Letters from France

Letters from France

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Title: Letters from France
Author: C. E. W. Bean

Release Date: May 14, 2006 [eBook #18390]
Language: English
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FROM FRANCE***
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LETTERS FROM FRANCE
by
C. E. W. BEAN
War Correspondent for the Commonwealth of Australia
With a Map and Eight Plates

[Illustration: AUSTRALIANS WATCHING THE BOMBARDMENT
OF POZIÈRES Their mates were beneath that bombardment at the
time]

Cassell and Company, Ltd London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1917

To those other Australians who fell in the Sharpest Action their Force
has known, on July 19, 1916, before Fromelles, these Memories of a
Greater, but not a Braver, Battle are herewith Dedicated

PREFACE
These letters are in no sense a history--except that they contain the truth.
They were written at the time and within close range of the events they
describe. Half of the fighting, including the brave attack before
Fromelles, is left untouched on, for these pages do not attempt to

narrate the full story of the Australian Imperial Force in France. They
were written to depict the surroundings in which, and the spirit with
which, that history has been made; first in the quiet green Flemish
lowlands, then with a swift, sudden plunge into the grim, reeking,
naked desolation of the Somme. The record of the A.I.F., and its now
historical units in their full action, will be painted upon that background
some day. If these letters convey some reflection of the spirit which
fought at Pozières, their object is well fulfilled. The author's profits are
devoted to the fund for nursing back to useful citizenship Australians
blinded or maimed in the war.
C. E. W. Bean.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER
Preface
1. A Padre who said the Right Thing
2. To the Front
3. The First Impression--A Country with Eyes
4. The Road to Lille
5. The Differences
6. The Germans
7. The Planes
8. The Coming Struggle: Our Task
9. In a Forest of France

10. Identified
11. The Great Battle Begins
12. The British--Fricourt and La Boiselle
13. The Dug-outs of Fricourt
14. The Raid
15. Pozières
16. An Abysm of Desolation
17. Pozières Ridge
18. The Green Country
19. Trommelfeuer
20. The New Fighting
21. Angels' Work
22. Our Neighbour
23. Mouquet Farm
24. How the Australians were Relieved
25. On Leave to a New England
26. The New Entry
27. A Hard Time
28. The Winter of 1916
29. As in the World's Dawn

30. The Grass Bank
31. In the Mud of Le Barque
32. The New Draft
33. Why He is not "The Anzac"

LIST OF PLATES
Australians Watching the Bombardment of Pozières
Sketch Map
"Talking with the Kiddies in the Street"
"An Occasional Broken Tree-Trunk"
No Man's Land
Along the Road to Lille
The Trenches here have to be Built Above the Ground in Breastwork
A Main Street of Pozières
The Church Pozières
The Windmill of Pozières
The Barely Recognisable Remains of a Trench
The Tumbled Heap of Bricks and Timber which the World Knows as
Mouquet Farm
"Past the Mud-Heaps Scraped by the Road Gangs"

[Illustration: Rough sketch showing some of the German defences of
Pozières and the direction of the Australian attacks between July 22 and
September 4, 1916. (From Pozières to Mouquet Farm is just over a
mile.)]

LETTERS FROM FRANCE
CHAPTER I
A PADRE WHO SAID THE RIGHT THING
France, April 8th, 1916.
The sun glared from a Mediterranean sky and from the surface of the
Mediterranean sea. The liner heaved easily to a slow swell. In the waist
of the ship a densely packed crowd of sunburnt faces upturned towards
a speaker who leaned over the rail of the promenade deck above.
Beside the speaker was a slight figure with three long rows of ribbons
across the left breast. Every man in the Australian Imperial Force is as
proud of those ribbons as the leader who wears them so modestly.
Australian ships had been moving through those waters for days. High
over one's head, as one listened to that speaker, there sawed the
wireless aerial backwards and forwards across the silver sky. Only
yesterday that aerial had intercepted a stammering signal from