The Road to Flers

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The Road to Flers

The future gain in the sore loss

Australians, including a Lewis gunner, making their way to the front near Longueval, January 1917. [AWM E00136]

Poppies in a field near Flers. [DVA]

The Gueudecourt (Newfoundland) Memorial on the road beyond Gueudecourt, the D574, is a good place to end a battlefield tour of the Somme. Few visitors come to this isolated and forgotten spot. After the war the Dominion of Newfoundland placed the caribou memorial here in a small battlefield park containing a section of original trench. The men of the Newfoundland Regiment captured the trenches in this area from the Germans on 12 October 1916, the furthest point of advance of British Empire units during the Battle of the Somme which started on 1 July 1916 and spluttered out around Flers in useless Australian and British attacks in early November. During the Somme Winter it was the Australians who would have manned this trench.

'The Caribou', Gueudecourt (Newfoundland) Memorial, Gueudecourt. [DVA]

Australian soldiers, Biscuit Trench, Gueudecourt, December 1916. [AWM E00103]

Australian official correspondent, and later official war historian, Charles Bean, wading through mud in Gird Trench near Gueudecourt, c.1917 [AWM E00572]

Australian stretcher–bearers carry a wounded man through the mud near Delville Wood, December 1916. [AWM E00049]

Three kilometres away over the fields to the north–east lies the town of Bapaume the object of the British attack on 1 July 1916. General Sir Douglas Haig, the commander of the British expeditionary Force, had intended a great breakthrough of the German lines early on but, when that did not eventuate, his armies picked away at the German positions pushing them back metre by metre. Between July and November 1916 the British forces advanced, attack by attack, from their start lines around Mountauban village, according to British historian Martin Middlebrook, at an average rate of about 74 metres per day. They killed or wounded some 230,000 Germans according to one recent authority – Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The Somme, Sydney, 2006, p.301. The British loss during these actions was 432,000 soldiers, among whom were Australians. These figures bring to mind the lines of poet John Oxenham at the entrance to the Newfoundland Park a few kilometres north from here:

Tread softly here! Go reverently and slow!
You let your soul go down upon its knees
And with bowed head, and heart abased strive hard
To grasp the future gain in the sore loss!

Newfoundland Memorial, Gueudecourt. [DVA]

Field near Flers. [DVA]

The time to come up here is on a day when the wind cuts into the skin from an Atlantic gale and the rain beats on the face. Then one can better appreciate the reality of these lines of Captain Walter Belford, the 11th Battalion’s historian, about Flers and Gueudecourt:

… no pen could ever adequately describe the misery and privations of the men holding the line. The trenches were ghastly ditches full of water and mud, and the decomposing remains of heroes of already forgotten battles … Rain fell nearly every day, there was no drainage, and the weather was too cold for anything to dry … mud was the God of this sector … in looking back the troops have only one horrible memory of Flers, and that is of the mud. It was as if the whole region had wilted under the terrific strain put upon it, and as if the backbone had gone out of the land, leaving only a soft, viscous mass for the troops to die in,

Cotterill, in Walter Belford, Legs–Eleven, Being the Story of the 11th Battalion (AIF) in the Great War of 1914–1918, Perth, 1940, p.360–1

An exhausted mule, Fricourt, December 1916 [AWM E00091]

The old Flers Road, Will Dyson, January 1917. [Lithograph on paper AWM ART02215_007]

The Road to Flers

The future gain in the sore loss

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