Butte de Warlencourt

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Butte de Warlencourt

The fight for the Loupart Bastion

Headstone of Lieutenant Robert Botten, 27th Battalion (South Australia), Warlencourt British Cemetery. [DVA]

The attempted Australian advance on 2–3 March 1917 to the north–east of Warlencourt village cost many South Australian lives: men from Hesso, Adelaide, Wallaroo Mines, Port Pirie, Murray Town and other localities. They were serving with the 27th Battalion (South Australia) and of the twenty–five soldiers of the battalion who were killed in action on those two days, eighteen lie in Warlencourt British Cemetery. In Plot VI, Row H, Graves 33, 34, and 35 are three brothers–in–arms: Lieutenants David Caldwell, aged 24, Robert Botten, aged 28, and Arthur Lucas, aged 35. In civilian life, Caldwell was a carpenter and Botten and Lucas were clerks.

There are a number of Special Memorials to Australians in Warlencourt, commemorating soldiers whose graves could not be indentified when the cemetery was set up in 1919, but who are believed to be buried here. Special Memorial 5 remembers Private George Bartlett, 27th Battalion, aged 27, of Port Lincoln, South Australia, who was killed by a shell on 3 March 1917. A mate, Corporal James Slaven, remembered George Bartlett in these words:

He was an asset to any team. We used to call him ‘Bullocky’ as he had done a lot of bullock driving up Tarcoola way in Australia. Was a thick set, well set up chap.

Private George Bartlett, Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureu file, www.awm.gov.au/cms_images/1DRL428/00002/1DRL428–00002–0260602.pdf

Special memorial for Private George Bartlett, 27th Battalion (South Australia), Warlencourt British Cemetery. [DVA]

These men died at the Loupart Bastion, north–east of Warlencourt, a place not marked on any map, but the location of which is easy to find. Down the road towards Bapaume from the cemetery is a side road to the left, the D10E1, leading to Warlencourt village. The road climbs and, just before the village, a side road goes off to the right. This is the road to Bois Loupart (Loupart Wood) and it emerges out on a promontory of land called on the map ‘le Mont Cailloux’. Hereabouts were the German trenches of the Loupart Bastion, described by Charles Bean as ‘that bastion, on whose edge lay the higher part of Malt Trench, [and which] now became the centre of the struggle on the … Anzac front’.

View looking north–east from the memorial at the Butte de Warlencourt. The road is the D929 from Albert to Bapaume. The Warlencourt British Cemetery can be seen off to the right and dead ahead and over the top of the hill was the ‘Loupart Bastion’ attacked by Australian soldiers on 2 March 1917. [DVA]

Up this road from Warlencourt at 3.07 am on 2 March 1917 came a company of the 27th Battalion taking part in an attack on Malt Trench. Lieutenant Robert Botten, taking the bombers into Malt Trench, was killed there, in the words of the battalion history, while ‘most courageously leading his men’. After a few minutes in Malt Trench the Australians were driven out by a German counter–attack. Back in Warlencourt village, all available men of the 27th Battalion were sent forward to recapture the lost position led by Lieutenant David Caldwell. German shells began to fall along the road and Caldwell, who was organising the defence along the bank, was killed. Lieutenant Arthur Lucas died in the same shelling. Early morning mist now covered the battlefield as Sergeant John Lockwood, accompanied by another man identified by Charles Bean as a ‘fierce looking NCO with a revolver in each hand’, bombed their way down 300 metres of German trench, capturing three enemy posts. For his bravery that morning Lockwood received the Military Medal. By the end of the day the AIF had established itself in the Loupart Bastion.

On 2–3 March 1917, this isolated spot was the scene of a small engagement by Western Front standards, but it is just as much an Australian battlefield as Pozières, Flers, Bullecourt and Villers–Bretonneux. And, to paraphrase the words of American observer Winston Churchill in 1917, as he drove from Bapaume to Albert: Everywhere along that road, which runs like an arrow across the battle–field to Albert, were Australian graves.

An Australian transport unit returns along the road from Bapaume (today the D929) near Le Sars for supplies for the troops fighting beyond Bapaume, France, March 1917. [AWM E00432]

Members of the 2nd Pioneer Battalion fill in a mine crater on the main road between Le Sars and Bapaume (today the D929), March 1917. [AWM E00343]

Butte de Warlencourt

The fight for the Loupart Bastion

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