E-text prepared by Elaine Walker, Paul Ereaut, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/)
Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 18390-h.htm or 18390-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/8/3/9/18390/18390-h/18390-h.htm)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/8/3/9/18390/18390-h.zip)
LETTERS FROM FRANCE
by
C. E. W. BEAN
War Correspondent for the Commonwealth of Australia
With a Map and Eight Plates
[Illustration: AUSTRALIANS WATCHING THE BOMBARDMENT OF POZIÈRES
Their mates were beneath that bombardment at the time]
Cassell and Company, Ltd
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1917
To those other Australians who fell in the Sharpest Action their
Force has known, on July 19, 1916, before Fromelles, these Memories of a
Greater, but not a Braver, Battle are herewith Dedicated
PREFACE
These letters are in no sense a history--except that they contain the
truth. They were written at the time and within close range of the
events they describe. Half of the fighting, including the brave attack
before Fromelles, is left untouched on, for these pages do not attempt
to narrate the full story of the Australian Imperial Force in France.
They were written to depict the surroundings in which, and the spirit
with which, that history has been made; first in the quiet green Flemish
lowlands, then with a swift, sudden plunge into the grim, reeking, naked
desolation of the Somme. The record of the A.I.F., and its now
historical units in their full action, will be painted upon that
background some day. If these letters convey some reflection of the
spirit which fought at Pozières, their object is well fulfilled. The
author's profits are devoted to the fund for nursing back to useful
citizenship Australians blinded or maimed in the war.
C. E. W. Bean.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
Preface
1. A Padre who said the Right Thing
2. To the Front
3. The First Impression--A Country with Eyes
4. The Road to Lille
5. The Differences
6. The Germans
7. The Planes
8. The Coming Struggle: Our Task
9. In a Forest of France
10. Identified
11. The Great Battle Begins
12. The British--Fricourt and La Boiselle
13. The Dug-outs of Fricourt
14. The Raid
15. Pozières
16. An Abysm of Desolation
17. Pozières Ridge
18. The Green Country
19. Trommelfeuer
20. The New Fighting
21. Angels' Work
22. Our Neighbour
23. Mouquet Farm
24. How the Australians were Relieved
25. On Leave to a New England
26. The New Entry
27. A Hard Time
28. The Winter of 1916
29. As in the World's Dawn
30. The Grass Bank
31. In the Mud of Le Barque
32. The New Draft
33. Why He is not "The Anzac"
LIST OF PLATES
Australians Watching the Bombardment of Pozières
Sketch Map
"Talking with the Kiddies in the Street"
"An Occasional Broken Tree-Trunk"
No Man's Land
Along the Road to Lille
The Trenches here have to be Built Above the Ground in Breastwork
A Main Street of Pozières
The Church Pozières
The Windmill of Pozières
The Barely Recognisable Remains of a Trench
The Tumbled Heap of Bricks and Timber which the World Knows as Mouquet
Farm
"Past the Mud-Heaps Scraped by the Road Gangs"
[Illustration: Rough sketch showing some of the German defences of
Pozières and the direction of the Australian attacks between July 22 and
September 4, 1916. (From Pozières to Mouquet Farm is just over a
mile.)]
LETTERS FROM FRANCE
CHAPTER I
A PADRE WHO SAID THE RIGHT THING
_France, April 8th, 1916._
The sun glared from a Mediterranean sky and from the surface of the
Mediterranean sea. The liner heaved easily to a slow swell. In the waist
of the ship a densely packed crowd of sunburnt faces upturned towards a
speaker who leaned over the rail of the promenade deck above. Beside the
speaker was a slight figure with three long rows of ribbons across the
left breast. Every man in the Australian Imperial Force is as proud of
those ribbons as the leader who wears them so modestly.
Australian ships had been moving through those waters for days. High
over one's head, as one listened to that speaker, there sawed the
wireless aerial backwards and forwards across the silver sky. Only
yesterday that aerial had intercepted a stammering signal from far, far
away over the brim of the world. "S.O.S.," it ran, "S.O.S." There
followed half inarticulate fragments of a latitude. That evening about
sundown we ran into the shreds of some ocean conversation about boats'
crews, and about someone who was still absent--just that broken fragment
in the buzz of the wireless conversation which runs around the world. A
big Australian transport, we knew, was some twelve hours away from us
upon the waters. Could it be about her that these personages of the
ocean were calling one to another? Days afterwards we heard that it had
not been an Australian or any other transport.
Somewhere in those dazzling seas there was an eye watching for us too,
just above the water, and always waiting--waiting--waiting--. It would
have been a rich harvest, that crowded deck below one. If the monster
struck just there he could not fail to kill many with the mere
explosion. But I don't believe a man in the crowd gave it a thought. The
strong, tanned, clean-shaven faces under the old slouch hats were all
gazing up in rapt attention at the speaker. For he was telling them the
right thing.
He was not a regular chaplain--there was no regular padre in that ship,
and we were likely to have no church parade until there was discovered
amongst the reinforcement officers one little subaltern who was a padre
in Tasmania, but who was going to the front as a fighting man. We had
heard other padres speak to troops on the eve of their plunging into a
great enterprise, when the sermon had made some of us wish that we only
had the power and gift to seize that wonderful opportunity as it might
be seized, and have done with texts and doctrines and speak to the men
as men. Every man there had his ideals--he was giving his life, as like
as not, because, however crude the exterior, there was an eye within
which saw truly and surely through the mists. And now when they stood on
the brink of the last great sacrifice, could he not seize upon those
truths--?
But this time we simply stood and wondered. For that slip of a figure in
khaki, high up there with one hand on the stanchion and the other
tapping the rail, was telling them a thousand times better than any of
us could ever have put it to himself exactly the things one would have
longed to say.
He told them first, his voice firm with conviction, that God had not
populated this world with saints, but with ordinary human men; and that
they need not fear that, simply because they might not have been
churchgoers or lived what the world calls religious lives, therefore God
would desert them in the danger and trials and perhaps the death to
which they went. "If I thought that God wished any man to be tortured
eternally," he said, "to be tortured for all time and not to have any
hope of heaven, then I would go down to Hell cheerfully with a smile on
my lips rather than worship such a being. I don't know whether a man may
put it beyond the power of God to help him. But I know this, that
whether you are bad or good, or religious or not religious, God is with
you all the time trying to help you.
"And what have we to fear now?" he went on, raising his eyes for a
moment from the puckered, interested brown foreheads below him and
looking out over the shimmering distant silver of the horizon, as if
away over there, over the edge of the world, he could read what the next
few months had in store for them. "We know what we have come for, and we
know that it is right. We have all read of the things which have
happened in Belgium and in France. We know that the Germans invaded a
peaceful country and brought these horrors into it, we know how they
tore up treaties like so much paper; how they sank the _Lusitania_ and
showered their bombs on harmless women and children in London and in the
villages of England. We came of our own free wills--we came to say that
this sort of thing shall not happen in the world so long as we are in
it. We know that we are doing right, and I tell you that on this mission
on which we have come, so long as every man plays the game and plays it
cleanly, he need not fear about his religion--for what else is his
religion than that? Play the game and God will be with you--never fear.
"And what if some of us do pass over before this struggle is ended--what
is there in that? If it were not for the dear ones whom he leaves behind
him, mightn't a man almost pray for a death like that? The newspapers
too often call us heroes, but we know we are not heroes for having come,
and we do not want to be called heroes. We should have been less than
men if we hadn't."
The rapt, unconscious approval in those weather-scarred upturned faces
made it quite obvious that they were with him in every word. In those
simple sentences this man was speaking the whole soul of Australia. He
looked up for a second to the wide sky as clear as his own conscience,
and then looked down at them again. "Isn't it the most wonderful thing
that could ever have happened?" he went on. "Didn't everyone of us as a
boy long to go about the world as they did in the days of Drake and
Raleigh, and didn't it seem almost beyond hope that that adventure would
ever come to us? And isn't that the very thing that has happened? And
here we are on that great enterprise going out across the world, and
with no thought of gain or conquest, but to help to right a great wrong.
What else do we wish except to go straight forward at the enemy--with
our dear ones far behind us and God above us, and our friends on each
side of us and only the enemy in front of us--what more do we wish than
that?"
There were tears in many men's eyes when he finished--and that does not
often happen with Australians. But it happened this time--far out there
on a distant sea. And that was because he had put his finger, just for
one moment, straight on to the heart of his nation.