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Front was a complete failure. Over 5500 had been killed or wounded and 400 taken prisoner. In one day, the Australians suffered one-fifth of the casualties sustained during their eight months at Gallipoli. As his men returned, Elliot cried. In the 60th Battalion alone, only one officer and 106 men out of 887 made it to the morning roll call. Almost nothing had been gained. And the Germans had been distracted from the Somme for just a moment.
    In his report, Haking said that the artillery barrage was strong and that the attack had failed because the British lacked fighting spirit and the Australians ‘were not sufficiently trained to consolidate the ground gained’. This ignored the fact that the ultimate objective—the German support lines—had turned out to be water-filled ditches. They ‘lost heavily’, he wrote, but he felt that, despite the failure, the battle had done both the Australian and the British division ‘a great deal of good’.
    The British headquarters dressed up the failure as a successful raid. In Australia, the newspapers followed the British communiqué:
    Yesterday evening, south of Armentières, we carried out some important raids on a front of two miles in which Australian troops took part. About 140 German prisoners were captured.
    In reality, the 5th Division had been wiped out and the survivors were demoralised. They were learning what war on the Western Front was like. Lieutenant Ronald McInnis wrote that ‘We thought we knew something of the horrors of war but we were mere recruits and have had our full education in one day.’ The men of I Anzac Corps were about to find out for themselves. As the Germans buried the Australian dead in mass graves, the three divisions of the corps— the 1st, 2nd and 4th Australian Divisions—moved from Messines down to the Somme.
    KILLED IN ACTION
____________________
    LANCE CORPORAL GEORGE BLAKE
Carpenter. 19 July 1916
    SECOND LIEUTENANT WALTER CARRUTHERS
Bank clerk. 29 September 1918

    DIED OF WOUNDS
____________________
    PRIVATE ALGERNON BELL
Fireman. 24 July 1916

CHAPTER THREE

THE SOMME, POZIÈRES, 1916

    NOCTURNE (EXTRACT)

    Silent I sit and gaze into the gloom
Of No Man’s Land, and see the shattered trees,
Set like a row of ghostly sentinels,
There where the stakes and
tangled bard-wire cease.

    Now to my staring eyes
they seem to move:
Have they advanced or
were they there before?

    Skyward a star-shell soars
with silver ray—
I flout my fears and think
of them no more.

    PRIVATE TUNU PARAU

IN THE HOT sun on 20 July, the 1st Australian Division waited in a hastily dug trench that faced the tree-lined streets of the German-occupied hamlet of Pozières and the two formidable trenches of the second German line (known as Old German Lines) on a ridge 450 metres behind it. Whoever held Pozières had control of the highest point of the battlefield. General Sir Henry Rawlinson considered it the key to the area, and General Haig wanted it captured. British troops had tried to take the hamlet on the first day of the Somme offensive, nearly three weeks earlier. But the Germans had held on through that attack and four others, and the bodies of British dead hung in the wire.
    On 19 July, the men of the 1st Division had left their billets and marched 15 kilometres, leaving behind the green countryside as they got closer to the front-line. Just before the town of Albert, the men put on their tin hats, and officers discarded their ‘Sam Browne’ revolver belts so snipers couldn’t easily distinguish their rank. They passed under a golden statue of the Virgin Mary and child hanging from a shelled cathedral in Albert. The Australians nicknamed her ‘Fanny Durack’ after the 1912 Olympic swimming and diving champion. The statue was by now famous and symbolic—both sides believed its fall would signify the end of the war. Then the Australians crossed a shell-holed land and barely