Share
Clip description
Men of the 11th Battalion, AIF, marching beside a light railway near Armentières, probably in early June 1916. Soldiers rest by a road with their horses tethered in shell holes. A military padre takes divine service. A battery of 18-pounder guns is pulled through a town by mounted troops.
Curator’s notes
The film exists as three reels. These shots come from the first reel and the titles appear to be misleading – part of what Charles Bean was complaining about (see main notes). The men from Western Australia are not moving up to the trenches if we believe the caption on a photograph held by the Australian War Memorial (EZ0047) which describes ‘a working party from the 11th Battalion leaving the front line after repairing dugouts’. They walk beside a trench tramway used to transport supplies to the front line at night. We can tell these are the same men as in the footage because of a distinctive match: the formation of trees in the background, the soldier carrying the box (who has no backpack) and the soldier two ahead of him, who also has a lighter coloured tunic and no backpack. The reason there is both cine film and a still photograph is that there were two photographers with Charles Bean this day. Ernest Brooks was the stills photographer and Edward G Tong was the cine cameraman. They had arrived on 2 June 1916 after an urgent request from Bean for official photographers to cover the visit of the Australian Prime Minister, Mr WM (Billy) Hughes. Bean knew Brooks from the Gallipoli peninsula and distrusted him, because he was prone to faking his photographs, but he had no choice but to work with him (see With the Dardanelles Expedition, c1915, and Bapaume to Bullecourt, 1917).
Bean was an accomplished photographer himself and took more than 700 photos of Gallipoli but he was forbidden to do so on the Western Front, a situation that infuriated him. Brooks and Tong were sent to work with him in the first week of June, so many of the shots of this film were likely made that week. Bean’s diary says that he took Brooks and Tong to visit the 11th Battalion on 3 June. The 11th Battalion, part of the 3rd Brigade, were then holding Cordonnerie Salient, south of Armentières, and had recently seen heavy fighting and enemy shelling, with 47 men killed, 73 wounded and 11 still missing. This was some of the first fighting for the Australians on the Western Front. Bean was keen to get details of a raid the battalion had recently made on the German trenches, which may be why he took the photographers there. The AWM records the still photograph as being taken on 5 June but that may be doubted because Tong was sick that day. It would be very unlikely that Brooks alone was able to take a still photograph and moving images of the same troops at the same time. Bean writes that he had to help carry their heavy equipment.
On 5 June, Bean writes that he took Brooks to the 2nd Brigade, via the Watling Street trench, which was a communication trench near Messines Ridge. The day before, he had taken them to film ‘a church service with Padre Dexter preaching’. This is the service we see in this clip. Bean writes that Dexter had ‘a good way with the troops’. He was a ‘stout button-nosed, rather red-faced sea captain’ who served in the Boer War. ‘He practises buffoonery of a rather crude type and plays for popularity by joining in every questionable joke – and talking something in the same style if he thinks the company stands it. He’s a brave man and hardy and I daresay unselfish really but a very crude, ordinary type of man really’ (AWM38,3DRL606/45/1, 4 June 1916, p 22). Bean does not say where this service was filmed but Walter Dexter was chaplain to the 2nd Brigade, so we may assume he would be somewhere near Messines. Note that he preaches with an Australian flag draped on a makeshift altar. A photograph held by the AWM (EZ0038) identifies these soldiers as members of ‘an Australian transport unit on church parade in a rest area’ and confirms the date as 4 June 1916 – a Sunday. Bean’s opinion of Padre Dexter was to change during the war: in 1921 he asked Dexter to officiate at his marriage to Ethel Young.
Note the shadow of the cinematographer in the shot panning past the horses in the shell holes. We see that he is wearing a tin hat and cranking the camera by hand. A note in Bean’s diary (AWM38,3DRL606/69/1, p 9) suggests these horses in craters may have been shot at Sausage Gully, one of the main access routes for troops and supplies from Albert to Pozières. Note also the puppy at the feet of the officer in the front at the divine service. The same puppy sits in the same place in the still photograph.
The location of the final shot of the clip, a battery of 18-pounders towed by horse teams, is unknown. The shot gives a good sense of the enormous dependence that both sides had on horses for transport, at least in the early stages of the war. Motorised transport was still relatively new in the First World War, although it became increasingly important as the war dragged on and supplies of horses dwindled.
