Read Online Zero Hour by Leon Davidson - Free Book Online

once again devastated whole towns. Sons, brothers, husbands, fathers and friends had gone to Europe ‘from the uttermost ends of the Earth’ and had died there. Their loved ones did not even have a body to bury. Whole communities went into mourning and some began to question the war. Even by 1916, Anzac Day had become a day of remembrance.
    GOING INTO HELL
    Although the Somme was finished for the New Zealanders, the offensive continued. General Haig wanted further advances of two and a half kilometres to gain higher ground before the winter rains arrived. He was convinced the Germans were losing their fighting spirit, but they were still managing to dig new defensive lines. On 7 October, the British advanced against troops forewarned of the attack by a deserter. The Germans mowed them down as they crossed the flooded land. A week later, men of I Anzac Corps, which had been stationed near Ypres in small dugouts with thin sheet-iron roofs, crammed into cattle cars, slid the doors shut to keep out the cold, and talked and sang around candles as they steamed down to the Somme. They were unimpressed; few wanted to leave the quieter Ypres area and some felt they were being thrown back into battle to save British soldiers. This was not the case; Haig simply considered the Australians to be in a fitter fighting state than the other divisions. The 5th Australian Division, which had been reinforced since Fromelles, was also ordered to the Somme from Armentières.
    Icy winds cut into the men’s faces on 21 October as they marched through Dernancourt, 16 kilometres from Flers, then past a sign for Fricourt stuck in the ground. It was all that remained of the village—even the rubble had been used to fill shell holes. In the valleys, British troops sang around small fires, or sat in dugouts, candlelight flickering through the blankets that covered their entrances.
    Duckboard tracks took the Australians past Delville Wood, now nicknamed ‘Devils Wood’. The dark hid the shattered trees and bodies but not the stench. As they moved up Turk Lane, arcing Very lights and flickering red shrapnel explosions lit the horizon. The dead lined the parapet, and wounded soldiers flowed back the other way. A passing British soldier told them, ‘My God, you are going into hell up there.’
    MUDDY RABBITS
    When the duckboards ended, near the front, the men struggled through mud ‘churned to the consistency of pea soup’. They passed a dugout in which officers were huddled around a box, reading a map by candlelight. The five-kilometre walk took seven hours, and after passing the ruins of Flers, the exhausted men took over the seized German trenches. Flares lit up severed arms and legs sticking out of the dirt walls.
    As they waited for the next major offensive to advance the line, Whizz-Bangs caved in trenches, and blew fountains of mud in the air. The force of shrapnel explosions ripped clothes from the men. In the distance they could hear the staccato bursts of machine guns and the crack of sniper fire. The dead were thrown into shell holes and covered with slop. Soldiers went mad from the shock and tension—one man foamed at the mouth and crawled up the trench on all fours until he was removed.
    When not on duty, the men took sanctuary in the German dugouts, even though their doors faced the German artillery. Those soldiers who didn’t get a bunk slept on their packs. At least these dugouts were concrete; others were just holes dug in a bank or trench wall and, like ‘muddy rabbits’, the men crawled into them to sleep as 5.9s ‘howled out of foggy space and burst with earth shaking fury’ around them.
    The rain and mud forced the postponement of the major offensive. Instead, smaller operations were ordered—on 5 November and 14 November—to seize a German salient and the higher ground that overlooked the Allied trenches. Despite brutal fighting, the Australians were driven out of