Zero Hour by Leon Davidson Read Free Book Online Page B

gave him any chance of survival, but he recovered and returned to the Western Front, serving until he was poisoned by gas in 1918.
    A GRINDING ADVANCE— 8 AUGUST TO 5 SEPTEMBER
    With Pozières heights now secured, General Haig ordered the commanders in the area to organise their own attacks while he built up new divisions and ammunition for a September advance. Under General Gough, the Australians were to advance towards Mouquet Farm—a German strong point—to get in behind Thiepval, another bastion of the German line. Over the next 28 days, the 1st, 2nd and 4th Australian Divisions were all used as Gough ordered attack after attack to drive a narrow salient two kilometres to the farm. The Germans made them fight for every metre, shelling their salient from the front and both sides. Fresh battalions were sent to the front via different routes to prevent them seeing the dead bodies from the previous attacks. When the ground was ‘spongy’ underfoot, the men realised they were stepping on corpses.
    Twenty-year-old Sergeant David Badger wrote to his parents in South Australia, saying:
    When you see this I’ll be dead; don’t worry…Try to think I did the only possible thing, as I tell you I would do it again if I had the chance.
    He died in the next attack.
    The Australians hated the shallow advances on narrow fronts—now reduced to one or two battalions—and many felt they were just being sent to kill Germans. In one Australian’s opinion, ‘All we are doing is using up German Reserves, and, at a faster rate, our own.’ Even the New Zealand commander, Major General Sir Andrew Russell, believed the Australians were being wasted.
    The tactics created bitterness towards the commanders, and a feeling that no one knew what they, the soldiers, were going through. In their view, the newspapers reported only the official line about successful attacks, with no mention of the human cost. Corporal Arthur Thomas wrote that a ‘book on the life of an infantryman’ needed to be written to ‘quickly prevent these shocking tragedies’. Captain Gordon Maxfield felt that
    Nothing published in the papers is worth a damn… There are some astounding tales to be told about the war which will make your hair stand on end when the facts are made public.
    Lieutenant Raws believed his comrades were being murdered ‘through the incompetence, callousness and personal vanity of those high in authority’. He died before Mouquet Farm fell; in all, 6300 Australians were wounded or killed in the drive to the farm.
    Many soldiers came to see the generals as butchers—sending thousands to be massacred without a second thought— and bunglers, who planned botched battles in luxury, well behind the front-line, while their men suffered in the trenches. With little or no contact between the generals and ordinary soldiers, it was easy for the men to blame the commanders for failures. The war was meant to have been short, won using old military tactics of men marching in massed formations, but new technology had wiped out that hope and the generals, faced with a different kind of war, struggled to adapt. They tried new methods—creeping barrages, warfare in the skies, gas and massed artillery bombardments—but limited advances still came with horrendous casualties. The pressure was enormous—their governments and people at home wanted and expected a quick, decisive victory.
    Despite 58 generals being killed on the Western Front— 53 British, three New Zealanders and two Australians—most were well behind the front-line during battles. With wireless communication still in its infancy, it was difficult for the commanders to have a real-time understanding of what was occurring once a battle started; the phone lines were routinely cut, despite signallers risking their lives to fix them. Runners, carrier pigeons and flares were used, but these all had