Soldier’s letters to home from trenches revealed the true horrors on front line

WHEN the Reverend John Raws heard about the massive casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, he could have been excused if he had surreptitiously thanked his saviour for sparing his two sons whom he had taken from Manchester to Australia as young boys.

At the time he could not have predicted that just three weeks later one of his sons would become involved in a much smaller scale Australian version of the July 1, 1916, disaster – near the Somme village of Pozieres.

During the disastrous attack on July 29, 1916, there were 1,500 Australian casualties for miniscule gains, and one of the men missing was Goldy, John Raws’ son.

That was the catalyst which inspired Goldy’s brother Alec, a journalist, who was serving in the same battalion (the 23rd Australian Battalion), to write one of the most celebrated series of letters from the front ever penned by an ‘Australian’ soldier.

These letters, which are virtually unknown in Manchester where both Goldy and Alec were born, included an attempt to dampen down their parents’ inevitable grief because of the sad news.

But they also contained one of the most vivid accounts of hardship in the front line the Australian public, hungry to find out what their own offspring had been through, had ever read.

The first letters following Goldy’s disappearance were written to inform his siblings and friends that he was telling a white lie to their parents.

On August 12, 1916, he wrote to his brother-in-law:

‘I’ve told mother and father he is wounded, but that I don’t know his whereabouts. I had to tell them something.’

Only when all enquiries had been made and nothing positive found, did Alec finally write to his father three weeks after Goldy’s disappearance to tell him the truth:

‘There is no further news of Goldy. I would advise you to place no great hope on Goldy turning up as a prisoner because though the chance is there, it would be foolish to cling feverishly to what would probably prove to be a groundless hope in the end.’

But it was the startlingly frank descriptions of what life was like in the front line which set Raws’s letters apart from the other accounts from the front which the Australian public had seen previously.

Amongst the letters he sent to his sister there was a gripping account of what the Australian infantryman was having to endure to prepare the ground for an attack.

After the setback on July 29, 1916, the Commander-in-Chief Sir Douglas Haig decreed that the next assault would only be permitted after the Australians had dug assembly trenches within 200 yards of the German line being attacked.

Raws told his sister what that entailed for officers such as him, whose men were detailed to do the digging at night:

‘The first night when I went right up to the front line, we had to march for three miles under shell fire, go out into No Man’s Land in front of the German trenches, and dig a narrow trench to be used to jump off from in another assault. ‘I was posted to bring up the rear and prevent straggling. We went in single file along communication trenches. We were shelled all the way up, but got absolute hell when passing through a particularly heavy curtain of fire which the enemy was laying on a ruined village (Pozieres). ‘In the midst of this barrage, our line was held up. I went up from the rear and found that about half of us had been cut off from the rest of the battalion and were lost. ‘I would gladly have shot myself, for I had not the slightest idea where our lines, or the enemy’s, were, and the shells were coming at us from three directions. ‘We lay down terror-stricken along a bank. The shelling was awful. I took a long drink of neat whiskey, and then went up and down the bank trying to find a man who could tell me where we were. ‘Eventually I found one. He led me along a broken track and we found a trench. He said he was sure it led to our lines. So we went back and got the men. It was hard to make them move. They were so badly broken. But in the end we found our way to the right spot out in No Man’s Land. Alec Raws

‘I was so happy that I did not care at all for the danger although we were being shot at all the time.

‘I had been told that if we did not finish the job before daylight, a new assault planned for the next night would fail. We had to drive the men by every means. And dig ourselves. The wounded and killed had to be thrown on one side. I refused to let any sound man help a wounded man.

‘Just before daybreak, an engineer officer, who was hopelessly rattled, ordered us to go, although the trench was not finished. I took it on myself to insist on the men staying, saying that any man who stopped digging would be shot. We dug on, and finished amid a tornado of bursting shells. All the time the enemy flares were making the whole area almost as light as day. We got away as best we could.

‘I was again in the rear going back. Once again, we were cut off and lost. I was buried twice with dead and dying. The ground was covered with bodies in all stages of decay and mutilation. I would, after struggling free from the earth, pick up a body, and try to lift him out with me, only to find him a decayed corpse. I pulled a head off one man and, and was covered with blood. The horror was indescribable.

‘In the dim misty light of dawn, I collected about 50 men and sent them off on the right track for home.

‘Two brave fellows stayed behind and helped me with the only unburied wounded man we found. We got down to the first dressing station. There, I met another of our men, who was certain that his cobber was lying wounded in that barrage of fire.

‘I would have given my immortal soul to get out of it. But I simply had to go back with him and a stretcher bearer. We spent two hours in that devastated village searching. But all the men we found were dead.

‘The sights I saw during that search, and the smell can, I know, never be exceeded by any-