Pozières, First Australian Division Memorial

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Pozières, First Australian Division Memorial

Pozières, The First Australian Division Memorial

An Australian war memorial – Charles Bean at Pozières

Main street, Pozières, August 1914. [AWM G01534I]

The main street of Pozières after the German bombardments of July–August 1916. [AWM EZ0097]

CEW Bean, Charles Lambert, 1924. [Oil on canvas AWM ART07545]

As soon as he was able after the beginning of the Australian actions around Pozières, Charles Bean, Australia’s official war correspondent and later official historian, began touring the battlefield. Despite the constant danger, he visited as much of it as he could. He described the new landscape of Pozières that had been created by modern artillery. His words give meaning to the expression, ‘war torn’:

Imagine a gigantic ash heap, a place where dust and rubbish have been cast for years outside some dry, derelict, God–forsaken up–country township. Imagine some broken–down creek bed in the driest of our dry central Australian districts, abandoned for a generation to the goats, in which the hens have been scratching as long as men can remember. Then take away the hens and the goats and all traces of any living or moving thing. You must not even leave a spider. Put here, in evidence of some old tumbled roof, a few roof beams and tiles sticking edgeways from the ground, and the low faded ochre stump of the windmill peeping over the top of the hill, and there you have Pozières.

CEW Bean Letters from France Melbourne, 1917, pp.113–4

The ruins of ‘Gibraltar’, October 1919. [AWM E05744]

And it was during these hellish weeks that Bean became convinced of the need to tell people in faraway Australia of the achievements, endurance and suffering of their family members and friends in France. Bean’s dream eventually resulted in the building of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, a memorial conceived amidst the devastated landscape of the Somme battlefields. Bean’s companion, Charles Bazley, remembers Bean musing on this future memorial:

I can still remember nights in August 1916 when – after busy days in which he tramped the Pozières battlefield, visiting our units in the line and our batteries in rear of them, looking in at aid–posts and casualty clearing stations he would return to our camp at the edge of Becourt Wood … there in the twilight CEW [Bean] would sometimes talk for a while of the thoughts he was turning over in his mind concerning an Australian war memorial museum.

Charles Bazley, quoted in Dudley McCarthy, Gallipoli to the Somme: the Story of CEW Bean, Sydney, 1983, pp.259–60

Pozières was rebuilt after the war and today vibrates to the large amount of traffic on the main Amiens to Bapaume road. From the First Division Memorial there is a pleasant walk down the Rue de L’Èglise to the village church. Beside the church is the local war memorial with its own list of the local war dead – ‘Mort au Champs d’Honneur’. Across the road is the Mairie (Town Hall) and school. War material is being constantly unearthed in this area and behind the Tommy Café (a Pozières institution!) is a large collection of battlefield relics. Here, too, is the ‘Tommy Trench’ complete with barbed wire, German machine guns and an Australian ‘digger’ in a slouch hat! These relics are a stark reminder, as one sits in the café over baguettes and coffee, of the reality of Pozières in July 1916.

Pozières. [DVA]

In the trench, Tommy Café, Pozières. [DVA]

There is no easy way to sum up a battle experience like Pozières during 24–26 July 1916 when the Australians of the First Division lay out under the German bombardment. It impressed Queenslanders enough for a small settlement in that state to be named Pozières in memory of the battle. What is really sobering is to realise that as the First Division was relieved on 26–27 July 1916 the battle was, in a sense, just beginning. Ahead lay the struggle for the Pozières heights around the windmill to the east of the village and then the terrible fighting along the ridge line northwards towards Mouquet Farm. The First Division returned to Pozières in mid–August to fight at Mouquet Farm and that battle honour appears on their memorial. But it was that first operation on the Western Front that the division wanted most to commemorate – the seizure of Pozières during those four July days when, despite all the enemy artillery hurled at them, they clung to their positions.

One of the old platoon, Will Dyson, 1917. [colour lithograph on paper AWM ART02245_003]

Road sign at the eastern entrance to Pozières village. [DVA]

Water tower at the eastern entrance to Pozières village. [DVA]

Grave, Pozières, September 1917. [AWM P03631_187_1]

Pozières, The First Australian Division Memorial

An Australian war memorial – Charles Bean at Pozières

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