"Over There" with the Australians

by R. Hugh Knyvett

I am reluctant to leave this chapter with its peaceful memories, for it is the antechamber of hell. There is little here that hints of the brimstone and fire just through the door. But our path lies that way and we must pass on.

CHAPTER XXII

THE SOMME

The battle of the Somme lasted eight months, and never since the days of chaos and darkness has a portion of the earth been under the sway of such forces of destruction. Not even the Flood itself so completely destroyed the habitations of man. Flourishing towns were powdered into brick-dust, thousands of acres of forest were reduced to a few blackened stumps, and every foot of ground was blasted and churned and battered again, while every yard was sown thick with bullets more malignant than the seeds planted by Jason. To-day nature is busy trying to hide the evidence of the hate of man, and long grass and poppies cover the blackened soil and grow in the shell-holes, until only in the memory of the men who strove nakedly in its desolation and death will the knowledge of that area as it was for those eight long months remain. If he visits it again the poppies and the grass will fade, and it will appear to him once more as the ploughed land of demons, and grinning at him in every yard will be the skulls of the countless unburied that there lie. The other birds will shun it, for there are no trees, but the lark will still sing on, as this brave-hearted bird continues to do even when the guns are booming.

Australian blood has sanctified much of that soil, and Australian bravery has monopolized some of its names. As surely as Gallipoli will Pozières and Thiepval and Bapaume be associated with the name and achievement of Australians in the minds of readers of the history of the great war. These are places that will ever be names of honor and glory in the thought of the Australian people as will be Flers to New Zealand and Delville Wood to South Africa.

At Pozières the First and Second Divisions demonstrated that the abandon and tenacity against odds that secured a footing on the Gallipoli Peninsula was still the special prerogative of the care-free lads from these South Sea nations. Our own artillery was unable effectively to silence the fire of the German batteries, and wave after wave melted like snow in the sun, yet the unconquerable spirit drove the remainder on until the positions were taken and held. There were wounded men who dragged themselves, not back to their own lines for attention, but forward toward the enemy so that they might be able to strike at least one blow ere they died. There were others that had their wounds dressed and then returned to the fighting. No one left the line that day who could help it, or his name would have been remembered as an outstanding exception among the many who, wounded again and again, and faint from loss of blood, still fought on. This engagement carved a line in my own heart, for therein died three comrades who enlisted with me, and our souls were grappled together by many common dangers shared and mutual sacrifices cheerfully made. There is no life in the world that tries out friendship like a soldier's in active service, and when it has endured that, it is stronger than the love of twin for twin, like the love of David and Jonathan, of Damon and Pythias, a love that passeth knowledge.

The Germans had one ally on the Somme that wrought us more havoc than all his armament. How we cursed that mud! We cursed it sleeping, we cursed it waking, we cursed it riding, we cursed it walking. We ate it and cursed; we drank it and cursed; we swallowed it and spat it; we snuffed it and wept it; it filled our nails and our ears; it caked and lined our clothing; we wallowed in it, we waded through it, we swam in it, and splashed it about—it stuck our helmets to our hair, it plastered our wounds, and there were men drowned in it. Oh, mud, thou daughter of the devil, thou offspring of evil, back to your infernal regions, and invade the lowest circle of the inferno that you may make a fit abiding-place for the slacker and pacifist! I take back all I said about the sand of Egypt. It was a mere irritant compared with this mud. I am sorry for the times I have been out of temper with the mud back in Australia, when it clung to my boots in tons, when I have been bogged in a sulky in the "black soil" country. Australia, you have no mud, just a little surface stickiness that I will never growl at again as long as I live:

"It isn't the foe that we fear;
It isn't the bullets that whine;
It isn't the business career
Of a shell, or the bust of a mine;
It isn't the snipers who seek
To nip our young hopes in the bud;
No, it isn't the guns,
And it isn't the Huns—
It's the MUD,
MUD,
MUD." [1]

Official reports of the later battles in 1918 tell us that the shell-fire on the Somme was a mere popgun show to these battles, but it is difficult for the imagination to grasp this fact, as it did not seem then that the air had any room for more shells. In fact, I have seen shells meet in the air, both exploding together. It seemed to us at times as if there was not a foot of air that did not have a shell in it. In one battle there were four thousand guns firing over a five hundred yards front, the heavies being seventeen and a half miles behind the lines, and the field-guns massed wheel to wheel a hundred and fifty to the five hundred yards, and row after row like infantry drawn up for review. Shells not merely whistled and screamed overhead, they leaped from the ground beneath one's feet with a flame that burned, a roar that deafened, and a displacement of air that swept one away. At artillery practice in peace times there is great excitement if one lone man happens to be in front of the gun, but on the Somme we walked about among them, over them, and round them, and we were never warned even when they fired but a couple of yards away. One day a red-hot shell from a gun about fifty yards away landed at my feet, but, fortunately, did not explode. For four months our artillery expended an average of half a million shells a day. The increase in artillery last year may be judged from the fact that in the last six months of 1917 one million tons of shells were used by the British on the western front. By day the drum-fire of the guns beat on one's ears like a devil's tattoo until one felt that in another week reason would be unseated. But at night was added the horror of flame that drove away the darkness with a ruddy glare. It seemed as if thousands of Bessemer furnaces were refining metal for the paving of hell. Into this caldron of man's making that outdid the fury of the elements young lads from farms and shops walked uprightly. Like ants impotent in their strife they swarmed, and to a watcher from another world they must have appeared like insects in the crater of Vesuvius in eruption. Yet the mind of man, so much greater than his body, had organized and planned this monstrous scene, and from his method it deviated not a hair's breadth.