The Road to Flers

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The Road to Flers

This slimy, dismal hole

Beyond Longeueval the road, the D197, runs north–east, briefly beside Delville Wood to the right, then out over open country to the village of Flers a couple of kilometres away. A kilometre beyond Flers the D197 reaches a crossroad from which the D74 runs to the right to the village of Gueudecourt a kilometre away. In the village, the Rue du Caribou becomes the D574 heading eastwards out of the village uphill to the top of a ridge. Here is the Gueudecourt (Newfoundland) Memorial, a bronze caribou on a stone pedestal gazing defiantly towards the dual carriageway of the A1, the Autoroute du Nord, and the village of Beaulencourt. During the ‘Somme Winter’ of 1916–17 the front–line trenches garrisoned by the divisions of the Australian Imperial Force swung back in a slight north–westerly direction from the memorial towards Flers and the Butte de Warlencourt on the Albert–Bapaume road, the D929.

Road sign north of Flers for Gueudecourt. [DVA]

Rue du Caribou, Gueudecourt. [DVA]

The D74E leading up out of Gueudecourt on to the Newfoundland Memorial [DVA]

The Newfoundland Memorial, Gueudecourt. [DVA]

Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, Longueval. [DVA]

Flers village, and the surrounding area, was seized by the New Zealand Division and the British 41st Division during the Battle of Flers–Courcellette on 15 September 1916. The New Zealanders battled on here and, before they were withdrawn on 4 October, they had suffered more than 7,000 casualties. Some companies, which had gone into action 230 strong, came out with 30 men, an attrition rate of 90 per cent! An estimated 1,560 New Zealanders died in these battles and the bodies of 1,205 of them were never found, or if found, were unidentifiable.

Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, Longueval. [DVA]

A New Zealand Memorial to the Missing is situated at Caterpillar Valley Cemetery on the D20 between Longeuval and Contalmaison. It was from this cemetery that the body of New Zealand’s ‘unknown warrior’ was exhumed on 6 November 2004 and taken home to Wellington, New Zealand. At the handover ceremony on that day at the New Zealand Memorial in Longueval, the Chief of the New Zealand Defence Force, Air Marshal Bruce Ferguson, said:

I told him [the Warrior] we're taking him home and that those who are taking him home are soldiers, sailors and airmen, past and present. I asked the Warrior to be the guardian of all military personnel who had died on active service. I then promised that we, the people of New Zealand, will be his guardian.

Road sign for the New Zealand Forces Memorial on the D197, Longueval. [DVA]

The New Zealand Forces Memorial, Longueval. [DVA]

The view towards Flers, February 1917. [AWM E00209]

The taking of Flers was partly accomplished with a new weapon, the tank. After the war the British Tank Corps erected its memorial in France directly opposite the Australian memorial at the Windmill site, Pozières, to indicate that it was hereabouts that the first battle in history in which tanks were used began. In late October 1916, as the divisions of the AIF returned to the line east of Flers, they could see the ruins of these strange new monsters of the battlefield. ‘After passing Flers’, wrote Charles Bean, ‘the Australians saw their first tanks, derelicts of the September fighting, in some case with the crew still lying dead among the machinery’.

Flers. [DVA]

The Australians fought at Flers and Gueudecourt in the dying days of the Battle of the Somme in November 1916. Basically, these last operations were conducted to try and push the British positions forward out of the low valley beyond Flers and up to the Bapaume ridge for the winter. From there the British could look over the German rear lines rather than the other way around. But the Flers fighting achieved little and it was conducted in the most appalling conditions. So bad was the going across the devastated landscape between Longueval and Flers that the first Australian units to make their way in late October 1916 up to the front from rear camps, a distance of about eight kilometres, took between 9 and 12 hours. The men, wrote Bean, ‘were worn out before they arrived’. Further torrential rain produced a situation where to get along with full equipment over a distance of just three kilometres could take up to six hours. In these circumstances attack after attack was simply postponed. To Lieutenant Leslie Newton, 12th Battalion (Tasmania and Western Australia), the trenches east of Gueudecourt defied description:

… [they] were half full of a thick, viscus mud, which made traffic almost an impossibility. There was literally nowhere for the men to sit down, and many of them spent the whole twenty–four hours in a standing position with this wet, clammy mud up to, and in some cases, over their knees … sleep in the front line was almost an impossibility.

Leslie Newton, The Story of the Twelfth, Hobart, 1925, p.253

The bringing up of supplies was a nightmare for man and beast. The battalion transport sections laboured long and hard to keep the front line in hot food, ammunition and other essential materials but at a high cost. Pack horses would be loaded up beyond Longueval with supplies and hot food and tea in containers. Then began the awful journey to Flers and beyond:

… men and beasts would flounder and struggle through the shelled and broken country. Sometimes a horse would slide into a shell hole full of mud and water; sometimes it was impossible for the poor beast to scramble out, and the animal would only bog himself more if he struggled. Sometimes other horses and mules would be used to haul him out, but often a horse would sink until only his head and poor imploring eyes would be showing above the morass. A merciful bullet was then the only kindness.

Walter Belford, ‘Legs–Eleven’, Being the Story of the 11th Battalion (AIF) in the Great War of 1914–1918, Perth, 1940, p.370

Traffic block, early morning near Cosy Corner on the Somme, Will Dyson, 1917. [Pencil, brush and wash with crayon AWM ART02393]

Gathering fuel, Delville Wood, Will Dyson, 1917. [Lithograph on paper AWM ART02281_004]

It was said that ‘nearly as bad as Flers’ was the worst a transport driver could say of any subsequent battlefield.

In the cold and the wet, illness flourished along with a particularly nasty condition called ‘trench foot’, a form of frost bite which impeded circulation to feet clothed in heavy boots for hours spent standing in mud and freezing water. The skin literally rotted, resulting in extreme cases, in gangrene and amputation. The only remedy was lightly laced boots, fairly constant drying and rubbing of the feet with oil, and putting on dry socks until they too became sodden. Padre William Devine, 48th Battalion (South Australia and Western Australia), recalled men coming in from the line in the vicinity of Grass Lane, just north of Flers:

… limping painfully in boots that had to be cut from their feet to disclose the swelling and dull discolouring of incipient frost–bite. 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 piece of ground on the shoulders of a passing digger.

William Devine, The Story of a Battalion, Melbourne, 1919, p.66

Australian Army medical Corps soldiers carry men suffering from trench foot, December 1916. [AWM E00081]

Coming out on the Somme, Will Dyson, December 1916, [Charcoal, pencil, brush and wash on paper AWM ART02276]

Padre Devine wrote of Flers and Gueudecourt – ‘The German was no longer the great enemy, it was the winter’. Individual soldiers coped with these conditions as best they could but a certain stoical humour played its part. Some verses from Private George William Cotterill, 11th Battalion (Western Australia), a 20–year–old engine cleaner from Perth, probably conveys the feelings of most Australians who served through that winter on the Somme:

Australian farriers shoeing horses by the roadside at Bazentin, February 1917. [AWM E00184]

What is this slimy, dismal hole,
Where oft I’m lurking like a mole?
And cursing Germans heart and soul?
My Dug–out!

Where is it–that beneath the floor,
The water’s rising more and more,
And where my roof’s a broken door/
My Dug–out!

Where is it that I try to sleep,
Betwixt alarms, then up I leap
And dash thro’ water four foot deep?
My Dug–out!

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

Snow scene near Mametz, Frank Crozier, 1919. [Oil on wax lined canvas. AWM ART02158]

The Road to Flers

This slimy, dismal hole

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