They were sprawled in the snow when the rum came around.
Rum was supposed to lend its fire to the fighting spirit, to fortify the fearful, and to grant greater courage to the already courageous.
Almost all the men in the snow outside the northern French village of Bullecourt offered their pannikins to the rum carriers. They wanted warmth. Or anaesthetic.
My grandfather clung to the memory of the rum ration in the time before battles on the Western Front of France and Belgium as if it was something holy in a time damned.
A memory of what would happen in his life on this day, however, could not be driven away by a sea of rum.
It was before dawn out there on the snowy plain south-east of Bullecourt. April 11, 1917. A hundred years ago next Tuesday.
By the end of that day, two-thirds of those men who took their rum in the snow would be dead, wounded or taken prisoner of war.
It was a catastrophe merely waiting for the starter's whistle.
The British high command had decided to use tanks for the first time in fighting history.
The tanks, primitive beasts, were supposed to have arrived a day before, and the men had waited out in a blizzard on the morning of April 10, but no tanks had appeared and the attack had been called off. By then, the Germans defending their Hindenburg Line of wire and trenches and fortifications knew what was coming.
Twelve tanks finally arrived on the morning of April 11, but too late to be of any use. Their job was to flatten the barbed wire behind which the Germans waited, a task normally undertaken by artillery. But only three tanks made it to the wire, and by then Australia's ground troops, unwilling to wait for daylight to expose them, had already flung themselves into battle.
We have become numbed to mountains of ghastly statistics from the Western Front, but the bare facts of what happened to Australia's young men in the fields outside Bullecourt 100 years ago remain an ache in our history.
The Australian 4th Division, which provided the ranks of young bodies for the battle, lost 3000, dead and wounded.
One of the division's two brigades, the 4th, lost 2339 of its 3000 men all on its own.
Another 1170 Australians were taken prisoner by the Germans.
This was more than a quarter of all Australians taken prisoner during the entire war, and their fate is often forgotten.
Most of those captured on that day were imprisoned in an old stone fort near Lille, Belgium, and were put to hard labour building huts and dugouts and carrying and loading heavy ammunition for the Germans. According to Private Horace Ganson of the 16th Battalion, who was captured at Bullecourt, he and his fellow prisoners were fed a slice of bread in the morning and a watery soup at lunch.
One in 12 of Australia's prisoners of World War I died in captivity. The remainder were sustained by Red Cross parcels sent across the lines.
This, then, was the harvest of the first battle of Bullecourt.
After this disaster, a second battle of Bullecourt would be waged within a month. Of course.
It would take the lives and the vitality of thousands more Australian men - this time it would be, in turn, the 2nd Division, the 1st Division and the 5th Division.
The destroyed village of Bullecourt and a bit of strategically meaningless land was gained.
The casualties were 7000.
By the end of it, almost every Australian soldier in France in the first half of 1917 had taken part in the fighting around Bullecourt.
But soon, the high command lost interest and shifted its attention to other parts of the front, and the battles of Bullecourt faded into the crushing stalemate that epitomised that long, medieval war fought with modern weapons of mass destruction.
And what of my grandfather?
In old age, he told me this, as if he needed to unload a weight:
As he and his mates of the 14th Battalion rushed through the dawn towards their fate, the terror and the wildness on them, a young man came out of the mist and the smoke, blundering towards him.
My grandfather, himself only 22, had known the boy all his life - he came from a farm in the same district as his own family's holding back in western Victoria.
My grandfather called to the young man that he was going the wrong way, that he should turn around.
But as he came close, it became obvious there was to be no turning around. The boy's eyes were rolling, his tongue hung out like that of a crazed horse and in the frozen dawn, he face poured with sweat. Fear, my grandfather said, had stolen the boy's sense of himself.
The military would have called it cowardice and desertion. My grandfather had never been willing to make such a judgment.
And yet, he said, when they came home to their farms, neither he nor his former mate could look at each other, and through all the years of their lives, they never spoke again.
They didn't have the words. A moment on a battlefield in France 100 years ago had stolen them.
