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failed against the strong German defences. But Haig agreed to Haking’s plan, and Godley lent Haking the newly arrived 5th Division.
    A POINTLESS TRICK
    Haking’s plan was that the 5th Division, with the weakened 61st British Division on their right, would advance in waves to capture the German front-line and the support trenches beyond it. Shortly before the attack, one of Haig’s staff suggested it be cancelled: there wasn’t enough ammunition for the artillery, and the flat 360-metre expanse of no-man’s-land—the length of three rugby fields—was too wide to cross successfully. Haking insisted the attack go ahead. The troops, he said, were ‘worked up’ to do it, and any change ‘would have a bad effect’ on them. The commander of the 5th Division, Major General Sir James McCay, kept quiet. He was happy enough that his division, the last to arrive in France, would be the first to take part in a serious action, despite half the men not having seen the front-line, let alone fought in a battle.
    In the German breastworks, with their concrete machine-gun shelters, and from Fromelles village one and a half kilometres back, German observers had watched the British and Australian preparations. They put up a sign saying ‘Advance Australia. If you can!’
    Late in the morning of 19 July, as the Australians passed British graves from 1915 on their way to the front-line, over 320 guns opened fire on the German trenches. Some of the troops still wore their slouch hats because there weren’t enough helmets to go around. It was a hot day. The Australians cheered as the shells tore ragged gaps in the German breastworks and heaved them into the air.
    But the German troops, including 28-year-old Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler, hunkered down in their concrete dugouts, listening to the replying bark of their artillery. For hours their shells destroyed the Australian trenches. Men hugged the parapets to avoid shrapnel, standing on the dead, as stretcher-bearers laboured to remove the wounded. One soldier, driven mad by the constant shelling, kept calling for his mum to close the gate. An officer cried like a child; other men just babbled.
    MORE HOPELESS
    With another 15 minutes of the Allied bombardment left, the Australians moved out into no-man’s-land. The 8th Brigade was on the far left, the 14th Brigade was in the middle and the 15th Brigade was on the right, directly opposite the Sugarloaf and with the furthest to go. The 61st British Division was attacking next to the 15th. Despite dust and smoke smothering the land and making it difficult to see, the 15th Brigade commander, Brigadier General Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliot, was confident the artillery had done its job. He told his men, ‘You won’t find a German in the trenches when you get there.’ When zero hour arrived, at 6 p.m., the 15th Brigade charged through an overgrown orchard and across a shallow river. The Germans at the Sugarloaf hauled out their machine guns and waited in the low summer sun until they had a clear view, then started firing. Their bullets ripped into trees and sparked off the wire. The attacking troops dove into shell holes or the river. When men of the following waves ‘looked over the top, they saw no-man’s-land leaping up everywhere in showers of dust and sand’. They also saw men hit with so many bullets that their bodies were cut in two. Still, at five-minute intervals, the waves of men charged. For Sergeant Walter Downing, it was like the charge of the Light Horse at Gallipoli, ‘but more terrible, more hopeless’.
    No-man’s-land on the left of the Sugarloaf was narrower, and the 8th and 14th Brigades swept across it and into the enemy trench before the Germans had time to react. After bayoneting and shooting anyone in their path, the Australians moved on to capture the support trenches, but all they could find were open grassy fields crossed with hedges