Zero Hour by Leon Davidson Read Free Book Online Page A

no-man’s-land, reached the jumping-off point to find soldiers and officers alike losing their nerve through the constant shelling. After one officer was killed and, according to Raws, ‘the strain had sent two other officers mad’, Raws and a fellow officer took over and insisted that the digging be finished. The dead and wounded were no longer to be buried or carried out. The soldiers’ only task was to dig. Another officer, driven to the edge, ordered the men to retire, but Raws threatened to shoot anyone who left.
    For five nights, the men dug the jumping-off line under shellfire. Some fled into the dark to escape the noise and fear. Raws wrote: As Raws left, he and three others helped a wounded man, using Raws’ puttee to tie the man’s severed leg to his pack.
    I have had much luck and kept my nerve so far. The awful difficulty is to keep it. The bravest of all often lose it—courage does not count here. It is all nerve—once that goes one becomes a gibbering maniac…
    And forests! There are not even tree trunks left, not a leaf or a twig. All is buried, and churned up again, and buried again. The sad part is that one can see no end of this. If we live to-night, we have to go through to-morrow night, and next week, and next month. Poor wounded devils you meet on the stretchers are laughing with glee. One cannot blame them—they are getting out of this…
    â€¦We are lousy, stinking, ragged, unshaven, sleepless…I have one puttee, a dead man’s helmet, another dead man’s gas protector, a dead man’s bayonet. My tunic is rotten with other men’s blood, and partly spattered with a comrade’s brains.
    On 4 August, the 2nd Division lay in the newly completed jumping-off line. The moment their artillery shells stopped hitting the German trenches, they rushed across the shortened no-man’s-land and quickly captured the two almost flattened trenches of the Old German Lines on the ridge behind Pozières. In the 10 days that the 2nd Division had been in the line, 6800 had been killed or wounded.
    A GERMAN REPLY
    With only two days’ experience in trenches at Armentières, on 6 August the 4th Australian Division relieved the 2nd Division. Several attempts to recapture the heights had already been shot down, but the Germans were determined. General Falkenhayn, the German commander, had insisted from the start of the war that no land was to be relinquished without a fight and that lost land was to be recaptured at the first opportunity. But with German commanders rushing counterattacks, the Germans were now being as mauled as the Allies.
    At dawn on 7 August, as the 4th Division sheltered in captured dugouts from a systematic bombardment, the Germans attacked again. The heights were lightly held by the Australians to prevent loss of life during heavy shelling, and three battalions of German troops swept over the battered trenches, stopping only to roll bombs into the dugouts and to leave sentries at the exits before the rest moved down the slope towards Pozières.
    In one dugout, Lieutenant Albert Jacka, who had won a Victoria Cross for his actions at Gallipoli, fired his revolver up the stairs over two wounded soldiers, killing the German stationed at the top. Jacka and seven others prepared to dash back through the Germans to Pozières, but when they saw 40 Australian prisoners under a guard of the same number being led back towards the new German lines, Jacka lined up his men and charged.
    The German guards opened fire, hitting every man— Jacka was hit seven times—but they reached the guards and a savage bayonet and fist-fight erupted, with the prisoners also attacking their guards. More raced over to join in, until
    Huns and Aussies were scattered in ones and twos all along the side of the hill…Each Aussie seemed as if he was having a war all on his own.
    The Germans, now outnumbered, surrendered. When Jacka was carried out, few