The Battalion again journeying towards the south was returning to places already made quite familiar during its previous term of fighting on the Somme.
On the morning of October 27 the men detrained at Longpre, and from there marched to Villers-Sous-Ailly, two days later to Bertincourt and on the following to Vaux. This latter, a pleasant district, was very suitable for training, and officers and men discussed the possibility of the winter being spent in it. For some argued that the powers that be had too much regard for the lives and lungs of Australians to submit them to the rigours of winter in the trenches. But three days later they were again marching to Flesselles, and on the following morning a long column of motor lorries carried the Battalion to the village of Dernancourt.
Dernancourt was even then partly in ruins, and the limited accommodation it afforded as well as the rain and mud of an early winter, made it a very wretched place. Here the daily waste of the Battalion through sickness would in a short time have left it very much depleted in strength. Many of the men had contracted colds, and when the soldier in the field has even a slight ailment, he has little chance of getting rid of it except by treatment in hospital. He has no room in which to confine himself in pyjamas and slippers. He must go to hospital, be struck off the strength of his unit, and when he has been discharged from hospital much time elapses before he is returned. But the medical officer obviated this by establishing a small hospital within the regiment, where men could be well cared for who were only temporarily indisposed.
After a few days spent at Dernancourt the Battalion went to Fricourt, a village which was at that time levelled to the ground. From there to Switch Trench where the unit took up a position in support of the Brigade. This trench was deep in water and mud, no shelters of any kind were available, and it afforded practically no protection from shell-fire. German air-craft was particularly active at that time, and in the Infantryman's estimation the enemy was having everything his own way in the air. Aeroplane observation soon discovered the presence of troops in Switch Trench, with the result that the trench was heavily shelled periodically and a number of casualties inflicted.
But worse than the enemy shell-fire were the impossible conditions under which the troops were living. Their dress was fighting-order with one blanket and oil sheet, great-coats and packs having been dumped at Dernancourt. So they settled down to fight what was to be their most formidable enemy during the next five months - the winter, its rain and snow, its frost, its hunger and cold. That trench was drained and dug and re-dug. It contained no dug-outs or shelters of any kind that could protect from either shell-fire or weather, and all ranks rested during the night by lying snuggled under their waterproof sheets stretched across the trench. Parades were held frequently to inspect the men's feet, to insist on having wet feet dried, on having whale-oil rubbed into them, to see that wet socks were changed. Meals were cooked in the open trench, a practice not looked on with favour by the higher commands, for it was feared that the smoke might attract the enemy's artillery-fire. It probably did so, but the risk was more than counter-balanced by the effect on the troops of substantial hot meals.
On the night of the 18th the battalion moved into the front line. The day before had witnessed the first of the winter's snow storms, and all the country around was a desolate wilderness. General Glasfurd, the brigade commander, had already been killed in this sector, and the casualties of the preceding units, though not very heavy, afforded evidence of a rather lively time in the front trenches. But the men set to work, and in a short time things were more tolerable than life in Switch Trench. The line now ran over high ground for the most part, and once it had been cleaned out the troops could rest in conditions which, by contrast, were comfortable.
But the approaches to the line were in a frightful state: they were dangerous, they were long and tedious, and therein lay the awful hardship of that term in the trenches. For those men had to be fed and fed well if they should endure such hard conditions. And one looking back at that great struggle for existence and endurance cannot but admire the organisation which made success possible. Food had to be cooked at the ruined village of Flers, nearly a mile away. Thence a hot meal was carried by fatigue parties morning and evening. A meal carried such a distance in winter, carried in petrol tins with blankets sewn around them to preserve their heat, might not impress the average person very favourably. But one has got to be in the trenches and to share once in the good stew that can be contained in a petrol tin in order to understand how preferable it is to the cold army ration. In such a manner was food carried to the troops morning and evening, whilst at. 5 a.m. and 3 p.m. bovril or hot milk to which their rum ration had been added, was stolen to them along that dangerous track. In the same way dry socks were conveyed to the front trenches every day, whilst wet socks were removed and feet dried and massaged.
A person having but a vague idea of the horrors of trench warfare in winter, or who merely reads of its hardship with an imagination little adequate to visualising its details, might think that men thus provided for were quite happy. So indeed they were happy, if manly and cheerful acceptance of their circumstances should be called happiness. But such were those circumstances that all the organisation and labour expended were needed to make them tolerable. One remembers well other units where the same organisation and labour were not shown, and their ranks were thinned by sickness before they had spent 48 hours in the line. The German was no longer the great enemy: it was the winter. Therefore was it that battalion commanders whose tactics were good enough, or at least harmless, were in those days promptly removed from their commands on plain questions of hot stew and dry socks.
YET all the foresight and care expended could not entirely ward off the dread of the soldier, trench feet. Men came over the rising ground to the medical aid post dug into the shelter of the ridge at Grass Lane, limping painfully in boots that had to be cut from their feet to disclose the swelling and dull discolouring of incipient frostbite. Every effort was made to check the malady, and often the sufferers were able to resume their work. Others were unable to do so, and left the trenches on the long journey to the rear. Their feet wrapped in cotton wool, they limped along or negotiated a particularly difficult bit of ground on the shoulders of a passing digger. A weird sight presenting a sordid picture of war, weirder for the suggestion which it obtruded on the onlooker of a schoolboy game in some happy playground.
After eight days spent in these conditions the battalion was relieved, the relief starting before 9 o'clock in the heavy grey fog of the November evening, and not being completed until after midnight. Then the men trailed through the slush and mud back to Mametz, which they reached early in the morning. Here they were housed in wooden huts, and the unit settled down to repair the ravages of life in the trenches.
A week later the battalion marched back to Dernancourt, where all ranks had access to their packs, which had been dumped at that village three weeks previously. Little training could be done there, so great was the congestion of troops in the area. So on December 17 the unit entrained for Plesselles, a happy village, in which the men spent their first Christmas in Prance. New Year's Day was celebrated in the same place by a brigade sports meeting. The results of the various competitions, in which the battalion led the other units of the brigade, were duly and solemnly entered in the Battalion War Diary, and or, the following day the men set out to resume the sterner sport of the trenches.
From Flesselles to Franvillers, then on to Dernancourt, then to Fricourt, stopping but a night at each village, so that five days after their sports meeting at Flesselles they were again in the front line trenches at Gueudecourt. Here all the hard conditions of their first winter term in the trenches were again encountered, but encountered with even more efficiency and success. Ways and means of communicating with the front line were perhaps more difficult than before, the shortest route over which ammunition and rations had to be manhandled involving a distance of two miles. That journey was made over a dangerous and unprotected track, which could only be used between 5 o'clock in the evening and 5 o'clock in the morning. But the men stuck to this fighting against cold and hunger and wet and discomfort of every kind, just as they stuck to the fighting against German artillery in the trenches at Pozieres. They endured a term of ten days in the front line before relief came to them.
There now ensued a period lasting from the middle of January until the middle of February, when the Battalion was quartered in different camps scattered over the reserve area. It was not a pleasant period in the estimation of the men. Brisbane Camp, Albury Camp, Townsville Camp, with their comfortless wooden huts like toy boats at anchor in a sea of mud, sadly belied the climate and character of the places after which they had been named.
A heavy fall of snow was soon afterwards followed by frost which lasted about three weeks. This made things much more tolerable, the men were dry and were able to enjoy themselves during the days, which were usually very pleasant. But at night the cold in those huts was a hard ordeal, for coal could not be procured and it was almost equally impossible to obtain supplies of wood.
If the discomforts of this period were distasteful to the men, not less so was the character of the work in which they were engaged. For their occupation during the day was that of making or mending roads, and whether rightly or wrongly the digger thought that those who put him to such work were scarcely playing the game. Even at this comparatively early date, he had come to look upon himself as worth preserving for front-line work only. He resented his unit being used as a Labour Battalion, and at the same time being called on when necessary arose to do the work of storm-troops. It was no satisfying retort to him, that regiments of the Guards Division also had to work at road making. For he had seen a regiment of Guards at Flers look tremulously for relief and get it after 48 hours; whilst he and his cobbers from the sunny south shivered in the snow and cursed their bad luck, but stuck to it doggedly for another six days.
In the middle of February the Battalion again moved to the front line, in the same area as that which was previously occupied by it. At the same time the thaw came, and the long-sustained frost was at an end. The enemy's artillery was very active, whilst his infantry were so remarkably quiet in the trenches as to arouse suspicion. So the Battalion scouts patrolled the front every night endeavouring to find out the enemy's intentions. These patrols seldom had much to report except a very dreary time in no-man's-land, shell-holes filled with water and a desolate waste of ground that was almost impassable. Occasionally they met German patrols abroad on the same errand as themselves, but for the most part the enemy showed no activity.
These facts duly became the subject of intelligence-reports, and on the strength of them the higher commands decided that the morale of the enemy must be very low. They resolved to test that morale, probably with a view to exploiting further any success gained. All arrangements were made for a small local attack in the brigade sector on the night of February 22, which should involve the capture of a section of German front by the 48th Battalion. Patrols had reported the presence of three formidable belts of wire entanglements in front of the enemy's trenches. In order to overcome these obstacles, the attacking party carried blankets which were to be thrown across the barbed wire. The attack was to have no artillery support, but was to be assisted by a barrage of Stokes mortars and Vickers machine-guns. Much reliance was also placed on the work which should be done by a party armed with rifle-grenades.
Such was the very Inadequate means adopted as a result of the inadequate conception of the task on hand, an inadequancy that could be redeemed by no amount of attention to detail on the part of the unit concerned. The operation was attended by just such success as it merited. The first and second ridges of wire were successfully crossed, but the attacking party had a third and more formidable belt still in front of them. By that time the enemy who had been thought so dormant was very much awake. He sent up flares illuminating the whole area, whilst the ground was swept with his machine-gun fire. Fortunately the attacking party was a small one, and the broken nature of the ground enabled the men to take cover easily. They got back to their trenches having achieved nothing in an operation whose methods had no chance of success, and the Battalion congratulated itself on getting well out of an ugly situation at no greater cost than three minor casualties.
On the following night the 48th Battalian [sic] was relieved, and as was usual during a relief its patrols were in no-man's-land prudently guarding against a surprise attack. There a great surprise awaited them, for they could not discover any sign of the enemy immediately in front. Their curiosity led them to the opposite trenches, then right across the ground that had been the objective of the preceding night's attack. They returned and reported that they had failed to get into touch with the enemy, and that they thought he was withdrawing his forces. But the Battalion was even then being relieved, the further care of the front was in the hands of the relieving unit. Moreover scouts were not uncommonly credited with good imaginations. Nevertheless the scouts were in this case worthy of credence; for the enemy had begun that night the withdrawal which in the spring of 1917 he carried east of Bapaume, falling back on the Hindenburg line.