Endurance Page 25

  From Voormezeele, the Bosche had been forced back some three miles over the last three years. In this corridor, civilisation as I knew it had been banished. Grassy meadows, ploughed fields, gardens, shrubs and trees ceased. Constant shelling from both armies had remoulded the landscape to a more desolate wilderness than I had ever seen. The road remained as an essential artery to maintain the beast. It was a pathway between the wreckage, broken vehicles, carts and other detritus of war.

  We turned off the road, having driven as far as we safely could, and continued on foot.

  ‘Sling these gas masks over your heads,’ said Bean, demonstrating. ‘Like so. And keep your shrapnel helmet on at all times. I stirred up so much trouble to get you fellows appointed, I’m not about to lose one of you through carelessness.’

  We had soon walked to where Bean informed us we were now in front of the Australian artillery. The Australian howitzer batteries sent shell after shell screaming over our heads some three thousand yards to the German lines. There was an ear-splitting din such that I could not suppress an involuntary crouching as I walked.

  We arrived at an unimposing mound and Bean informed us that this was the remnant of Hill 60, which had been blown up in June by underground mines. The trenches here were waterlogged and I gave up trying to keep my boots dry. Around the clock, soldiers operated water pumps—not unlike the bilge pumps on Endurance—to relieve the flooding of the underground tunnel systems.

  We had been following a connecting trench for some distance when suddenly Bean disappeared from before my eyes. Seconds later he bobbed out from behind a hessian door and called Wilkins and me to come in. All was blackness inside, until I made out a trail of candles leading down a damp tunnel. There was a series of stairs and ladders by which we descended some two hundred feet. We turned a corner and found ourselves in a damp candlelit room being introduced by Bean to the Australian colonel in charge of this section of the line. I had the presence of mind to salute.

  Soon we were sipping tea from white china cups as the colonel explained the intricacies of the Australian artillery battery operations and the thousands of yards of telephone wires which communicated directions and distances of enemy targets. Our artillery gunners aimed their deadly missiles, but could not see the death and destruction caused. I found myself distracted by the framed family portraits and homely furnishings of the colonel’s subterranean office, and the convulsive shudder of candle flames each time the Australian guns rumbled above our heads. As we made our way back through the clay catacomb tunnels there was something horribly familiar, and it was some time before I realised it was the smell in my nostrils of lamps burning whale oil.

  ‘Hoyle? What the devil are you doing here?’ The uniformed figure emerging from the gloom was Blake, Leslie Blake from Aurora. We grabbed each other, quite stunned by our chance meeting in such a place. Bean and Wilkins were surprised to hear that Blake had been a geologist with Mawson’s expedition.

  Bean shook hands with Les. ‘Well done, Captain Blake, on your Military Cross,’ he said.

  ‘What’s this about?’ I said in surprise. ‘Have you been taking risks?’

  ‘Surveying work.’

  ‘Marking out the front line,’ added Bean. ‘And I heard you were wounded.’

  ‘Only in the buttocks. I was so busy keeping my head down I forgot about my arse.’

  Blake brushed off further questions, and instead offered to show us his digs and give us a tour of Hill 60.

  Blake was fluent with the numerous tunnels and caverns. He directed us to a trench which, by a series of cramped steps and ladders, led to a small observation post at the crest of Hill 60. This was my first view of no-man’s-land. It was a land the like of which I had never seen before and could never have imagined. No matter how many eyewitness accounts I had heard, no matter how many grainy photographs I had seen in the newspapers, I was unprepared for what lay before me. To the east for about two thousand yards was a wasteland bordered by long zigzagging lines of German frontline trenches, and reserve trenches further back. I could see into our own trenches and the hessian-covered squalor in which our infantry lived. This desolate corridor extended both north and south as far as the eye could see.

  Nothing lived in no-man’s-land. Colour plates would be wasted on its grey and grimy pockmarked churn of earth and debris of war. There was no living vegetation. Trees were but shorn stumps. Barbed wire coiled wickedly in thickets tangled and clumped by constant shelling. Misshapen slabs of concrete marked collapsed German fortifications. Everywhere was broken or abandoned equipment; remnants of wagons, ammunition boxes, gun mounts, artillery shells, rifles, bayonets, helmets, fragments of uniforms and of men.

  Directly in front of where I stood, an enormous crater had been gouged out by one of the explosions set off by Australian tunnellers. Lying way down in this pit were the decomposed remains of three German soldiers. Exposed to the elements and in full view, there could be no concern for these corpses, their identity or burial. It was, I gathered, an unremarkable scene even for a photographer.

  Framing this scene, a mile behind each of the lines of trenches, were barrage balloons, from which tiny occupants suspended in baskets were observing what life there was and directing artillery fire here and there.

  My gaze took it in, horror upon horror. The countryside had been churned and raked into a landscape unrecognisable to its former rural inhabitants, and even more desolate than the icefields that had swallowed Endurance. There was little prospect for explorers who dared venture into no-man’s-land. Just as on the Antarctic plateau, it was easier to die here than to live. Better to be adrift on an iceberg in the Antarctic. To have survived only to return to this! And to think of my erstwhile companions on Aurora and Endurance who had already been killed and maimed by this uncivilised conflict.

  By the time we tramped back to the car at Voormezeele then drove on to headquarters at Hazebrouck, it was almost midnight and we were exhausted. George did not say too much on the way back. I gathered he had seen terrible things in the Balkan War, though surely not on this scale of devastation. Despite my tiredness, I was unable to sleep. I realised I had little knowledge of the background to this conflict, partly because of my absence from ‘civilisation’, but more because I had never taken an interest in politics. Frankly, for the job I had taken on, it mattered not. I was expected to be a seasoned professional. Opinions and emotions played little part.

  I started to think about what photographs could be taken. What I had just seen was grim and featureless, but was the very heart of the beast. I could more easily photograph scenes away from the front, scenes of soldiers parading and training, but for what purpose? They might satisfy an army censor but would not satisfy me. And in the back of my mind I remained confused as to what I should think about the wanton killing of men. Could this killing, this war, be photographed? There was undoubtedly a moment of time between parading soldiers and bloated corpses that was called action. How close I could get to that action I had no idea.

  As to the horror around me, I had no darkroom to retreat to, and instead reverted to my diary to set out what I had seen:

  Until my dying day I shall never forget this haunting glimpse down into the mine crater on Hill 60, and this is but one tragedy of similar thousands and we who are civilized have still to continue this hellish murder against the wreckers of humanity and Christianity.

  Blake had told me the Australian 7th Field Engineers were at Renescue, so a few days later George and I called in there and I asked after Captain Eric Webb. Shortly Azzi emerged, wondering who the hell was the army captain wanting to see him. He could hardly believe his eyes when he saw who it was. We embraced, and slapped each other on the back marvelling at the strangeness of our circumstances and me being in uniform. Azzi looked aged, even more than when I had seen him in London. His face was gaunt with bags under his eyes. But it was terrific to be reunited.

  That evening, Wilkins and I dined with Azzi in his mess in a well-concealed du
gout. He introduced me to his fellow officers as if I were a celebrity, and against a background of the crump, crump of artillery fire, we told stories from the frozen world.

  Before the end of my first week, Bean collected me in his car to photograph a visit from Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief. Haig was to review his Australian soldiers, which Bean said was an honour the Australian infantrymen would long remember. I hoped he was right about the latter.

  The entire Second Division was assembled in one location for Haig’s convenience, and as a precursor to marching to Ypres to take part in Haig’s latest plan to achieve a breakthrough. It was a unique event and Bean asked if I could devise a way of taking a single photograph of one whole battalion.

  The division was bivouacked outside Renescue in a series of wheatfields over some fifty acres of flat farmland. Harvesting of wheat in these fields had just finished and the men now stood in rows where the golden wheat had stood. These men were in their prime: tall, well fed and rested, having just completed furlough during the European summer. From the feathers of their slouch hats to the puttees strapped above their boots, they were proud soldiers, trained to make an impact, ready and willing to test themselves. There would be casualties, but there were no conscripts here; these were volunteers who had travelled around the world to fight for king and country. They were responding to the call I had ignored when I sailed off to join Shackleton. This was their great adventure away from the humdrum of the cities, the quiet country towns, small coastal dairies, rolling wheatfields and dusty sheep stations. A soldier’s life was their great escape from the expectations of being breadwinners toiling away in factories, shops, offices and farms.

  I devised a bosun’s chair just as I had on Endurance, and was soon hoisted with my equipment some sixty feet, courtesy of an ancient yew tree and a dozen infantrymen. In the front rows were the young lieutenants and captains, whom I was told were most certain of being among the casualties. Their buckles and buttons shone a little brighter than those of the khaki masses behind them. Despite my elevation, I could not capture all that humanity in my viewfinder. Not being in a position to ask over ten thousand men to walk back one hundred steps, I did the best I could in hazy conditions. It was an imposing sight to see these Australians assembled in their battalions, a multitude of youthful upturned faces squinting into the morning light, too many to identify individual faces in the image I would create. As I held open the shutter, I could not help but wonder how many of this proud formation would return from Ypres.

  ●

  Our build-up to a major offensive is plain to all, including the Bosche. In the meantime, horrific slaughter and devastation is wrought by the artillery of both sides. My senses have been pounded day and night with the thundering roar of our heavy guns sending their shells screaming overhead to the German lines. I am both fascinated and horrified by this constant shelling. The howitzer guns rest on haunches of steel, their barrels pointing to the sky. These huge gargoyle-like beasts with up to fifteen-inch-calibre guns send projectiles of metal and high explosives weighing some fourteen hundred pounds thousands of yards through the air to the enemy lines. These beasts have an insatiable appetite. The arteries of the frontline are clogged with carts and trucks bringing forwards stockpiles of artillery shells.

  The Germans return fire with deadly accuracy. The only saving grace is that, due to our build-up of troops and munitions, the Germans have so many targets I have come to accept not every shell is aimed at me. Still, when I hear the familiar whistle of German howitzer shells coming my way, I instinctively duck and sometimes drop to the ground. I have learned the hot spots. The men I speak to who are required to work throughout the barrages in these areas have a fatalism about them and accept that death is a simple matter of chance.

  ●

  Not long after setting up our quarters on the edge of Steenvorde, the village was subjected to an aerial attack. I woke in the dark to the sound of exploding bombs from German Gotha bombers. In the morning, smoke was rising from the ruins of old stone houses and the traffic on the roads was in chaos. Bean arrived to view our digs and escort Wilkins and me to the old city of Ypres.

  ‘You may as well see what we have been fighting to defend these last two years,’ he said as we bundled ourselves into the car.

  As we approached Ypres from the west, the pleasant roadside fields became increasingly filled with the necessities of war; army camps and stores, munition dumps, field hospitals, ambulances, truck depots and all manner of wrecked vehicles.

  One mile before Ypres, we entered a broad tree-lined avenue. Driving closer to the town, green foliage gave way to misshapen pockmarked trunks and bare branches. On the city outskirts all tree branches had been severed by artillery fire and only scarred stumps remained.

  Bean explained, ‘The first battle of Ypres was where the German advance was finally stopped in 1914. The Germans tried again to take Ypres in April 1915. I was in Gallipoli then. They couldn’t capture the city, but they pretty well encircled it, close enough to shell it to smithereens. Haig now wants to push the Germans back. You fellows have arrived just in time.’

  ●

  A traffic sentry pulls us up before Ypres and we have to proceed on foot. He checks our passes and admonishes me, ‘Tin hat on, sir, and gas mask in the “at ready” position.’ Our artillery batteries near Ypres maintain a constant bombardment on the German lines and the Bosche return shot for shot, aiming for our batteries and supply dumps. Every so often they send another shell into the Ypres ruins. Masonry, stones and brick dust fly into the air. The Bosche have the exact bearings of the main roads and intersections around Ypres and can at any time land a shell where they choose. Sometimes their shells land on an empty stretch of road, sometimes among a team of horses and equipment, and sometimes amid a group of men. Artillery is impersonal. Those firing the guns do not see what they destroy. But a couple of miles away their observers in barrage balloons press binoculars to their eyes and peer through the smoke and mist.

  The main roads through the city have been cleared of rubble and we are able to stroll between what were once fine buildings but are now mere remnants of their former selves.

  Roofs and top storeys have been blown away. Windows are shattered and stone walls contain huge gaping breaches. Building frontages are now just piles of masonry, and private rooms and apartments are exposed to the elements, wallpaper and furnishings telling something of the former inhabitants, who either fled or lie beneath the wreckage. Brass bedsteads are twisted into skeletal shapes, kitchen stoves are riddled with shrapnel, books, pictures and toys are no longer cherished but scattered and abandoned. We clamber carefully around beams poised precariously on walls almost completely shot away. In relatively sheltered alleyways we come across Royal Artillerymen merrily cooking rations and living out of cellars that have so far survived the onslaught.

  ‘And this,’ says Bean as we round a corner, ‘is what remains of the Cloth Hall.’

  I am struck by the sight of what was obviously at one time a most impressive building and is now an even more impressive ruin.

  Bean sees my interest. ‘I can tell you it was built in the thirteenth century, when Ypres was the centre of the textile trade, but was destroyed within a few weeks in 1914.’

  It has the appearance of a huge cathedral, well over three-hundred-foot long, and even now the battered remnants of its imposing tower stand some hundred feet. The main building has several floors, all of which have caved in, along with the roof. The entire archway façade had been intricately carved with historic figures now headless and pockmarked from shrapnel. Columns and archways lie like fallen giants.

  With Bean’s agreement, Wilkins and I return the following day, determined to photograph the tragic destruction of this ancient walled city. I have never seen anything like this, a whole metropolis destroyed. I am, I suspect, more taken by the macabre appearance of the Ypres ruins than I would be were the city intact.

  We stumble through rubble an
d adventurously climb the five-storey walls of the old post office. The huge oak beams which made up its ceiling are now just matchwood. The walls visibly shake with concussion from the nearby twelve-inch artillery gun batteries. We look to the east of the city, where a historic gateway once led across a moat onto the road to Menin. The breach in this ancient wall now leads to the frontline trenches. The Second Division of the AIF, which I photographed at Renescue, will shortly pass through here. Just past the city walls I can see the intersection on Menin Road known as Hellfire Corner, one of the most dangerous places on earth. The road has hessian curtains erected to spoil the German artillery observers’ view of the constant traffic. As I watch I see our supply wagons gallop gamely through Hellfire Corner, dodging shell bursts at breakneck speed. It is a game of chance.

  I feel strangely guilty at my enthralment with everything I see. It is all new. Away from the front, the countryside is the stuff of picture books. Autumn has now arrived, leaves have turned red and are about to fall. But I am fascinated by the advanced mechanisation of the war effort, especially the power and numbers of howitzer and artillery batteries, the sheer volume of shells fired and their devastating effect on the combatants and the landscape. I can’t believe the mix of aircraft, from large German Gotha bombers to the small biplane scouts and fighters which regularly perform aerial gymnastics for the benefit of incredulous trench dwellers. I am determined to have my chance in the air as soon as I can visit an Australian squadron. And, though I keep it to myself, I remain unable to understand the folly of those who want to be involved in this murderous conflict, for that is what it seems to me: sheer wanton murder.