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Noreuil, Noreuil Australian Cemetery

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France 1917: Advance to the Hindenburg Line

Noreuil, Noreuil Australian Cemetery

The cruelty of war – Vaulx to Noreuil

Beyond Vaulx Australian Field Ambulance Cemetery the D10E proceeds on into Vaulx–Vraucourt. In the middle of the village are signs to the right and then sharp left for Langicourt along the D36 and up the hill to Vaulx Hill Cemetery on the left. On their way to the front hereabouts during late March 1917, the 50th Battalion (South Australia) passed through Vaulx. Battalion headquarters and one company stayed there while the rest of the unit came on towards Lagnicourt, possibly marching close to where the cemetery is today. In Vaulx, Major Harry Seager wrote of how even fruit trees and rose bushes had been cut down. As they withdrew, not surprisingly, the Germans had done all they could to hinder the advance of their enemies:

I went into beautiful little towns … where the houses were being gutted by smoldering fire, and into hundreds of villages where the enemy had just gone out of them after touching off explosive charges which had made all their cottages collapse like card houses, their roofs spread flat upon their ruins, and their churches, after centuries of worship in them, fall into chaotic heaps of masonry … I saw the little old fruit–trees of French peasants sawn off at the base, and the tall trees along the roadsides stretched out like dead giants to bar our passage. Enormous craters had been blown in the roadways, which had to be bridged for our traffic of men and guns, following hard upon the enemy’s retreat.

Philip Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told, London, 1920, internet edition, www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext02/nicbt10.txt

The road to Vaulx–Vraucourt, the D10E. [DVA]

A line of trees felled across a road by the Germans to slow the Australian advance towards the Hindenburg Line, France, 1917. [AWM H08797]

Road signs, Vaulx–Vraucourt. [DVA]

Road sign for the D36 to Langicourt, Vaulx–Vraucourt. [DVA]

A garden at Vaulx–Vraucourt, France, destroyed during the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in March 1917. [AWM E00413]

Houses destroyed at Vaulx–Vraucourt by the Germans during their withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917. [AWM E00418]

Philip Gibbs, the British journalist who wrote those words, conceded that the Germans were not barbarians. Interviewing local French people, many of whom understandably had no love for ‘les Boches’ as they called them, Gibbs found they often had a good word to say about individual German soldiers. One was described as a ‘good natured fellow’ who gave the children his ‘own bread’ and chopped wood for Madame. A German officer, who could see that the destruction of villages for military purposes cast the Germans in a bad light, remarked:

But what can we do? We are under orders. If we do not obey we shall be shot.
It is the cruelty of the High Command. It is the cruelty of war.

Australian soldiers pass through Vaulx–Vraucourt, France, 20 April 1917. [AWM E00589]

The cruelty, and at times simple bad luck, of war, is evident among the headstones at Vaulx Hill Cemetery. There are 103 Australians buried here, eighteen of whom are artillerymen. In Plot I, Row G, Grave 11, is Gunney Donohue, 4th Brigade Australian Field Artillery, of Melbourne, who died of wounds on 7 April 1917 at the age of 18. On that day, Gunner Donohue was serving with his battery, situated in the valleys and hillsides around Noreuil and Langicourt villages, alongside much of the Australian field artillery which was being brought up for the forthcoming Australian attack at Bullecourt. It was evening, and Sidney was on cook’s fatigue, preparing the meal for his mates in the battery when a shell burst 500 yards [460 metres] past him. Sidney’s ‘great chum’, Gunner Robert Peel, declared that normally Sidney would have been ‘safe as a house’ but that on this occasion the entire base of the shell flew back and wounded him mortally in the legs. Gunner Donohue was taken to a nearby dressing station, where he was treated by the 7th Brigade’s doctor, Captain Brian Mack, AAMC, but without a murmur or complaint he died. He was buried hereabouts in what was called ‘Death Gully’ and was moved into Vaulx Hill Cemetery after the war.

Vaulx Hill Cemetery. [DVA]

Vaulx Hill Cemetery on the D36 Vaulx–Vraucourt–Langnicourt road. [DVA]

Headstone of Gunner Sidney Donohue, Australian Field Artillery, Vaulx Hill Cemetery. [DVA]

Headstone of Captain Brian Mack, Australian Army Medical Corps, Vaulx Hill Cemetery. [DVA]

Headstone of Lieutenant Colonel–Bertram Watts, Australian Field Artillery, Vaulx Hill Cemetery. [DVA]

Captain Brian Mack was himself killed three days later when a shell landed in his dugout as he was sitting down to a meal. Three others were killed by this same shell: Lieutenant–Colonel Bertram Watts and Lieutenants Herbert Harding and Guy Davenport. These AIF artillery officers lie next to each other in Plot II, Row B, Graves 3, 4 and 6.

Headstone of Lieutenant Herbert Harding, Australian Field Artillery, Vaulx Hill Cemetery. [DVA]

Australian artillerymen prepare an 18–pounder battery site near Vaulx, France, March 1917. [AWM E00430]

At Vaulx Hill Cemetery, as in all the cemeteries maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission along the old Western Front, one is struck by the beauty of the setting and the care lavished on the maintenance of headstones and flower beds. Australians and others are increasingly visiting these cemeteries and discovering what a wealth of memory and connection can be found on the headstone inscriptions, in the cemetery registers and in the visitors books. The personal messages in the latter are often especially poignant.

Entry, visitors book, Vaulx Hill Cemetery, 14 April 2007, Linda and Langdon Emery of Exeter looking for Private William Moore, a ‘boy from Exeter who rests in this lovely field’. [DVA]

Visitors book, Vaulx Hill Cemetery. [DVA]

Headstone of Private William Moore, 55th Battalion (New South Wales), a ‘boy from Exeter’, Vaulx Hill Cemetery. [DVA]

Cabinet for visitors book and cemetery register, Vaulx Hill Cemetery. [DVA]

The fighting leading up to the Bullecourt battles and the period of the battles themselves was a particularly trying time for the Australian artillery. The batteries were pushed up close to the line and in the Noreuil and Langicourt valleys in areas which were also main channels of communication to the front. General German shelling and counter–battery work was fairly constant and led to a steady stream of artillery casualties. The infantry chided the artillerymen with the observation that in this area they really ‘entered the war’ and began to experience the sort of casualties common in the front line. Charles Bean described the enemy fire on the artillery:

The valley slopes and narrow flats … were … seldom free from intermittent shelling, the tawny slowly–unrolling cloud from the burst of a 5.9–inch shell becoming an almost permanent feature of the landscape … the valley was frequently fired at, sometimes heavily with gas shell.

Charles Bean,The Australian Imperial Force in France, 1917, Volume IV, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Sydney, 1940, p. 360

An Australian 18–pounder gun crew in the Noreuil Valley during the battle for Bullecourt, May 1917. [AWM E0600]

The 5.9s were particularly loathed. They were fitted with so–called ‘instantaneous’ fuses that burst before they hit the ground, scattering fragments travelling at the speed of a bullet for metres around.

Beyond Vaulx Hill Cemetery the ‘sunken road’ rises gradually, following the contour of the hill. Off to the left is Noreuil village, in the valley, and eventually an old crossroads is reached where once a lane ran down to Noreuil. In this area, in April 1917, the 1st Brigade Australian Field Artillery had its batteries when, on 15 April, the Germans in a sudden counter–attack broke through the Australian lines and reached Langicourt village. By 5 am the enemy had surrounded the guns of the 2nd Brigade in the village and were making their way up the road towards the 1st Brigade. There was, according to Charles Bean, something of a panic and the artillerymen retreated back towards Vaulx–Vraucourt, where fortunately they came among those who were ‘without nerves’. The Germans reached the guns but were driven off, eventually, by Australian counter–attacks, before they caused much damage to the guns. Of the twenty–two guns which fell into enemy hands temporarily at Lagnicourt just five were damaged, the enemy soldiers preferring, according to Bean, to spend their time scrounging for food and souvenirs. The action at Langicourt that day cost the AIF 1010 casualties.