Pick of the Week Pozieres

Pozieres
Scott Bennett
Scribe, $36.95

While the experience of first-time author Scott Bennett is crucially important to the way this book was written, what is also wonderful is that the man can write. So often, someone’s interest in history is not enough to create a good book, but in this case, the desire is matched by competence.

 It’s not perfect, with some awkward moments when the detail of the battle is juxtaposed with background information, and possibly some of the rhetorical questions used as links from one episode to the next could have been left out. But it’s firm writing, and driven by a curiosity and intelligence that shines through.

 Bennett became interested in the history behind the Pozieres campaign in July 1916 when he heard about his great-uncle Ernie Lee, from Mossiface near Bairnsdale.

 When Ernie died, aged 23, he was heralded as one of the men who had “dared and achieved, in the face of untold dangers”.
In actual fact, Ernie had illegally enlisted when he was 15, and had behaved very badly, defying orders and spending the terrible 45 days when the Anzacs were sent forward on a suicidal mission to take push the Germans back from their line held at Pozieres on the Western Front in prison.

 You can’t blame young Ernie, but what puzzled Bennett was the mythification of the Pozieres battle, and also the lack of detail about what happened there.

 So he set himself to find out.

 The result is both a piecing together of events and a kind of questioning about the way Australians have reacted to this part of our history. He hits the tone beautifully: neither apologetic nor harsh.

 Bennett has sifted and pondered, and come through ten years of research with an account that is compelling. The men who survived, he writes “became sombre and reflective”. Not all coped with the extraordinary demands the “ill-conceived” attacks on Pozieres made of them, “understandably overcome with fear”.

 And from the individual stories, Bennett steps back and asks an interesting question: “why the Pozieres battle has been largely neglected by Australians while the Gallipoli campaign has etched itself upon the national psyche”.

 The answer lies, partly, in the way history selects and then magnifies. Bennett has tried to keep his history life-sized, to restore the dignity of those who found themselves part of the chaos of a “victory that came at such terrible cost it seemed indistinguishable from defeat”.

 - Rosemary Sorensen
 

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