Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Alan Davies’s older brother and fellow Old Scotch Collegian Herbert Martyn Davies had died of wounds during July 1916.

Alan joined the 14th Battalion and from Egypt, and left for France during June 1916. He was with them at Bois Grenier on 2 July when he received a severe gunshot wound to the left thigh, during a raid on the German trenches. He was serving as a member of the scout group during the raid. In the history of the 14th Battalion, he is reported to have stated after the raid, “Australians will do for me, after what I saw them do that night.”

Almost 90 men were involved in the raid, with 7 being killed or died of wounds. Many of the survivors were badly wounded and many had to be carried or dragged in from No Mans Land by some brave individuals.

Davies was badly wounded in the thigh during the raid.  While recovering in a hospital in England he wrote the following spirited account of the affair to his father, which was published in the Melbourne Argus: “I suppose I had better tell you the whole show. The staff decided that our battalion should give a raid, and they called for volunteers for raiders, and of course they got too many offering, as they only wanted 66, so the O.C. of the raid selected them, and as he was the O.C. of A company he got mostly A chaps with him. I managed to get in, as they needed four scouts, and — got in, too, as a parapet man. As soon as the raiders were selected, we were taken away from the rest of the battalion and put up at a billet by ourselves to train. Each man in the raiding party had a certain job to do in the raid, and he had to be a specialist in that kind of thing. We were trained there for three weeks, just like a football team. We were taken runs, and given a cold bath every day, and extra food. And we rehearsed the whole show time after time; it's simply wonderful the way everything is arranged for, and the time worked out to seconds. I wish I could tell you how it works.

We don't take a single thing with us to show who we are if Fritz gets our bodies. We wear Tommy uniforms and have our face and hands blackened, so that we will be hard to see at night. Only about four men out of the 66 carry rifles and bayonets. Those who carry the bayonets have them painted black. The rest carry weapons ac-cording to their jobs, most of them carrying revolvers, bombs, and ''knobkerry’s." These are beautiful weapons, and very handy in a trench. They consist of an entrenching tool handle with an iron cog-wheel on the end. The scouts have revolvers, bombs, wire cutters, and a tomahawk.

To see the collection of weapons used on a raid one would think you were back in the stone age, but everything is carried for a certain purpose. We had plenty of revolver practice from very good instructors, and be-came pretty fair shots in the end.

During the time we were training the scouts used to go out and find out all about the part of ''No Man's Land" that we were to cross on the raid. It made me very tired, as we didn’t get back till 1.30 or 2 a.m., and we had to go on with our training just the same next day.

You can imagine our excitement on the night of the show, as the result of all our practice and training was to be crammed into eight minutes' work. Well, when we did our dash, all went like clockwork except one thing, and that mistake proved very costly to us. Part of the artillery's work was to cut a path through Fritz's' wire for us to rush through. We had reckoned on going through in 30 seconds. In the formation adopted for the raid the scouts were in front, and I was the second man to reach the wire. Imagine how we felt when we dashed up to the wire and found we had 60 yards of entanglements to go through hardly cut at all—the artillery had been firing just too far, and nearly all their shells had landed in Fritz's front trench, instead of in his wire. I don't know how we did it, but we got through into the German trench, and did our job in full. A piece of shrapnel got me through the left thigh, right on top of Fritz's parapet. It didn't stiffen at once, and I managed to drag myself back through their wire, and then one of our chaps who had not been hit managed to get me out to a drain about the centre of "No Man's Land."

It was impossible to get back to our own trenches until Fritz's bombardment lifted, for he had been bombarding our front line ever, since our artillery had started on him. All our party lay there, hoping that the searchlight that was playing on "No Man's Land" would not find us. The beggars knew we were there all right, and they started spraying that part of "No Man's Land" with machine-guns and shrapnel. If it had not been for the drain, I am sure they would have got the lot of us. We all rolled into it, and lay flat. It was 2ft. 6in. deep and not much more than 18in. wide, and half-full of water and mud. We had to lie there for an hour and three-quarters before their guns lifted off our trenches. While we were lying there, I got one of the frights of my life—a shell burst so close that the chap next to me and myself were buried with earth. You can imagine how warm it was lying there at 2 a.m. I got stone cold, and my leg was quite stiff by this time. As luck would have it, this trench ran up to within 25 or 30 yards of our front trenches, and as they were still playing the searchlight and machine-guns all over us, our only way out was along the drain. I got along at first by digging in my fingers and pulling, while the chap lying behind me pushed my right foot. I went for a fair distance this way, but it was too slow, as there were a lot of our chaps be-hind me, and they, could not pass, so this fellow went over the top of me and crawled and I hung on to his braces and tried to keep my face up out of the mud as he dragged me through. When we got to the end of the drain a big sergeant of ours was waiting there, and he picked me up and carried me right across to our trenches with the bullets snapping all round. As soon as he got me back over the parapet he went for more, and while I was waiting for the stretcher-bearers, he brought in four more. He must have had a charmed life. I don't know how it is they did not get him. Australians will do for me, after the things I saw them do that night."

He went to hospital at Boulogne and was then transferred to England. In September he was granted a two-week furlough. From January 1917 he was sufficiently recovered to be taken on strength of No. 1 Command Depot as a Private. In September 1917 he was transferred to AIF Depots UK and promoted to Extra-Regimental Corporal with the rank of Acting Sergeant.

In December 1917 he joined the ranks of the Anzac Provost Corps, or military police: a category of men notoriously unpopular with other Anzacs. The following day he was promoted again to Extra-Regimental Corporal. In May 1918 he requested successfully to be transferred out of the provosts to the 25th Battalion, losing his rank in the process. His father later claimed that he did this out of determination to go back and ‘help his mates’.

He sailed for France on 22 May and on 29 May was taken on strength of the 25th Battalion. Less than two months later, in July, with the end of the war in sight, he was killed in action. His friend James Wood was with Alan, and described him as dying instantly on being hit by a German shell forward of Villers-Bretonneux.

Alan’s service file contains a restrained and poignant letter from his father asking that information about Alan be sent to his business address as ‘anything connected with his death tends to upset his mother.’