Share
Clip description
Troops move forward in shallow trenches newly won from the enemy, past the wrecks of two tanks, and with shells bursting around them. Stretcher-bearers and walking wounded return in the other direction, past the wreckage of battle. In the field, an ambulance man and a chaplain dress the wounds of a man recently hit in the chest.
Curator’s notes
Everything that the official photographers shot, in still or moving images, had to be passed by a military censor, operating at the nearby army headquarters, which is probably why we never see images of the dead in the Australian films. This policy was not always uniformly administered: there are images of dead soldiers in The Battle of The Somme (1916), the most successful film of the war, made by two British cameramen in the summer of 1916. There are also photographs showing Australian dead, taken by the Australian photographers in this very battle (see E04677).
Fighting in Flanders does contain images of the wounded, and the final shot of this clip is one of the most striking of such scenes, because it is so intimate and immediate. There are at least nine men in this sequence, most of them likely to be stretcher-bearers who are waiting to carry this man back to a Casualty Clearing Station. The shot is carefully composed, so that we do not see the face of the wounded man, although it’s fairly clear that he is seriously wounded. One of the men is a chaplain, assisting the man doing the bandaging, whose cigarette remains intact throughout.
The Battle for Menin Road was regarded by the British as a complete success, despite more than 20,000 casualties, for a gain of about 1.3 km, on average. Les Carlyon, in his book The Great War (2006, Macmillan, ISBN 13: 978.1405037617), says, ’The Anzac push in the centre had succeeded better than any Australian attack so far in the war: it had literally gone by the clock, one step after another. But the Australians had still lost 5000 men either dead or wounded. This was the equivalent of one third of a division, or two months’ worth of voluntary enlistments back in Australia. These losses had been incurred in roughly the same time span as the failed attack at Fromelles in 1916.’ The figure of 5000 casualties refers only to 20 September.
The Fromelles attack is widely known in Australia because it was the first major action of the newly arrived Australian divisions in France, in 1916. The Battle for Menin Road, a year later, is barely remembered despite the almost equally terrible casualties, perhaps because it was not, by then, unusual. Indeed, it was considered a complete success by Field Marshal Haig, even though the British losses may have slightly exceeded those of the German divisions opposite. And these were the figures for just a few days of the Battle for Passchendaele. Australian troops attacked Polygon Wood, the next objective, on 26 September. In just over one week in these two battles, Australia lost 11,000 men, dead or wounded. In the eight weeks to the cessation of the battle on 10 November, Australian casualties numbered 38,000, an average of 4750 per week.
