At Berteaucourt the Battalion was now for the first time in the department de la Somme, that part of France in which it was to spend most of its period of relaxation, of fighting and of resting during the whole future course of the war. The river from which the department takes its name enters it where Ham is situated at its south-eastern corner, flows north through Peronne, then zig- zags westwards through the centre of the department passing near Bray and near Corbie on its way to Amiens, again slightly northward on to Abbeville and to the sea. Here it is the river, there it is canal, but ever its waters flow peacefully, whilst the flourishing towns and pretty villages it once skirted have perished to make it famous.
It was in this department that the battalion had its first encounter in the war of the Western Front, at Pozieres, which lay just within its borders. Afterwards the unit left for the trenches of Flanders, but returned to it to lie for several weeks at Flers and Gueudecourt, looking over at Bapaume. Then Bapaume enticed the men of the 48th outside its limits, where they were badly used at Bullecourt, and once more hurried back to their old department to count their dead and fill their vacant places.
Yet again they left it, this time for a long spell in the north, and got on very well in a series of engagements, beginning with Messines. They remained away until they fared very badly at Passchendaele, and immediately they struck misfortune set out once more for their familiar territory, and marched to its extreme corner, where the department meets the sea.
In the beginning of 1918 they returned to the north, and for a time enjoyed themselves immensely, until they had to rush away from their sports and games their cinematograph shows and concerts, to help defend its capital. Finally, a few weeks before the armistice was signed, they crossed its eastern boundaries for their last engagement with the enemy, and some nights later stole away from the new ground which they had won from him and, marching till dawn, were again within its limits.
Amiens is the heart of the department, and is the mainspring of all its activities. After the first great enemy onslaught of 1914 the battle-line had settled on its eastern half, cutting it north and south, and lying dangerously near to its centre. Some distance behind the German trenches lay French towns and villages. So fast was the rush of the first advance that their capture had involved but slight damage, and the inhabitants settled down to such normal activities of life as the conditions of German occupation allowed them.
Then, in the middle of 1916, the enemy's tide-line of fortification and defence, which seemed to have become stable for all time, began to recede under strong and constant pressure. Not regularly and evenly did it recede, but over each district it moodily ebbed and flowed, its fringe and its backwash devouring the towns and villages, the farms and orchards, that it had spared in its first sweeping advance. Slowly and fitfully it went back, leaving all its war's residue of filth to mark its ebb, crumpling up railroads, disfiguring the broad, clean highways, wiping out the peaceful country lanes, strewing with wreck the fertile lands and smiling plains, and carrying with it what remained of the panic-stricken inhabitants.
Only at the eastern borders of the department did the devastating wave rest. There the armies that followed its receding water-line were blocked by a barrier which seemed to make intrusion impossible. Behind that barrier its waters piled up again, gradually swelling all through the summer of 1917 and through the following winter. Then in the spring, like those floods that come with the melting of the winter's snows, they again burst forth, and again they swept over the land from which they had so reluctantly receded. This time the menacing wave had far to go before there was any civilian life to disorganise, any quiet farms and happy villages; but it had in abundance the whole intricate organisation and works of a great military life, and on them it fed to satiety its appetite for destruction. Men and horses and guns, hospitals and workshops and rail- roads all were engulfed by it. Many were caught by it even as they fled from it as from something preternatural. Others stood against it only to be tossed on its crest as it surged on towards its old line. Even that did not prove to be its high tide, for it swept still further on, making for the heart of the department it had already so foully used.
The heart, Amiens, it did not reach. A breakwater intervened, against which it spent its strength; and with a suddenness almost as dramatic as its westward flow, it again receded towards the east until it had left the hills and valleys of the Somme far behind.
Just as the river runs through the department from east to west, so does a broad main highway from its south- western to its north-eastern corner bisect it diagonally. This is the Amiens- Bapaume road, which crosses the river at Amiens. Along this road are several places of poignant interest to a member of the 48th Battalion. When he has left Amiens behind and is approaching the outskirts of Albert, he comes to that part of the road where it is crossed by the old railway line, and where his battalion formed one of those obstacles that blocked the western passage of the great tide in its second rush towards Amiens. When he has passed through Albert and continued but a short distance on the same road, he may even now see an unshapely mound on his left. It is all that remains of the old windmill that marked the highest point on the Pozieres Ridge. Near the windmill lie many of the 48th's dead. There the battalion had its first engagement on the Western Front, when in two days fighting 598 officers and men were thinned from its ranks, what time the battle-line so reluctantly receded east wards after its first long menace of the west. When he goes further along and approaches the outskirts of the department, he may see on his right what remains of Flers and Gueudecourt, where the battalion spent most of the severe winter of 1916-17, and there fought against all the rigours and dull misery of trench-life. If he leaves Bapaume and follows the road as it veers round to the east on its way to Cambrai, he may look over to that country around Noreuil on his left and leading towards Bullecourt, where his battalion offered its second great holocaust in the spring of 1917.
Such great happenings had their being in the department de la Somme, and such mighty interests had it in store for the men of the 48th Battalion, who were now for the first time billeted within its boundaries. But in those first days at Berteaucourt no one thought of the future, the present offered sufficient food for reflection; for the battalion in its march from Doullens to Berteaucourt had "made a bad march."
When many men fall out on the line of march, and time is wasted, and the general military appearance of the unit suffers, there is always a violent commotion afterwards. What the battalion commander has to say to his senior officers is religiously handed on by them to their immediate juniors, until it reaches the sergeants of the different sections who impose it with lurid additions on men of noted inclination to fall by the wayside. In this case there was more than one battalion, and apparently more than one brigade involved. The proverbial luck in numbers availed not, however, to afford escape from the battalion commander, from the brigadier; and, finally, from the divisional commander, who swore that his brigades should be taught to march.
The divisional commander at that time was Major-General Sir H. V. Cox. He was not exactly a genial man, that old Indian soldier, with a little of the heat of India's sun in his temper. He is remembered best in his casual encounters with the digger on the roads, or about the camp, when he would put the embarrassed Australian through a strict cross-examination, firing questions at him with quick, jerky utterances and a most unfriendly air. One is inclined to think that he may have arranged those situations and affected much of that manner for his own enjoyment of the digger. Certain it is that he lacked not appreciation of the Australian soldier, nor lacked the will to give emphatic expression to it long after he left the division. That his caustic words were not unrelieved by humour could have been seen on Christmas Day of the same year, when he strolled round the billets of the 48th Battalion, and the diggers greeted him with scant ceremony, but with a cheery grin and "a merry Christmas, Mister Cox." It was a well-tried division before he left it, and many of those who lived under his strict regime still credit his foundation of it with much of its subsequent success.
General Cox was not in an amiable mood, however, towards the several battalions that had just arrived in the Somme area, and immediately the most vigorous training was begun. Reveille was at 6 a.m. From 6.30 a.m. till 7.30 a.m. there was drill. After breakfast followed a route march over a distance of nine or ten miles in full marching order. From 2 p.m. until 5.30 p.m. training went on again, and at night there was instruction in Lewis gun work from 7 o'clock till 9 o'clock, at which all officers were bound to attend. The programme of training and instruction went on daily, and daily the heavy route marching was gone through, until every road and hedge row and farm-house in the surrounding district had become monotonously familiar, and the men asked one another with humorous sarcasm what work had brought them to France - "whether they had come to fight, or to go touring the country like blanky Cook's tourists."
The days of Berteaucourt were withal very happy ones. The hours of relaxation were enjoyed the more for the hard work which preceded them. In no part of France did the men make more friends among the civilian population. It was the first time that the battalion had been billeted in a normal French village, with convenient access to its many estaminets. In this village estaminets were numerous, and those were the days when champagne was plentiful. Perhaps that "champagne" was inferior to champagne, but it was not inferior to what afterwards fetched high prices under, the same name. The soldier's pocket was quite equal to it. The soldier's many celebrations, occasioned by anything from a victory over a neighbouring battalion in the football field to a victory over Fritz in the battlefield, could, in his estimation, be properly honoured by no other drink. At these celebrations he drank, and sometimes drank deep.
Of those French estaminets it might be said that, in general, the entertainment provided by them was not much abused. Utterly unlike the chinking bars of English-speaking countries, whose patrons enter, drink, and are then expected to make way for others, the estaminet approximated more to the English inn of Dickens and of the pre-Victorian era. The corner of shelves, containing many-coloured bottles of wine and of syruppy liqueurs, represented but a small part of the activities of its roomy interior. In the centre of it there was usually a large stove, where madame cooked many plates of chipped potatoes and many golden omelettes for the diggers, as they sat around the several tables admiring the operation. At the stove, also, madame prepared the Australians many cups of coffee, whilst madame's daughter remained on duty at the shelves to dole out the rum which was to be added to it. Around those tables the soldiers were free to remain throughout the evening, discussing their great doings of the past, and greater imaginings. Madame used a woman's tact to prevent excess, because she had a woman's business shrewdness to guard against her estaminet being put out of bounds by the battalion authorities if excess occurred. Punctually the picquet came to empty out at bedtime those who had imbibed too freely, using a friendly insistence and the help of the soldiers who had not imbibed at all.
The many who did not take strong drink were not left uncatered for by the all-providing estaminet. Their presence was always welcome to madame for the restraining influence on the few who were liable to become difficult. Madame's coffee was perfect, even without the addition of rum, and this they could sip whilst they smoked and made of the estaminet their club.
The soldier on active service is necessarily an out-of-doors man. During the day he seldom goes to his billet except to put on his equipment for parade, or leave it there when parade is dismissed. He is quite content with his billet for its two purposes - storing his belongings and housing his bed when he adjourns to it after the fatigue of the day. But the hut or farm-shed allotted to some twenty soldiers, is usually a cheerless, draughty place by day, and a congested, dimly-lit place by night. So during the long nights the lights and cleanliness and warmth of the estaminet afforded a happy release to the soldier, when resting behind the lines. Afterwards organisation advanced in this as in all other details of military life and work, and every effort was made within the army itself to brighten the soldier's hours of relaxation. Of concert halls and recreation huts and entertainment troupes that were then made available, he made full use. In a fighting unit, however, ever marching from place to place, such organisation was often disorganised. For such units the estaminet continued to serve, only to a lesser degree, the same useful purpose which it had served in the beginning.
In the back areas there were also other places where entertainment was of a much more harmful kind, and where the soldier was liable to that risk of demoralisation which can never be dissociated from the life of a great campaign. These lay far back, however, in the large towns at the base, with which the battalion never came in contact. Speaking generally, it might be said that the normal life of the fighting unit in France, represented something far more pure-minded and morally healthy than is maintained by a similar body of men in civil life.
Thus the days at Berteaucourt went on until the 27th of the month, when the battalion marched away on the road to Toutencourt, a village lying towards the east, where the great battle was even then raging. That was the first battle of the Somme ,and the men of the 48th had as yet but the most indefinite rumours of it. They spent the night under canvas at Toutencourt, and two days later were again in comfortable billets at Harponville, a small village in the neighbourhood.
On August 1 they left Harponville, and, resuming the march eastwards, soon saw Albert in the distance, and saw for the first time the leaning figure of the Virgin on its church spire. The battalion did not enter the town, for every now and then shells landed in its, throwing up clouds of dust and smoke and debris from its piled masonry, and troops went through its streets quickly, and only in small parties at long intervals. So the unit rested on the western side of Albert, and made preparations to bivouac near an old brick- field there, whilst awaiting instructions as to what part it was expected to play in the battle of the Somme.