The Battlefield
Allen Hancock
Copyright 2010 Allen Hancock
Cover design by A Hancock
Photograph Wikimedia Commons
“Imagine a gigantic ash heap, a place where dust and rubbish have been cast for years outside some dry, derelict God-forsaken up country township. Imagine some broken-down creek bed in the driest of our dry central Australian districts,abandoned for a generation to the goats, in which the hens have been scratching for as long as man can remember. Then take away the hens and the goats and all traces of any living or moving thing. You must not even leave a spider. Put here, in evidence of some old tumbled roof, a few beams and tiles sticking edgeways from the ground, and the low faded ochre stump over the top of the hill, and there you have Pozieres”
C.E.W Bean, Letters From France
…
Apart from the wild flowers the countryside could have easily been anywhere in rural Australia. Mile upon mile of rolling fields, broken only by occasional clumps of trees marking waterways or small townships. Such a scene in Australia would have had its share of wild flowers too. Pale pinks and golds, or even the purple carpet of the feral Patterson’s Curse would have easily suited this landscape.
But none of them compared to the brilliant red of the poppies scattered across fields on either side of the dusty road. Sometimes single splashes of blood against green fields, sometimes gaping wounds where the colour would run from one side of a hill to another. The fields of Flanders were a glory to behold.
Their boots were coated with white dust kicked up as the column trudged to the next clump of trees on the distant horizon. They cursed as another motor lorry rattled past them throwing up a white cloud of chalky powder to choke them once again. Some of the men had been with the battalion since even before the landing at Gallipoli. Others had joined them there, but the majority were replacements like Billy Mackay who had arrived in Egypt after the withdrawal.
It wasn’t any real patriotic fervour that made Billy enlist. Of any man trudging along the road in that summer of 1916, Billy Mackay owed the least debt to his country. He saw an opportunity to escape the drudgery that had ruled his life. He would ask nobody’s permission again to come and go from his own home. The aboriginal mission at Lake Tyers was left behind him on the other side of the world. The battalion was his home now, a home with a history of sacrifice and bravery, of heroism and suffering. His family consisted of the men around him, men who had been a part of that history, or those who soon would be.
“Hey Billy,” said the man beside him. “Have a look at that over there.”
“What are you talking about, Harry?” Billy asked.
“The statue on top of the church there,” Harry explained. “Its Fanny Durack.”
“Fanny who?”
“Didn’t they teach you any thing at that mission school? Fanny Durack. She won a gold medal for swimming at the Olympic Games.”
Billy could see the statue clearly as the head of the column marched into the town. A golden figure of the Virgin Mary topped the tower of the church, her arms held aloft. Constant bombardment by German artillery to prevent the tower’s use as an observation post had broken some of the mountings until the statue hung perilously from its base, the Virgin’s raised arms pointing down at the ground. It did look like a woman poised to dive.
“You’re an irreverent bastard, Harry,” said the corporal who marched on Harry’s other side. “That’s the Basilica of Albert. The tommies call the statue the Hanging Virgin. Legend says that the war will end only after she falls from her tower.”
“So why don’t they just knock her off the top then?” Harry asked.
“There’s another legend that says whatever side knocks her down will lose.”
“Somebody better tell the bloody Huns then,” Harry said as a low growling rumble came to them from up ahead. The noise had been with them all along but they had grown so used to the sound of artillery that only silence was noticeable now.
“You’re not saying much, Billy,” Harry said.
“Too bloody tired, Harry.”
“Eight days of marching. My feet just keep going by themselves.”
Ahead of them the column came to a halt. Instead of the order to fallout came the order to remove their helmets from their packs and to swap them for the felt hats the men normally wore. The latter were collected for storage and the battalion moved on.
“Not a good sign, Billy,” Harry said as they moved off again along the road.
“No,” Billy agreed. He rubbed his hand along the smooth woodwork of the rifle slung over his shoulder. “Do you think we’ll get to fight at last.” For most of the new men their greatest fear had always been that the fighting would finish before they had their chance to join in.
“Don’t be in such a hurry,” Harry said. “There are blokes who’ve been in it since Anzac Cove, and they still haven’t fired a bloody shot.”
“What do you mean?” asked Billy.
“I mean there’s not much point in firing unless you’ve got something to shoot at. When you live like a rat in a hole in the ground, and old Fritz or Johnny Turk is doing the same; there are not many chances of seeing each other, let alone shooting each other. Unless one of you goes over the top. Believe me Billy, when you do that you’re so busy trying to keep from getting shot yourself you don’t worry too much about shooting the other bloke. Just hope to God the artillery’s blown him away already.”
“In this war,” added the corporal, “it’s the artillery that decides the battles. Our artillery blows the Germans out of their trenches so that we, the infantry, can go in and occupy them.”
“Until their artillery can blow us out,” added Harry.
They left the town of Albert behind and the road ran straight and true, just as the Romans had built it centuries earlier. Up ahead it climbed a rise between two low hills to disappear over its crest. On either side of the road they could see men sprawled about on the ground. The brigade’s other three battalions had arrived ahead of them and a red-faced sergeant major waited to greet the last of the units.
“Fall out to the left hand side of the road,” he yelled. “Look lively there.”
“Look lively?” Harry mumbled. “A bloke marches all bloody day to get to wherever the hell he’s going, and when he finally arrives there’s always some bludger who’s ridden all the way in a motor car yelling at him to look bloody lively. I’ve marched half way around the world and everywhere I go there’s always somebody to yell at me when I get there.”
To a man the battalion moved off the road and dropped onto the soft grass without waiting for the chance for orders to the contrary to be given. They obeyed the infantryman’s unwritten creed; don’t stand when you can squat, don’t squat when you can sit and don’t sit when you can lie down.
While the officers trotted off immediately to where the Battalion Commander waited to pass on his orders, the men took advantage of the rare opportunity to light up a smoke. They gratefully accepted a mug of warm, overbrewed tea prepared in a petrol can by the cooks who had raced ahead with their horse-drawn cookers to be ready for just this moment. Despite the still discernible taste of petrol it was like heaven sent nectar as the sweet liquid soothed their parched throats.
It was almost quiet below the ridge; the thunder of the guns ahead deflected upwards. The dull thump of the concussions transmitted through the ground was the only evidence that artillery fire was landing close by.
The breaks in the routine of marching were never long enough. As Billy fell into line again beside Harry his friend remarked. “It’s bad enough being a part of what the English call the Reserve Army Billy, but now we get to be held in reserve in the Reserve Army.”
The battalion began to climb towards the ridgeline in much the same manner as 4000 men of the Tyneside Irish Brigade had done less than three weeks earlier. They too had been in reserve. Ahead was a low saddle divided by the old Roman road running in a dead straight line from Albert, through the village of Pozieres, and on to Bapaume where the German Headquarters was located. With Tara the hill to the right and Usna the hill to the left, the ridge between formed the Tara-Usna Line. It had hidden the Tyneside Irish well as they formed up nearly a mile behind their front line.
Passing over the crest the soldiers had walked onto an expanse of unbroken grassland gently sloping down to their own forward system of trenches. Their mission as reserve unit had been to occupy those trenches vacated by the units carrying out the main part of the assault against the German lines above them.
The offensive launched from those trenches had met with a great deal of success, quickly capturing the trenches of the Germans less than two hundred yards away near the village of La Boiselle. But the reserves still had to travel for more than a mile before they could take their part in the battle. To consolidate the early gains while the forward units pushed through to their secondary objective. But the Germans still held the strong points on the high ground.
Open to continuous machine gun fire dropping into their ranks from extreme elevation, the Tyneside Irish Brigade’s four battalions were like wheat falling before a scythe as they were reduced to only a handful of men, even before they had reached their own front line. Their story was not unique of course. On 1 July 1916, along a front stretching for eighteen miles north from the River Somme, an army of 519,000 had attacked the German trench system. The battle cost almost 60,000 casualties in that one day, around half of those, like the Tyneside Irish Brigade, during the first hour.
Now it was the turn of the Australians to play their part.
…
By the time the train reached the end of the line at Bairnsdale the carriages were almost empty but the welcome home was just as warm for the handful of soldiers who disembarked, grateful that the long journey had reached an end. Billy watched in silence as his fellow travellers were patted on the back by a grateful town, were hugged and kissed by loved ones they had almost forgotten under the constant storm of shells.
He watched the crowds disperse, taking their men home with them, or to the local hotels. Billy was alone for the first time since he had stood on that very spot three years ago. Crushing his cigarette into the dirt under his heavy boot he threw the kitbag over his shoulder to begin his twenty mile walk home.
Billy’s shadow was cast long by the setting sun by the time he passed the gap in the sandbar at Lakes Entrance, the chattering of sea birds accompanying each weary stride as he trudged on into the night. He could smell the sea long before he saw it, the evening breeze bringing with it the fishy aromas of the waters churning through Bass Strait. An hour later he could see the flickering lights coming from the settlement ahead of him and for the first time allowed himself to think of home.
“Who is it?” the voice called from behind the locked door of the superintendent’s cottage.
“Billy McKay, sir,” Billy called through the door. “I need to get through the gate.
“The gate’s locked for the night, Billy,” the voice called back. “You’ll have to wait till morning.”
“I’m just trying to get home.”
“You know the rules, Billy. The gate’s locked for the night. You can’t expect to be let in whenever you feel like it.”
“But I....”
“Be off with you before I let the dogs loose.”
Billy felt that he should have been angry but his long years of conditioning to the rules of the settlement, and to his place in life, far outweighed a few short years of war. The sounds and smells of home on the night breeze were strong as he walked off into the darkness to where he knew of a depression where a latecomer could squeeze under the barbed wire fence.
~~~~
The Battlefield was extracted as a short story from the novel Song of the River. The Battlefield was the winner of the 2004 Army (Magazine) Short Story Competition. If you enjoyed 3:14 am and would like to read more, try:-
Short Stories
- The Battlefield
- The Billabong Incident
- The Big Cheese
Novels
- The Chance of a Storm
- Song of the River
Records Management
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- Recordkeeping for Knuckleheads
Allen Hancock was born in Adelaide, South Australia in 1952. He joined the Australian Regular Army in 1970 and spent the next 21 years moving around most areas of Australia. He left the Army in 1992 and has been working as a professional records manager since then. Allen has more than 40 years association with the records industry working with Federal and State Government agencies as well as in higher education and private enterprise.