politicians but upon either General Russell, one of the Y.M.C.A. secretaries, or quite possibly some private soldier from the ranks. There was a tremendously deep-seated pride in the New Zealand name, and a deep desire that the nation should be worthily represented. Small people as we were, our name stood very high and if we had been able to send the equivalent of General Smuts to the Peace Conference our part there would not have been a negligible one.
The mention of church parades brings up the exceedingly interesting question of religion insofar
The army, however, is a department of State, and the State as such has always paid homage to Almighty God. And so from the time of Constantine there has been observable in the army of every state in Christendom a strange phenomenon—the army chaplain. He has usually been a commissioned officer attached for discipline, pay and rations. His business is to pray for victory and to pay attention to the minor morals of the men. He has been sometimes an heroic but more often rather a lonely and pathetic figure. Heroic because, after all, war is from one angle so utterly Christian. The true business of a soldier, Ruskin says, is on due occasion to die for his country. Sacrifice is
Yet the padres were pathetic figures! They had to conduct church parades and most of them were very anxious to do so. It was such a wonderful opportunity to preach to perhaps a thousand—men! They had never had such congregations before—so quiet and orderly, too! So the brass bands droned out "Onward, Christian Soldiers" or "Fight the Good Fight" and the men listened in dour silence. And after this the padre told them how naught]/ it was to swear.
When the service was over they went back blaspheming at the system that compelled a man to be religious by numbers or go on cooks' fatigue. The average man was utterly disgusted with these parades and from the point of view of real religion they did untold harm. He felt, too, although he could not give articulate expression to his thoughts perhaps, that there was a deep underlying
Nearly all the padres were good men. Their private lives were for the most part unimpeachable. A few were saints and some were heroes. Nearly all were anxious to do what they could to bring comfort and cheer to their men. So they went round with cigarettes and buckshee stuff. Some were popular and most were respected fairly well, but there was always the barrier of rank which many never managed to surmount. They always had a tendency to be obsessed with the fact that they were army officers and not primarily "men of God." Whether as chairman of the unprintable sex lectures delivered at Sling by an expert with a mind like a sewer, or as the central figure in the ceremonial church parade, or on the battlefield itself, they tended to become ineffective. They had become
The trouble went far back into history to the fatal compromise made by the persecuted but vietorious Church with pagan Rome. The Church will never speak with full authority until she ceases to be a subservient body, and realizes that her mission is, not to support tottering social systems inherited from old hard paganisms but, to lead the world to new conceptions of brotherhood and peace.
Despite the failure on the official side, religion did not entirely disappear. Before the first sailing from Egypt a group of men gathered frequently in the Y.M.C.A. at Zeitoun. Sadly depleted, they maintained a precarious footing at Anzac to revive strongly again on a bleak hillside at Lemnos and to grow again during the reorganization at Moascar. There were not many left after the first Somme, but in the training period before Messines they formed a divisional organization and established groups in many units. The new movement was called the "Brotherhood of Men of Goodwill." At Messines many were killed and wounded; during the spell it gathered impetus, but was nearly shot to pieces at Passchendaele; and yet it grew again in ' numbers and in influence until at Authie representatives of every unit in the division gathered together in the large upper room of the big estaminet. All the denominations were represented from Roman
The weeks passed without any great excitements beyond the normal trench spells and a great deal of work in preparing the new defensive systems of the Purple and Red Lines. The influenza epidemic swept across No Man's Land. Commencing in the east and centre of Europe, among populations whose resisting power had been lowered by the food scarcity and
Chapter XXVII
Of How the New Zealanders Commenced to Go Forward
Onward, New Zealand!
As the summer passed the power of the German Empire slowly waned. Their furious assaults on the Western Front had given them great tactical victories, but nowhere had they quite managed to reach their strategic objectives. They had inflicted enormous losses but they were bleeding at every pore. Their marvellous army was shaken and breathless and scarce able to keep up its rain of hammer blows. The flower of German manhood lay dead on innumerable fields. The raw materials essential for the manufacture of munitions were almost exhausted. Food was scarce and the civilian population had for. a long time been undernourished. Even the front-line troops received only enough to keep body and soul together. The people of the Rhineland were becoming demoralized by the bombing raids of the British Air Force. Russia, broken, conquered, humiliated, aflame with revolution, was stirring the revolutionary elements toward action. Not only did the Bolsheviks fling the secret treaties into the ash barrel of history, but they
On the other hand, the power of the Allies waxed greater. The mood of depression had passed. Guns and munitions and aeroplanes poured in from England and men by thousands from America. With this gigantic reserve piling up, Foch was able to do what he never could otherwise have done—use the British and French armies without fear. Faced by the spectre of defeat, the German war lords thundered on, endeavouring to reach Paris. Their blows were heavy, but there were not lacking signs of weakness and indecision. They endeavoured by rallying all their strength to deal a death blow, but it was arrested in mid-air, and after three months of furious breathless fighting the end came.
From the middle of June old soldiers in the New Zealand Division began to notice the preliminary preparations for a great battle. Heavy guns were brought in by ones and twos. Tanks came up quietly by night and were hidden away in patches of wood. Gradually the sector grew hotter. Shell-fire
Rossignol Wood was the highest point on the German line. It consisted of two rectangular patches which opposed a frontage of about five hundred yards to our line in front of Biez Wood, and a lesser and more irregular flank in the direction of Gommécourt. The wood covered an area of some twenty acres. Within it were very deep dugouts and concrete emplacements. It was the bastion of the German trench system in front of Puisieux-auMont and a jumping-off point from which they could deploy a considerable attack. It was as Jçnger, a brave German who faced us here writes: "One of the countless spots that for a few weeks were the central points of the lives and deaths of thousands of men. … It had not the slightest strategical importance and yet at that time it had a meaning for all Europe as a local symbol of power where many lines of fate intersected and against which were set in motion a strength in men and machinery that would have reclaimed a whole province."—Copse 125. Day by day it was subjected to the most terrific bombardments. One moment it would be seen to be sleeping in the sunshine and the next it was deluged with bursting shell. Columns of black smoke rose slowly in the air, carrying clods of earth and broken branches, smashed equipment and mangled men. The chalk was ploughed many feet deep and clouds of white dust floated in
Day after day and night after night patrols crept forward to explore the mysterious wood and the trench system that guarded it. Are the enemy holding such and such a point? A man goes out in broad daylight. He creeps slowly along a length of shallow trench, reaches a point where he must crawl flat on his stomach and crosses inch by inch with infinite caution. The old trench runs under a big hedge and for a moment he is screened from view. He passes the line of the hedge and sees in front of him a parapet. Running parallel with it, and almost touching it, is an old sap filled with wire that five yards farther on bends back to the enemy line. If the post is manned the sentries will be not more than six feet away. The New Zealander presses gently against the wire, finds that it yields a little and that by squeezing along by the wall he can very slowly work his way toward the bend. Inch by inch! Foot by foot! The sinuous coils have to be handled with an extremity of care because if a single strand rattles there will be an alarm and a shower of bursting bombs from which there could be no possibility of escape. Once there is a little rasp and the scout stops dead and waits for minutes that seem like an hour. No bomb! He goes on and at the bend emerges and sees running straight ahead a broad empty communication trench with
At night a patrol goes out in front of the wood itself. The four men cross the parapet and move quietly through a gap in their own wire. Helmets and equipment are left behind and they carry rifles with magazines fully charged, with a few spare clips in their pockets and a couple of bombs apiece. Once clear of the wire, they adopt a diamond formation and then with the leader in front go slowly forward toward the dark mysterious line of trees. Every now and again they slide into a shell-hole, listening intently for any sound and then satisfied that all is safe, move forward once again. Halfway across No Man's Land an old trench is found and searched thoroughly in case the enemy should have pushed forward listening posts to occupy it at night. There is no one in it. A wooden cross with a bit of tattered cloth fluttering from it is the next mark and from there the slow, careful, doubled-up walk
But even as the light streaks up the patrol lie flat and motionless, faces to the earth so that there should be no gleam on white flesh. They make no move even when the flare falls hissing among them. Another goes up and another, but there is no movement. They are not detected. After a little longer pause the leader glides forward. Straight ahead, not fifteen yards away, is a mound of white chalk on the edge of a wood. Black stumps and broken branches form a weird background. Dark objects, J just visible, may be men or may be trees. Is it an enemy post? There is but one way to be sure and the patrol work toward it on their stomachs, moving 1 inch by inch, fingers on triggers with the first pressure already taken. The rear man has the pin in ] his first bomb loosened and is ready in the fraction of a second to launch it over the heads of the others. Five yards away from the mound the leader half rises and goes rapidly in, the others following.' It is an empty shell-hole nearly ten feet deep and unmanned. Close beside it is a heap of rails, wire, iron standards and beams of wood, evidently an old engineers' dump. For ten minutes they lie quiet and listen. They have reached the line of the wood and from the flares which rise on the left it is obvious that they are level with, and perhaps in between, the enemy posts. Shall they proceed farther?
Once more the leader goes ahead straight into
Suddenly, one of the patrol places his hand on a dry stick. It breaks with a sharp snap. Up goes a flare and almost at the same time two machine-guns rattle out. Fortunately their elevation is eighteen inches too high for the men who have instantly flattened out. They roll quietly into a shell-hole. Fritz has evidently caught a glimpse of their movement and immediately goes mad. All his machineguns along half a mile of front open up with a tremendous rattle and send through belt after belt in stuttering blasts. The bombs bang in his wire and there is a brilliant display of flares. The four who have caused this extravagant display of hate sit secure in their crater and laugh noiselessly. Nothing could have done their work better for them. Sentries in the line itself will be able to take direct
At this time American troops were attached temporarily to the New Zealand Division to gain experience of trench warfare. They were Virginians —the grandsons of the men who had fought under Lee and Jackson and indeed one of their captains was a grandson of the great Confederate commander-in-chief. They were very anxious to learn and were not obsessed with any idea of teaching veteran troops how things should be done. They were very likeable folk; and with their quaint sayings, strange manoeuvres, their faculty for getting lost, and their remarkable simplicity, they provided much amusement and made many friends.
And now the pace began to quicken. On 15 July the riflemen rushed Fusiliers and Ford Trenches and bombed down Nameless and Nameless support J taking prisoners and machine-guns. Second Canterbury rushed the north-eastern corner of Rossignol Wood and so gained observation into the very heart | of it. Two days later the enemy blew up their pillbox and withdrew to Moa and Shag. Aucklanders cleared Duck, Swan and Owl. Second Wellington reached the line of Chasseur Hedge. On the 22nd, 1st and 2nd Otago and 1st Auckland attacked again. To clear the way for the Otago attack a sergeant crawled out to the enemy wire and a moment before the barrage was to fall exploded
Chapter XXVIII
Of How the New Zealanders Swept Forward from Bapaume To Le Quesnoy
The German offensives had now definitely failed. The one hope, now, of their leaders was to fall back on defensive positions and, resolutely holding these, to play for time and bring the whole war to a position of stalemate. The Allies realizing this, thrust in against the retreating enemy with all their weight, hoping to turn their retreat into a rout.
On 21 August commenced the battle of Bapaume, and for the next eleven weeks the New Zealanders were constantly moving forward. Under cover of a heavy mist and barrage fire, the Rifle Brigade swept resistlessly in the direction of Irles. Three days later the 1st and 2nd brigades attacked on the line Biefvillers, Grévillers, and Loupart Wood to clear the last ridge before the town. An hour before dawn the assaulting battalions lined up in a long row. Fifteen hundred yards away their objective showed up, dark masses of trees against the lighter background of the open fields. There is | no barrage and the men move off quietly across the silent level. Some walk straight down the main
The line halts and a man moves forward to reconnoitre. The light is dim and there is utter quietness except for a sudden frenzied burst of machinegun fire far away on the left. He moves on. Five yards away there is a guttural challenge. The figures are German, a platoon probably in a forward post. The trench blazes with a sudden crackle of fire. The scout falls flat. By some miracle he is not hit and opens fire himself at point blank range. From behind a Lewis-gun comes into action and sweeps the parapet. Most of the Germans fall in a swathe and the survivors fling up their hands. The advance goes on. Two hundred yards farther on there is a stop while a trench and some old huts are searched. From somewhere on the left there are shouts of alarm and another rattle of fire. Someone else has run on to a point of resistance. Quietness again and a steady move forward! The outline of the tree-skirted village comes nearer. Some platoons reach the dark line without
Germans were everywhere. In a few moments it was clear that the New Zealanders had come clean through the infantry screen and had reached the enemy guns. A great Red Cross flag hung from the upper window of a large house from which a German ambulance just managed to make its escape; a battery of four 8-inch howitzers was taken; a great gun on a railway mounting was rapidly towed out by an engine and just got through; scores of men without firing a shot threw up their hands and surrendered. At Loupart Wood and at the top right-hand corner of the village there was bitter resistance.
Just at dawn the long thin line of attackers came up towards the crest-line. Suddenly it seemed light. From thirty yards in front came a shout of I alarm. German gunners had been peering out into the darkness. Their own men had not fallen back on them. No SOS flares had gone up. The fire in front might easily have been explained. Their ' front line was a thousand yards away. And yet | there were suspicions that all was not well. Then, as the dawn came clear before them, they saw an enemy line advancing! They hesitated! The initiative lay with any bold leader on either side. A sergeant rushes forward to lead the way in, but at | the critical moment finds a belt of trip-wire at his feet. A German springs to his gun. Then in a moment six of them blaze into action. They fire belt after belt and cut up the ground in all
Back across the valley three tanks are seen. Helmets go up on bayonet points to attract their attention. A veteran sergeant who had fought in every fight from the Landing goes back and explains the situation. The tanks follow him up the hill. Bang! Bang! Bang! An anti-tank gun concealed somewhere among the trees opens up viciously on the lumbering iron monsters. One is hit and then another. The sergeant walks in front of the remaining one. The little shells burst all round him. A flying splinter tears his wrist. He moves on. The machine-gun rattle commences to slacken. The gunners see their danger and suddenly they feel hopeless. The tank is close upon them. They flee back among the trees. The infantry rise up, and, even as they do so, bang! clear and hard, a shell strikes the tank. It gives a lurch, slews half-round and then stops dead; but the infantry press on across the sunken road and work down the crest and fling themselves under heavy fire into the old grassgrown shell-holes of 1916. The brave sergeant who had led the attack was shot dead by an enemy sniper as he continued to press forward. All along the front the Germans recovered from their surprise. Fresh battalions were pushed forward in front of Bapaume. Their fire became very heavy and the attack was stayed.
For the next few days constant pressure was maintained. The fighting patrols were continually
All this time prisoners came back in scores and hundreds. Patrols of four or five men moved up and attacked machine-gun nests and after a little bombing or a few shots the garrison surrendered and twenty or thirty men would file out with their hands up, leaving four or five guns splendidly placed with which they could have shot down a battalion. As they went back to the prison cages the men in the rear who had nothing better to do examined these "kamerads" for automatic revolvers, field-glasses, wristlet watches, and anything else of value. The "ratting" of prisoners was a very interesting process. Some men were too proud to plunder ana stood aloof. Others out of a thirst for knowledge or a desire for souvenirs displayed a keen interest in all that was Fritz's from his jewellery and cash to the photo of the "fräuleins" that he carried in his pocket. Usually the search was conducted in a friendly spirit and the unfortunate one was consoled for the loss of his Iron Cross or his girl's photograph with cigarettes or tobacco or a tin of beef. There were beastly men though whose desire for gain was stronger than any feeling of common humanity.
One Red Cross private in particular was disgustingly avaricious. A little group of Germans came stumbling back. One of them was very white and looked as though he were fainting. An infantry man stepped up to him, raised his overcoat, and saw that one arm was hanging in a broken smash. The ghastly wound was undressed, without a tourniquet, and the poor wretch was bleeding to death. The matter was pointed out to the Red Cross man, who
Every night now the bombing planes went over, squadron after squadron, to bomb the German roads and bridges and dumps and the towns of the Rhineland. Germans, too, came over—not so many, because they were being overwhelmed in the air also —and bombed Bapaume. In the old days at Romarin the night raiders had been picked up by searchlights and then heavily shelled by antiaircraft guns. There was a beautiful display of fireworks for all those who cared to sit up and watch the proceedings. In due course the raider dropped his bombs and then departed trailing shrapnel bursts behind him, but never apparently the worse for wear. The anti-aircraft gunners and the
Times, however, had changed and the "strafing" of raiders had become a much more scientific and deadly business. The drumming in the air grew louder, the throb of a German engine became clearly distinguishable. Half a dozen dazzling beams shot up and crossed and recrossed each other in the darkness. One of them catches the great Gotha; then the others converge upon him and hold him fast in a point of intense light. Desperately, blindly, he endeavours to break through the circle of light into the friendly darkness. A British fighter that has been on patrol far up in the upper air flies to within fifty feet of the blinded giant and rattles in a short burst of fire. The Gotha commences to fall. The roar of her engines ceases. Streaks of smoke and flame burst from her fusilage. She is on fire and falling fast. A thousand feet from the ground she tumbles out of the searchlight beams and then, wrapped in a sheet of her own flame, crashes among the ruins of the town, her bombs exploding with frightful detonation as she strikes the earth. For miles round the infantry in all the camps look on with eagerness and cheer as the raider drops to earth. The searchlights go out. The patrol takes up its beat again. Two
Trescault Spur was strongly held and the Germans were determined to maintain it. They brought up two crack divisions, newly rested and re-equipped, one of them being the famous Jaegers, a magnificent body of men in their distinctive uniforms of green, strengthened with patches of leather. They lined the ridge with machine-guns and brought a power of artillery. The 2nd and 3rd battalions of the Rifle Brigades made the preliminary attack. The companies moved out in the pitch darkness stumbling over broken wire, old trenches and through the tangled copses in front of Gouzeacourt Wood. Our barrage fell and still in the darkness the men moved forward. The German guns replied at once and their whole front blazed with machine-gun fire. In the darkness they trained their guns too high and the right attacking company went in and stormed African support. After some little while the company on the left came up, but the remainder of the attack made only small progress. Now commenced some of the fiercest bombfighting of the war. Parties of riflemen bombed all along African support to Dead Man's Corner, driving the enemy before them. But their supplies of bombs ran out and the brave Jaegers attacked in their turn and drove them back. All day small parties of men dashed up communication saps with bucketfuls of bombs and, raining them on some enemy post, compelled it to give ground, and then, as like as not, were beaten back by showers of stick
For a few days the New Zealanders were withdrawn and held in reserve to exploit successes on the army front. But on 29 September they were brought up and early in the morning attacked across Welch Ridge and toward La Vacquerie. While brave men in pockets here and there fought well and a couple of platoons were even cut off and compelled to surrender, the attack swept forward resistlessly and in an effortless fashion. Nearly fifteen hundred prisoners, thirty-two cannon and two hundred machine-guns were captured with the slightest of loss, and there is little doubt that the triumphal procession would have swept on still farther if it had not been halted prematurely. Such are the successes that can be won against a broken army. From the captured ridges the grey spires and towers of
The advance swept forward again across the impenetrable masses of wire that guarded the Beaurevoir-Masnières line through Esnes and Lesdain, numbers of Germans surrendering without a fight. Patrols pushed into Fontaine-au-Pire and Beauvois. In the latter village the New Zealanders received a rapturous welcome from a few civilians who had hidden in the cellars till the fighting should pass over them. Viesly was taken and Briastre. To show how broken were the enemy, it is sufficient to say that the New Zealanders had advanced eleven miles in five days and with a total casualty list of five hundred and thirty-six had inflicted very great loss on the enemy, captured thirteen guns, and over fourteen hundred prisoners. During all this time there was intense activity behind the lines. Transport continually moving up to establish fresh supply bases, engineers testing wells, building bridges, repairing roads, signallers incessantly pushing out fresh wire, field ambulances moving forward their advanced dressing stations, artillery moving up to keep pace with the advancing infantry.
On 23 October the New Zealand Division commenced its last advance and swept through Vertigneul and Pont-à-Pierre and Beaudignies to the outskirts of Le Quesnoy, where, on 4 November, the last fight was fought. In the darkness two orange-coloured flares shot up as a signal that all was ready
"Nous sommes sauvés! Nous sommes sauvés l"
"Vive I' Angleterre! Vive la France!"
"Embrassez-moi, monsieur!"
"Ici, monsieur, four vous et les camarades!"
Flowers and cakes and flags were showered on the men. There was kissing and handshaking and weeping and laughter.
"Après quatre années! Nous sommes sauvés!"
There was wild tumultuous excitement. Everywhere as if by magic the tricolour was flying on the buildings and the blue, white and red of France was on rifle-barrels and round men's hats.
And outside the town, when the fighting had died down to a few long-range shots, one of the bravest of the brave who had fought at Anzac and through all the French campaigns fell mortally wounded by a chance shot.
Chapter XXIX
Of How the New Zealanders Marched Into Germany
On 11 November the New Zealanders commenced to go back for the "King's Rest," a mythical holiday that the division had been promising itself for a long time. As the battalions moved they received word that the Armistice had been signed and that the fighting was over. The news was received without excitement. It had, of course, been expected. "Thank God the bloody business is over at last." And then slowly, as the shadow lifted, men commenced to talk of home and loved ones without the "if" that for so many years had darkened all bright plans for the future. Word came that the division was to form part of the army of occupation and that the men were to march to the German border. This news was received with mixed feelings. A trip to Germany was certainly something to look forward to, but marching long distances with full packs had never been a favourite pastime of the New Zealanders. Though tramping all day long over cobblestones or through slushy mud with an eighty-pound pack up is excellent for the health there were not many who appreciated the advantages of physical culture so carried out.
When the line of march lay parallel with the railway, and cheering Tommies passed with glad shouts to the weary footsloggers, the atmosphere became distinctly thicker and more sulphurous. When the spirit is not willing the flesh has always a tendency to become weak. However, once the march was fairly commenced, it proved on the whole to be the best of good fun.
The route lay through the storied country of the Sambre and Meuse valleys. Every few miles the men passed some famous town—Jemapper, Valenciennes, Bavay, Maubeuge, Charleroi, Namur, Liège. Up and down this old road had gone the armies of William of Orange and Marlborough, of Napoleon and Blçcher and Wellington. The country was unmarked by ravage and the ancient towns were very fair to see. Each night saw the battalions in fresh billets—sometimes a great railway station with wooden floors for the lucky and asphalt for the remainder; or a factory, or some huge chateau that the Germans had stripped of wood to make their fires, and sometimes the barns of a little village. Friendliness was in the very air. | The liberated French and Belgians were overflowing with happiness and enthusiasm for the "brave British heroes." At Verviers there were marvellous scenes. For four years the inhabitants had lived as it were in Germany and through their streets had poured unending streams of men in field grey, singing German songs as they marched to the battlefields of the Western Front.
But now the tide had turned. In the last few
Once across the German border the troops entrained at the little station of Herbesthal and proceeded to Ehrenfeld just outside Cologne, from where they crossed the Rhine by the bridge of boats and marched through the town to Mulheim and the surrounding villages. The German population came into the streets and watched with expressionless faces. Many of them were the men who had held the hosts of the Allies at bay for so long
Fair-haired little Fritz was the beginning of it. He had been starved for chocolate and his national pride commenced to wilt before friendly men who offered him slabs of delight. His golden-haired little sister shyly took some, too, and friendship commenced to widen. With the women folk the New Zealanders rapidly became popular. Courtesy is a key that opens hearts the wide world over and the New Zealand standards of courtesy to women have always been high. When frau and the fräuleins found that the men in slouch hats gave up seats in tram-cars, opened doors, were not above carrying parcels or working the pump, they were at first a little suspicious, but when they perceived that such civilities were simply the outward expression of respect to themselves as women, they rapidly thawed and the billets became very friendly places. Many of the men were invited to dances and social functions and they went. If demobilization had not commenced rapidly and proceeded apace, there might well have been German war brides in New Zealand to-day.
Chapter XXX
And of How They Came Home
Then there was shouting and laughing and weeping and all the kings came to the shore and they led away the heroes to their homes and bewailed the valiant dead.
Kingsley,
TheHonorata was the first of the great procession of transports that swept across the Atlantic through the Panama Canal and so to the blue waters of the Pacific. She made no stops and the eager men on board desired none. Some had been away from their homes for over four years and all their desire was for the sight of loved ones and the dear familiar faces and the green hills of their native land. At last the Pencarrow Cliffs rose up out of the sea and the transport ran in past Seatoun and Miramar and Point Halswell to the wharves at Wellington that were black with the waiting people. Three days later on a brilliant day she steamed past the yellow cliffs of Coromandel and into the Hauraki Gulf, passed Tiri and Waiheke and Motutapu, and then through the Rangitoto Channel with Milford and Takapuna on the right-hand side. And as she swung round North Head the sirens of all
Appendix
Few serious thinkers to-day would endeavour to justify the World War. It was beyond reasonable doubt the major insanity and the most profoundly immoral act of our time. St James says with extraordinary aptness: "Each man is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust, and enticed. Then the lust, when it hath conceived, beareth sin: and the sin, when it is fullgrown, bringeth forth death." War springs from the lusts of men, from the insistence of nations at all costs to seek satisfaction for their own desires at the expense of their neighbours. The peoples of old Europe had over a period of some fifty years built up a complex of conflicting desires that could in the long run result only in catastrophe. In 1870 German unity had been attained largely as a result of a victorious war against France and she was afraid of a French war of revenge. She feared the growing friendship of France with Russia. She was jealous of the sea power of Great Britain, and she desired greatly to obtain more colonies so that she might find markets for her growing industries. There were those in Germany, too, who thought imperially, and in the floodtide of their strength dreamed of the conquest of the world for the sake of glory and Deutschland! Deutschland über alles! In France they were afraid of Germany. Patriotic feelings had been outraged by the debacle of the Franco-Prussian War. If it could be hopefully attempted many Frenchmen desired a war of revenge and the extension of French borders towards the Rhine. Great Britain was afraid of the growing sea power of Germany. For a hundred years, and these the years of her great prosperity, she had without challenge been supreme on the
All the European countries were determined to enforce their desires even if the act of enforcement should involve the violation or the overthrow of any who stood in the way. They all desired peace providing that they could secure their ends by peaceful means but if not they were all prepared to fight. So the Germans organized a marvellous army because they were expecting to fight on two fronts and at the same time built a strong navy to challenge the supremacy of the seas. The French trained every man to arms, girdled their frontiers with powerful fortifications and made powerful alliances. The British true to the ancient policy that had won so many wars had by far the greatest navy in the world. In 1914 the inevitable happened and Europe broke out into a flame of war. In every country men rallied to the colours with enthusiasm and genuine passion.
Now this rally was not in the least surprising. A spirit of self-centred and selfish nationalism was very strong in Europe. As a result of the process of history each national unit had become self-conscious and unified within itself. The nation—the fatherland—was the largest and most important organization that man knew. It had a visible corporate life. Men felt themselves to be bone of its bone, flesh of its flesh. From infancy they had sung its songs—the "Watch on the Rhine," the "Marseillaise," "Rule Britannia." Their history books were the stories of their countries' wars. German boys read of the campaigns of Frederick the Great. French boys marched with Napoleon through all the capitals of Europe. English boys thrilled at the stories of Drake and Clive
If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is forever England.
sings
All that a man might ask, thou hast given me, England. Yet grant me one thing more, That now when envious foes would spoil thy splendour, Unversed in arms, a dreamer such as I May in thy ranks be not unworthy, England, for thee to die.
says another. And in the last year
I vow to thee, my country—all earthly things above— Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love, The love that asks no questions: the love that stands the test, That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best, The love that never falters, the love that pays the price. The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.
We who belonged to the British race had grown up at a time when Kitchener and Roberts were the public idols. The occupation of Egypt, the conquest of the Sudan, the smashing of the Boxer Rising, and the Boer War were the great events of our childhood. The righteousness of these conquests had scarcely been discussed. Britain of course was always right. The Mahdi's men had killed Gordon; the Boxers had murdered missionaries; the Boers were said to have treated the Kaffirs very cruelly. There was always a sufficient cause of war. Somehow Britain seemed always to have been right and presumably always would be.
All of us—Germans, French and British—learned before the war to think of international affairs from the point of view of narrow self-centred nationalism. There was, on a large scale, no other loyalty open to men. Communism was of course fermenting beneath the surface; but even good British and German socialists were after all in the main nationalists first and internationalists second. The majority sections of the Labour parties everywhere supported the war—although with somewhat guilty consciences. Then there was the Christian Church which in theory should have been a united body and truly international and which should have stood for a world brotherhood that would have made a world war impossible. Everywhere however the Churches, hopelessly divided by national barriers, were the obedient servants of patriotism and imperialism. The greatest debacle of the war was without question that of the Christian Church. She was subservient everywhere to the national governments. All over the world Christian ministers closed their New Testaments, preached more paganism and became the recruiting sergeants of the armies.
So a world that had been brought up to believe in war went with songs and cheering down the brimstone tracks that led to the fields of Armageddon; and so, by the way of terror, to the supreme tragedy of the Peace Conference; there to learn, by bitter experience and cruel disillusionment, that the way of war and violence achieves nothing except destruction. As
Waste of muscle, waste of brain, Waste of patience, waste of pain, Waste of manhood, waste of wealth, Waste of beauty, waste of health, Waste of blood, and waste of tears, Waste of youth's most precious years, Waste of ways the saints have trod, Waste of glory, waste of God. — War.
The condemnation of war lies not in the sacrifice of life, but in the fact that the sacrifice is wasted as far as the attaining of any good end is concerned. Sacrifice is the essential of all development toward higher levels of life. It is the way of the Cross. But to be availing, sacrifice must be directed into profitable channels. There can be a waste of the capacity for sacrifice just as there can be a waste of patience or wealth. The primary aim of a combatant is not to offer himself as a sacrifice but to destroy his opponent with the minimum of loss to himself. The paradox of war is that great communities endeavouring to enforce their desires against others in the most selfish manner, are, for the attainment of their ends, compelled to challenge their own peoples to most heroic acts of self-giving. The glory of war lies in the fact that masses of ordinary men are prepared to devote themselves to bloody wounds and frightful deaths for the sake of loyalties, which however mistaken, are nevertheless the highest that they know. To go to war is an evil thing, because war is destructive of brotherhood. But there is one thing even worse and that is to remain at peace for the sake of gain. A school acquaintance of the writer's remarked at the beginning of the war that he was not going to be shot at for five shillings a day. The remark was utterly ignoble, and if it had fairly reflected the mind of our people it would have stamped us as what our old Teutonic forefathers called "nithing" —the utterly contemptible.
The writer of this book how holds the Christian Pacifist position, and in the event of another war would not take up arms and fight. He believes that the great task of all men of goodwill is to abolish war and build a peaceful world. It is a mistake however as some writers of war books would seem to suggest that man can be frightened from war by accounts of the suffering of men in battle, by the description of incidental horrors, or by a totalling of the losses in life and material. In so far as any of these are introduced into this book it is with no such
For about a hundred years we had been slowly laying, the foundations of a national character of strongly marked individuality. The incidence of the war completed and intensified the process. We emerged from the conflict a nation, and a proud one at that, with traditions of courtesy, patience, endurance, steadfastness and valour. And now conscious of our nationality with strong life stirring in our veins and a world of change before us, what are the great ends that challenge us to achievements ?
The first is the making, in fact, of "a land fit for heroes to live in." We have copied far too slavishly the worn out institutions of the Europe of the Industrial Revolution and in a country that is full of food and natural wealth of all sorts we have allowed our people to suffer to a shocking extent. Thousands of men who fought in the ranks of the N.Z.E.F. have been on relief work. Our educational system has been so gravely interfered with that it will take a generation to recover. And all this because we have not dared to break the enchanted ring of ancient custom! Within our own borders at least we can make a land of plenty in which no one will
Our second great end should be to make our proper contribution to international life. We are a small people and yet at the end of the war we had a reputation out of all proportion to our size. We have now direct representation at the League of Nations and of course at all Imperial conferences. But what have we done with these opportunities? Slavishly followed the old men of Europe who have continued to dodder along the brimstone tracks that lead to destruction!
Surely a young and virile people can do better than this? Our general standard of education is high—our human quality is perhaps not surpassed anywhere. We have the capacity for thought, we are able to take initiative and then to perform with a steadfastness of purpose mat can with patient perseverance win through a storm of difficulties. Why is it that for thirty years since the great tide of liberalism ran out that we have done no great and notable thing toward making a better country and a better world? Various reasons can be given—years of material prosperity, the terrible upheaval of the war, the difficulties of the post-war years. But now surely the time has come for another burst of national self-expression mat will lift us to higher things.
For fifteen years the men of the N.Z.E.F. have been getting married and settling down and fighting hard to get on their feet and that last wasn't easy after the four tremendous years of packed experience. During all this