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pushed back towards the Sugarloaf. Then, at 3.15 a.m., Germans from Dead Sow Farm attacked the 8th Brigade again, overrunning part of the ditch, and reoccupying the left section of their old front-line.
    The Australians had been fighting for nine hours. With Germans now back on both sides of their old line and still moving out of Dead Sow Farm, the exhausted men in the ditch were faced with a choice of surrendering or dying. Over 150 of the 8th Brigade charged back, pouring into the reoccupied German trench, where they fought savagely with the enemy, before scrambling out and rushing back towards their own trenches. Two men out of a group of 11 who’d made a pact to stick together were caught in the trench. The other nine returned to help them, then they rushed across no-man’s-land. All but one made it. He was shot dead as they reached the wire entanglements.
    With news reaching McCay and Haking that the 8th Brigade had retreated and the Germans were back in either end of their original front-line, Haking ordered the last Australians to withdraw. As the sky grew lighter, Toll’s men in the German front-line streamed down the communication trench back to the Australian line. Those still in the ditch had no escape; the Germans were behind them. Some surrendered; others kept fighting—calling desperately for reinforcements. When they ran out of ammunition they reached for their bayonets but by 9 a.m. the attempt to capture the Sugarloaf was over. In one bombing post, seven men lay motionless in the mud.
    CRYING OUT
    For three more hours the German artillery pounded the smashed Australian trenches, which were filled with the dead and dying, blood and mud caking their uniforms. At midday, the shelling stopped. The ensuing stillness was broken only by the cries of the wounded lying in no-man’s-land. The ‘wounded could be seen everywhere raising their limbs in pain or turning hopelessly, hour after hour, from one side to the other.’ They called for help and for water as the sun burned them and flies crawled over their faces and their wounds. German bullets smacked into any that tried to crawl back. In the trenches, men sat in a state of shock, staring at nothing.
    Later, while some men ate cold bully beef from the tin, others slipped out into no-man’s-land, taking advantage of an informal offer by a German officer to let the wounded be collected. But when McCay found out, he ended the truce— no informal negotiations were allowed with the Germans.

    Australian dead lying in a gap in a barbed-wire entanglement, Somme region.
AWM E03149
    The Australians then risked their lives on mercy missions. Three hundred men were brought back on the first night, but the following day no-man’s-land was still cluttered with men. One soldier with a serious head wound walked around in circles, collapsed then got up and walked again. No one could reach him. He kept walking, collapsing, getting up, until a German sniper shot him, perhaps to end his misery. The Australians drew lots to decide who would venture into no-man’s-land for the wounded. Sergeant Major Arthur Brunton wrote a farewell to his wife, ‘perhaps for the last time, though I hope not’. Second Lieutenant Simon Fraser, a Victorian farmer, was bringing back a wounded soldier when someone else called out, ‘Don’t forget me, cobber.’ When Fraser returned with reinforcements to collect the wounded man, another soldier screamed, ‘Stretcher-bearer! stretcher-bearer!’ then ‘Come on New South Wales.’ He’d been out there for three days, and when he was finally brought in, his wound was fly-blown.
    Many others weren’t found, and they died in no-man’s-land. Private Algernon Bell wrote in his diary that he was wounded ‘in arm and leg. Going to try and crawl back to trenches tonight’. He made it, but died four days later.
    The first battle that the Australians fought on the Western