British staff officers routinely complained that Australians were ‘independent to a fault, argumentative, disrespectful of rank… yet the finest fighters in the line.’ That the Australian Imperial Force in the early years of World War I was comprised disproportionately of rural laborers, shearers, drovers, miners, and tradesmen accustomed to physical hardship and improvisation left them to command these men who were fiercely egalitarian, suspicious of hierarchy, and above all, socially informal. The Australian soldier was one to resist rigid discipline, saluting rituals, and officers they viewed as incompetent or overly formal.
Postings to non-combat theaters did not help the Australians who were unlikely to become soldiers through barracks discipline, so it was no surprise in retrospect that Sydney Roydhouse did not stay on for long in Suez with the 4th Battalion. He was nearly twenty-three when he enlisted in August 1914, coming from the trade of a chainman – a surveyor’s assistant using a ‘Gunter’s chain’ of 66-feet long and 100 links to measure distances in the days before electronics.
After weeks of training, he embarked with B Company, 4th Battalion for more time spent waiting during their weeks at sea (during which time Britain declared war on Turkey) and stopped at Colombo and Aden before arriving at Alexandria on the morning of December 3rd. The next day, at Mena Camp, they began training which would go on through January – in fact there was such little occurring otherwise that the entire war diary for the month of January was a single entry to note ‘Company training was carried out daily.’
That was the entirety of the first part of Sydney’s service, for on February 5th he was sent home. His company commander reported: ‘Character indifferent, inclined to be insubordinate and very slack, thoroughly unreliable, takes no interest and does not try to become a soldier.’ He shipped off and immediately on arriving at Melbourne the next month, he was discharged.
It was, technically, sufficient service to qualify him for the 1914–15 Star – the lone medal now remaining from what was once a complete entitlement. His early enlistment is to his credit, but the impression suggested by that medal – a gallant association with the 4th Battalion, who would later bleed at Gallipoli – belies the reality that Roydhouse spent only a short and unsettled period in Egypt before discharge. The soldier he would one day become was not forged at Mena under that Egyptian sun.
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It seemed any feelings of resentment for his dismissal had passed as by November 1915 he volunteered again and was accepted back into the service. After their losses at Gallipoli and the learnings that initiative, toughness, and endurance mattered more than drill-square compliance, men like Roydhouse were welcomed back into the Imperial Force again.
As part of the 17th Reinforcement for the 12th Battalion, Roydhouse departed Australia for the second time and in August 1916, after several months of training including some months as a gunner, he arrived in France. The Battalion was just moving into reserve and picked up their reinforcements on the way. After allocating Sydney to 15 Platoon, D Company, they immediately packed up again to go by foot and rail to reach Ontario Camp in the reserve area. The Battalion needed to recover from their recent losses, and the next month was spent in training the recent replacements. With the onset of Autumn, it turned wet and muddy. Rainy days were spent half in training and half in sport with working parties nightly. The ranks were also subjected to a gas chamber to ‘give them confidence in the efficiency of their gas masks.’
On October 1st, they approached the front to take over near the Ypres-Comines Canal and Hill 60. The position had been fought over again and again and D Company, in the trenches with B Company, were in much closer proximity to the German trenches ‘than any we had hitherto experienced, so much so that orders had been given that no one was to speak above a whisper.’ Their own trenches were poorly constructed and at the foot of a long slope ideal for rolling poison gas. The first days of October brought rain that further deteriorated the condition of the trenches and once it let up, they spent much of their time reconstructing under sniper fire.
Those days spent in constant anticipation of attack – during which it was also suspected there may be a tunnel beneath them that would erupt at any time – was Roydhouse’s introduction to the Western Front. It turned brighter for a few days during the Brigade route march through thirty miles of ‘very interesting country, passing Mont des Cats, Cassell, Arneke (a rich pastoral district), Watton (with an ancient castle overlooking the town), and a number of smaller towns and villages. The 12th Battalion finished the march by getting into very good billets at Nordasques, a picturesque village on the St. Omer-Calais road, about 12 miles from the latter town.’ Those three days of pleasant weather did not hold and before long, after more marching, it was raining again, and duties consisted mostly of digging pits along the road for which to sweep in mud and slush and attempt to ease the traffic congestion.
The early days of the winter campaign put the 12th Battalion in an area ravaged by previous shelling that had obliterated most of the trenches. Men resorted to living in flooded dug outs and shell holes and, if lucky, had a tarpaulin to stretch over to keep out any further rain. From there they departed for Delville Wood across roads of mud varying from two to fifteen inches deep and uncertainty whether the next footfall would send one plunging into a mired hole.
‘Delville Wood itself, with the duckboard track winding its way round trees and between shell holes, was a depressing place. The wet, bare tree trunks, many of which were mangled and hanging in unnatural positions as a result of shell fire, gave the place the appearance of a deserted nether-world.’ D Company was given a particularly terrible trench to occupy with water well above their boot tops. Any efforts to raise the floor with ammunition boxes and duck-boards were swallowed by the mud and for their forty-eight hours occupying the position they saw twenty-seven men carried off on stretchers due to trench foot.
November gave way to winter in earnest. Through December and January, heavy snow fell across the line, followed by prolonged frost that hardened the ground and left trenches brittle and unforgiving. Movement became slower and more deliberate, the cold biting into hands and feet during sentry duty and night work, while shellfire continued to tear apart positions already weakened by months of bombardment.
On occupying positions at the end of February, it was necessary to determine whether or not an opposing trench was occupied or not, and this position known as Malt Trench was the target for 18th Battalion on February 26th. The men of the 12th waited for their neighboring battalion to advance, but while snipers picked at them throughout the morning, the 18th Battalion was absent. Eventually they received order to advance alongside the 9th Battalion. It was decided that evening that D Company would move along the right flank and occupy a quarry and in the pre-dawn hours, they began to move forward quietly without artillery support.
The right flank, simply by their numbers, ‘induced the enemy to retire without putting up much of a fight’ and each platoon quickly established posts. It was not without casualties, however, and the company commander, Captain Webber, was wounded that morning alongside Private Roydhouse who had taken a bullet through his left hand.
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He spent a few days at the field ambulance before shipping out to England to recover, which took several weeks and kept him off the line until that summer. The line he left in dreary winter had transformed, at least by summer temperatures, and the 12th Battalion was preparing for operations east of Ypres. Summer heat settled heavily over the men, compounding fatigue as they carried ammunition, rations, and equipment along exposed tracks under intermittent fire. There was little sense of a front line as a fixed place, as it instead existed as a narrow, dangerous zone that crept forward or collapsed back with each operation. It was a sweltering return to the unglamorous realities of infantry life – marching, waiting, and working under conditions that punished the body even when no shots were fired.
Into another winter and into 1918, the tempo of the war increased. The battalion found itself drawn into a series of actions that blurred together in memory. After so many months in combat, tempers frayed accordingly, and on May 11th, Roydhouse was brought before a court martial on charges of threatening language toward a superior officer and disobeying a lawful command. The sentence – one year’s imprisonment with hard labor – was severe, but it was suspended just ten days later. The decision reflected the Army’s priorities by this stage of the war where experienced men were too valuable to discard, even when they chafed against authority.
It was only weeks later on June 3rd that Roydhouse witnessed one of the moments that would remain with him long after the fighting ended. During an advance near Mont-Harris in the early hours of the morning, a fellow soldier from 15 Platoon known as “Snowy” on account of his fair hair was struck by shellfire. Roydhouse only found him moments later in a shell hole, illuminated by the thin light of a silver crescent moon with a shell fragment having passed through his head. He moved on in the advance without seeing him again.
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August 1918 proved to be a most punishing month when the Battalion committed to renewed offensive operations during the Allied advance. They drove forward again and again against a stubborn enemy fighting from well-sited positions, supported by heavy artillery and machine-gun fire. The ground offered little protection in fields stripped bare by years of shelling, villages reduced to rubble, and shallow folds of earth that failed to break observation or fire. Casualties mounted with relentless speed. By the end of the fighting the battalion’s effective strength had fallen to barely four hundred men, a figure too low to sustain its traditional structure. A, B, C, and D Companies disappeared from the order of battle, temporarily replaced by composite companies designated X, Y, and Z.
The survivors – drawn together from across those former companies – pressed on through further advances and reliefs, the fighting no less dangerous for the sense that the end might now be in sight. At last, the battalion was relieved and moved back once more to the huts in Tank Wood near Tincourt, where only later would it be understood that they had completed their final battle of the Great War.
In closing its record, the battalion history notes that the 12th Battalion suffered the largest number of casualties in the 1st Australian Division while in France. It had never been known to retire, save for one company at Lagnicourt when overwhelmed by ten-to-one odds – and even then the lost ground was recaptured. It failed on only one occasion, at Meteren, and then through circumstances beyond its control. Its emergency signals were fired but twice, once due to such thick fog, and on both occasions the enemy was repelled without artillery assistance. While Sydney was still prone to misconduct – charged again in April 1919 for drunkenness – his parting from the Army came under circumstances far removed from those of 1915. He had never adapted to barracks discipline, yet amid fatigue, danger, and loss, he had proven himself a soldier.