by Peter Hart
Through the hard work of the RFC, the Royal Artillery had developed the capacity to destroy targets behind the German lines that were not actually visible from the British front line. One limitation still remained. The artillery never could and never would be able to guarantee perfect accuracy even after they had been ranged on to a target. The failure of the guns recoil action to recreate the exact same firing position (especially in wet and muddy conditions), slight differences in every shell fired, the varying effects of wind, atmospheric pressure and other meteorological factors—all these resulted in shells flying slightly over the precise target, dropping slightly short or very slightly deviating to left or right, resulting in a rectangular beaten zone that could be up to 50 yards long and less than 10 yards wide, depending on the gun calibre. This made it difficult to guarantee that even after a zone had been flayed with shells any had actually landed in the trenches or gunpits that were the real target.
The emergence of trench warfare led to a demand for a simple short-range weapon that could throw a shell upwards and across the short divide of No Man’s Land, to drop and explode within the opposition front line. No great sophistication was required and the brighter engineer officers used their initiative to construct primitive mortars redolent of a much earlier style of siege warfare. The requirement for mortars had not been anticipated and the British Army did not have a single trench mortar when the war started. As ever, the press of war ensured that the design, assessment and manufacturing process was constricted into months rather than years and soon every division was equipped with a Stokes light mortar battery attached to each of the infantry brigades and three further 2-in medium mortar batteries as an integral part of the divisional artillery. Although the trench mortars were relatively simple weapons the men still had to be trained.
I was sent to a remote village in the back areas to go on a trench mortar course to learn something about the 2-in trench mortar pudding stick toffee apple. It consisted of a bomb weighing 42 lbs on a steel rod weighing 8 lbs and about 3 feet long, the rod fitted with a long tube at the lower end of which was a rifle mechanism. There were several different lengths of charges which could be used. The maximum range was 570 yards. The platform was extremely difficult to fix steadily and was nearly always uprooted after a few rounds had been fired. There was, however, one good feature of the mortar. The bombs were provided with a sensitive direct-action fuse that made them the best weapon we had at that time for wire cutting.14
Second Lieutenant Alfred Darlington, 283rd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 56th Division
As the trench mortar batteries gained in confidence they in turn would demonstrate their potential and capabilities to the infantry within the division. Sometimes these exhibitions did not go entirely according to plan. Lieutenant Edgar Lord went to one such demonstration with his best friend Lieutenant Ivan Doncaster.
We sat down in a field near to some sandbag emplacements awaiting the arrival of the ‘brass hats’, who were to occupy the stalls. The personnel of the Trench Mortar Battery were preparing for the show, shortening fuses and such like, when suddenly we heard a cry, ‘Run for it!’ Scores of people rushed madly in all directions, so I rose to my feet and tried to move away from the emplacements, but had only gone a few yards, when I felt rather than heard a tremendous explosion. At once I flung myself on the ground covering my head with my arms. An unbelievable roar rent the air; earth and pieces of metal flying everywhere. Everyone there was hit with either or both. Two more explosions followed, during which time I did the ‘worm turn’ in a useless endeavour to reach cover. When we gathered our scattered wits, I discovered a hole an inch long in the shoulder of my tunic and my right thigh felt as if it had been beaten with a heavy stick, whilst I was covered with earth. A few yards away a man lay groaning across a few strands of barbed wire, through which he had been trying to crawl, but the gust had merely blown him into it, assisted by a piece of shell in the seat of his pants. I bandaged him, but as the leg of my trousers felt warm and sticky, I had to ask Doncaster to attend to two small wounds of mine. As the pain became more severe, I found it more comfortable to lie on my stomach. It was at least an hour before ambulances arrived to take us away. Only one man was killed outright, but several died later from the seventy or eighty casualties, a number surprisingly small considering the nearness of the crowd. If it had happened ten minutes later, most of the staff and senior officers would have been involved. An officer was shortening fuses on some of the shells, when he accidentally released a striker which fired a ten-second fuse. Instead of throwing the shell into an empty emplacement or traverse, he dropped it where he was among all the bombs—and ran for it—he was not hurt at all!15
Lieutenant Edgar Lord, 15th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, 96th Brigade, 32nd Division
What would in the modern world be regarded as an absolute calamity was just another incident in the dangerous pageant of war. The infantry took an almost instant dislike to this new weapon of war. The trench mortars would descend on the front-line troops, fire a few rounds and then depart as quickly as possible. The German retaliation would be swift, but not quite swift enough to catch the trench mortar crews. The answering burst of shell fire would land squarely on the long-suffering front-line troops. However, the mortars were formidable weapons of war simply because they had the power to deliver large amounts of high explosive accurately on to a target.
AFTER IMPROVING THEIR weapons skills the soldiers were ready to commence the programme of tactical exercises that would try and get them ready for what would face them when they went over the top in a few weeks’ time. Battalion parades and route marches would get them used to working en masse as a battalion. Most of the men were keen to learn, recognising perhaps that they needed all the help they could get.
We moved back for our training for the ‘Big Push’, full of enthusiasm, which carries one a long way. This training business was infinitely harder work than being in the line. There was no rest all day and far into the night for a good many of us. Our headquarters were at Ailly-sur-Somme, a most charming place, and all the battalions were equally well situated round about. Our training ground was a big open bit of country which, when we came to it, was covered with beautiful crops, but these we had absolutely to ignore, and in no time there was very little left. What compensation the farmers got I cannot imagine, but certainly it would not be less than £1,000 for our piece of ground alone. It seemed wicked, but there was nothing else to be done as all this country was very closely cultivated and it was absolutely necessary to carry out this training.16
Brigadier General F. C. Stanley, Headquarters, 89th Brigade, 30th Division
Although the training programme varied immensely according to the whims of the divisional commanders, in many cases an effort was made to layout on the ground the overall shape and course of the battlefield and particularly the relative positions of the specific German lines that would be their objectives.
We dug, I suppose, from 6,000 to 7,000 yards of trenches; of course not to full depth, but enough to show what it looked like. Here we practised every day, getting every man to know exactly what was required of him and what the ground would look like on the day. They all tumbled to it fairly well, and certainly our practice improved all of us very much indeed. We practised all day and every day. First, battalions singly, and then two or more battalions together. We had a sort of dress rehearsal which the Divisional Commander attended. As regards weather, it was a beast of a day, pouring with rain and everybody got soaked through. But things went off quite satisfactorily and he was very nice.17
Brigadier General F. C. Stanley, Headquarters, 89th Brigade, 30th Division
The last exercises were often seen as a chance to demonstrate what they had learnt in front of the generals and staff.
We finally made our last ‘dress rehearsal’ witnessed by the commander of the Army Corps, the 56th divisional general and all the brigadier generals, so there was plenty of red tape around. The smok
e bombs were sent over just before the commencement, the attack was carried out quite satisfactorily and all the positions carried quite easily, but of course we had no opponents on this occasion.18
Lance Corporal Sidney Appleyard, 1/9th Battalion (Queen Victoria’s Rifles), London Regiment, 169th Brigade, 56th Division
For the exercises were in no sense realistic: there was no live firing from fixed-line machine guns, no deafening explosive detonations to recreate the sheer shock and awe of war; such training concepts had not yet been developed and belonged to the future. The result was that an aura of unreality often permeated accounts of these training exercises.
The whole of the division was assembled and grouped as for the attack. After the usual explanations and pow-wows, beginning from the brass-hats and commanding officers and finishing with the platoon officers and section leaders, we moved across country against imaginary Boche trenches. As we went along the various bodies of men unfolded themselves into smaller groups, and eventually into extended order, as per programme, according to the amount of opposition which we were supposed to be encountering. After some time, having advanced a great distance and captured an immense tract of country (with such surprising ease that we all felt it was a pity we hadn’t thought of doing it this way before) a halt would be called. Whereupon the brass-hats would ride up again and there would be criticisms, more explanations and more pow-wows. This being over we could collect ourselves together and hurry home, so as not to be late for tea. War under these conditions certainly was very enjoyable.19
Lieutenant William Colyer, 2nd Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 10th Brigade, 4th Division
The British Army had been hastily assembled, if not thrown together, but it had an unshakeable confidence in its own abilities. Whether Regular, Territorial or New Army every constituent unit seemed to firmly believe that they were the finest unit in the British Army—bar none. Even a regular sapper, Major Philip Neame VC who had been attached to a territorial division soon swallowed any doubts and became a true believer in the mighty prowess of his new division.
The best territorial divisions within a matter of a few months of getting to France were as good as a regular division—they became first class. I know that because I went from being a sapper officer with a regular division to become a brigade major in a territorial division and in the closest touch with the four battalions in my brigade. They were first class. When they were first sent to France, they were split up and a battalion attached to different regular divisions and thereby had something like six months attachment to a regular brigade. So they’d had that training and when they were collected again and made a division, their own division again, they were absolutely first class. The personnel were, taken on the whole, more intelligent than the average regular soldier. Most of them in the London territorial division were highly educated in that a great number of them were London clerks and that sort of thing. They became a first-class division and in battle they could be counted on to undertake any task.20
Major Philip Neame VC, Headquarters, 168th Brigade, 56th Division
Major Neame was undoubtedly an intelligent man and a good judge of men, but his confidence in his division was not so much misplaced, as influenced by his own optimism and natural pride in their achievements thus far. Everything possible at the time had been done to get these men ready for war, but the chronic lack of experienced men to train the hundreds of thousands of raw youths meant that in reality there was small chance of turning this vast conglomeration of office workers, pitmen, factory workers and farm labourers into cohesive units of hard-bitten soldiers. The Territorial and New Army divisions may have been promising material, but they lacked the sheer intensity of battle experience, while the Regular divisions were regular only in name by 1916—they, too, were filled with raw recruits, as their original ranks were for the most part either dead or still recovering from wounds. These men were the men that would meet the German Army in battle on the downlands of the Somme.
CHAPTER THREE
Moving On Up
THE SOMME WAS ORIGINALLY a green and pleasant land. The rolling chalk ridges were liberally dotted with small villages, farms and woods. The Germans looked on this unspoilt rural scene with the sole intention of eking out every defensive advantage they could squeeze from the configuration of the land. Having roughly sketched out their front in the hectic days of 1914, the Germans then set about digging themselves in properly—they were there for the duration.
The river Somme flowed in a generally westerly direction between Péronne and Amiens and over the centuries it had gradually eroded a mile-wide flat valley about 200 feet lower than the general level of the surrounding ground. On the northern bank the slopes were broken by several small valleys, and the larger valley of a sizeable tributary, the river Ancre, on which lay the small town of Albert. The Ancre in turn had a series of small valleys dropping down to it from the higher ground. Between the Somme and the Ancre lay a chalk ridge dotted with villages running from Morval, Guillemont, Longueval, Bazentin-le-Petit, Pozières (which marked the highest point) to Thiepval immediately above the Ancre. North of the Ancre the ridge continued through Beaucourt to Serre. Behind this first ridge lay another low ridge centred on the town of Bapaume. Communications were not extensive and the main road between Amiens and Bapaume ran through Albert, up and across the ridge passing directly through Pozières.
The German front line crossed the Somme just in front of the village of Curlu and then ran along the forward slopes of the ridge bending round to follow the contour lines of the minor valleys running down to the main rivers. It also incorporated several villages enclosing Mametz, Fricourt, La Boisselle, Ovillers, Thiepval, crossing the Ancre below Beaucourt, then through Beaumont Hamel before running north in front of Serre. Unfortunately for the British the expression ‘front line’ was something of a misnomer. In fact it was a fully-realised trench system consisting in itself of three lines about 200 yards apart, linked together by communication trenches and incorporating fortress villages. The trenches were extremely well constructed with the plentiful provision of deep dugouts with multiple exits up to 40 feet deep, which could accommodate in relative comfort the whole of the trench garrison. In front of them were two belts of tangled barbed wire that were up to 30 yards wide. The houses of the villages had been fortified, largely by the use of reinforcing concrete, and the extension of existing cellars to form an underground warren. Also incorporated into the First Line, or standing just behind it, were trench-based strong points, which were independent fortresses in their own right. Perhaps typical of these was the Hawthorn Redoubt, which lay in front of Beaumont Hamel, and the Schwaben Redoubt, which lay on the ridge spur behind Thiepval. A Second Line defensive system had also been constructed between 2,000 and 5,000 yards (depending on the local tactical configuration of the ground) behind the First Line. This ran along the top of the Guillemont-Pozières Ridge before crossing the Ancre and running to the north and was very similar in its characteristics to the forward system. Finally the Germans had made considerable progress on digging a Third Line system a further 3,000 yards back. This then was the citadel that the British Army sought to crack wide open.
When the tide of battle had first washed round the Somme ridges, the pursuing French Army found it politically impossible to cede any more ground to the German invader for mere tactical reasons. Every inch of their homeland was precious to them and they therefore dug in on the lower ground facing the Germans rather than stepping back and occupying a less overlooked position. When the British took over the sector in 1915 they were equally bound by considerations that transcended mere tactics. For the British lines were in no way comparable to the trenches carved out by the Germans. The entire philosophy of the British Army was totally different. They were engaged in a strategic offensive designed to drive the German Army out of France and Belgium. Their trenches were more a jumping-off point for the next attack than a considered defensive system per se. As a result, although t
here was some superficial similarity in the basic front line, communication and support trenches, there were no concrete reinforced machine-gun posts, no village fortresses, no proper switch lines and above all no deep reinforced dugouts to shelter the bulk of the troops. The British soldier had no conception of the underground billets afforded their German counterparts on the Somme front. The ordinary British soldier usually had to be content with a ‘cubby hole’ burrowed out in the side of the trench. It provided some shelter from the pitter-patter of rain or shrapnel, but left them painfully exposed to high explosive shells.
