Did you know Germany nearly won the First World War?

Sometimes we can't see the wood for the trees. When we Australians commemorate ANZAC Day each 25 April, that's often how I feel. The big picture, 'macro' story can be lost within the mire of various platitudes and 'micro' commentary.

Craving to understand more of the big picture, I was very interested in the latest issue of the Sydney Review of Books, featuring Greg Lockhart’s article Gallipoli Reckoning. It examines two books about Gallipoli, books whose authors were driven by ‘the strong impulse to follow primary evidence and build their subjects from the bottom up’.  This was music to my ears. It’s how I like to work too. Last week, in Churchill’s Silver Bullet, Lockhart reviewed a book using primary resources, rather than conventional wisdom and self-serving books, to examine how the disastrous Gallipoli decisions were made in England, decisions which ultimately led to what Lockhart describes as the ‘heroism in defeat’ narrative in Australia.

Weblinks this year led me to last year's offering, under the heading Imperial Romance,  Greg Lockhart reviewed two other ‘war’ books and argued that ‘Australian histories of the Great War are generally part of an imperial romance that floats free from any workable Australian national framework’. 

Stephen & Nigel Boulton - Brothers in Arms

After reading Lockhart’s commentary on the general shortcomings of WW1 military history books, I felt greatly relieved that my own recent book on this topic offers the reader almost entirely a primary resource document. It cites Bean’s Official History of Australia in the War of 1914-18 only once – in a quote on pp 339-340 covering specific events at the end of March 1918.

Should I confess that I was largely ignorant of Australia’s overall role in WW1 when I sat down to ‘do something’ with the Great War letters written by my Boulton grandmother’s two brothers? The letters were saved by their recipient, my great grandmother, who had them typed in the 1920s. She presented a typed copy to the Australian War Memorial. The originals were immediately requested and they have been preserved in Canberra ever since.

It was those Boulton letters which taught me the history of that appalling war. They offer a wonderful primary resource for the times, largely free of today’s interpretations. Some may be disappointed that my book simply orders the letters, introduces them where necessary and ‘presents the story’. But women readers of my book, in particular, have responded well to this approach because it’s a narrative account of that war, personalised, with intelligent characters whose lives the readers can follow.

I was limited by space, time deadlines and publishing costs from delving much further into the military, political and social history beyond what is revealed within the text of these letters.  The book would have been too long. Thus, the several hundred letters are offered up as an original source for professional historians and general readers who are invited to draw their own conclusions.

Here follow several of mine.

The letters cover the whole war, including the Gallipoli campaign, but do not support the view that the events of 25 April 1915 saw the birth of Australian ‘nationhood’. As Lockhart points out, this happened in the lead up to Federation in 1901, and afterwards too. A sense of nationhood saw the establishment of citizen military forces from 1901 and the building of our own naval fleet, which sailed proudly into Sydney Harbour in 1913.

Nor was Gallipoli the initial generator of Australian ‘mateship’, as we hear so often on ANZAC Day. I'm glad that this claim is morphing into something I can support - that it's the (existing) quality of Australian mateship which helped us survive adversity at Gallipoli and in later battlefronts. My own three books about early convict settlers (listed below) show that Australian mateship dates from 1788 and the convict era. Mateship was an outcome of the long journeys on the transport ships and the ensuing years of struggling to survive physically and psychologically in a land of flood, fire and drought. From 1794 the Hawkesbury district, food bowl for the colony, saw numerous examples of mateship: local residents helped each other with food, shelter & labour and more distant residents donated money following the numerous floods which devastated that district over the next 25 years.

By 1820, community self-help was well-established in Australia. And, as free settlers flooded in after the Napoleonic wars ended, mateship became well-entrenched among the lower echelons of Australian society, the emancipist convicts. I have no doubt that close analysis would prove that a good proportion of the physically tough, stoic, bravely reckless, laconic, larrikin survivors we laud on ANZAC Day could trace their roots and their attitudes back to convict forebears.

The Boulton letters support the argument that it was our ‘self-identity’ as Australians that was forged during the Great War, a process which began at Gallipoli and intensified on the Western Front. The Boulton brothers, born in Australia of English parents, were clearly ambivalent about their own national identity at the start of the war. As Nigel wrote on 19 Sep 1914, ‘How glorious it is to feel one is a Britisher at a time like this. What a wonderful country England is, and what a wonderful nation. I quite agree with you. Mum, I thank God I was born of English parents every time I think of it.’

Over the next four years the brothers rubbed shoulders with men and women from other states; they compared the performance of Australian soldiers against those from other countries; they observed living conditions and cultures in many other countries. They began to feel proud of the strengths of their own countrymen and to think of Australia as ‘home’.  They became Australians, in their minds, as part of a gradual process.

Western Front, 1918. © John Newland, 2015

The other insight I gained from compiling this book was also significant. And it’s something we rarely, if ever, hear in Australia, obsessed as we are with the Gallipoli story. I discovered that in the spring of 1918 Germany's 'Spring Offensive' made a Big Push forward and Germany nearly won the Great War. The map shows how far the German front line extended into France at this time.

The Boulton letters taught me a huge history lesson, that it was the Australians who played a major part in our side ‘winning’ in the end. I learned about the role of the Australian First Division near Hazebrouck in stopping Germany’s spring advance on the crucial Channel ports, then holding and ‘shoving back’ that front line through the summer of 1918.  Down in the Somme valley, on ANZAC Day in 1918, other Australian soldiers recaptured the crucial high ground at Villers-Bretonneux. In the late summer and autumn of 1918, with Monash at last in charge of all the Australian Divisions as a combined force, the Australian strategy turned the German advance into a rout in the Somme Valley, pushing them back well beyond St Quentin, Negotiations for the Armistice began.

I ssk myself, was this 'victory' story I extracted from the Boulton brothers’ letters true? If so, why don’t we hear more of this story in Australia? Why are we so scared to claim credit for part of the big picture narrative of the Great War on the Western Front? Instead, we dwell on the successes and more often the failures of individual battles. We continue to seek glory in defeat. This year I expect we’ll hear much more about how many men we lost in 1916 (huge numbers in the costly disaster at Fromelles in July and in the brilliant victory at Pozières in July & August) than we'll hear about what these battles meant, strategically.

Recently I attended an event at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. It was a large crowd and everyone I spoke to had made a pilgrimage to the war memorials on the Western Front. Many of my personal friends have too. But the impact made on them focused on the terrain and the futile loss of life on individual battlefields, demonstrated so starkly by the endless rows of war graves. When I get to visit the Western Front region, it will mean much more than that to me. The Boulton letters have jolted me into an understanding of the overall significance of the role played by Australians on the Western Front, one hundred years ago.

Footnote: My three books about early convict settlers are 'Robert Forrester, First Fleeter' (2009), 'Paul Bushell, Second Fleeter' (2010) and 'Southwark Luck; the Story of Charles Homer Martin, Ann Forrester and their Children' (2012), with details listed on my website.

Also see my website for details of how to purchase ‘Brothers in Arms: The Great War Letters of Captain Nigel Boulton, R.A.M.C. & Lieut Stephen Boulton, A.I.F.’