Fromelles and Pozières, 1916

Paying Tribute to Fallen Soldiers,
Australian War Memorial, Canberra

We are about to commemorate the Battle of the Somme, that horrendous five month period of 1916 when 1.1 million soldiers were killed or wounded on the Western Front – lives wasted, for no appreciable gain by either side.

My grandmother's two brothers (just) survived this experience, so naturally I was attracted to Peter Fitzsimons' latest publication: 'Fromelles and Pozières: in the Trenches of Hell'. These two battles were the two definitive experiences for Australian troops in 1916 and far exceeded the horrors of 1915's Gallipoli.

On 9 March 2016 at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne the author spoke at length on this topic … without notes, an impressive performance as a feat of memory. He emphasised that his goal with the book was for his team of researchers to find every possible bit of evidence which would show, not tell, what it was like to be in those trenches. My gentlemanly great uncles had often glossed over the ‘showing’ bit in an amazing set of wartime letters they wrote, so I bought a copy of the Fitzsimons book.

For someone looking for more information about an important moment in our history, the book was worth reading although frequently irritating for its over-the-top blokiness. The author tried to give a day by day account of developments, with the Australian war correspondent Charles Bean clearly the author’s personal hero and guiding light. Inclusion of German archival material added interest. It was disappointing that, as usual, the focus was almost exclusively on the exploits and experiences of various infantry units. The overall role of the artillery in that appalling was frequently mentioned but quotes from, and recounting the experiences of, individuals in the artillery units were scarce. The book’s military unit jargon, its relentless blood & gore and the 'rah rah, Aussies' content so beloved of a vehemently-Republican author, became so overwhelming that, when I reached the end of the 689 pages of text, I needed to deconstruct it.

The first 272 pages traverse the first six months of 1916. After the Australian troops were evacuated from Gallipoli (in December 1915) they were regrouped, reinforced and ‘prepared’ for service on the Western Front. Lost within the book’s myriad details is their underlying structure. This is important to understand, as Fitzsimons spends much of the book castigating senior military leaders.  To summarise, Australian forces in 1916 were organised as two armies:

• 1 Anzac Corps, commanded by the English General Sir William Birdwood, comprising the experienced Gallipoli veterans of the 1st Division (led by Englishman General Harold Walker) and 2nd Division (led by Australian General James Legge).
• 2 Anzac Corps commanded by another Englishman, General Alexander Godley, comprising the newly-formed 4th Division (led by Englishman Major-General Sir Herbert Cox) and 5th Division (led by Australian Major-General Sir James McCay).

(The Australian Brigadier-General John Monash’s new 3rd Division did not arrive in France until November 1916, long after the battles at Fromelles and Pozières.)

The two Australian armies were under the overall control of British High Command, the infamous British General Sir Douglas Haig and his various underlings. Their gross failures make me glad not to be a descendant of any of them. Too much blood on their hands.

On their arrival in France (from late March 1916 onwards) the Anzac forces were posted to the so-called ‘nursery sector’ near Fromelles in Flanders. Supposedly, not much fighting was happening there; both sides were just holding their lines. Meanwhile, the Battle of the Somme further south was being planned. It commenced on 1 July. Right from the start, it did not go well. Extra troops were needed. The experienced Australians of the 1st and 2nd Divisions and those in the newly-formed 4th Division were moved down to the Somme, leaving the newly-arrived 5th Division to take their place near Fromelles, around 11 July.

The next 230+ pages cover the debacle of 24 hours at Fromelles on 19 & 20 July 1916. Our rookie foot soldiers and artillery gunners had only just arrived in France, yet they were picked to attack crack German troops, well-entrenched for more than a year, intimately familiar with the territory and in an impregnable position. I reached the end of that single day & night battle feeling as angry as the author. The role played by Haig’s underling, the British Lieut-General Sir Richard Haking, in sending the raw recruits of the 5th Division on his ill-judged mission to inevitable slaughter was criminal, even worse than the orders given at Gallipoli. McCay, the Australian in charge of the 5th Division, was equally despicable for not permitting the truce offered by the Germans so that his desperately-injured men could be retrieved from No Man's Land.

Now for the Somme, where Haig's underling General Hubert Gough was calling the shots at Pozières. Frequently I found myself comparing the Fitzsimons account with that of my great uncle Stephen Boulton, whose letters show that Australia’s six week involvement in the Pozières campaign began the day after the Fromelles slaughter. Bombardier Stephen Boulton's artillery unit (within the 21st Field Artillery Brigade of the 1st Division) began bombarding the German troops at Pozières at 10pm on 20 July. The Australian infantry’s brilliant success in capturing the village of Pozières is quietly confirmed when Stephen’s letter of 23 July is headed ‘in a German trench’. Even General Haig admitted 'the capture of Pozières by the Australians would live in history.' (Fitzsimons, p 597.) Stephen and his fellow gunners participated continuously in the greatest artillery barrage of all time until 7 August when the exhausted, deaf and shell-shocked men were briefly rested away from the front line carnage. The three Australian divisions were rotated ‘in the line’, during which time Stephen received a field promotion to Corporal, until Stephen's artillery unit was relieved slightly ahead of the 1st Division's infantry and sent back to Flanders on 27 August for a 'rest'.

Unveiling the Memorial to 1st Division, Pozières, 8 July 1917. Source IWM 02598

 The Australian troops eventually won possession of the Pozières windmill, the highest ground for miles, although it ‘marks a ridge more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth’. (Fitzsimons, p 661, quoting Bean.) One Australian on this battleground accused the British Generals of murder and blamed the extreme level of casualties on ‘the incompetence, callousness and personal vanity of those high in authority’. (Fitzsimons, p 614.) Pozières was a huge strategic win for the Allies in 1916 and I wonder why so few Australians have even heard about this great victory. It seems that we prefer to celebrate our military failures. Even in Fitzsimons’ massive tome the six weeks at Pozières warranted only 150 pages. Perhaps this was because the author and his researchers were mining the voluminous literature published about the 24 hours at Fromelles.

Fitzsimons tries to follow individual soldiers so that we engage with them emotionally but it’s often hard to keep track of so many characters and so many vignettes. My own book about #WW1 (‘Brothers in Arms: The Great War Letters of Captain Nigel Boulton R.A.M.C. & Lieut Stephen Boulton, A.I.F.’) follows only two men through the entire war. It’s less militarily detailed, less bloody, much gentler, and a much shorter first hand account (although more sweeping in its coverage, from August 1914 through to February 1919 and beyond) but equally sad and moving.

In his Epilogue of 30+ pages, Fitzsimons reviews the fate of various officers and men featured in the story. Needless to say, most of the ‘bad guys’ were honoured and most of the ‘good guys’ suffered.

The underlying story woven into 'Fromelles and Pozières: in the Trenches of Hell' is shocking. Whichever way they learn of it, more Australians need to know it – especially the story of our amazing victory at Pozières, against the odds. 

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.’

The War That Changed Him

How a boy became a man.

Stephen Philip Boulton was born on 31 March 1890 in the booming gold-mining town of  Clunes, Victoria. His father was a bank manager with the Union Bank of Australia (now today's ANZ Bank). When his father died in 1895, his mother joined other family members in NSW, where Stephen received primary schooling.  Aged ten (pictured), he was sent on his own on the long sea voyage to join his brother at the British Orphans Asylum, a boarding school in England. Both boys returned to Sydney & completed their schooling at The King's School at Parramatta. 

Stephen was a boyish 24-yr-old (pictured) when he left his job in the Sydney head office of the newly-established Commonwealth Bank and enlisted as a Gunner with the A.I.F. on 12 January 1915. 

He served at Gallipoli, in the dangerous job of carting ammunition from Anzac Cove to the trenches, but became seriously ill with dysentery & was evacuated to Imbros in September 1915, ending up in Malta, the nurse of the Mediterranean.

He was 25 when he became a Bombardier, back in Egypt, on 12 March 1916, before the Australian artillery moved to the Western Front.

He was a toughened-up 26-yr-old (pictured) when he was promoted to Corporal on 27 September 1916, just after surviving the horrendous battle of Pozières in France, where Australian troops fell more thickly than on any other battlefield of the war.

He was a mature 27-yr-old (pictured) when he graduated from the Royal Field Artillery School in England and entered the officer ranks, on 3 November 1917. He continued serving on the Western Front throughout 1918, as a Lieutenant in the 2nd Field Artillery Brigade. 

Read more in Brothers in Arms: The Great War Letters of Captain Nigel Boulton, R.A.M.C. & Lieut Stephen Boulton, A.I.F., available online through BookPOD

Brothers in Arms

This is a story of how a book was written. A shaggy dog story, admittedly, but true. 

It begins more than ten years ago. Whenever I got out of the car on those long drives to Sydney I limped for the first 50 metres. My right Achilles tendon had seized up. Eventually a heel spur began to grow steadily on my right heel. I did not connect the two symptoms. People who should have known better told me the spur would most likely disappear as mysteriously as it appeared. Several years ago the pain in my right heel began to wake me from my sleep, often several times a night, just from the pressure of my heel on the mattress. Invigorating morning walks with my neighbour were abandoned. It hurt too much. 

Belatedly I discovered this was not purely an ageing problem. It had something to do with the genes (the structure of the foot bones, the tightness of the Achilles tendon) and young people can suffer too. The ‘high heels’ of my younger days at the office made it worse, as has the subsequent wearing of ‘flatties’ with an enclosed heel. With one foot always slightly bigger than the other, that heel is rubbed more tightly by the shoe back and sets up chronic inflammation. 

Three months ago I seized the day and had an operation, termed 'correction of Haglund's Syndrome and gastroc lengthening'. The surgeon reported afterwards that my heel was a big mess – the inflammation had widely calcified and so had part of the Achilles tendon. The excess bone was sawn away and the tendon repaired as much as possible. The slow road to recovery meant crutches, a moon boot and sitting around for several months with my foot ‘up’ – literally. Not easy when you live alone. 

My youngest sister Cathy abandoned her husband, garden and farm animals and came to stay as my nurse for the first week. So kind. So thoughtful. Four different neighbours did my shopping and collected mail for me over the next few months. Bless them. Friends called in for cups of tea. The company was appreciated. I hated being stuck at home but that cloud did have a silver lining  - the whole experience proved that my house will be user-friendly when I reach my dotage. It’s small and easy to look after. It has no steps. My ensuite has an accessible shower. A high stool in the bathroom and another in the kitchen meant I could reach everything and perform all essential daily tasks. Note to self – ‘never sell this house’. 

But, what was I going to do to pass the time as a temporary invalid? TV has its definite limits. Unusually, I wasn’t in much mood for reading. After a general anaesthetic, with a painful foot, at first I couldn’t focus on anything approaching creative writing either. I remembered the letters my grandmother’s two Boulton brothers wrote home to their mother in World War 1. Nigel Boulton happened to be in London when war erupted and served as a doctor with the British Army. Commonwealth Banker Stephen Boulton became an artillery man with the AIF. Many WW1 soldiers sent letters home, or postcards with a few lines scrawled on them, but it’s rare to find a set of letters like these, literate, from two brothers in different armies, telling the story of that appalling war from start to finish. The letters were typed in the 1920s and a copy was presented to the Australian War Memorial which promptly requested the originals. 

I’d previously had our family's typed copies scanned with OCR (optical character recognition) to create a Word document, the same process as the National Library of Australia uses to digitise old newspapers and publish them on Trove. Since old and faded typefaces don’t scan well, thousands of OCR mistakes occurred, as in the example (where the original typing and spelling was correct and the address At Sea became 21T). Every single line on every page of the Boulton files had to be read and corrected where necessary. It was an excellent if tedious project on which to focus when my brain wasn’t working properly. 

The task took me over. I dropped out of the world for several months and sat on my couch, awkwardly juggling computer, mouse, mouse pad and fragile original documents against which I checked the OCR, along with crutches and moon boot. The letters were later interwoven chronologically and some brief introductions were written to help the story flow.

A book emerged. It had the tentative title of Stout-hearted Men. Remember that stirring song from the 1940 show New Moon? Its rousing chorus repeated in my brain for months. Led by Nelson Eddy it goes: 

Give me some men who are stout-hearted men, 

Who will fight, for the right they adore, 

Start me with ten who are stout-hearted men, 

And I'll soon give you ten thousand more. 

Shoulder to shoulder and bolder and bolder, 

They grow as they go to the fore. 

Then, there's nothing in the world, can halt or mar a plan, 

When, stout-hearted men, can stick together man to man. 

Those words seemed so apt for a book about the Great War, when millions marched off in enthusiastic support of their cause, but too many people today don’t know what 'stout-hearted' means. I road-tested other titles:

• Mummy’s Boys – ironical of course, my grandmother’s brothers were anything but! 

• Mother’s Boys – Nigel was quite formal. 

• Matee’s Boys – Stephen, more of an Aussie, combined the Latin word for mother (Mater) and the word ‘mate’ to address his letters to ‘Dear Matee’. 

• Dolly’s Boys – their mother Dora was known as Dolly. 

Nothing resonated with family and friends until my daughter suggested Brothers in Arms. 'That’s what the book’s about, Mum!’ So that’s the current working title. What do you think? Despite the centenary deluge of World War 1 material, I hope to interest a publisher in the Boulton story. It has a theme and it sucks the reader in to that whirlpool of a hundred years ago.

P.S. I'm still limping, but free of pain and improving week by week.

UPDATE, 30 Nov 2015. My agent and I agreed that commercial publishers had planned their offerings for the centenary of WW1 long ago, so I decided to self-publish this book, which is now available through BookPOD.

Anzac Day Reflections

What a difference a year makes. Last year, pouring rain, today a balmy 12 degrees.

This was the scene at 5.20am at Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance, the silhouette reflecting the heads of thousands of people, already gathered and standing quietly, waiting for the Dawn Service to begin at 6am.

Last year at this time I wrote of my concern that we were presenting Australian history as if everything began at Gallipoli in 1915. This morning was very different. We heard a moving rendition of the poem 'In Flanders Fields' and two very inspiring addresses, delivered by three very impressive young Australians. The two short speeches spoke of emotional current day experiences (a trip to the site of the Sandakan death marches in Borneo, a tour of duty in Afghanistan), were not at all jingoistic and carried far more impact than usual because they were not mouthed by platitudinous politicians. The latter were present in large numbers in the official party but thankfully were silent (apart from a few words from the State Premier).

This large, respectful crowd of 45,000+ got me thinking about why so many people find this ceremony so meaningful. Afterwards my neighbour and I discussed the level of psychological damage underlying so much of Australian cultural life.

WW1 had a devastating impact on virtually every family in this country, including my own. Large numbers of women (including most of my grandmother's friends) never married because the young men of their generation had been killed. My grandmother's brother, Lieut Stephen Boulton, was an artillery man and is buried in France. Her husband, my grandfather Engr Lieut Cleon Dennis, RAN, died young as a result of his war service, leaving her to raise five young children alone.

WW2 created a baby-boomer generation many of whose fathers returned home as damaged individuals, without the benefit of post-traumatic-stress counselling. More recently our community is coming to terms with the horrors of the forced adoption of children in post-war years and the widespread abuse of children by clergy and others in positions of authority.

With so many fractured families within our community, and secularism replacing religion, we increasingly seem to find comfort and meaning in the uplifting, almost spiritual nature of the Dawn Service. Today we come together in a shared moment, paying tribute to qualities of character(bravery, loyalty, stoicism) beyond the norm of our daily lives.