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somewhere – I don’t know where – but one understood that the decision would be brought back by him. At 2.30 either he, or some message, came back. There was a general stir in the small crowd which was in the know.
    I heard a message being read out from the General’s dugout for sending to all the units out on the ridges: ‘Sir Ian Hamilton hopes they will dig … and that the morning will find them securely dug in where they are … The Australian sailors have just got a submarine through the Dardanelles and torpedoed a Turkish ship.’

Fleurbaix, 1916 – The Battle of Fromelles
    W.H. Downing

W.H. ‘Jimmy’ Downing served in the 57 th Battalion, part of the legendary Brigadier Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott’s 15 th Brigade – which meant Downing participated in most of the significant Australian actions of the war.
    Downing was born in 1893 at Portland in Victoria, and was rejected by the army eight times on account of his height. He managed to stretch himself on the ninth occasion. He was accepted on September 30 th , 1915, joining the 7 th Battalion in Egypt, before transferring to the 57 th in France. Sergeant Downing was awarded the Military Medal at Polygon Wood.
    Fromelles is a village not far from Armentières and Fleurbaix in Northern France. On July 19 th , 1916 it was the A.I.F.’s introduction to the slaughter of the Western Front, and was the worst 24 hours in Australian history. The 5 th Division suffered 5533 casualties. Downing’s 57 th Battalion, in support, was spared the worst of the frontal attack, but nevertheless lost 35 killed. The Australians (and the British 6 1st Division) were ordered (by British High Command) to charge across open boggy ground against entrenched German machine-guns. It was hopeless and brave – but a slaughter.
    After the war Downing completed a law degree and eventually went into partnership with Pompey Elliott in the firm H.E. Elliott and Downing. Some of the material in To the Last Ridge was published by the Melbourne newspapers Argus and the Herald, before book publication in 1920. (A new edition was published in 1998.) Downing also published the wonderful dictionary Digger Dialects in 1919 (new edition, 1990). Walter Downing MM died in 1965.
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    There is a holy place by a little stream, a marsh between the orchards near Fromelles. This is its story.
    From 10 th to 17 th of July the Black and Purple Battalions held the line. On the night of the 12 th there was an alarm – the S.O.S. (two red stars hovering in the night) – barrages, counter-barrages. There were raids and violent shelling. There was the frightful chaos of minenwerfers (trench mortars), shaking the ground into waves, trailing lines of sparks criss-crossed on the gloom, swerving just before they fell, confounding, dreadful, abhorred far more than shells, killing by their very concussion, destroying all within many yards. The enemy knew that a division fresh to the Western Front was in the line. He was bent on breaking its spirit. How little he succeeded, those battered breastworks and the little marsh bear witness.
    No-man’s-land, on the front occupied by the 15 th Brigade, was a double curve like the letter S. It was from five to seven hundred yards wide, narrowing on the left to two or three hundred, where the 8 th and 14 th Brigades were placed. At the wide end it was split lengthwise by a little stream, which wandered at last beneath our parapet by Pinney Avenue, where the tunnellers worked.
    By the stream the ground was marshy but not impassable, for it was mid-summer. On either side, the British and the German lines fronted each other on low opposing slopes, rising in tiers – front-line, supports, close reserves, reserves. Owing to the wet, low-lying nature of the ground there were no trenches, but solid breastworks of beaten sandbags reveted with iron and timber, fortified with concrete slabs or ‘bursters’. These were from 20 to 30 feet thick, and seven to ten feet high. There was