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and a watery ditch filled with corpses 180 metres beyond the German front-line. The ditch had at one point been the Germans’ support line but it was now flooded and abandoned. At 6.30 p.m., unaware that the 15th Brigade and the British to their right had been shot to pieces and that the Sugarloaf wasn’t captured, one of the battalion commanders, Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Toll, scrawled a note saying his men were digging in. He attached it to a messenger pigeon, the safest and most reliable means of communication available. The bird took 17 minutes to fly the several kilometres back to headquarters. By the time the message was read and fresh orders given, events at the front were changing.
    A BUTCHER’S SHOP
    Toll returned to the unoccupied German front-line with most of his men, leaving some of his troops from the 8th and 14th Brigades to make the 45-centimetre-deep, 900-metre-long watery ‘support line’ ditch defendable. The men scraped the clay mud off their entrenching tools into the two empty sandbags they each carried, hopelessly trying to build a wall. Ammunition and sandbags were running low, but the carrying parties bringing up supplies were being shot down. Meanwhile, engineers raced to dig communications saps between the Allied line and the captured German frontline. The shallow river in no-man’s-land was bloated with ‘wounded and dying men—like a butcher’s shop—men groaning and crying and shrieking’. When the carriers did reach the front, many stayed to fight rather than returning for more supplies.
    With messages arriving that the men were digging in, the Australian commanders believed there was still every chance of success, even though the 15th Brigade and the British hadn’t reached the Sugarloaf. A new attack to begin at 9 p.m. was planned to capture it, but at the last moment Haking ordered the British troops to wait until the morning. The Australian staff were told, but the message wasn’t passed on to Elliot until half of his reserve battalion had already advanced into the dwindling light. Out in no-man’s-land, soldiers from the earlier waves rose from craters to join the charge, but machine-gunners on the Sugarloaf shot them down.
    A LONG BLURRY NIGHT
    With only the 8th and 14th Brigades now fighting, German reinforcements moved out of a ruined farm, known as ‘Dead Sow Farm’, to attack the isolated soldiers in the ditch. Men from the 8th Brigade were closest to the farm and took the brunt of the attack. But the Germans were quickly shot down by machine guns that the Australians had moved forward. Shelling had blocked the river’s flow and the water was rising in the ditch. Unless the wounded were spotted and pulled out in time, they drowned. When the men’s rifles became clogged with mud, they took dry ones from the dead. Behind them, in the captured front-line, Toll and his men worked to make the middle section secure, building up the destroyed breastworks with rotten, disintegrating sandbags and German corpses.
    Then the Germans rushed down from the uncaptured Sugarloaf and moved along the empty zigzagging breastworks of their old front-line from the right, towards Toll. As they did they drew parallel with the men of the 14th Brigade in the ditch. Flares of white stars lit up a night ‘blurred by dust and smoke’ and the 14th Brigade could see the spikes of German helmets moving behind them. Realising they were about to be cut off from the captured German front-line and consequently their own lines, a group charged the Germans across the open ground. They were shot down, and the survivors were forced to scramble back to the ditch.
    The Germans kept moving down their old front-line towards the middle section and Toll. Bombers were sent to stop them getting further behind the men in the ditch, and when the bombers and Germans met, as many as 12 bombs were ‘in the air at a time’. Slowly, the Germans were