In the Footsteps of Private Lynch Read online

  The men of the 45th Battalion were active in their patrolling at night, but the German artillery was alert to this. Their unit history says that on 27 November 1916, one officer and seven men were killed and one officer and 28 men of other ranks were wounded – a lot of good men. After this time in the line near Gueudecourt, they moved back to New Carlton camp near Bazentin, 10 kilometres behind the line. The 45th then established themselves at Flesselles, north of Amiens, where they enjoyed Christmas and were granted leave to visit the city. Though far from the warmth of an Australian summer, the men of the 45th Battalion enjoyed a quiet Christmas behind the lines. The men's ordinary food ration was supplemented 'by the purchase of certain delicacies', according to the battalion history, and each man received a parcel from the battalion Comforts Fund, including a pipe and tobacco, cigarettes, socks and sweets. The battalion history goes on to say: 'These simple gifts had a special significance to soldiers fighting thousands of miles away from their own folk and they were valued because they were packed with loving care and the best of good wishes.'1

  In Australia, the hot, dry summer was in great contrast to the northern winter. Christmas for many families was a sombre affair with celebrations and the usual ceremony far from their minds. Of more concern were their menfolk, how they were faring; if indeed they were still alive. On 1 January 1917, daylight saving was introduced under Commonwealth legislation as a wartime fuel-saving measure which, due to wartime emergency regulations, was binding on all the states.

  In early January 1917, the 45th Battalion were met by their reinforcements, including Private Lynch, and marched to Dernancourt. There, Nulla and his mates are like visitors at first, inspecting 'souvenirs' in chalky old trenches, seeing their first dead man, wandering off to look at an anti-aircraft battery, before they 'make off for fresh excitement'. Nulla watches the firing of the big guns and speaks to the gunners about their targets. The gunners explain that each gun, when not firing on a specific target, is ranged on the Australian SOS line – an area in front of the Australian frontline in no-man's-land and extending back into the German positions. Should there be a surprise attack upon the Australian line, the defending troops would fire a coloured flare or series of coded flares so that the guns, already registered on the likely area of attack, could be quickly brought into action. The Germans did the same and many times in Somme Mud we read of German SOS flares being fired once any disturbance was detected from the Australian front.

  For Nulla and his mates, it is only when they see the first casualties come in, 'the mud-stained, blood-sodden bandages and the frail white faces', that reality begins to sink in. But there is no time for pondering: that afternoon they move off for the frontline.

  Moving towards the front 'through absolutely unbelievable conditions', Nulla passes through Bernafay Wood:

  On either side stretches a quagmire, a solid sea of slimy mud. The roads are few and narrow and only distinguished from the surrounding shell-ploughed mud by an unbroken edging of smashed motor cars, ambulances, guns, ammunition limbers and dead horses and mules. [pp. 22–23]

  Bernafay Wood had been a British objective in the July 1916 offensive and was the scene of savage fighting. The Germans had set up well-sited machine-gun positions in the shattered wood and inflicted high casualties on the advancing British, but the wood was captured on 4 July. Today this wood, as with others in the immediate area like Delville Wood, Trones Wood and High Wood, shows the scars of the heavy shelling and fighting during the First World War.

  This is the same across many of the old battlefield areas of France and Belgium. After the war, the trees grew back, creating woodlands once more, but nobody cleaned up the area and filled in the shell-holes. And so today, once you walk into the tree line, the ground is rough and churned up and both the trench-lines and the shell-holes are clearly visible, though overgrown with blackberry bushes and other weeds. The boundaries, however, remain virtually the same as they were for hundreds of years before 1914.

  The men press on. Nulla notes that bogged vehicles are being dug out and 'patches of corduroy are being placed over the worst places' in the road, referring to the common practice during the First World War of laying down logs side by side to make a roadway. The existing roads had not been built to take the enormous amount of traffic and the heavy weight of gun limbers (carts for guns and ammunition) and supply wagons. They were farm tracks or narrow country laneways between villages, unsealed and with no firm foundation or base. For the men stumbling forward, they were now covered in slippery logs or lengths of sawn timber; broken, irregular and hazardous underfoot. Men slipped and twisted their ankles, slid between the logs or stumbled on exposed roots covered by a layer of sticky mud.

  Because of the accuracy of the German artillery, these roads were continually under fire, so that the sides of the road were littered with upturned wagons, dead horses, smashed timber and the stores and supplies that had been spilt from shell-shattered wagons. Among this debris would have been the bodies of men and horses, mud-splattered and bloated and left where they had fallen.

  Nulla trudges through mud, lies in the mud in the rain with the other men for over an hour and then, when darkness falls, files on towards the frontline. He and his mates want to shelter from enemy shelling while the experienced soldiers, who have 'been through Gallipoli, Fleurbaix and Pozières', seem to barely heed it. The young reinforcements do their best to hide their fear. And then comes the 'strangled scream and the rushing air of an approaching shell' and Nulla witnesses his first death in battle, before he has even made it to the frontline.

  With a mighty roar the shell explodes spouting flame and phosphorus fumes everywhere. Mud is showered over everyone as pieces of shell fly over our prone bodies. A man five feet ahead of me is sobbing – queer, panting, gasping sobs. He bends his head towards his stomach just twice and is still ... We've had our baptism of fire, seen our first man killed, right amongst us, and hurry on before another shell comes. [p.. 23]

  Finally they reach the front. We know from the battalion history that, just as in Somme Mud, at the frontline the 45th Battalion took over the 46th Battalion's trenches – Grease Trench and Goodwin's Trench – where the men were up to their knees in mud. These trenches were part of a complex of trenches including Lard Trench, Petrol Lane, Whale Trench and Oily Lane, near Gueudecourt to the northeast of Pozières. Trenches were given names in various ways. Sometimes it was after an officer who commanded a section of trench or ordered it be dug. At other times a theme was used, such as the trench system northwest of Gueudecourt, which was named after various grain crops. Hence you have Barley, Wheat and Malt Trench. Sometimes places were named after popular landmarks such as Hyde Park Corner and Piccadilly in Ploegsteert Wood, and Collins Street in Gueudecourt.

  Gueudecourt was the scene of heavy fighting for the Australians and the 45th Battalion until early April, when they moved north to Bullecourt. The British front at this time was trying to continue the push in a northeasterly direction and Dominion forces were everywhere in this part of the line. The South Africans had suffered badly at Delville Wood just to the south and the New Zealanders had a similarly costly experience at nearby Longueval.

  Gueudecourt is today a typically sleepy French village surrounded by green fields and quaint little farms. One place easily identified on the outskirts of the village is Fritz's Folly, which still remains a sunken road. The stark black and white photographs of Fritz's Folly show a desolate landscape bare of trees, but you can make out the snaking lane and the high ground occupied by the Germans a kilometre in the rear.

  Also near Gueudecourt is what is known on the trench maps of the time as 'Cheese Road'. This too is a sunken road which starts a kilometre out of the village near the AIF Burial Ground, Grass Lane. This cemetery was in dead ground, well out of sight of German artillery observers, and was the location of an Australian Field Dressing station in 1916 and 1917. Men who died while receiving treatment were buried there. Naturally there are a number of men from
the 45th Battalion interred there, such as Private Walter Leo Lussick, a New Zealand-born member of the battalion who died aged 20 on 19 January 1917. Like Private Lynch, he had enlisted in Bathurst in February 1916 and had arrived in the third reinforcement of the battalion.

  Nearby are the graves of two other 45th Battalion soldiers who died on the same day – 6 August 1916 – fighting near Pozières. The first is of another Bathurst boy, Spencer John Letcher, an apprentice painter. He had enlisted in October 1915 and had sailed as part of a reinforcement for the newly formed 45th Battalion then in camp at Tel-el-Kebir in Egypt. From there he had sailed on the Kinfauns Castle to Marseilles, arriving in early June 1916 and, like so many others, took the train north to the battlefields. After his death, his personal effects were sent to his father and comprised '2 wallets, belt, note book, cigarette case, letters, gospel, tracts'.

  In the same cemetery is the grave of Lance Corporal John Stewart Mulholland, aged 33, who was also killed in action on 6 August 1917. He was born in New Zealand, landed at Gallipoli five days after the initial landing and also sailed to Marseilles on the Kinfauns Castle. He was killed during the fighting around Flers and Gueudecourt in early 1917.

  Private Lynch's luck held and his war continued. On his first night in the line in Grease Trench, his character Nulla experiences the German heavy mortars known as minenwerfers ('mine throwers') as they bombard the trench, making the ground shake. These weapons came in a range of calibres, but the most common was the 'light' minenwerfer, which fired a 7.6-centimetre-calibre explosive-filled projectile weighing 4.5 kilograms. It had a range of up to 1,300 metres but was very effective in close trench fighting because it could send a projectile high into the air so that it dropped on the Allies' line only 300 metres away, demolishing a section of trench. Though they were heavy and difficult to handle in muddy conditions, they were used extensively from the beginning of the war. At the armistice, there were 10,000 still in service.

  While the Germans had developed the minenwerfers before the outbreak of the war, the British were slow to introduce an equivalent. The British engineer Wilfred Scott-Stokes set to work designing a 3-inch mortar, however, the first Stokes mortar did not see active service until September 1916.

  While in the frontline at Grease Trench, Private Lynch was part of a wiring party sent out at night to strengthen the barbed wire defences in front of their position. This involved screwing in iron pickets, twisted iron stakes (also known as a 'screw picket') to act as a post onto which the wire was secured. This was dangerous work in no-man's-land in front of the Australian trenches and close to the German frontline. As Nulla tells us:

  No one speaks as everyone knows that half a dozen machine-guns are on the enemy parapet just a hundred yards away. Quietly out, our footsteps sound like thunder to our excited minds. [p. 24]

  At this time, screw pickets were made in Sweden and the company supplied both the German and Allied armies. Today in France and Belgium, you can still see First World War screw pickets being used by farmers to hold up fences to keep in their cows. You can also find them dumped with other rusty war detritus.

  As Nulla recounts, his half hour with the wiring party and coming under fire did more to accustom him to the frontline than a week standing in the mud. He and his mates had been blooded. They were not quite the same fresh-faced, carefree larrikins who steamed across from Australia on the Wiltshire. We can only imagine that Private Lynch, like so many Australian soldiers, experienced a similar dramatic change on entering the frontline.

  For almost the next three years, Lynch would go through a cycle of spending a few days in the frontline, or in support or reserve lines, then being marched out to a rest area for a spell or to a hospital for treatment of his wounds, only to then return to the frontline to face death and the horrors of battle once again. Just like his narrator, Nulla, Private Lynch's war was to centre for months on a small area no bigger than 10 or 12 kilometres by about 6 kilometres across; from Gueudecourt in the north, to the divisional baths in Fricourt further south. From early January until the move north in April 1917, he was never far from the sounds of war and, for most of this time, within artillery range of the heavier German guns.

  THREE

  Holding the

  Line

  The winter of 1916–17 was the worst in living memory, and the snow and icy conditions were something totally new to the Australians. The earth froze for a time and, while this was easier to deal with than mud in terms of moving troops and supplies, it increased the risk of hypothermia for the men and made attacks impossible. Weapons and machinery froze because oil could no longer lubricate them; guns did not fire. Men took to loaves of bread with axes and slept in their boots, as they would be unable to pull them on in the morning because they would be frozen and brittle. The earth was rock hard, impossible to dig into.

  The weather slowed operations and the mounting of offensives would have to wait until the spring thaw. The war had become one of survival against the elements more than the Germans. In Egypt, the British were preparing to push into the Sinai Peninsula to clear out Turkish forces before their planned invasion of Palestine, which had Jerusalem as its ultimate objective. In Mesopotamia, British forces were pushing towards Baghdad. On the Western Front, the Australian divisions were concentrated in a 5-kilometre front in an arc around Gueudecourt.

  Lynch's first experience of the frontline had lasted an exhausting eight days, and following three weeks' rest at Mametz Camp, he returned with his battalion to the trenches near Gueudecourt. On 8 February they moved into the support positions in Gap and Switch Trench and relieved the 14th Battalion. Eight days later, they moved forward into the reserve trenches at Pilgrims Way, before moving into the frontline at Stormy Trench on 17 February.

  It is in the village of Bazentin – by now just a 'pulverised brickyard' – that Somme Mud picks up the story. That night it starts to rain and, weighed down by heavy greatcoats, equipment, rations, ammunition and a wet blanket each, they march to the line. Nulla mentions that the guide who is to lead them to their positions calls to them when they reach 'the sunken road'. Sunken roads, which are still common in this area, are roadways that have, as a result of constant use over a long period, cut themselves into the landscape and hence appear 'sunken'. They may be a metre or more beneath the level of the surrounding countryside, often with steeply angled sides. Within the deeper sunken roads, men were able to burrow into the sides and make temporary shelters. Battalion headquarters, always somewhere just behind the frontline, were often situated in the protection of a sunken road, along with support units such as field kitchens, first aid posts and communication centres. Today they are popular with military archaeologists who, with the aid of metal detectors, often find interesting war relics in and around them. Many sunken roads have been widened to allow two lanes of traffic and their profile is very different from what it would have been in 1917.

  Naturally, changeovers were done at night, but any sound quickly summoned an enemy barrage on the frontline and the support trenches, risking the lives of double the usual number of men, as one battalion left and the new one came in to replace them. If German intelligence received word of troop movements in and out, they became an attractive target for the gunners – men massing in narrow, unprotected trenches, with nowhere to run.

  Nulla and the other men climb up out of the sunken road and walk across the mud to their guide, who is waiting for them in Eve Alley, a communication trench leading to the frontline. The trenches around Gueudecourt were in very poor condition, especially Eve Alley. The mud there was knee deep and the men preferred to walk in the open above the trench, exposing themselves to enemy fire, rather than struggle through the mud and become exhausted. Nulla himself does this, risking the German machine-gunners and snipers about 200 metres away. Conditions in the reserve lines were no better. According to Charles Bean, Gap and Switch Trenches, near Gueudecourt, were 'merely an open muddy drain in which men suffered almost as severely as in the front
line'.2 Looking at the open, undulating countryside today, so windblown and exposed, it is clear the men had little protection from the elements and it is easy to imagine how terribly cold they must have been.

  This part of the frontline had been so heavily shelled that long sections of trench had been obliterated. Soldiers were manning shell craters and short sections of trench and there were gaps between their isolated posts. There was a large gap in the line between Lynch's 45th Battalion and the 48th Battalion some 100 metres away and this gap needed to be patrolled regularly during the night, with men from each battalion taking turns to make the dangerous trip between outposts.

  One can imagine the fear of a man having to sneak out alone and make his way across 100 metres of muddy, shell-blasted battlefield at night with nothing to guide him but his sense of direction and rat-cunning. There were no landmarks in this flat, desolate landscape, no hills or even trees to act as reference points, just a trust in your sense of direction and a lot of courage. You were on your own. In the blackness, somewhere over there, you would have to find the Australian frontline, knowing that the men there were silent and alert, staring into no-man's-land, ever vigilant in case of a surprise attack. The chance of a nervous or trigger-happy sentry firing on you would prey on your mind, especially as you needed to crawl close to the Australian position before whispering the password, so that the Germans, a short distance away across no-man's-land, could not hear.

  Over 100 metres, if a man strayed off course by only a few degrees, he could suddenly find himself in the enemy's trench or caught in their wire. As trenches were built and destroyed, saps were pushed forward and trenches weaved and twisted in all directions, it was very easy to take a wrong turn. Later in this chapter, Nulla's mate Yacob makes himself very unpopular both with the men and his officers when he nearly guides the relief troops into the enemy line – and from what history tells us about the trenches around Gueudecourt, particularly the nearby area of the 'Maze', this was easily done.