Share
Clip description
As the German forces withdraw to better fortified positions in March 1917, British troops pursue them across the ruined ground of No-Man’s-Land. Australian Pioneers construct a light railway alongside the Albert-Bapaume Road, in support of the advance.
Curator’s notes
The footage of the troops advancing across No-Man’s-Land (seen in long shot, from low in a trench) looks authentic, partly because we see shells bursting in the near distance, and because the cameraman is clearly staying low. If it is genuine, it’s a very rare scene indeed, because cameras were rarely able to film such scenes in the First World War. There are scenes in other films purporting to show men advancing across the chewed-up ground of the Somme, but few are considered genuine (see With the Australians in France 1916).
The wider question is who are these men? The titles are carefully worded to suggest they are Australians of the 1st Anzac Corps, without actually saying it. The AWM holds another film using some of this footage which identifies these men as South Africans. The film is labelled Arras, Bullecourt and Hindenburg Line – cuts for library, and you can watch it here. The footage is less clear, suggesting it is a later duplicate, but there is more of it, with titles identifying ‘South Africans’ bringing in three German prisoners, who are shown in close-up. This dramatic footage is missing in Bapaume to Bullecourt, which tends to support the idea that they are South Africans. It’s difficult to believe that Charles Bean, or whoever put together Bapaume to Bullecourt, would have left out scenes showing the taking of prisoners if they had been Australians doing it.
That then raises the question of why this advance across No-Man’s-Land was used at all in a film purporting to be about the Anzacs advancing on Bapaume and Bullecourt. If the makers of the film knew they were South Africans, there is a clear logic to leaving out the section where they take prisoners, because these men could be more easily identified by the close-up view of their uniforms. A possible scenario is that the film’s editor needed scenes of troops advancing, to go with the genuine footage of the Australians in Bapaume, in order to set the scene. He appears to have taken what he needed from the ‘South African’ footage, and carefully worded the titles so that we think they are Anzacs.
