CHUIGNES
Allusion has been made to the great bend which occurs in the course of
the River Somme. It is indeed a geographical circumstance which must be
borne in mind, if the phraseology current at this epoch in the war is
to be clearly comprehended.
The river flows in an almost due northerly direction from the
neighbourhood of Roye as far as Péronne, and then bends quite sharply,
at that locality, in a western direction, past Bray, Corbie and Amiens,
towards the sea, beyond Abbeville. In the story of the fighting of
the period from March to August we have been concerned only with that
portion of the river valley which ran parallel to our line of advance;
but interest will henceforth focus itself largely upon that other reach
of the Somme which runs on a north and south line, upstream, from the
town of Péronne.
This latter stretch of the river lies squarely athwart the direction in
which the Corps had been advancing, and the obstacle to that advance
which the river would presently constitute was continued in a northerly
direction from Péronne by an unfinished work of a great canalization
scheme to be called the "Canal du Nord." This canal was already wide
and deep, and formed a tactical obstacle of some significance, for the
excavations incidental to this project had been almost completed before
the war.
The "line of the Somme," as it was understood in the tactical
discussions of the period now to be dealt with, meant, in short, the
line formed by that part of the river which lay upstream (_i.e._, to
the south of Péronne), and the continuation northwards of that line
by the Canal du Nord. Both features being military obstacles, they
and the highlands to the east of them together afforded an eminently
suitable continuous line on which the enemy might, if he were permitted
to do so, establish himself in a defensive attitude in order to bar our
eastward progress.
The autumn was upon us; not more than another eight or nine weeks of
campaigning weather could be relied upon. A quite definite possibility
existed that the enemy might be able to put forth so powerful an effort
to contest our further advance, inch by inch, that he would gain
sufficient time to prepare the line of the Somme for a stout defence,
and hold us up until the arrival of winter compelled a suspension of
large operations.
There were at that time, indeed, some who contended that as we had
apparently succeeded in putting an end to the German offensive we
should rest content with the year's work; that our soundest strategy
would be to permit the enemy to take up such a line of defence;
and then quietly to wait over the winter until 1919 for the full
development of the American effort, now only in its inception.
So far, the enemy had given no indication of any readiness to undertake
a precipitate withdrawal from the great bend west of the Somme. On the
contrary, his resistance had stiffened to such an extent that little
further progress was to be hoped for from the methods of open warfare
which I had employed since August 8th.
If, however, another powerful blow could be delivered, to be followed
by energetic exploitation, it was quite possible that the enemy might
be hustled across the Somme, that this might be achieved at such a rate
that I could gain a firm footing on the east bank, and that thereby the
value to him of the line of the Somme, as a winter defence, might be
destroyed.
This was the very project on which I now embarked. The First Division
was in Corps Reserve, had rested and was fresh. The 32nd Division had
only just come into the line. By handing over a substantial sector to
the French, my frontage south of the Somme was about to be shortened
to 7,000 yards, a very suitable front for a deliberate attack by two
Divisions.
I held a conference at Fouilloy, near Corbie, in the afternoon of
August 21st to announce the plan, and to settle all details with the
Commanders and services concerned. The Infantry assault was to be
entrusted to Glasgow and Lambert, attacking side by side; but the
former had allotted to him much the larger share of the battle front,
at the northern end, the corollary rôle of the 32nd Division being to
seize Herleville and carry our line just to the east of it.
The date of the attack was fixed for August 23rd, and the Second and
Fifth Divisions were warned to be in readiness to come into the line
a day or two after the battle, in order to commence immediately the
process of keeping the enemy on the run, and hustling him clean out of
the river bend and across the line of the Somme.
The conference of that day was of special interest, in that I had to
deal with two Divisions which had not participated in any of those
Corps Conferences, previously held, which had initiated a fully
organized Corps operation. The Commanders and Staffs were strangers
to each other and, some of them, to me and my Staff. Nearly all of
them were yet unfamiliar with the special methods of the Corps. The
conference was therefore a lengthy one, for many problems of tactical
mechanism, which had been settled in connection with the preceding
battles of Hamel and August 8th, had to be reopened and elucidated.
These regular battle conferences were in the Australian Corps an
innovation from the time the command of it devolved upon me. They
proved a powerful instrument for the moulding of a uniformity of
tactical thought and method throughout the command. They brought
together men who met face to face but seldom, and they permitted
of an exhaustive and educative interchange of views. They led to a
development of "team-work" of a very high order of efficiency.
The work of preparing for, and the actual conduct of, these conferences
was always a very arduous business; but they more than repaid me for
the effort they entailed. They served two paramount purposes. They
enabled me to apply the requisite driving force to all subordinates
collectively, instead of individually, and thereby created a
responsive spirit which was competitive. In addition, each Commander or
Service had the advantage not only of receiving instructions regarding
his own action, but also of hearing in full detail the instructions
conveyed to his colleagues. He knew, not merely what his colleagues had
to do, but also knew that they had been told what to do; and he had an
opportunity of considering the effect of their action on his own.
The senior representative of the Heavy Artillery, Tank and Air Services
invariably attended, and listened to all the points discussed with the
Divisions, and the Divisional Commanders heard all matters arranged
with these services. In this way, each arm acquired in the most direct
manner a steadily expanding knowledge of the technology of all the
other arms.
My reason for emphasizing these matters in the present context is that,
on this particular occasion, an attempt was to be made to carry out a
major Corps operation at little more than thirty-six hours' notice; and
the Division which was to have assigned to it the principal rôle was
still in Corps Reserve and a day's march from the battle front.
That, in spite of these handicaps, the battle proved brilliantly
successful is a testimony to the valuable part which these Corps
conferences played in securing rapid and efficiently co-ordinated
action; a result which would, I am confident, have been unattainable
under the stated conditions by the mere issue of formal written orders.
Although only two out of the seven Divisions of the Corps were to
participate in this operation, it was my intention to employ, for
the full assistance of the Infantry, the whole resources of the
Corps in Artillery, Tanks and Aircraft. That was a principle which I
always regarded as fundamental, and one from which I never permitted
any exception to be made, although the pressure upon me to rest a
substantial portion of these ancillary services was always very great.
The general plan for the battle ran briefly as follows. The 32nd
Division would attack with one Infantry Brigade, under a barrage, on
a frontage of 1,000 yards; the capture of the village of Herleville,
which was still strongly held, being its principal objective.
The 1st Australian Division would attack on a frontage of 4,500 yards,
with two Brigades in line, and one Brigade in reserve. The attack would
be carried out in three phases.
The first phase was a normal assault, under an Artillery barrage, and
with the assistance of Tanks, to a predetermined line, which would
carry us beyond the Chuignes Valley; the second phase was in the nature
of exploitation by the two line Brigades, but was expressly limited to
a maximum distance of 1,000 yards beyond the main first objective.
The third phase was to be contingent upon the complete success of
the preceding phases, and would consist of an advance by the Reserve
Brigade for a further exploitation of success, by the seizure of the
whole of the Cappy bend of the river, including the towering hill close
to the Somme Canal known as Froissy Beacon.
All arrangements for the forthcoming battle having thus been completed,
the First Division duly relieved the Fifth Division on the night of
August 21st, and hastened forward its preparations for the attack,
which had been fixed for 4.45 a.m. on August 23rd.
In the meantime, the first attack which any British Army other than the
Fourth had made since August 8th was at last launched on August 21st
along the whole front of the Third British Army, northwards from Albert.
It has come to be an article of faith that the whole of the successive
stages of the great closing offensive of the war had been the subject
of most careful timing, and of minute organization on the part of the
Allied High Command, and of our own G.H.Q. Much eulogistic writing
has been devoted to an attempted analysis of the comprehensive and
far-reaching plans which resulted in the delivery of blow upon blow,
in a prescribed order of time and for the achievement of definite
strategical or tactical ends.
[Illustration: The Canal and Tunnel at Bellicourt--looking north.]
[Illustration: The Hindenburg Line--a characteristic belt of sunken
wire.]
All who played any part in these great events well know that it
was nothing of the kind; that nothing in the nature of a detailed
time-table to control so vast a field of effort was possible. All
Commanders, and the most exalted of them in a higher degree even
than those wielding lesser forces, became opportunists, and bent
their energies, not to the realization of a great general plan for a
succession of timed attacks, but upon the problem of hitting whenever
and wherever an opportunity offered, and the means were ready to hand.
In these matters it was the force of circumstances which controlled
the sequence of events, and nothing else. An elaborate time-table
controlled by definite dates and sequences for the successive
engagement of a series of Armies would have been quite impossible of
realization. Even a Corps Commander had difficulty in forecasting
within a day or two when he would be ready to launch an attack on any
given part of the front. For an Army Commander it was a matter of a
week or even two.
All attempted time-tables were controlled by our Artillery
requirements; both the assembling of the necessary guns--often drawn
from distant fronts--and the accumulating of the requisite "head" of
ammunition to see a battle through, were processes whose duration could
only be very roughly forecasted.
The dumping, in the gun pits and in ammunition stores, of the necessary
500 or 600 rounds per gun meant days of labour in collection and
distribution on the part of the railways and motor lorries. The
breakdown of a few motor lorries at a critical time, or the dropping
of a single bomb upon an important railway junction, were disturbing
factors quite sufficient to have arrested the flow of ammunition, and
to have postponed, indefinitely, any programme based upon its prompt
delivery.
It will be obvious, therefore, that no reliance could be placed, days
or weeks beforehand, upon a given attack taking place on a given day;
therefore no plans could be made which depended upon such attacks
taking place in a predetermined sequence.
Shortly put, therefore, the decisions of the High Command were
confined to questions such as where an attack should be made, in
what direction, and by what forces. The date was always a matter of
uncertainty, and the only control that could be exercised was by
postponement, and never by acceleration.
For the greater part of the offensive period it was therefore
necessarily left to the Commanders of the Armies to conform to a
general policy of attack, the time and method being left to their
own decision or recommendation. And they, in turn, relied upon their
Corps Commanders to seize the initiative in the pursuit of such a
policy. Naturally, the Army at all times made every effort to secure
co-ordinated action by its several Corps; but it rarely happened that
more than one Corps at a time carried through the main effort--the
other Corps performing subsidiary rôles. The great battle of September
29th to October 1st, which completed the final rupture of the
Hindenburg line, was, however, a signal exception to this rule.
The attack by the Third British Army on August 21st is a case which
illustrates the delays inseparable from battle preparations. The
project of such an attack had already been mooted on August 11th, when
General Byng (Third Army) paid me a visit to discuss my battle plan
of August 8th, and I gathered on that occasion that he hoped to begin
within four or five days. The event showed that the operation actually
took ten days to materialize. No criticism is suggested. The conditions
of transport of troops and munitions doubtless made its earlier
realization quite impossible.
The attack coming when it did, however, considerably eased the
situation of the Fourth Army, upon whose front Ludendorff had flung all
his available reserves, drawn from all parts of the German front, in
his endeavours to bring the Australians and Canadians to a halt.
He was now suddenly confronted with the prospect of another "break
through" in a different part of his line, and the German people had
been taught by their press correspondents to believe that a "break
through" was the one thing most to be resisted by the German Supreme
Command, and the one thing impossible of achievement by us.
There can be no doubt, therefore, that the success of the Third Army
on August 21st, although not comparable in its results with the battle
of August 8th, did materially assist the prospects of my own success in
the operations upon which I was then embarking.
The immediate effect of it was already felt the very next day. For the
Third Corps, which was still the left flank Corps of the Fourth Army,
and which had made very little progress since August 8th, was enabled
to advance its line a little past Albert and Meaulte.
The Third Australian Division, which, it will be remembered, had
taken over the front and the rôle of the now disbanded Liaison Force,
participated, by arrangement, in this attack and, swinging up its left,
brought my front line, north of the river, square to the Somme Valley,
and just to the forward slopes of the high plateau overlooking Bray
and La Neuville. The Third Pioneer Battalion at once got to work on
restoring the broken crossings over the Somme, to the south of Bray,
and put out a series of advanced posts upon the left bank of the river,
which gave us practical control of the great island on which stands La
Neuville.
Meanwhile, on the left flank of the 9th Brigade, which had carried
out the Third Divisional attack, there was serious trouble. The enemy
counter-attacked in the late afternoon. The 9th Brigade stood firm;
but the 47th Division (of the Third Corps) yielded ground, leaving the
flank of the 9th Brigade in the air. A chalk pit, which we had seized,
formed a welcome redoubt which enabled the 33rd Battalion to hang on
for sufficiently long to permit of the 34th Battalion coming up to form
a defensive flank, facing north.
In this way the gallant 9th Brigade (Goddard) was able to retain the
whole of its gains of that day; but the risk of an immediate further
advance was too great while the situation to the north remained obscure
and unsatisfactory. The capture of the village of Bray, which was still
strongly held by the enemy, had, therefore, to be postponed, although
it had been part of my plan to capture it that same day as a measure of
precaution, seeing that I calculated upon being able the next day to
advance my line south of the Somme to a point well to the east of Bray.
The great attack by the First Division supported by the 32nd Division,
which has come to be known as the battle of Chuignes, was launched at
dawn on August 23rd, and was an unqualified success.
The main valley of the Somme in this region is flanked by a number of
tributary valleys, which run generally in a north and south direction,
extending back from the river four or five miles. They are broad,
with heavily-wooded sides, and harbour a number of villages, such as
Proyart, Chuignolles, Herleville and Chuignes, which cluster on their
slopes.
One such valley, larger and longer than any of those which, in our
previous advances, we had yet crossed, lay before our front line of
that morning, and square across our path. It ran from Herleville,
northwards, past Chuignes, to join the Somme in the Bray bend. It
was the most easterly of all the tributary valleys to which I have
referred, and it was also the last piece of habitable country before
the devastated area of 1916 was reached, just a mile to the east of it.
The valley afforded excellent cover for the enemy's guns, and the
expectation was that some of them would be overrun by our attack. It
was also ideal country for machine-gun defence, for the numerous woods,
hedges and copses afforded excellent cover, and had in all probability
been amply fortified with barbed wire. It was a formidable proposition
to attack such a position on such a frontage with only two Brigades.
The 2nd Brigade (Heane) attacked on the right, the 1st Brigade (Mackay)
on the left, and the first phase was completed to time-table, with the
green objective line, located on the east side of the long valley,
in our possession. The only temporary hitch in the advance along the
whole front was at Robert Wood, where the enemy held out, and had to be
completely enveloped from both flanks before surrendering.
Then came the second phase, and no difficulty was experienced in
advancing our line 1,000 yards east of the green line, nor in
establishing there a firm line of outposts for the night.
The third phase presented a great deal more difficulty than I had
anticipated. It was to have been undertaken by the 3rd Brigade
(Bennett) pushing without delay through the 1st Brigade, and advancing
in open warfare formation north-easterly towards Cappy, for the seizure
of Hill 90, overlooking that village and on the south-west of it, and
terminating at its northern extremity in the high bluff of Froissy
Beacon.
There was, however, some unexplained delay in the initiation of this
advance, and it was not until about 2 o'clock that the 3rd Brigade
moved forward to the assault of the long slope of the Chuignes Valley,
which still lay before them in this part of the field. The enemy, under
the impression that our attack had spent itself, had occupied the
plateau in great strength, and at first little progress could be made.
Mobile Artillery was, however, promptly pushed up, and this proved
of great assistance to the infantry. Garenne Wood, on the top of the
plateau, into which large numbers of the enemy had withdrawn, proved
a difficult obstacle, and incapable of capture by frontal attack.
It, too, was conquered by enveloping tactics, and with its fall the
resistance of the enemy rapidly subsided, and the 3rd Brigade had the
satisfaction of hunting the fugitives clean off the plateau into the
Cappy Valley.
The whole of this phase of the battle was an especially fine piece
of work on the part of the Regimental Officers. It was open warfare
of the most complete character, and the victory was won by excellent
battle control on the part of the Battalion Commanders, by splendid
co-operation between the four Battalions of the Brigade, and by
intelligent and gallant leadership on the part of the Company and
Platoon Commanders.
Beset as I had been by many anxieties during the early afternoon as
to how the Third Brigade would fare in the difficult task which had
been given it, rendered more difficult by the delay of which I have
spoken, I had the satisfaction that night of contemplating a victory
far greater than I had calculated upon.
For the 32nd Division had successfully captured Herleville, and the
First Division had seized the whole country for a depth of 1½ miles
up to a line extending from Herleville to the western edge of Cappy.
The whole Chuignes Valley was ours. By its capture the enemy had been
despoiled of all habitable areas, and had been relegated to a waste of
broken and ruined country between us and the line of the Somme.
We took that day 21 guns and over 3,100 prisoners from ten different
regiments. The slaughter of the enemy in the tangled valleys was
considerable, for our Infantry are always vigorous bayonet fighters.
They received much assistance from the Tanks in disposing of the
numerous machine gun detachments which held their ground to the last.
It was a smashing blow, and far exceeded in its results any previous
record in my experience, having regard to the number of troops engaged.
Its immediate result, the same night, was the capture of Bray by the
Third Division, north of the river, thus completing the work of that
Division which the failure of the 47th Division on their left the day
before had compelled them to leave unfinished. The 40th Battalion took
200 prisoners, with trifling loss to themselves.
A more remote result, which made itself apparent in the next few days,
was that it compelled the enemy to abandon all hope of retaining a hold
of any country west of the line of the Somme; it impelled him at last
to an evacuation of the great bend of the river, a process which he
began in a very few days.
Such was the battle of Chuignes. Much of the success of this brilliant
engagement was due to the personality of the Divisional Commander,
Major-General Glasgow. He had commenced his career in the war as a
Major of Light Horse, and had participated in the earliest stages of
the fighting on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
Speedily gaining promotion during that campaign, his outstanding merits
as a leader gained him an appointment to the command of the 13th
Brigade, when the latter was formed in Egypt in the spring of 1916. For
two years he led that Brigade through all its arduous experiences on
the Somme, at Messines and in the third battle of Ypres.
This fine record was but the prelude to the history-making
performances of the 13th Brigade in 1918 at Dernancourt and
Villers-Bretonneux, and Glasgow seemed easily the most promising, among
all the Brigadiers of that time, as a prospective Divisional Commander:
a judgment which fully justified itself.
Of strong though not heavy build and of energetic demeanour, Glasgow
succeeded not so much by exceptional mental gifts, or by tactical
skill of any very high order, as by his personal driving force and
determination, which impressed themselves upon all his subordinates.
He always got where he wanted to get--was consistently loyal to the
Australian ideal, and intensely proud of the Australian soldier.
The number of prisoners captured on this day, and the total numbers of
the enemy encountered in the course of an advance which was relatively
small, pointed to a disposition of troops which was unusual on the part
of the enemy.
According to the principles so strongly emphasized by Ludendorff,
in instructions which he had issued, and copies of which duly fell
into my hands, there was to be, in his scheme of defensive tactics,
a "fore-field" relatively lightly held by outposts and machine guns.
The main line of resistance was to be well in rear, and there the main
concentration of troops was to be effected.
Why had this dictum been so widely disregarded on this occasion? It was
a question worthy of close inquiry, and two German Battalion Commanders
who were captured by us on that day supplied the answer.
Reference has already been made to the message which I issued to the
Corps on the eve of the great opening battle; and to the fact that a
copy of this message had fallen into the hands of the enemy, probably
by the capture of an officer in the close fighting which took place at
Lihons on August 9th and 10th.
In due course the substance of this message was published in the German
wireless news, and in the German press of the time, but cleverly
mistranslated to convey a colouring desirable for the German public.
It so happened that not long before the opening of our offensive I
had, at the request of the authorities, sent to Australia a recruiting
cable, which appealed to the Australian public for a maintenance of
supplies of fighting men.[16] That the full text of this cable also
became speedily known to the enemy is a testimony to the far-flung
alertness of their Intelligence Service. It, also, was published in
their press.
Basing their editorial comments on this material, the _Berliner
Tageblatt_ of August 17th, 1918, a copy of which I captured, and
another journal whose name was not ascertainable, because in the copy
captured the title had been torn off, both indulged in arguments, which
were long, and intended to be convincing, to prove to the German people
that I had promised my troops a "break-through;" that I had failed, and
that, admittedly, the "proud" Australian Corps had been shattered, had
come to the end of its resources and was no longer to be taken into
calculation as an instrument of attack by the "English."
It was perfectly legitimate, if clumsy, propaganda. But it was a
curious example of a propaganda which recoiled upon the heads of its
propounders. The Battalion Commanders, who, like all German officers
whom we captured, were always voluble in excuses for their defeat,
pleaded that they had been deceived by the utterances of their own
journals into believing that the Australian offensive effort had come
to an end, once and for all, and that no further attack by this Corps
was possible.
[Illustration: MAP D]
It was this belief which, they said, had prompted their respective
Divisions (for each of them represented a separate one) to disregard
Ludendorff's prescription; their Divisional Generals had felt justified
in availing themselves of the very excellent living quarters which
existed in the Chuignes Valley, near the German front line of August
22nd, to quarter all their support and reserve Battalions.
It was there that we found them--increasing the population of the front
zone far beyond that which we had been accustomed to find. Was there
ever a more diverting example of a propaganda which recoiled upon those
who uttered it? Intended to deceive the German public, it ended in
deceiving the German front line troops, to their own lamentable undoing.
Among the captures of the battle of Chuignes, which, as usual,
comprised a large and varied assortment of warlike stores, including
another great dump of engineering materials near Froissy Beacon, and
two complete railway trains, was the monster naval gun of 15-inch bore,
which had been so systematically bombarding the city of Amiens, and had
wrought such havoc among its buildings and monuments.
It was first reached by the 3rd Australian Battalion (1st Brigade)
during a bayonet charge which cleared Arcy Wood, in the shelter of
which the giant gun had been erected. An imposing amount of labour had
been expended upon its installation, and the most cursory examination
of the effort involved was sufficient to make it evident that the enemy
entertained no expectation of ever being hurled back from the region
which it dominated.
The gun with its carriage, platform and concrete foundations weighed
over 500 tons. It was a naval gun, obviously of the type in use on
the German Dreadnoughts, and never intended by its original designers
for use on land. It had a range of over twenty-four miles, fired a
projectile weighing nearly a ton, and the barrel was seventy feet long.
It had been installed with the elaborate completeness of German
methods. A double railway track, several miles long, had been built
to the site, for the transport of the gun and its parts. It was
electrically trained and elevated. Its ammunition was handled and
loaded by mechanical means. The adjacent hill-side had been tunnelled
to receive the operating machinery, and the supplies of shells,
cartridges and fuses.
The gun and its mounting, when captured, were found to have been
completely disabled. A heavy charge of explosive had burst the chamber
of the gun, and had torn off the projecting muzzle end, which lay with
its nose helplessly buried in the mud. The giant carriage had been
burst asunder, and over acres all around was strewn the debris of the
explosion.
For some time, some of my gunner experts favoured the theory that the
gun had burst accidentally, but the view which ultimately prevailed was
that the demolition had been intentional. Many months afterwards, the
full story of the gun and its performances was elicited from a prisoner
who had belonged to the No. 4 (German) Heavy Artillery Regiment, and it
was circumstantial enough to be credible.
The story is worthy of repetition, not only because no authentic
account of this wonderful trophy has yet been published, but also
because the history of this gun curiously illuminates the enemy's
plans, intentions and expectations between the dates of his onslaught
in March and his recoil in August.
The substance of the story is as follows: The gun came from Krupp's.
Work on the position was started early in April, 1918--only a few days
after the site had fallen into the enemy's hands. It was completed
and ready for action on the morning of June 2nd. Its maximum firing
capacity was twenty-eight rounds per day. It fired continuously until
June 28th. By this time the original gun was worn out, having fired
over 350 rounds at Amiens. A new piece was ordered from Krupp's. It
arrived on August 7th, and was ready to fire by 7 p.m. It fired its
first round on August 8th at 2 a.m. and kept on firing till August
9th, firing thirty-five rounds in all. At 7 a.m. on August 9th, all
hands were ordered to remove everything that was portable and of value.
Demolition charges were laid and fired about 9 a.m. on August 9th. The
crew returned to Krupp's.
It is to be inferred from this narrative that the enemy's defeat at
Hamel on July 4th did not deter him from his enterprise of replacing
the original worn gun, but that after August 8th, he quite definitely
accepted the certainty that he would be allowed no time to remove the
gun intact, and so he destroyed it in order that we might not be able
to use it against him.
This is the largest single trophy of war won by any Commander during
the war, and it was a matter of great regret to me that the cost of its
transportation to Australia was prohibitive. The gun, as it stands,
was, therefore, fenced in, and it has been formally presented to the
City of Amiens as a souvenir of the Australian Army Corps.
So long as any Australian soldiers remained in France, this spot was
a Mecca to which thousands of pilgrims wandered; and soon there was,
over the whole of the immense structure, not one square inch upon which
the "diggers" had not inscribed their names and sentiments. There, in
the shade of Arcy Wood, the great ruin rests, a memorial alike of the
sufferings of Amiens and of the great Australian victory of Chuignes.
FOOTNOTES:
[16] The cablegram in question was dated July 13th, and was in the
following terms:
"Since the opening of the German offensive in March every Division
of the Australian Army in France has been engaged and always with
decisive success. The men of Australia, wherever and whenever they
have entered this mighty conflict, have invariably brought the enemy
to a standstill, and have made him pay dearly for each futile attempt
to pass them on the roads to Amiens and to the Channel Ports. Their
reputation as skilful, disciplined and gallant soldiers has never
stood higher throughout the Empire than it does to-day. Those who are
privileged to lead in battle such splendid men are animated with a
pride and admiration which is tempered only by concern at their waning
numbers. Already some battalions which have made historic traditions
have ceased to exist as fighting units, and others must follow unless
the Australian nation stands by us and sees to it that our ranks are
kept filled. We refuse to believe that the men and women of Australia
will suffer their famous Divisions to decay, or that the young manhood
still remaining in our homeland will not wish to share in the renown
of their brothers in France. Nothing matters now but to see this job
through to the end, and we appeal to every man to come, and come
quickly, to help in our work, and to share in our glorious endeavour.
"MONASH, Lieutenant-General."