Private John Dalglish

Rod Martin

By late 1915, the ‘glory’ phase of the war had well and truly passed in Australia.  The long lists of casualties and news of reverses had dampened enthusiasm for the conflict and led to a serious decline in the numbers of men volunteering for active service.  By November, numbers were down to 11 230, less than one-third of the record total in the previous July.  Despite this reality, and reacting to British calls for a greater contribution from the empire, the Hughes Labor government decided to offer an additional 50 000 troops on top of those already enlisted.

Just how the government hoped to get such a number on a voluntary basis is uncertain.  However, it did its best by embarking upon an energetic recruiting campaign and a call to arms by ‘Billy’ Hughes, the prime minister.

Proclamation issued by the prime minister, 15 December

1915 (Fitzsimons, Peter: The ballad of Les Darcy)

It was in this atmosphere that coppersmith John Dalglish enlisted in March 1916.  Thirty-three years old at the time and married with a young child, John may have been moved enough by the propaganda to decide that he had to do his bit.  169 centimetres tall and weighing sixty-four kilos, with blue eyes and brown hair, John had no previous military experience – but he was obviously willing to learn.  Initially assigned to the depot battalion based at Royal Park,  John was soon transferred to 21 Battalion and became part of that unit’s 16 Reinforcements group.

16 Reinforcements sailed for Europe on A71 HMAT Nestor on 2 October 1916.  They travelled via the Cape of Good Hope to avoid submarines in the Mediterranean, and arrived in England in February the following year. On the fifteenth of that same month, they sailed to France via Folkstone in Kent.  Once there, they joined 21 Battalion, based at that time at Warlencourt, near Arras in the northern part of the country.  The unit had just come out of the front line trenches and was located in the rear at the interestingly named Acid Drop Camp.  On 22 February, John and his compatriots received their first taste of real conflict when the battalion returned to the front line and stayed there until the end of the month.  This was the time when the Germans staged a strategic retreat along the Western Front to their heavily fortified and more easily defended Hindenburg Line.  For 21 Battalion, this meant occupying a number of trenches abandoned by the enemy.  The Germans were not going to let them have it all their own way, however.  The battalion diaries record that the Australians were shelled regularly and fired at with machine guns as they moved forward and then occupied the new trenches.  German aircraft also got in on the act, machine gunning the troops on a number of occasions.  During the period the battalion was in action, two lieutenants and ten other ranks were killed.

In March and early April, the unit spent time in and out of the front line, much of it near the town of Bapaume.  John was away from the action for some time in April, spending the time in hospital being treated for a severe bout of diarrhoea.  Such afflictions were common in the trenches, where unhygienic conditions abounded.  He may have returned to the battalion just in time to participate in the voting for the second plebiscite on conscription, held by the new Hughes conservative government late that month.

Men of 21 Battalion voting in the second conscription  plebiscite,

Bullecourt 29 April 1917. (AWM A00755)

Soon after John returned to the battalion it took part in what was labelled the Second Battle of Bullecourt.  In April, Australian forces participated in the first battle, a poorly conceived, planned and executed attack that cost almost 3,350 casualties and the capture of 1,300 others. Les Carlyon describes the whole affair as a ‘bloody fiasco’.  Second Bullecourt, the following month, was better planned.  Undeterred by the failure of the first offensive, British 5 Army commander Sir Hubert Gough decided on a second go, this time using a preliminary artillery barrage.  The attack, which began on 3 May, was partly successful, and close to 600 metres of territory had been seized by 6 May.  Fighting took place in the trenches of the Hindenburg Line and Richard Travers tells us that combat raged backwards and forwards between the trench line and a sunken road half-way across no man’s land.  Bill Gammage describes it as some of the most savage close-quarter fighting of the war.  He quotes an Australian wounded early in the battle as saying that a day later:

The reaction set in and I cried for hours.  My Mate’s arm was Blown into my chest and Pieces of P________ were splashed over more than a dozen. (p. 187)

Gammage goes on to write that this man’s comrades bombed, stabbed and bashed their enemy unceasingly, the dead piling up thickly.  Relieving troops quailed as they  approached what he describes as a holocaust.  Eventually, on 15 May, a final German counter-attack was repelled by the successful Australians.  The enemy then withdrew from Bullecourt.

The battlefield of Second Bullecourt, 6 May 1917. Note the shell

exploding in the distance. (AWM P02321.065)

The Australians’ performance at Second Bullecourt was described at the time as the most gallant ever, and one of the great deeds of the war.  However, the victory was on a small scale and came at a high cost.  Australia suffered 7,000 casualties, a number of them from 21 Battalion.  John was lucky and apparently survived the battle unscathed.

Licking its wounds, but on a victorious high, 21 Battalion spent a considerable time in reserve after Bullecourt until it moved north into Belgian Flanders to participate in the next ‘big push’, which had begun at Messines, near Ypres, in June.  Having been thwarted in his attempts at a grand advance on the Somme in the previous year, British commander-in-chief Sir Douglas Haig now planned to attack at the same spot where two previous efforts had failed, and at twice the speed, ostensibly to seize the Belgian coast and the German submarine pens there.  This, he claimed, would negate the impact of U-boats on vital Atlantic convoys and open the way to the north German plain.  More cynical observers have suggested that he simply wanted to try to win the war before sizeable numbers of American troops entered the fray (the United States had entered the war in April of that year) and stole his thunder.

Whatever his real reasoning, Haig was unrealistic in his aims.  Flanders is a naturally swampy area, made arable only by an extensive network of drainage canals constructed and maintained over hundreds of years.  Constant pounding by heavy calibre shells during two battles and now a third destroyed this delicate system and rendered the exercise ripe for disaster. All that was needed was rain – which came down in bucket loads almost as soon as the main attack began at the end of July.  As a result, men, horses, equipment and machinery quickly became bogged down and, in many instances, disappeared in what Leon Wolff describes as gluey, intolerable mud.

Flanders Fields 1917  (AWM E01200)

After recuperating and training for three months, 21 Battalion arrived in Flanders in mid-September to participate in the Third Battle of Ypres.  It provided support for the successful attack at Menin Road late in the month, losing a number of men in the process. 

Front line trenches at Broodseinde Ridge 1917             (AWM E00948)

In October, it was involved in another successful attack at Broodseinde Ridge, but suffered 434 casualties as a result. 

Third Ypres petered out in November after the capture of the town of Passchendaele.  21 Battalion was also involved in the advance on that spot.  It was a pyrrhic victory, as the town had long since been destroyed by shell fire, and its occupation provided no real strategic advantage.  The whole battle, however, cost Australia 38,000 casualties.  As Peter Cochrane puts it, this meant thirty-five men died for every metre of ground seized.  It was a very costly exercise in futility.

Like the rest of the Australian Imperial Force, 21 Battalion saw out the rest of the year recuperating from the conflicts at Ypres.  While still in Flanders, John was admitted to hospital on Boxing Day 1917.  He was suffering from a chancre, an early, wart-like sign of syphilis.  He was not the first, nor would he be the last soldier to suffer such an affliction while on active service.  Having been away from home for lengthy periods of time, and in constant physical danger, it is perhaps not surprising that many men sought some comfort in the numerous brothels that sprang up near the front and in the streets of cities such as Paris, Amiens and Armentières with its infamous mademoiselle!  The dangers of venereal disease were ever-present in such circumstances, however, and syphilis was a killer in the days before penicillin was discovered.  John would probably have been forced to undertake a painful and risky course of treatment using often toxic compounds containing elements such as arsenic in efforts to destroy the disease.

The treatment was obviously long, and he was not discharged from hospital until 19 February 1918.  After a period of convalescence, he rejoined 21 Battalion on 13 March.  At that time it was still located in the Ypres sector. On 2 April, however, it returned quickly to the Somme area in France to assist in combating what was to be Germany’s last offensive.  Replenished with troops from the Eastern Front now that Bolshevik Russia had sued for peace, and keen to achieve a victory before American troops arrived in large numbers, the Germans launched a large-scale offensive in Belgium and France on 21 March.  Despite being forewarned of the attack , the Allies fell back under the onslaught, losing most of the territory they had gained in the previous year.  The Germans came close to taking Paris before their advances were checked in battles such as Villers-Bretonneux.  After a period of reconsolidation, the Allies were able to move forward again.  One of the first successful forays was at Hamel on 1 July.  John and his compatriots were involved.  Using the now proven tactic of ‘bite and hold’, and incorporating tanks and American troops, Australian Corps commander Sir John Monash launched his attack on the village and valley on 4 July, the final objective being the eastern ridge. It was over in ninety-three minutes.

British, American and Australian troops the day before the Battle of

Hamel, 3 July 1918.   (AWM E02697)

Searching for survivors (and lurking Huns!) in Hamel, 5 July 1918 (AWM E02666)

On 8 August, the Allies began their big push to penetrate the Hindenburg Line.  Their initial success was so great that German commander Erich Ludendorff described the day as the black one for the German Army.  John and the rest of 21 Battalion attacked south of the Somme on that day in what became known as the Battle of Amiens - part of a wider move orchestrated by Monash.  For the first time in almost four years, the war was one of movement, and victory was won in twelve hours.  The Germans suffered 27,000 casualties and lost 12,000 as prisoners.

As the Allies steadily advanced towards the Hindenburg Line, John went on some well-earned leave to England on 31 August and did not return until 21 September. As a result, he missed the Battle of Mont St. Quentin, which began on the day he left the front.  It was another brilliant victory for the Australians.

All these successes, however, came at great human cost, mainly because Haig was now using the Australians as ‘shock’ troops.  They were the ones the Germans were really frightened of, and called madmen.  General Rawlinson, commander of the British 4 Army, told Haig that German officers were saying that their men no longer wanted to face Australians.  By the end of September, so great were the losses of seven battalions, including the twenty-first, that they could barely raise companies (100 – 225 men).  In consequence, headquarters decided to disband them and use the remaining men to reinforce sister battalions.  The men, no doubt including John, were aghast at the idea of closing down the unit they had fought and many of their comrades had died in, and they wanted to fight on together. As Les Carlyon tells us, battalion loyalty was greater than that for brigade or division. In consequence, the men mutinied on 25 September.  When ordered to disband and march off to other units, they refused.   Monash, believing that destruction of the Hindenburg Line was more important than a squabble over shoulder patches, deferred the order by the end of that day.  None of the mutineers was punished for his disobedience.

The remains of  21 Battalion fought in what was to be the Australians’ last hurrah, at Montbrehain on 5 October.  It was formerly a large village of about 900 people, but by then it was almost deserted, save for German troops and a few people hiding in cellars.  21 and 24  Battalions moved through the narrow entrance to the village.  Each battalion was so decimated that it was made up of only about 240 men.  However, despite further losses, they were successful, and the village was in Australian hands by nightfall.  21 Battalion held the village overnight and, the next day, became the last Australian battalion to withdraw from active operations on the Western Front.  The Hindenburg Line had fallen! 

A few days earlier, Captain Ellis, the historian of 5 Division, described fellow Australian troops as they left the front:

Troops more fatigued had rarely been seen and yet, by sheer determination, they overcame the weakness of body and marched back in excellent order . . . But their strained, pallid faces revealed what they had passed through, and numerous transport units along the road respectfully and in silence pulled their vehicles to one side [so] that the war-worn men might not have an extra step to march.  It was a mute and eloquent testimony of brave men to heroes. (Quoted in Carlyon, p. 731) 

21 Battalion troops advancing on Montbrehain, 5 October 1918 (AWM E03126)

Once the Australians were out of the line, Monash was able to carry out the order to disband the undermanned units.  This happened on 13 October, and John and his compatriots became part of a reconstituted 24 Battalion.

The men remained in France until the end of the war in November, moving once again to the northern part of the country, close to the Belgian border. On the thirtieth of the month, while based there, John was hospitalized with influenza.  Three days later he was dead.  The official cause of death was broncho-pneumonia – ‘due to field operations’.  He had successfully seen out the war, only to be felled by a common disease.  It is more than likely, however, that he was one of the many millions who succumbed to the Spanish ‘Flu pandemic that swept the world for two years between 1918 and 1920.  The description of his symptoms and the speed with which he deteriorated make this a distinct possibility.

John was buried with military honours in Le Cateau Communal Cemetery, not far from the town of Cambrai.

Le Cateau Communal Cemetery (Commonwealth War Graves Commission)

Sources

Australian War Memorial - collection

Barnard, Loretta (ed.): Australia through time, Sydney, Random House, 8^th edition, 2000   

Carlyon, Les: The Great War, Sydney, Macmillan, 2006

Cochrane, Peter: Australians at war, Sydney, ABC Books, 2001     

Commonwealth War Graves Commission

Fitzsimons, Peter: The ballad of Les Darcy, Sydney, HarperCollins Publishers, 2007 

Gammage, Bill: The broken years: Australian soldiers in the Great War, Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, 2010

Hosein, Sean   INFECTION FIGHTERS: Syphilis--Old tests and treatments

National Archives of Australia

Travers, Richard: Diggers in France: Australian soldiers on the Western Front, Sydney, ABC Books, 2008

Wolff, Leon: In Flanders fields, New York, Ballantyne, 1960