The battle for Bullecourt, as reported at the time.

The following are two reports from the 'The War Illustrated' from 1917, regarding the Australians and the Battle for Bullecourt.

The articles are from 'The Great War in a Different Light.'

The War Illustrated, 26th May, 1917

The Great Battle of Arras - The Epic Story of Lievin and Lagnicourt

How the Australians Broke the Prussian Guard
The dominance of a hill is a possession of majesty at any time, but when war is raging in the fields below you it is a throne of opportunity beyond compare.
Fortunately for those who witnessed the last days of the first phase of the Battle of Arras there were thrones innumerable. The slopes of the Vimy Ridge, Notre Dame de Lorette, the heights above the valley of the Souchez were the tiers of so many amphitheatres from which the lucky observer could witness a pageant of war which has hardly been matched from the beginning.
Before him lay a grimy plain beneath which are some of the immense riches of France. About him and behind him were the once-glorious woods, the steep slopes down which the Germans had been driven headlong but a few days before, and the villages whose picturesqueness had defied even the dour enmity of coal. From here he could look at his case down into the very streets of Lens, the capital of this mighty coalfield ; here he could see far away this regiment advancing, that at rest ; could watch the bursting of the mighty shells and boast of his indifference — but, above all, could say that the city was doomed and must speedily be in our possession. It was tragic, too, for though Lens must fall, who should say what of its riches would be left to us ?

Inferno in Lens
Watching the city from a distance we saw ominous things. Now it would be the smoke of some great fire rolling up by the cathedral tower, suggesting for an instant that the church itself was burning — anon, a shattering explosion, the vomit of flame and black vapour from the mouth of a coal-pit, and perhaps upon tills the lingering thunder of sonic building which had come clattering down. In the streets themselves, bordered by the miners' houses with their picturesque red roofs, a human being was rarely to be seen. We pictured the townsfolk hiding in their cellars and listening to that crash of sounds which .said that the enemy was seeking to rob them of their poor riches and their bread. There were moments when scattered figures in the familiar grey-blue darted from street to street carrying neither muck-rake nor lantern, but the deadlier high explosive which should blast the pits and bring down the houses about the people's ears.
And all this, mind you, in a sudden and welcome blaze of the morning sunlight, come as an interlude to wind and wet and snow and misery. Men lifted, their eyes to it and declared it to be an omen. The week that ended on Sunday, April 15th, should go out as it had come in upon the crest of a mighty victory. It was actually on Saturday, April 14th, that the Boche was driven out of Lievin, the famous western suburb of Lens, and on the following day there came their great counter-attack at Lagnicourt, which is down south and not far from Queant, about which we are hearing so much these days. This was a bloody affair, and the Australians have never done a finer thing. By a. concentration of forces, which was astonishing, the Germans massed an army of between forty and fifty thousand bayonets and threw it along the Cambrai-Bapaume road between the villages of Lagnicourt and Hermies. For a moment, overwhelmed by the torrent, we lost some prisoners and machine-guns, but, mustering again behind. Lagnicourt, we reattacked with a ferocity wholly remarkable even in days when men are found dead with the teeth locked in each other's flesh.

Coursing the Prussian Guard
Now, this counter-attack was made by picked troops of no fewer than five regiments of the Guard, and the barrage which heralded it was the best the Boche had put up since the Battle of Arras began. That our own casualties were relatively so few is not a little consoling, but our men took cover with a cleverness which was noteworthy, and, although the impetuosity of the attack overwhelmed them for the moment, they were never, in any sense, demoralised. And everybody agrees that their counter-thrust was superb. They charged with bayonets lowered and the wild. war-whoop of "Down Under."
Inch by inch they recovered the lost ground and drove the Hun back upon the famous Queant switch. What his feelings were when he found himself driven thus, not to the openings he had prepared, but actually back upon his own barbs, we must leave him to relate. This was the cold fact, nevertheless. He retreated in disorder, and then came up against that very entanglement he had prepared for our undoing. Screaming and shouting, he now ran to and fro like a rabbit that is coursed, seeking vainly for a burrow to shelter him. And the Australians watched him, and, seeing, they did not wait.

Australians' Battle Shooting
It was a veritable holocaust. Our men, kneeling down in the open, enjoyed sport of a kind they had hardly known during the war. Aiming carefully, they picked off their men one by one, and were unmoved by the shrieks of the wounded, whose dreadful cries were heard even above the rattle of the machine-guns. Fifteen hundred dead and three hundred prisoners were the fruits of this surprising victory. Lagnicourt has remained in our undisputed possession since this memorable Sunday, and the famous Prussian Guard has long since ceased to be a name with which Hindenburg can conjure. This was a fine finish to the first week's fighting in this titanic battle. Of it all, perhaps, the most deadly work had been done in the neighbourhood of Lievin, which fell finally to us on the Saturday morning. Some of our men who fought at Vimy and in the Souchez valley had but four hours' sleep between the Sunday morning and the Friday night.
They had to prod each other to keep awake in the trenches, but they stuck to it to the end, often advancing up to their knees in mud, meeting every kind of trap that could be set for them, and facing perils whose shape was changed with every hour that passed.
Sometimes their work was almost that of scouts. One officer of a Shire regiment, with half a dozen lusty fellows at his back, found his way into the suburbs and up to the roof of a house, whereupon he sniped a machine-gun party that was holding up our advance four hundred yards away. Others wandered around, discovering a gun emplacement here, or there a heave of the black earth which said that Bodies were buried beneath, and that a spade might find them living.
The Bois de Riaumont, the one prominent green hill between the Vimy Ridge and Lievin, had been fortified upon its western front until it resembled the glacis of an impregnable fortress.

Cunning and Courage
We flanked it cunningly, brave men creeping from ridge to ridge, here ducking into shell-holes, there sheltering a moment behind shattered walls and broken trees, until at last the Boche perceived the glitter of our bayonets and fled incontinently. So was it also with the machine-gun posts we named the Crook and the Crazy line. Their gunners shot by adventurers upon the wings, the posts could be held no longer, and once again the Boche bolted and left his equipment in our hands.
It was a great scene of battle this of the Saturday. Far up and down that valley of the black pits the smoke of the heavy artillery and of tlie light loomed and drifted. A fitful sun shone upon once- green fields and red-roofed houses and the shattered walls of ancient churches. Everywhere there moved the grey figures, leaping to the assault, here a regiment, there a platoon — again but a handful of men in quest of an adventure.

An Old Score Paid
And death was everywhere, and the roar of the great guns, and the aeroplanes soaring like monstrous hawks above, and the ambulances on their grim errands, and the prisoners who laughed or cried, or were silent in their black defiance.
"I knew you would come back to us," said an old Frenchwoman, spitting in the face of an insolent officer. "You always said you would." Others, men; crazy lads, lighted cigarettes with trembling fingers and declared that we had made "hell over yonder." All, perhaps, at heart were thankful to have been dragged from that inferno whose very fons et origo was the line Hindenburg had declared to be impregnable.
We had smashed it, indeed, when Sunday, April 15th, came. By the Friday night there had been 13,000 prisoners taken, including 285 officers. We got 166 guns, among which there were eight 8 in. howitzers and 130 field-guns and ordinary howitzers. Lens was still held, but only upon sufferance. Lievin and the villages round about were in our hands, and northward we had fought successfully over the very ground about Loos where we had suffered so many disappointments in the days which will never be forgotten.
The greatest military operation in the history of the British Army it has been called. Perhaps it is truer to say the greatest in the story of any army.


The War Illustrated 9th June, 1917

The Great Battle of Arras

How Bullecourt Was Won

"Busy scene behind the British advance on the Arras front, showing the heavy guns being placed in position and fired while the Lorries were bringing up the ammunition and materials for the dug-outs in course of construction. To the left the field telephone was already at work."

This already historic Bullecourt ! What immortality has been won amid its ghastly ruins ! What a month it will make of this May in the year of grace, 1917, when the whole record of the war is before us I
Not, be it observed, that we did not hear the name of Bullecourt before May set in. There was fighting, hard fighting, there on April 14th, at the end of the first week of the Battle of Arras, when Hindenburg flung the Prussian Guard upon the Australians between Lagnicourt and the village, and for the day averted the peril to his famous switch — -the new line of trenches running from Queant in the south to Drocourt in the north. That was the only set-back we met with during the famous week, and its memory was soon to be wiped out by achievements as magnificent as any the great battle has shown us.
It was natural that the German Higher Command should realise the importance of Bullecourt. Here ran the famous Hindenburg line, long spoken of as impregnable. Behind it was the switch, but the switch was not yet ready, and our airmen reported the feverish haste with which the wire was being set up and the concrete laid down. To gain time for the completion of this work Bullecourt must be held at all costs, the precious Guard hurled upon the Colonials, and on the battered fields about strewn with the German dead.

Fighting Amid the Ruins
This must once have been a pretty village, as pretty villages go in the river valley of the great coal-fields. It lay at the foot of a gentle declivity, was not remote from the vicinity of trees, and had a church and cemetery with some pretence to the picturesque. Red roots there were and pretty little houses, and main streets with byways, winding and tortuous in the best French manner. Now it 'is a blur of brick and timber upon a fair prospect. Not levelled utterly to the ground as were Thiepval, Combtes, and the villages of the Somme in the threat battles of last year, it was yet so destroyed that the oldest inhabitant might have been hard put to it to say, which had been the Grande Rue and which the Petite. The very fact added to the difficulties of the English, the Scots, and the Australians who took it so gallantly.
What fighting was this amid the desolation ! Look at those fellows creeping across the beams of a roof which once covered a house but is now a mass of dust and timber upon a shattered floor. They are figures from a new inferno, surely — powdered to the very helmets, their faces begrimed, their boots caked with the muck, their beards unkempt, their eyes alight to the joy of it. Somewhere below them, they are saying, in a Labyrinth of linked cellars running beneath the houses, are the Germans who have been holding on to Bullecourt these many days. We know of their presence by the witness of our splendid dead who lie, white and still, amid the debris. They hide there in the depths to leap up when the opportunity comes and sweep that desolation with their emplaced machine-guns. And the work done, they go down to their burrows again and listen for British steps on the roof above, or wait shivering for the grenade which shall come with a flash and a roar and strew these sorry caverns with the. corpses of them or their fellows.
Now, this kind of fighting has been going on in Bullecourt since the third day of May. It was then that the Australians broke with magnificent dash into the Hindenburg line upon the right of the village, and, despite the fact that they had formed a most dangerous salient for themselves, held on tenaciously for ten days.

"Corner of the battlefield near Arras, showing a “Tank” about to set forth on its ponderous progress over German trenches and entanglements. The “Tank” did wonders in the battle and were little affected by the new anti “tank” guns devised by the Germans to combat them. "

Heroism of the Australians
Nothing could fetch these fine fellows out. Digging themselves in as they could, cunningly taking advantage of every bit of broken wall or shattered ruin that the wilderness afforded, they lay down and waited for their fellows to come on. There were English and Scottish later on upon the south-west and the west, and in these there rested the hopes of these undaunted pioneers.
"Tommy will stick it all right," they said, when told that he had already deserted the village. "And there are some Scotties who will hold on till all's blue," they added, with a conviction which is as fine a compliment as any paid to the matchless troops from across the border.
Well, the men did hold on, and long days of a swaying conflict resulted. Throughout, there was the ceaseless booming of the rival artillery ; now the Germans shelling those trenches of the Hindenburg line they had lost, now our fellows feeling far and wide upon the horizon for the guns which were doing the mischief. Overhead there soared the "planes," the great birds in a cloudless sky who told us of this concentration or of that, of feverish work by Germans to prepare the Queant switch, of men and machine-guns in the labyrinth of the village, and of the plight of the plucky Anzacs who endured ten days of hell that Bullecourt might be ours.
The latter story has been told us by some of them, but it must ultimately make an epic. From the north, from the east, even from the west, the attacks upon them came. Snipers to the south found open trenches and enfiladed them with bullets. There were rushes of Germans perpetually; the grey waves appearing suddenly from the bowels of the earth and leaping to the attack with savage cries. It was "Stand by !" and again "Stand by !" Their machine-guns rattled like sticks upon a railing ; their rifles were always in their hands. And when night came the whole heaven would be lit up with the blue-white- light of the flaming star-shells and the whirlwind barrage would open, and men would wait for dawn with eyes that had forgotten how to sleep.
Yet this was but the preliminary to the fierce fighting of Sunday, May 13th, by which Bullecourt finally was won for us.
We came in practically from three sides of it upon that great day. There were Scots upon the west and English cheek by jowl with them. Dust-begrimed men with sweat upon their faces, they fought from the early hours as demons possessed. Here were things done and seen which shall not be surpassed in the story of the war. Men fought with men as animals in some ruined arena. You saw Germans upon one side of a shattered barn and British upon the other, and their grenades went over the wreck of the roof and men trod upon their own dead to get at the enemy. Every cellar was a possible refuge for the Boche and his machine-gun. And we must hunt amid the brick and the mortar, turn every stone, lift every beam, that the bomb may go down and the dead be garnered.

Guns in Graveyard Vaults
There was no village now, nor any thought of church or market-place or street that Bullecourt had marked upon its map — only this ruin and the blackened figures leaping from stone to stone of it, and the bayonets flashing in the sunshine, and the cries going up of despair or of appeal as the steel went home and the life's blood gushed out. A fight to the bitter end, beyond all description horrible — yet for us a triumph beyond all expectation magnificent.
Perhaps the climax of all this deadly business came in the cemetery, where the graves were opened and the dead flung out. Here the Boche found in the vaults an emplacement for his machine-guns which could not have been bettered. And he fought to the very death amid the bodies and the bones of those who had lived their humble lives in this once pretty village, and had known, perhaps, the greatness and the glory of France, and had believed .that civilisation would leave those white crosses standing until the end. So little did he know of the German, the corpses of whose proud Foot Guards now he amid the broken coffins, and whose blackened faces send even strong men shuddering from this hallowed acre.
We had taken Bullecourt by the 14th, but there were counter-attacks, of course. We broke them up with a barrage which did great credit to our gunners, and but twenty of many hundreds reached our trenches at the first attempt. These were shot or bayoneted to a man, while a later effort resulted in one wretched Boche arriving at the parapet — to ask himself, it may be, if he were really alive, and to find the question answered immediately in the negative.

"transportation before and behind the Hindenburg Line "