‘Machine guns and men in trenches’: On the eve of battle, Albert Jacka made an awful discovery

It’s time. Just hours before, the 14th Battalion had been told there was a stunt on tonight at Bullecourt, and they must pack their kit with rations, rifles and Mills bombs, sharpen their bayonets and prepare themselves for battle.

There is no talk of tanks, as that information has been withheld from them, just as it has been from all bar their commanding officer. As intelligence officer, Captain Albert Jacka has already gone well ahead, but the rest begin their march forward after dark, heading down the cobbled lanes moving east, as a light snow begins to fall, and their every breath blows out steamy plumes in the cold air.

Onwards, they go, ’neath the incurious moon with a seeming swirl of fireflies at their feet, the result of their hobnailed boots striking sparks from the cobblestones. And listen now, lean closer, as the metallic beat of those hobnails and horseshoes on cobblestones comes ever closer, together with the shouts of the sergeants and corporals along the column keeping the men in time, and on time.

German trenches and wire defences on the Western Front.Credit: Daily Mirror

Now and then a soldier starts up a marching song, which flares like a lit match in the darkness, flourishes for a short time before slowly fading away, replaced once more by the rattles of gear and swooshing legs and slowly . . . silence once more, as they disappear in the night.

Onwards along the roads, onwards into the night.

Both Captain Harold Wanliss and Captain Albert Jacka have been frantically busy in the leadup to the attack.

“The battalion staff were working at concert pitch over the final preparations,” a soldier documents, “and Captain Wanliss’s cheery smile of optimism was infectious. Captain Jacka had taken over the duties of I.O. and everything was completed to the smallest detail with a thoroughness that could not be surpassed. Everyone welcomed the instruction to move forward to the jumping-off place in a sunken road about 800 yards from the Hindenburg wire.”

Just before they go, however, it is Jacka himself who must start the fray before it has even begun. It is his role as intelligence officer to slither, run and crawl right to the edge of the German wire, and ideally to the trenches beyond, to work out just what it is that they will face on the morrow. No Man’s Land is Jacka’s Land. To his fellows he appears nerveless, but that is not the case. It is simply that Jacka’s jangle of nerves, that shimmer of shell shock that haunts him in everyday life, disappears when he is in the thick of it. Only then is he truly cool and collected; a diamond created by pressure. Jacka knows the more he can see, the more Allies might live when the sun comes up, and the more Germans will die. One of his hopes is that, because “shooting of our artillery was very accurate yesterday evening” and “the heavy and field guns playing well onto wire all along our front”, he will find most of the wire between them and the German trenches destroyed. But there is only one way to find out.

Artillery was used to prepare the battlefield at Bullecourt.Credit: Australian Official Photo

So now in the company of Lieutenant Henry Bradley and Lieutenant Frank Wadge – the latter is the intelligence officer for the 16th Battalion – they head out. Jacka sets the pace, and it is slow, as they crawl ever closer, over the mud, through the mud, under the bloody mud at times, grasping the grass, snaking their way, wide-eyed and watchful, until they approach the first line of German wire.

Dammit, it has held, after all! Yes, it is “smashed by shell fire in places” but just in places. For the most part, it is “generally unbroken”, which is not what the generals want to hear. In some places, the “front line wire [is] about 20 feet through, and some of it as thick as your finger”.

The previous artillery fire was not enough, the running tomorrow will be rough. Alright, pause now, it is time to go past the wire, this is the end of No Man’s Land and the beginning of madness. Jacka will go solo here; leaving the other two gratefully behind for this most dangerous part. Should he buy it, they must return with what they already know. Jacka finds the twisting narrow path that goes through the wire, and begins crawling forward, alone.

But he is not alone, for as he gets close to the other side, and as he will tell Ted Rule, “I saw for myself the density of machine guns and men in their trenches.” It is stacked and packed, a tinderbox that the tanks will explode. To think that some of their senior officers had been insisting that the Germans had abandoned the Hindenburg Line, and it was theirs for the taking!

Far from it.

For, make no mistake . . .

“The garrison was holding it in strength and was very wide awake.” And, good God! Now a German patrol of nearly a dozen men is walking towards him, and there is nothing for Jacka to do but roll himself under the wire, lie completely still, stop breathing, and pray. In his right hand, he clutches his pistol, ready to spring into action at their first cry of alarm. For the moment, though, nothing. The quiet guttural chatter of the Germans sounds like drumbeats to Jacka’s ears, closer and closer, still he is, and pray he does, as they . . . amble by . . . and past. Thank Christ!

British tanks manoeuvre through land mines and barbed wire on the Hindenburg Line.Credit: Australian War Memorial

As Jacka retraces his path, he is, of necessity, able to get a good look at just how impenetrable this wire is, as he will record in his intelligence brief for this battle that should not be: “Wire before the front line is very massive and of an average depth of between 30 and 50 yards. This is supported on heavy wooden stakes, few iron pickets being in use . . . Wire between front and support lines is thin, only about 5 yards wide, and supported on ordinary corkscrew stakes. This was found almost untouched by our gun fire, but generally was negotiable.”

Negotiations continuing, Jacka gets through and can see that the second line of barbed wire ahead is also completely intact. There are endless rolls of vicious barbed wire, and a mass of men running up against it would have no chance of penetrating it before being cut to pieces by machine guns. The only hope now would be for the barrage to specifically target this line and blow it to pieces. Which would lose surprise as the Germans would know it’s a prelude to an assault. Now that he is closer to the trenches, he can certainly hear movement, and it sounds like there are a lot of German soldiers.

Jacka has seen and heard enough, and crawls back through the wire to rejoin Bradley and Wadge, his head spinning with the likely consequences of what he has seen. The crestfallen lieutenants are the first to hear the bad news. Jacka also reports his encounter with the patrol.

“How they failed to see me was a puzzle,” Jacka whispers. “They almost trod on me.”

But what would you have done if they had trodden on you? Weren’t you frightened?

Captain Jacka VC MC and Bar, is presented with a bar to his MC for bravery during the first attack on Bullecourt.Credit: Australian War Memorial

“Oh no,” murmurs Jacka. “I was quite calm because I knew what to do.“

Oh, yes? And what would that be?

“I was watching them, and if they had discovered me, I was going to get in among them and shoot the lot before they knew what had happened.”

Right. Good to know.

“I would have got away easily enough.”

Yes, he bloody would have. Bradley and Wadge, who are not immortal, imagine their very different fates. But out here, now, the shell-shocked Jacka, the man who shook for an hour when a drawer closed too quickly in a military hospital, has vanished.

As a matter of fact, he is now so confident that when one of his companions notes just how quiet the Germans are, and lightly wonders if there really can be that many of them, Jacka decides to prove it to him. Taking off his helmet, he starts bashing the wire with it, the jarring sound cleaving the night.

Everyone down!

There is an immediate and furious fusillade of fire from German lines so strong that his companions are shocked.

“How many do you think there are [now]?” Jacka asks, once it has died down.

“A million,” the gurgled answer comes back.

“Don’t exaggerate,” says Jacka, “I want to make a report. I don’t think there is half that number.”

But let’s get back now, boys, for we have a disaster to avert! To Jacka the situation is as plain as the nose on your face: the attack as presently envisaged is doomed to catastrophic failure.

This is an edited extract from The Legend of Albert Jacka by Peter FitzSimons, published by Hachette Australia on October 30.

Peter FitzSimons’ latest book.Credit: Suuplied

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.