The Ninth Corps battle front was to extend from Bellenglise to Bellicourt, mine from opposite Bellicourt to opposite Le Catelet.
The necessary troop movements and inter-divisional reliefs required nearly a week for their completion. By the evening of September 23rd, the last of the two Australian Divisions had been relieved by the Americans and the Ninth Corps, and on that night these stood on their respective battle frontages. I took over command of this new front, thus manned by Americans, in the forenoon of September 25th.
It is a somewhat noteworthy circumstance, but one which attracted no attention at the time, that between September 25th and September 29th, there was a period of five days during which no Australian troops were in the front line in any part of the French theatre of war. This was a situation which had never arisen since the first contingent of Australians arrived from Egypt in April, 1916. For nearly two and a half years, there had never previously been a moment when some Australians had not been confronting the enemy, somewhere or other in the long battle front in France.
I have said that I had been called upon to undertake the responsibility of directing in a great battle two Divisions (the 27th and 30th) of United States troops, numbering altogether some 50,000 men. These had been organized into a Corps, called the Second American Corps, and commanded by Major-General G. W. Read. It was certainly anomalous that a whole organized Corps should pass under the orders of a Corps Headquarters of another nationality, but in authorizing such an arrangement, General Rawlinson relied upon the good sense and mutual forbearance of the Corps Commanders concerned.
I am bound to say that the arrangement caused me no anxiety or difficulty. General Read and his Staff most readily adapted themselves to the situation. He established his Headquarters quite close to my own, and gave me perfect freedom of action in dealing direct with his two Divisional Commanders, so far as I found it necessary to do so. Read was a man of sound common sense and clear judgment, a reserved but agreeable and courteous personality. His only desire was the success of his Divisions, and he very generously took upon himself the role of an interested spectator, so that I might not be hampered in issuing orders or instructions to his troops. At the same time, I am sure that in his quiet, forceful way he did much to ensure on the part of his Divisional Commanders and Brigadiers a sympathetic attitude towards me and the demands I had to make upon them.
The Australian Corps had specialized in comprehensive and careful preparations for battle. Its methods had been reduced to a quite definite code of practice, with which every Staff Officer and Battalion Adjutant had, by experience, become intimately familiar. All this procedure was a closed book to the American troops, and they were severely handicapped accordingly.
I therefore proposed to General Read, and he gratefully accepted, the creation of an "Australian Mission" to his Corps, whose rôle would be to act as a body of expert advisers on all questions of tactical technique, and of supply and maintenance. This idea once accepted was worked out on a fully elaborated scale.
To the head of this Mission I appointed Major-General Maclagan, not only to command the personnel of the Mission itself, but also to live with and act as adviser to General Read's own Staff. The Mission comprised a total of 217 men, chosen from the First and Fourth Australian Divisions, and consisted of specially selected and very experienced officers and N.C.O.'s. The American Corps Headquarters was provided with a Major-General, assisted by one General Staff, one Administrative, one Signal, one Intelligence, and one Machine Gun Staff Officer. Each American Division had assigned to it an Australian Brigadier-General, assisted by several Staff Officers; each American Brigade had an Australian Battalion Commander and Signal Officer; and so on down the chain. Each American Battalion, even, had four highly expert Warrant or Non-commissioned officers to advise on every detail of supply, equipment and tactical employment of the troops.
By such an arrangement it became possible to talk to the whole American Corps in our own technical language. This saved me and my Staff a vast amount of time and energy, because the members of this Mission acted as interpreters of the technical terms and usages customary in the orders and maps of the Australian Corps, which were necessarily quite unfamiliar to the American troops.
Maclagan was a man eminently fitted for this task. In appearance and in temperament he is every inch a soldier. Of all my Divisional Commanders he was the only one who, immediately before the war, was a professional soldier of the Imperial Army. Although not Australian born, he was whole-heartedly Australian, for he had spent some years as Director of Military Training at the Royal Military College at Duntroon. On the outbreak of war he received the command of the 3rd Australian Brigade, and with it carried out the most difficult preliminary phase of the landing on the Gallipoli peninsula. He commanded the Fourth Australian Division from the autumn of 1917 until the conclusion of hostilities. His characteristic attitude of mind, so strongly in contrast to that of Rosenthal, was pessimistic. But that was not because he looked for difficulties, but because he preferred squarely to recognize and face all the difficulties there were. Yet he never failed in performance, and invariably contrived to do what he had urged could not be done. One could not afford to take him at his own modest estimate of himself. Both he and his Division always bettered any promise they gave.