4
Private Clifford Arnold Wall
Serial No.6340/A
‘D’ Company, 27th Battalion, 7th Brigade, 2nd Division AIF
Killed in Action, Battle for Mont St Quentin and Peronne, France
2nd September 1918, aged 24 years.
Cliff was born at the farm of his parents at Wandearah West near Port Pirie, South Australia, on 15 August 1894. His parents, John and Sarah Wall, had 13 children and Cliff was their ‘baby’, the last of their 13 children to be born, though not all survived childhood. With eight surviving older sisters and brothers, ranging from teenagers down, Cliff was never at a loss for company during his childhood.
The family farm was located about half way between Port Pirie and Port Broughton, near the main road, about 25 kilometres from Port Pirie, and many of those pioneering years were spent in clearing the virgin scrub and building and establishing the farm. The children attended the small Wandearah School, usually travelling by donkey cart. On Sundays the schoolroom was adapted to become their local church. The family never missed a church service, as their father John was a very pious man. Special outings were the regular shopping trips into Port Pirie, and the annual Christmas picnic on the beach at Fisherman’s Bay near Port Broughton.
After leaving school Cliff became employed on the family farm, a substantial part of his labours being to work a large team of draught horses behind various implements such as the plough, stripper, binder, and so on. It was no doubt his experience with farm horses that led him to volunteer for part-time service in the Light Horse of the Citizen Military Forces, based in Port Pirie, where he served for two and a half years.
The First World War commenced in Europe in August 1914 but Australian forces saw little action at the start. Cliff was eager to enlist to the patriotic cause and at the age of 21 he joined the infantry at Adelaide on 30 March 1916, one year after Australian forces made history when they landed at Gallipoli on 25 April as part of the new ANZAC corps.
Probably disappointed not to be part of the Light Horse, Cliff was placed as an infantry private in the reinforcements for the 27th Battalion, which had been raised in South Australia. A large number of his fellow recruits in this battalion hailed from the suburbs of Adelaide.
After training at Morphettville and Mitcham camps, the original 27th had left Australia in June 1915. Two months were spent in training in Egypt, then the 27th landed at Gallipoli on 12 September 1915 to reinforce the weary troops who had been there since April. The 27th had a relatively quiet time at Gallipoli and departed the peninsula in December as part of the general withdrawal, having suffered only light casualties.
Cliff and the other 27th reinforcements had missed this action, but they were destined for worse in the bloody trench warfare on the Western Front in France and Belgium. The reinforcements embarked at Adelaide on 28 August 1916 on the troopship ‘Anchisis’ and after a six-week sea voyage, disembarked in Plymouth, Devon, England, on 11 October 1916.
By train they travelled to the Wiltshire plains for more training, then after two months they entrained for Folkestone in Kent, via London. Here, on 15 December, the reinforcements boarded the ss ‘Golden Eagle’ to cross the English Channel, then took the train to Etaples in France, where they finally joined up with the main body of the 27th. The reinforcements spent the abnormally snowy and frigid winter of Christmas 1916/17 in getting to know their new comrades in arms.
The 27th then went through the normal routine of those battalions who were hosting newly arrived reinforcements to France – more months of training to familiarise them with trench warfare. In March 1917 Cliff was hospitalised for a week with tonsillitis, but then rejoined his battalion. The battalion entered the front line trenches off and on during early 1917, mainly in support, spending many freezing nights in the muddy trenches, bombarded by German guns. During this time the 27th took part in minor attacks during the significant German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line. Even without the constant threat of German bombs and snipers, living in the trenches was a filthy existence, among mud, rotting corpses, rats, lice, and other vermin. In June 1917 Cliff came down with trench fever, a particularly severe form of infection caused by lice, and was hospitalised again, this time for several months, at Rouen.
Released at Havre as being fit for duty, he rejoined his battalion in Belgium on 25 September 1917. During the previous week the 27th had taken part in a major attack when it was part of the first wave at the Battle of Menin Road. Victory here was to be followed up by an attack to capture Broodseinde Ridge in Belgium. The ridge commanded the heights for many miles around the Western Front trenches and taking it from the Germans was crucial to any further advance. Within a few days of arriving back from hospital, Cliff was in battle.
The Battle of Broodseinde Ridge was launched at dawn on 4 October 1917. What was not known was that the Germans had also planned an attack on the same day. Following a huge bombardment from both sides, a desperate battle took place in which both sides were puzzled as to why there was such fierce resistance. The 27th were not in the main attacking battalions but were detailed for support if necessary, and to dig communication trenches.
However, one of the attacking battalions suffered so many casualties that at 9.50am an officer rounded up 100 men of the 27th to assist in supporting the attack on the ridge. Cliff was part of this group that fought through the muddy shell holes around the shoulder of the ridge in the face of intense German machine gun fire and eventually took the ridge.
Over the next few days the allies consolidated their positions in readiness for another offensive on the next objective, the village of Passchendaele. This took place under constant shelling and sniper fire, and on 7 October, in pouring rain, Cliff suffered a gunshot wound to the left leg, putting him out of action. Carried back through the mud by stretcher-bearers to a field ambulance hospital, he was entrained back to the hospital at Etaples in France for an operation.
Spending a month in hospital, first at Cayeux, then Havre, he was released to convalesce and was granted three weeks leave in England in January 1918. During this leave Cliff joined up with his nephew, Claude Burgess from Murray Bridge, serving in the 43rd Battalion. Although they were nephew and uncle, Cliff and Claude were about the same age as Claude was the eldest son of Cliff’s eldest sister, Olive. Claude’s father Joe had migrated to Australia twenty-five years earlier as a young man but his family had remained in England. The two young soldiers visited Claude’s aunties, uncles, and cousins in London and Ipswich, Suffolk.
Rejoining the 27th Battalion in France on 26 January 1918, Cliff joined in with most of the other A.I.F battalions that fought to turn back the German spring offensive in April 1918. The 27th, hurried south from Flanders, was moved into the Dernancourt and Villers-Bretonneux sectors to assist and relieve the troops in the line. During fierce action there which repulsed the German attack, Cliff was wounded by being gassed, and so was hospitalised for a short while. Rejoining his unit again, on 2 June he was back in action when he was seriously gassed.
German gas attacks were particularly dreadful. Usually undertaken at night, taking advantage of prevailing wind, they were marked firstly by the quiet ‘plop’ ‘plop’ of gas canisters raining down, both into the crowded trenches and among the rest bivouacs at the rear. The Germans first threw in sneezing gas, which rendered it difficult for the troops to keep their gas mask on, and then changed over to mustard gas. Few immediate deaths were caused by mustard gas, but the condition of survivors was pitiful; eyes swollen and streaming to the point of blindness, voices gone, bodies blistered, and skin peeling. This time Cliff got a severe dose and spent a week in hospital as a gas-casualty, followed by four months convalescing in a bivouac in the French countryside.
He was not released as being fit for duty again until 7 August 1918, whereupon he rejoined his battalion. Three short weeks later he was back in action. The allies now planned to force the Somme line and the focus for this attack was to be through Peronne, which blocked an advance on the Hindenburg Line. This was an ancient fortified French town near the junction of the Somme and Cologne Rivers. However, before taking Peronne it was necessary to occupy the commanding height of Mont St Quentin. This was a formidable task, not only because of the terrain, but also because the German High Command fully realised its importance and had committed picked troops to its defence.
The attack commenced at 5am on 31 August and two days of intense fighting followed. On 2 September Mont St Quentin was taken and later in the day the Australians entered and took Peronne in street-by-street fighting, which Cliff took part in. The overall battle was huge, fought over a 28-mile front, and the allies advanced between 6 and 13 miles. 34,000 German prisoners were captured. On that day, 2 September 1918, Cliff had passed through Peronne and was pursuing the withdrawing Germans across open fields near the village of Allaines when an allied bombardment fell short. Cliff was hit by an exploding shell and killed in action, aged 24 years.
His comrades hurriedly buried him at the spot where he fell, in an isolated grave just south of Haut-Allaines and 1¾ miles north of Peronne. After the battle had passed by, Cliff’s remains were exhumed by the War Graves Commission and re-interred, in the presence of an army chaplain, in Peronne Communal Cemetery Extension, Plot 3, Row G, Grave 15. Just nine weeks later, on 11 November 1918, there was an armistice and the war was over.
Back at the farm in Wandearah, South Australia, his parents were grief stricken. Like so many parents of fallen warriors, all that John and Sarah Wall had to comfort them in the loss of their beloved son was a few medals and token trinkets “from a grateful nation”. Nevertheless, their patriotic loyalty was undiminished because the epitaph they selected for Cliff’s memorial card was:
“His country called, and honour bade him go
To battle against the grim and deadly foe;
Foremost was he in thickest of the strife;
For King and Country laid he down his life.”
…..ooo0000ooo….
Compiled 2006 by Max Slee, Tranmere, SA
from family recollections and photographs,
and records of the Australian War Museum
and National Archives of Australia.