Battle of the Yser
Mouquet Farm, AIF Memorial
A few yards of almost valueless advance – the end at Mouquet Farm
After the 16th Battalion withdrew from Mouquet Farm the Australian effort to take the fortress soon flickered out. Charles Bean described one of the last actions, the struggle for one German trench, the ‘Fabeck Graben’, between 3 and 5 September as ‘one of the bitterest fights in the history of the AIF’. In its last stages the Australians of the 49th, 50th and 52nd Battalions fought with men of the 13th Canadian Infantry Battalion sent to relieve them. Led at one point by ‘Little Maxwell’, a 24–year–old Tasmanian Lieutenant Duncan Maxwell of the 52nd Battalion who was 1.9 metres tall, the Canadians and Australians erected a new barricade to hold back the Germans. Then, with a handful of men, Maxwell sat down behind this new defence to await an expected counter–attack. None came. Soon, however, the German artillery found their range and shells began falling around them:
To turn their minds from the fatal burst which must soon come, they began telling themselves stories of wheat–growing, comparing the methods of Canada and eastern Australia and western Australia—until the inevitable shell crashed in their midst, killing or wounding all except Maxwell.
Charles Bean, The Australian Imperial Force in France, 1916, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Volume III, Sydney, 1929, p. 857
The position was eventually held and next morning, 5 September, Maxwell handed over this small Australian outpost to the Canadians.
Entrance to Mouquet Farm dugouts, Will Dyson, 1917. [charcoal and pencil on paper, AWM ART02219]
At the side of the road looking out towards the modern day buildings of Mouquet Farm is a small memorial to the battle erected by the Office of Australian War Graves. Looking north from here one can see, about a kilometre away, the great brick tower of the British Thiepval Memorial to the Missing. The encirclement of the German strong points at Thiepval was the supposed purpose of the Australian struggle and sacrifice at Mouquet Farm, a struggle which over four weeks cost the AIF 10,976 casualties for a few hundred square metres of France. If to this Australian figure is added the casualties for the Canadian and British units that became involved in the fight for the farm, the casualty figure reaches more than 20,000.
Few military historians have felt all this was a price worth paying. Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson saw it as a ‘terrible toll … for no purpose’, for the effort to capture Thiepval in this manner was soon abandoned. Even Charles Bean, Australia’s official historian, and generally charitable towards those in high command, could find nothing positive to say about Mouquet Farm:
This scheme of operations ran at great cost … until, like some clumsy machine, it came groaning to a halt in front of Mouquet Farm. The last seven efforts to restart it, undertaken with vast labour and devotion, had resulted in only one or two jerks of the wheels, grinding out through mud and blood a few yards of almost valueless advance
Charles Bean, The Australian Imperial Force in France, 1916, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Volume III, Sydney, 1929, p. 874
Puchevilliers British Cemetery, Puchevilliers. [DVA]
Second Lieutenant Edward Lionel Austin Butler, 12th Battalion (Tasmania and Western Australia), of Hobart, Tasmania, who died of wounds, 22 August 1916. [AWM H05690]
Headstone of Second Lieutenant Edward Lionel Austin Butler, 12th Battalion (Tasmania and Western Australia), Puchevilliers British Cemetery, Puchevilliers. [DVA]
Perhaps these bitter words were conditioned by Bean’s own personal loss at Mouquet Farm. In late August 1916, fighting with the 12th Battalion (Western Australia and Tasmania), his cousin, Lieutenant Lionel ‘Leo’ Butler, had his leg blown off and died of his wounds. Leo’s body was laid to rest in Puchevillers British Cemetery, kilometres behind the battlefield, ‘with great trees crowning the distant hills and the sunlight bathing the yellow corn fields’. Five or six friends, including Bean and his brother Jack, a medical officer with the 3rd Battalion AIF, stood by the grave, while nearby stood a farm labourer leaning on his scythe while a ‘French peasant woman with a tin can over her arm’ wiped her eyes with a handkerchief:
I couldn’t help wondering whether it was worth it; whether there is anything gained in this war that justifies such sacrifices. Leo would not have doubted it … not for one moment would he question it. But I don’t feel sure of it.
Charles Bean, quoted in Dudley McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme; the story of CEW Bean, Sydney, 1983, p.24
Mouquet Farm finally fell to a British unit on 26 September 1916 and Thiepval itself on 29 September.
The headstone of Lieutenant Herbert Walter Crowle, 10th Battalion (South Australia), who died on 25 August 1916 of wounds received at Mouquet Farm on 21 August 1916. Crowle was evacuated wounded from Mouquet Farm to the 3rd Casualty Clearing Station well behind the lines and when he died he was buried at Puchevilliers. His family had this headstone erected over his grave at the time and the Imperial War Graves Commission has maintained the original in Puchevilliers British Cemetery ever since. [AWM P04864.001]
Headstone of Lieutenant Herbert Crowle, 10th Battalion (South Australia), Puchevilliers British Cemetery. [DVA]
The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme seen from the AIF Memorial, Mouquet Farm. [DVA]
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© 2008 Department of Veterans' Affairs and Board of Studies NSW :: Last update - November 2008