Allusion has been made to the great bend which occurs in the course of the River Somme. It is indeed a geographical circumstance which must be borne in mind, if the phraseology current at this epoch in the war is to be clearly comprehended.

The river flows in an almost due northerly direction from the neighbourhood of Roye as far as PÉronne, and then bends quite sharply, at that locality, in a western direction, past Bray, Corbie and Amiens, towards the sea, beyond Abbeville. In the story of the fighting of the period from March to August we have been concerned only with that portion of the river valley which ran parallel to our line of advance; but interest will henceforth focus itself largely upon that other reach of the Somme which runs on a north and south line, upstream, from the town of PÉronne.

This latter stretch of the river lies squarely athwart the direction in which the Corps had been advancing, and the obstacle to that advance which the river would presently constitute was continued in a northerly direction from PÉronne by an unfinished work of a great canalization scheme to be called the "Canal du Nord." This canal was already wide and deep, and formed a tactical obstacle of some significance, for the excavations incidental to this project had been almost completed before the war.

The "line of the Somme," as it was understood in the tactical discussions of the period now to be dealt with, meant, in short, the line formed by that part of the river which lay upstream (i.e., to the south of PÉronne), and the continuation northwards of that line by the Canal du Nord. Both features being military obstacles, they and the highlands to the east of them together afforded an eminently suitable continuous line on which the enemy might, if he were permitted to do so, establish himself in a defensive attitude in order to bar our eastward progress.

The autumn was upon us; not more than another eight or nine weeks of campaigning weather could be relied upon. A quite definite possibility existed that the enemy might be able to put forth so powerful an effort to contest our further advance, inch by inch, that he would gain sufficient time to prepare the line of the Somme for a stout defence, and hold us up until the arrival of winter compelled a suspension of large operations.

There were at that time, indeed, some who contended that as we had apparently succeeded in putting an end to the German offensive we should rest content with the year's work; that our soundest strategy would be to permit the enemy to take up such a line of defence; and then quietly to wait over the winter until 1919 for the full development of the American effort, now only in its inception.

So far, the enemy had given no indication of any readiness to undertake a precipitate withdrawal from the great bend west of the Somme. On the contrary, his resistance had stiffened to such an extent that little further progress was to be hoped for from the methods of open warfare which I had employed since August 8th.

If, however, another powerful blow could be delivered, to be followed by energetic exploitation, it was quite possible that the enemy might be hustled across the Somme, that this might be achieved at such a rate that I could gain a firm footing on the east bank, and that thereby the value to him of the line of the Somme, as a winter defence, might be destroyed.

This was the very project on which I now embarked. The First Division was in Corps Reserve, had rested and was fresh. The 32nd Division had only just come into the line. By handing over a substantial sector to the French, my frontage south of the Somme was about to be shortened to 7,000 yards, a very suitable front for a deliberate attack by two Divisions.

I held a conference at Fouilloy, near Corbie, in the afternoon of August 21st to announce the plan, and to settle all details with the Commanders and services concerned. The Infantry assault was to be entrusted to Glasgow and Lambert, attacking side by side; but the former had allotted to him much the larger share of the battle front, at the northern end, the corollary rÔle of the 32nd Division being to seize Herleville and carry our line just to the east of it.

The date of the attack was fixed for August 23rd, and the Second and Fifth Divisions were warned to be in readiness to come into the line a day or two after the battle, in order to commence immediately the process of keeping the enemy on the run, and hustling him clean out of the river bend and across the line of the Somme.

The conference of that day was of special interest, in that I had to deal with two Divisions which had not participated in any of those Corps Conferences, previously held, which had initiated a fully organized Corps operation. The Commanders and Staffs were strangers to each other and, some of them, to me and my Staff. Nearly all of them were yet unfamiliar with the special methods of the Corps. The conference was therefore a lengthy one, for many problems of tactical mechanism, which had been settled in connection with the preceding battles of Hamel and August 8th, had to be reopened and elucidated.

These regular battle conferences were in the Australian Corps an innovation from the time the command of it devolved upon me. They proved a powerful instrument for the moulding of a uniformity of tactical thought and method throughout the command. They brought together men who met face to face but seldom, and they permitted of an exhaustive and educative interchange of views. They led to a development of "team-work" of a very high order of efficiency.

The work of preparing for, and the actual conduct of, these conferences was always a very arduous business; but they more than repaid me for the effort they entailed. They served two paramount purposes. They enabled me to apply the requisite driving force to all subordinates collectively, instead of individually, and thereby created a responsive spirit which was competitive. In addition, each Commander or Service had the advantage not only of receiving instructions regarding his own action, but also of hearing in full detail the instructions conveyed to his colleagues. He knew, not merely what his colleagues had to do, but also knew that they had been told what to do; and he had an opportunity of considering the effect of their action on his own.

The senior representative of the Heavy Artillery, Tank and Air Services invariably attended, and listened to all the points discussed with the Divisions, and the Divisional Commanders heard all matters arranged with these services. In this way, each arm acquired in the most direct manner a steadily expanding knowledge of the technology of all the other arms.

My reason for emphasizing these matters in the present context is that, on this particular occasion, an attempt was to be made to carry out a major Corps operation at little more than thirty-six hours' notice; and the Division which was to have assigned to it the principal rÔle was still in Corps Reserve and a day's march from the battle front.

That, in spite of these handicaps, the battle proved brilliantly successful is a testimony to the valuable part which these Corps conferences played in securing rapid and efficiently co-ordinated action; a result which would, I am confident, have been unattainable under the stated conditions by the mere issue of formal written orders.

Although only two out of the seven Divisions of the Corps were to participate in this operation, it was my intention to employ, for the full assistance of the Infantry, the whole resources of the Corps in Artillery, Tanks and Aircraft. That was a principle which I always regarded as fundamental, and one from which I never permitted any exception to be made, although the pressure upon me to rest a substantial portion of these ancillary services was always very great.

The general plan for the battle ran briefly as follows. The 32nd Division would attack with one Infantry Brigade, under a barrage, on a frontage of 1,000 yards; the capture of the village of Herleville, which was still strongly held, being its principal objective.

The 1st Australian Division would attack on a frontage of 4,500 yards, with two Brigades in line, and one Brigade in reserve. The attack would be carried out in three phases.

The first phase was a normal assault, under an Artillery barrage, and with the assistance of Tanks, to a predetermined line, which would carry us beyond the Chuignes Valley; the second phase was in the nature of exploitation by the two line Brigades, but was expressly limited to a maximum distance of 1,000 yards beyond the main first objective.

The third phase was to be contingent upon the complete success of the preceding phases, and would consist of an advance by the Reserve Brigade for a further exploitation of success, by the seizure of the whole of the Cappy bend of the river, including the towering hill close to the Somme Canal known as Froissy Beacon.

All arrangements for the forthcoming battle having thus been completed, the First Division duly relieved the Fifth Division on the night of August 21st, and hastened forward its preparations for the attack, which had been fixed for 4.45 a.m. on August 23rd.

In the meantime, the first attack which any British Army other than the Fourth had made since August 8th was at last launched on August 21st along the whole front of the Third British Army, northwards from Albert.

It has come to be an article of faith that the whole of the successive stages of the great closing offensive of the war had been the subject of most careful timing, and of minute organization on the part of the Allied High Command, and of our own G.H.Q. Much eulogistic writing has been devoted to an attempted analysis of the comprehensive and far-reaching plans which resulted in the delivery of blow upon blow, in a prescribed order of time and for the achievement of definite strategical or tactical ends.

All who played any part in these great events well know that it was nothing of the kind; that nothing in the nature of a detailed time-table to control so vast a field of effort was possible. All Commanders, and the most exalted of them in a higher degree even than those wielding lesser forces, became opportunists, and bent their energies, not to the realization of a great general plan for a succession of timed attacks, but upon the problem of hitting whenever and wherever an opportunity offered, and the means were ready to hand.

In these matters it was the force of circumstances which controlled the sequence of events, and nothing else. An elaborate time-table controlled by definite dates and sequences for the successive engagement of a series of Armies would have been quite impossible of realization. Even a Corps Commander had difficulty in forecasting within a day or two when he would be ready to launch an attack on any given part of the front. For an Army Commander it was a matter of a week or even two.

All attempted time-tables were controlled by our Artillery requirements; both the assembling of the necessary guns—often drawn from distant fronts—and the accumulating of the requisite "head" of ammunition to see a battle through, were processes whose duration could only be very roughly forecasted.

The dumping, in the gun pits and in ammunition stores, of the necessary 500 or 600 rounds per gun meant days of labour in collection and distribution on the part of the railways and motor lorries. The breakdown of a few motor lorries at a critical time, or the dropping of a single bomb upon an important railway junction, were disturbing factors quite sufficient to have arrested the flow of ammunition, and to have postponed, indefinitely, any programme based upon its prompt delivery.

It will be obvious, therefore, that no reliance could be placed, days or weeks beforehand, upon a given attack taking place on a given day; therefore no plans could be made which depended upon such attacks taking place in a predetermined sequence.

Shortly put, therefore, the decisions of the High Command were confined to questions such as where an attack should be made, in what direction, and by what forces. The date was always a matter of uncertainty, and the only control that could be exercised was by postponement, and never by acceleration.

For the greater part of the offensive period it was therefore necessarily left to the Commanders of the Armies to conform to a general policy of attack, the time and method being left to their own decision or recommendation. And they, in turn, relied upon their Corps Commanders to seize the initiative in the pursuit of such a policy. Naturally, the Army at all times made every effort to secure co-ordinated action by its several Corps; but it rarely happened that more than one Corps at a time carried through the main effort—the other Corps performing subsidiary rÔles. The great battle of September 29th to October 1st, which completed the final rupture of the Hindenburg line, was, however, a signal exception to this rule.

The attack by the Third British Army on August 21st is a case which illustrates the delays inseparable from battle preparations. The project of such an attack had already been mooted on August 11th, when General Byng (Third Army) paid me a visit to discuss my battle plan of August 8th, and I gathered on that occasion that he hoped to begin within four or five days. The event showed that the operation actually took ten days to materialize. No criticism is suggested. The conditions of transport of troops and munitions doubtless made its earlier realization quite impossible.

The attack coming when it did, however, considerably eased the situation of the Fourth Army, upon whose front Ludendorff had flung all his available reserves, drawn from all parts of the German front, in his endeavours to bring the Australians and Canadians to a halt.

He was now suddenly confronted with the prospect of another "break through" in a different part of his line, and the German people had been taught by their press correspondents to believe that a "break through" was the one thing most to be resisted by the German Supreme Command, and the one thing impossible of achievement by us.

There can be no doubt, therefore, that the success of the Third Army on August 21st, although not comparable in its results with the battle of August 8th, did materially assist the prospects of my own success in the operations upon which I was then embarking.

The immediate effect of it was already felt the very next day. For the Third Corps, which was still the left flank Corps of the Fourth Army, and which had made very little progress since August 8th, was enabled to advance its line a little past Albert and Meaulte.

The Third Australian Division, which, it will be remembered, had taken over the front and the rÔle of the now disbanded Liaison Force, participated, by arrangement, in this attack and, swinging up its left, brought my front line, north of the river, square to the Somme Valley, and just to the forward slopes of the high plateau overlooking Bray and La Neuville. The Third Pioneer Battalion at once got to work on restoring the broken crossings over the Somme, to the south of Bray, and put out a series of advanced posts upon the left bank of the river, which gave us practical control of the great island on which stands La Neuville.

Meanwhile, on the left flank of the 9th Brigade, which had carried out the Third Divisional attack, there was serious trouble. The enemy counter-attacked in the late afternoon. The 9th Brigade stood firm; but the 47th Division (of the Third Corps) yielded ground, leaving the flank of the 9th Brigade in the air. A chalk pit, which we had seized, formed a welcome redoubt which enabled the 33rd Battalion to hang on for sufficiently long to permit of the 34th Battalion coming up to form a defensive flank, facing north.

In this way the gallant 9th Brigade (Goddard) was able to retain the whole of its gains of that day; but the risk of an immediate further advance was too great while the situation to the north remained obscure and unsatisfactory. The capture of the village of Bray, which was still strongly held by the enemy, had, therefore, to be postponed, although it had been part of my plan to capture it that same day as a measure of precaution, seeing that I calculated upon being able the next day to advance my line south of the Somme to a point well to the east of Bray.

The great attack by the First Division supported by the 32nd Division, which has come to be known as the battle of Chuignes, was launched at dawn on August 23rd, and was an unqualified success.

The main valley of the Somme in this region is flanked by a number of tributary valleys, which run generally in a north and south direction, extending back from the river four or five miles. They are broad, with heavily-wooded sides, and harbour a number of villages, such as Proyart, Chuignolles, Herleville and Chuignes, which cluster on their slopes.

One such valley, larger and longer than any of those which, in our previous advances, we had yet crossed, lay before our front line of that morning, and square across our path. It ran from Herleville, northwards, past Chuignes, to join the Somme in the Bray bend. It was the most easterly of all the tributary valleys to which I have referred, and it was also the last piece of habitable country before the devastated area of 1916 was reached, just a mile to the east of it.

The valley afforded excellent cover for the enemy's guns, and the expectation was that some of them would be overrun by our attack. It was also ideal country for machine-gun defence, for the numerous woods, hedges and copses afforded excellent cover, and had in all probability been amply fortified with barbed wire. It was a formidable proposition to attack such a position on such a frontage with only two Brigades.

The 2nd Brigade (Heane) attacked on the right, the 1st Brigade (Mackay) on the left, and the first phase was completed to time-table, with the green objective line, located on the east side of the long valley, in our possession. The only temporary hitch in the advance along the whole front was at Robert Wood, where the enemy held out, and had to be completely enveloped from both flanks before surrendering.

Then came the second phase, and no difficulty was experienced in advancing our line 1,000 yards east of the green line, nor in establishing there a firm line of outposts for the night.

The third phase presented a great deal more difficulty than I had anticipated. It was to have been undertaken by the 3rd Brigade (Bennett) pushing without delay through the 1st Brigade, and advancing in open warfare formation north-easterly towards Cappy, for the seizure of Hill 90, overlooking that village and on the south-west of it, and terminating at its northern extremity in the high bluff of Froissy Beacon.

There was, however, some unexplained delay in the initiation of this advance, and it was not until about 2 o'clock that the 3rd Brigade moved forward to the assault of the long slope of the Chuignes Valley, which still lay before them in this part of the field. The enemy, under the impression that our attack had spent itself, had occupied the plateau in great strength, and at first little progress could be made.

Mobile Artillery was, however, promptly pushed up, and this proved of great assistance to the infantry. Garenne Wood, on the top of the plateau, into which large numbers of the enemy had withdrawn, proved a difficult obstacle, and incapable of capture by frontal attack. It, too, was conquered by enveloping tactics, and with its fall the resistance of the enemy rapidly subsided, and the 3rd Brigade had the satisfaction of hunting the fugitives clean off the plateau into the Cappy Valley.

The whole of this phase of the battle was an especially fine piece of work on the part of the Regimental Officers. It was open warfare of the most complete character, and the victory was won by excellent battle control on the part of the Battalion Commanders, by splendid co-operation between the four Battalions of the Brigade, and by intelligent and gallant leadership on the part of the Company and Platoon Commanders.

Beset as I had been by many anxieties during the early afternoon as to how the Third Brigade would fare in the difficult task which had been given it, rendered more difficult by the delay of which I have spoken, I had the satisfaction that night of contemplating a victory far greater than I had calculated upon.

For the 32nd Division had successfully captured Herleville, and the First Division had seized the whole country for a depth of 1½ miles up to a line extending from Herleville to the western edge of Cappy. The whole Chuignes Valley was ours. By its capture the enemy had been despoiled of all habitable areas, and had been relegated to a waste of broken and ruined country between us and the line of the Somme.

We took that day 21 guns and over 3,100 prisoners from ten different regiments. The slaughter of the enemy in the tangled valleys was considerable, for our Infantry are always vigorous bayonet fighters. They received much assistance from the Tanks in disposing of the numerous machine gun detachments which held their ground to the last.

It was a smashing blow, and far exceeded in its results any previous record in my experience, having regard to the number of troops engaged. Its immediate result, the same night, was the capture of Bray by the Third Division, north of the river, thus completing the work of that Division which the failure of the 47th Division on their left the day before had compelled them to leave unfinished. The 40th Battalion took 200 prisoners, with trifling loss to themselves.

A more remote result, which made itself apparent in the next few days, was that it compelled the enemy to abandon all hope of retaining a hold of any country west of the line of the Somme; it impelled him at last to an evacuation of the great bend of the river, a process which he began in a very few days.

Such was the battle of Chuignes. Much of the success of this brilliant engagement was due to the personality of the Divisional Commander, Major-General Glasgow. He had commenced his career in the war as a Major of Light Horse, and had participated in the earliest stages of the fighting on the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Speedily gaining promotion during that campaign, his outstanding merits as a leader gained him an appointment to the command of the 13th Brigade, when the latter was formed in Egypt in the spring of 1916. For two years he led that Brigade through all its arduous experiences on the Somme, at Messines and in the third battle of Ypres.

This fine record was but the prelude to the history-making performances of the 13th Brigade in 1918 at Dernancourt and Villers-Bretonneux, and Glasgow seemed easily the most promising, among all the Brigadiers of that time, as a prospective Divisional Commander: a judgment which fully justified itself.

Of strong though not heavy build and of energetic demeanour, Glasgow succeeded not so much by exceptional mental gifts, or by tactical skill of any very high order, as by his personal driving force and determination, which impressed themselves upon all his subordinates. He always got where he wanted to get—was consistently loyal to the Australian ideal, and intensely proud of the Australian soldier.

The number of prisoners captured on this day, and the total numbers of the enemy encountered in the course of an advance which was relatively small, pointed to a disposition of troops which was unusual on the part of the enemy.

According to the principles so strongly emphasized by Ludendorff, in instructions which he had issued, and copies of which duly fell into my hands, there was to be, in his scheme of defensive tactics, a "fore-field" relatively lightly held by outposts and machine guns. The main line of resistance was to be well in rear, and there the main concentration of troops was to be effected.

Why had this dictum been so widely disregarded on this occasion? It was a question worthy of close inquiry, and two German Battalion Commanders who were captured by us on that day supplied the answer.

Reference has already been made to the message which I issued to the Corps on the eve of the great opening battle; and to the fact that a copy of this message had fallen into the hands of the enemy, probably by the capture of an officer in the close fighting which took place at Lihons on August 9th and 10th.

In due course the substance of this message was published in the German wireless news, and in the German press of the time, but cleverly mistranslated to convey a colouring desirable for the German public.

It so happened that not long before the opening of our offensive I had, at the request of the authorities, sent to Australia a recruiting cable, which appealed to the Australian public for a maintenance of supplies of fighting men.[16] That the full text of this cable also became speedily known to the enemy is a testimony to the far-flung alertness of their Intelligence Service. It, also, was published in their press.

Basing their editorial comments on this material, the Berliner Tageblatt of August 17th, 1918, a copy of which I captured, and another journal whose name was not ascertainable, because in the copy captured the title had been torn off, both indulged in arguments, which were long, and intended to be convincing, to prove to the German people that I had promised my troops a "break-through;" that I had failed, and that, admittedly, the "proud" Australian Corps had been shattered, had come to the end of its resources and was no longer to be taken into calculation as an instrument of attack by the "English."

It was perfectly legitimate, if clumsy, propaganda. But it was a curious example of a propaganda which recoiled upon the heads of its propounders. The Battalion Commanders, who, like all German officers whom we captured, were always voluble in excuses for their defeat, pleaded that they had been deceived by the utterances of their own journals into believing that the Australian offensive effort had come to an end, once and for all, and that no further attack by this Corps was possible.

It was this belief which, they said, had prompted their respective Divisions (for each of them represented a separate one) to disregard Ludendorff's prescription; their Divisional Generals had felt justified in availing themselves of the very excellent living quarters which existed in the Chuignes Valley, near the German front line of August 22nd, to quarter all their support and reserve Battalions.

It was there that we found them—increasing the population of the front zone far beyond that which we had been accustomed to find. Was there ever a more diverting example of a propaganda which recoiled upon those who uttered it? Intended to deceive the German public, it ended in deceiving the German front line troops, to their own lamentable undoing.

Among the captures of the battle of Chuignes, which, as usual, comprised a large and varied assortment of warlike stores, including another great dump of engineering materials near Froissy Beacon, and two complete railway trains, was the monster naval gun of 15-inch bore, which had been so systematically bombarding the city of Amiens, and had wrought such havoc among its buildings and monuments.

It was first reached by the 3rd Australian Battalion (1st Brigade) during a bayonet charge which cleared Arcy Wood, in the shelter of which the giant gun had been erected. An imposing amount of labour had been expended upon its installation, and the most cursory examination of the effort involved was sufficient to make it evident that the enemy entertained no expectation of ever being hurled back from the region which it dominated.

The gun with its carriage, platform and concrete foundations weighed over 500 tons. It was a naval gun, obviously of the type in use on the German Dreadnoughts, and never intended by its original designers for use on land. It had a range of over twenty-four miles, fired a projectile weighing nearly a ton, and the barrel was seventy feet long.

It had been installed with the elaborate completeness of German methods. A double railway track, several miles long, had been built to the site, for the transport of the gun and its parts. It was electrically trained and elevated. Its ammunition was handled and loaded by mechanical means. The adjacent hill-side had been tunnelled to receive the operating machinery, and the supplies of shells, cartridges and fuses.

The gun and its mounting, when captured, were found to have been completely disabled. A heavy charge of explosive had burst the chamber of the gun, and had torn off the projecting muzzle end, which lay with its nose helplessly buried in the mud. The giant carriage had been burst asunder, and over acres all around was strewn the debris of the explosion.

For some time, some of my gunner experts favoured the theory that the gun had burst accidentally, but the view which ultimately prevailed was that the demolition had been intentional. Many months afterwards, the full story of the gun and its performances was elicited from a prisoner who had belonged to the No. 4 (German) Heavy Artillery Regiment, and it was circumstantial enough to be credible.

The story is worthy of repetition, not only because no authentic account of this wonderful trophy has yet been published, but also because the history of this gun curiously illuminates the enemy's plans, intentions and expectations between the dates of his onslaught in March and his recoil in August.

The substance of the story is as follows: The gun came from Krupp's. Work on the position was started early in April, 1918—only a few days after the site had fallen into the enemy's hands. It was completed and ready for action on the morning of June 2nd. Its maximum firing capacity was twenty-eight rounds per day. It fired continuously until June 28th. By this time the original gun was worn out, having fired over 350 rounds at Amiens. A new piece was ordered from Krupp's. It arrived on August 7th, and was ready to fire by 7 p.m. It fired its first round on August 8th at 2 a.m. and kept on firing till August 9th, firing thirty-five rounds in all. At 7 a.m. on August 9th, all hands were ordered to remove everything that was portable and of value. Demolition charges were laid and fired about 9 a.m. on August 9th. The crew returned to Krupp's.

It is to be inferred from this narrative that the enemy's defeat at Hamel on July 4th did not deter him from his enterprise of replacing the original worn gun, but that after August 8th, he quite definitely accepted the certainty that he would be allowed no time to remove the gun intact, and so he destroyed it in order that we might not be able to use it against him.

This is the largest single trophy of war won by any Commander during the war, and it was a matter of great regret to me that the cost of its transportation to Australia was prohibitive. The gun, as it stands, was, therefore, fenced in, and it has been formally presented to the City of Amiens as a souvenir of the Australian Army Corps.

So long as any Australian soldiers remained in France, this spot was a Mecca to which thousands of pilgrims wandered; and soon there was, over the whole of the immense structure, not one square inch upon which the "diggers" had not inscribed their names and sentiments. There, in the shade of Arcy Wood, the great ruin rests, a memorial alike of the sufferings of Amiens and of the great Australian victory of Chuignes.