Endurance Read online

  Our curved iron Nissen hut at Steenvorde proves quite comfortable, despite the chill in the air. In addition to Wilkins and our driver, there are two other staff who help with the carrying, developing, printing of photograph titles and chores like the cooking. I have christened the hut ‘the Billabong’, as a reminder of the Endurance expedition. In fact, the round sides of the Nissen hut reminds me of an upturned boat, not unlike the Snuggery. Unlike Endurance days, though, I am the only one who sleeps inside. The others have an army tent just outside. After my Endurance experience I value privacy perhaps too much. But the arrangement works well, notwithstanding the early start of winter rain. Our cameras, plates and film are out of the weather and there is a spacious darkroom.

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  Just before 5 a.m. on 20 September, Wilkins and I were approaching Hellfire Pass on the Menin Road. In pre-dawn drizzle we were carrying our full kit of equipment, cine and tripod and other cameras. Menin Road was for the briefest of intervals unusually quiet as the monster drew breath.

  Lining both sides of the road, at times head-high, was a dark twisted mass of machines, wagons, equipment, malodorous bodies of dead mules and horses, busted guns and munitions of all sorts.

  Bean had given us the heads-up a stunt was on, and so we had spent the night at the Red Cross dressing station in the ruins of Ypres, and had been glad to leave. We had been unable to sleep due to the constant roar of our own gun batteries. The dressing station had been emptied of its wounded and was in full readiness, with orderlies nervously fussing like hosts not knowing how many guests are coming.

  We knew the clock had struck five as, with a flash of light and a deafening roar for several miles in both directions, the whole of the British batteries opened up. The ground beneath our feet shuddered. Any attempt at conversation ceased. The gun crews were working nonstop on unseen targets, shells whizzed over our heads and the individual roar of each battery was lost to a cacophonous wall of noise that swelled and resonated in my head.

  With heavy loads we plodded on as our sense of hearing was overwhelmed by the constancy of the din. There was no backing away now, no saying stop to the guns. With our cameras at the ready we were part of whatever was about to happen, and in any event nothing could be heard even if we were to give voice to our apprehension. My mind wandered back to those days in the bush at home when prehistoric cicadas in their thousands simultaneously emerged from years of cold silence under the earth to torment all living creatures with their relentless fever-pitch drumming. Their shrill sound was impossible to escape as they beat their bodies senseless.

  Shortly, we reached the mine crater at Hooge. Bean appeared and led us down into brigade headquarters, where we descended some thirty feet, through passageways of running water and caverns leaking from the overnight rain. He introduced us to General Bennett, who was in charge of operations on this sector. Wilkins and I were glad for some respite from the crescendo above ground.

  Then, without warning, the guns stopped. The general looked up and all in the room fell silent. This was zero hour. Above us, line upon line of soldiers from the Second ANZAC Division that I had photographed at Renescue would already be out of their trenches, through the barbed wire and now running at the German positions. The phone stayed silent. I went back to the entrance, but it was still dark and there was nothing to see and nothing I could photograph. But I heard the tacca-tacca-tacca of Bosche machine guns; they would have plenty of targets.

  Within ten minutes our artillery started up again. The barrage had been lifted forwards to the next line of Bosche defences.

  Presently a message came down the wire that the first line of German trenches had been secured with light casualties. I received a nod from Bean. Wilkins and I made our way back outside. This was our chance to move up, even though we would be well behind the Australian attacking line. I emerged through a canvas flap and straightened up, dizzy with the rush of blood and noise, and blinded in the morning light. There was a terrific thud just yards from me. The ground shook and I was tumbling forwards through the air. Pieces of timber boardwalk were flying over my head. Curiously, I had time to notice the trench was upside down before I landed on my side with the camera pressed into my ribs. I was in one piece. George was lifting my pack off my back.

  ‘Frank, are you alright? Can you hear me?’ George’s voice sounded very distant.

  Other soldiers stood around looking at an enormous hole in a timber balustrade along one side of the trench. A Bosche shell had hit, but failed to explode.

  My heart was racing and I must have been whiter than a sheet by the look on George’s face. No blood, nothing broken, I felt slightly foolish sprawled across the ground. There was nothing else to do but move. I jumped up on the duckboards and ran on ahead with my gear before George could gather up his equipment.

  I must have been in shock, because I brushed past several soldiers coming the opposite way before realising they were wearing grey uniforms. They were Bosche. Wilkins caught me up and we both took in the sight. The Hun did not seem to notice us. Looking straight ahead, they trudged along to our rear lines. These were the first live German soldiers I had seen; unarmed, mostly terrified boys, and with barely any escort, prisoners of war to be interned. Ironically, they were the lucky ones, now free of the battlefield.

  More Bosche prisoners followed, carrying stretchers with the first wave of injured Australian soldiers. Other prisoners were holding and guiding the walking wounded, both Australian and German.

  Looking ahead into the German lines, the Bosche observation balloons had all come down or been destroyed. This morning the RAF dominated the sky, with no German aircraft to be seen. Our planes hung above the Bosche defences and regularly bombed and strafed the German positions. They ignored crisscrossing tracer bullets and anti-aircraft guns which sent up puffs of black smoke. Before too long, I saw one of our aircraft catch fire and plunge to the ground in no-man’s-land. Had my cine camera been on I might have captured this, but it was all over too fast.

  Wilkins and I passed ‘Stirling Castle’, which was now just a mound of concrete and brick remnants from what had once been a heavily fortified hilltop. From this point, the Australian dead and wounded were everywhere. They lay in the mud and ooze across the war-ploughed battlefield. I could not help but stare at my countrymen, many of whom had horrific wounds, but we did not pause until we reached the first of the German trenches. Here we stopped.

  The carnage along the entire length of the Bosche trench was more than I could ever have imagined. There were none living. The entrenchments themselves were waterlogged and had collapsed inwards, with arms, legs and torsos strewn throughout in a macabre broth. I did not see how I could capture a credible photograph of this scene. I was nauseous. Images of the horror of Grytviken whaling station were here emulated by human slaughter, with ‘civilised man’ as the pawns in this evil game.

  The noise was horrendous; shells whizzed overhead and there was a constant tacca-tacca of machine-gun fire from a further line of German defences. We kept our heads down.

  On the way back to brigade headquarters, Wilkins and I followed six Bosche prisoners carrying one of our wounded on a stretcher. A German shell landed among them and killed the whole party. There were no remains to be seen for three of them. The others were frightfully mutilated. We scurried past. We did not stop. There was nothing we could do.

  We made our way back along Menin Road, past row upon row of stretcher cases waiting for field ambulances, and then to Ypres by dusk and on to our hut at Steenvorde. That night we were up after 1 a.m. developing our photographic plates of the day’s efforts. I went to my bedroom dog-tired, shut the door, and before I could reach the basin I was retching on the floor, shaking and sobbing uncontrollably. I had to struggle to prevent my distress being heard by the men outside. How could God, to whom all on the battlefield prayed, be they British, German or French, allow the generals and politicians to carry on this obscene conflict? At headquarters they said we had won a victory a
nd captured over five thousand prisoners. But no one told me our casualties. Our dead could not be any less. How was it my friends Azzi Webb and Leslie Blake participate in this killing?

  Eventually, I fell asleep, slept deeply and woke refreshed.

  That morning I completed my diary entry for 20 September with something Bean had said to me, but which I regretted even as I wrote:

  One of the most glorious days in the annals of our history.

  Glorious . . . glorious . . . What on earth was meant by this? I had seen nothing glorious. Bean would undoubtedly know more of what had been achieved, but the cost in lives would need to be worth it. The more it played on my mind, the more offensive it became to me, and I scratched my pen through the words until they were indecipherable.

  We learned that during the prior evening, at the same time as we had been developing our negatives, fierce German counterattacks had taken place across the ground we had photographed. By morning, the Bosche had been repelled, though no reference was made to our casualties being light. The Second Division men were by then digging in to their new positions, not having slept for at least two days, and having nowhere dry or safe to lie down amid the churned-up mud. Casualties capable of walking had made their way back to dressing stations. Only a small number of our soldiers were required as prisoner escorts, and these struggled to keep pace with German prisoners anxious to get to the rear, away from the shelling. As for the dead, they lay where they fell, with no immediate prospect of burial parties. Our soldiers moved around them as if they were not there.

  Bean took Wilkins and me along to meet the British army censors, who were more reasonable to deal with than I expected. General Kitchener was apparently now so desperate for public support and more recruits that he had reversed the policy of banning journalists and was now actively seeking favourable propaganda stories and photographs. Even so, the censor’s concerns were misplaced and bureaucratic.

  One of the censors lifted a negative to the light. ‘Captain Hurley, this is the sort of thing we won’t allow,’ he said. ‘If the Boche saw this, they could identify the village in the background.’

  ‘I understand,’ I replied politely. ‘But the Germans already have their own photographs. Each morning I see their aeroplanes taking photographs of the build-up. Their artillery have the precise coordinates they need for each day.’

  ‘Aerial photographs don’t identify which units they are looking at,’ the censor responded sharply. He tossed the negative back into the box.

  I bit my tongue. ‘Let me show you a good way to hold negatives,’ I replied with a deliberate look of horror on my face.

  Bean smiled. ‘Captain Hurley and Lieutenant Wilkins will pop in once a week for clearances. They know the ropes.’

  A few days later, Bean called in to brief us on plans from headquarters to continue the push to remove the Germans off the high ground east of Ypres. Zero hour was set for 5.50 a.m. on 26 September. The First and Second Australian Divisions were relieved from the front, and in their place the Fourth and Fifth Divisions made their way through the mud into the newly taken positions. Others crossed Menin Road and assembled overnight in Chateau Wood and Glencorse Wood.

  On the twenty-fifth, Wilkins and I set out early to photograph the build-up, only to have a most nerve-racking and frustrating day. It was apparent the German artillery knew exactly when and from where our attack would come. Heavy shelling continued nonstop. The Bosche concentrated on our communication lines with uncanny accuracy, finding and destroying a number of ammunition dumps. In short time, the heavy traffic on Menin Road was a long line of blazing wrecks, between which a trail of mustard-gas victims with bandaged eyes and all holding hands were guided back through the mud.

  All day, stretcher parties streamed back from our front as the barrage took its toll. The casualties from shellfire were so horrendous I did not see how our attack could proceed.

  It was impossible to take any satisfactory pictures. Half the day was spent lying in shell holes with the camera strapped to my back, waiting for a chance to move about. But there were no chances, just moments of running madly across unprotected ground. Through the lens, the landscape was a dark, featureless mire. Nothing in the open stayed still long enough to be photographed. Men huddled all day in trenches and dugouts. Chateau Wood was not even a wood, just tree stumps and shredded branches. It gave no cover to our men. But they knew how to dig. Shovels, tin hats and gas masks kept most of them alive amid the onslaught.

  The bayonet and rifle were nothing compared to the destructive force of artillery assembled on both sides of the frontline. I was not so much afraid as dismayed by the random murderous force of the constant shelling. In the afternoon, a nearby dump of howitzer shells took a direct hit with a concussive reverberation that flung Wilkins and I to the ground. It seemed a full minute before the clods of earth, wood and metal debris ceased to rain on us. We were winded and deafened, but unharmed. But it was the end of both stills and cine cameras for the day.

  The next morning was another early start. An intense British cannonade opened with a giant thunderclap before dawn. Their work done, the guns fell silent at 5.50 a.m. Within a minute came the tacca-tacca-tacca of the German machine guns. Then our artillery started again. The Fourth and Fifth Divisions, with English infantry on their left and right flanks, advanced along a six-mile front. They found the German trenches and pillboxes pulverised by the shelling. Many Germans surrendered.

  The Anzacs advanced through Polygon Wood and captured the ruins of Zonnebeke village. Wilkins and I were allowed up into our new frontline positions, although only after they had been secured. The fighting itself had stopped, other than regular sniping. The real action was over. We were left to photograph the carnage. The German dead lay strewn across the floor of their pillboxes and scattered at their entrances and in shell holes and dugouts. Every scene was redolent of the firestorm that had passed through. But the firestorm had gone. I sensed the inadequacy of the photographs I had taken to date. The scenes I was photographing showed devastating destruction. But they did not show the fighting, nor did they show the certainty of imminent death for anyone moving above the parapet.

  Wilkins and I frequently moved in sight of the German lines, and to take a decent photograph we invariably spent time fussing around in one spot. Nearby soldiers complained we attracted attention. I walked on the wrong side of a pillbox with camera and tripod, and a bullet pinged off the wall beside me. I dropped to the ground and slid around the nearest corner. I felt sure the same sniper followed me all day.

  Counterattacks were expected at any time. We were still taking pictures of the heavily shelled pillboxes when a deadly Bosche barrage began. Wilkins and I set ourselves the task of photographing the shell bursts. This proved enormously difficult, not to mention life-threatening. Working from an old German dugout, I worked out as best I could the German targets and set up the camera and tripod in the open and framed the shot. At the sound of a shell I leaped out to take the photograph. Anything that sounded too close I dived back inside.

  We had better luck when we returned to Menin Road. We hid behind tree stumps and dived into ditches, but eventually secured some useful plates. Wilkins cut things too fine and landed heavily, cracking a rib and collecting a piece of shrapnel in the leg. By the time his wound was seen to, it was well after dark when we made it back to Steenvorde, totally exhausted. At the aid post the talk was of a successful day, though there were many casualties.

  Bean arrived at the Billabong not long after us. ‘You two are making a name for yourselves,’ he declared. ‘Headquarters have received reports of two mad Australian photographers doing their best to be blown up on the Menin Road.’

  ‘Can’t disagree with that,’ replied Wilkins. ‘But I think we succeeded in photographing some shell bursts today.’

  ‘You’re lucky you didn’t succeed in having an end to yourselves,’ admonished Bean. ‘You are no good to me in a field hospital or worse!’ With his thinning red hair a
nd glasses, his army uniform falling off his beanpole figure, he looked very much the schoolmaster.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Wilkins and I took chances today—but it paid off. We’ll now have photographs showing the shellfire our lads cop every day.’

  ‘But they don’t go looking for it.’

  ‘We have to go after it—otherwise we’ll have nothing worth seeing. When there’s an attack, we’re not allowed near the front, and the rest of the time our soldiers are in trenches or underground . . . The actual battleground is just a featureless mess with concealed trenches and camouflaged artillery posts. These shell bursts will help show the danger.’

  Bean stiffened. ‘You are not adding these shell bursts into your other photographs, are you?’

  ‘My oath, I am. I can show you, if you like.’

  Bean looked at me for several moments, then addressed me in his formal schoolmaster’s voice, ‘Captain Hurley, it’s not a case of what I like. It’s not to be done, not with any photographs you take with the AIF.’

  ‘But you want decent shots for the London exhibition, don’t you?’

  ‘The exhibition is to have photographs which accurately show the contribution of the Australian forces. I don’t want fakes! That’s the sort of thing Lord Beaverbrook and the Canadians do to sell newspapers. Your photographs are part of our historic record.’

  ‘Listen here, Bean, I don’t do fakes!’ I was angry now. ‘I can assure you, the German artillery today was very real. Be serious, man. You know Wilkins and I can’t just stand up in the middle of no-man’s-land and wait for everything to line up in the viewfinder! I’ve got no way of knowing exactly when a shell will explode, or if the explosion will be fifty yards on my left or ten yards on my right.’

  ‘Captain Hurley, I’m sorry if this wasn’t made clear, but your appointment was approved as official AIF photographer, and the photographs have to be cleared by censors. It’s not for you to be adding things later or changing the photographs. You owe it to the diggers to show things truthfully without cropping things in and out.’