Somme

by Peter Hart

  If God spares me I shall accept it as a special mission to preach love and peace for the rest of my life. If He does not, I know now in my heart that for anyone who is dead but who has loved enough, there is provided some way of piercing the veils of death and abiding close to those whom he has loved till that end which is the beginning. I want to live, too, to use all my powers of thinking, writing and working to drive out of civilisation this foul thing called war and to put in its place understanding and comradeship.20

  Lieutenant Tom Kettle, 9th Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 48th Brigade, 16th (Irish) Division

  Yet from the misery of war at least he had been vouchsafed a kind of hope for the future of Ireland, born from the shared experiences of Protestants and Catholics within the 16th and 36th (Irish) Divisions.

  Had I lived, I had meant to call my next book on the relations of Ireland and England: The Two Fools: A Tragedy of Errors. It has needed all the folly of England and all the folly of Ireland to produce the situation in which our unhappy country is now involved. I have mixed much with Englishmen and with Protestant Ulstermen and I know that there is no real or abiding reason for the gulfs, saltier than the sea, that now dismember the natural alliance of both of them with us Irish Nationalists. It needs only a Fiat lux, of a kind very easily compassed, to replace the unnatural with the natural. In the name, and by the seal of the blood given in the last two years, I ask for Colonial Home Rule for Ireland—a thing essential in itself and essential as a prologue to the reconstruction of the Empire. Ulster will agree. And I ask for the immediate withdrawal of martial law in Ireland and an amnesty for all Sinn Fein prisoners. If this war has taught us anything it is that great things can be done only in a great way.21

  Lieutenant Tom Kettle, 9th Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 48th Brigade, 16th (Irish) Division

  The intellectual man of letters also conceived a real respect and love for the endurance and good spirits of his men, serving alongside him.

  We are moving up tonight into the Battle of the Somme. The bombardment, destruction and bloodshed are beyond all imagination, nor did I ever think the valour of simple men could be quite as beautiful as that of my Dublin Fusiliers. I have had two chances of leaving them—one on sick leave and one to take a staff job. I have chosen to stay with my comrades. I am calm and happy, but desperately anxious to live.22

  Lieutenant Tom Kettle, 9th Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 48th Brigade, 16th (Irish) Division

  One of those reasons for living had been born just a few days before—his daughter Betty, whom he had never seen. He tried to encapsulate his feeling in a poem written on 6 September.

  The Gift of Love

  In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown

  To beauty proud as was your mother’s prime—

  In that desired, delayed, incredible time

  You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own,

  And the dear breast that was your baby’s throne

  To dice with death, and, oh! They’ll give you rhyme

  And reason; one will call the thing sublime,

  And one decry it in a knowing tone.

  So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,

  And tired men sigh, with mud for couch and floor,

  Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,

  Died not for Flag, nor King, nor Emperor,

  But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed

  And for the secret Scripture of the poor.23

  Lieutenant Tom Kettle, 9th Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 48th Brigade, 16th (Irish) Division

  He had survived the earlier attack made on Ginchy and on the 8 September was put in charge of the remnants of B Company. One of his subalterns was Second Lieutenant Emmett Dalton.

  I was with Tom when we advanced to the position that night and the stench of the dead that covered our road was so awful that we both used some foot powder on our faces. When we reached our objective, we dug ourselves in and then at 5 p.m. on the 9th we attacked Ginchy. I was just behind Tom when we went over the top. He was in a bent position and a bullet got over a steel waistcoat that he wore and entered his heart. Well, he only lasted about one minute and he had my crucifix in his hands. He also said, ‘This is the seventh anniversary of my wedding’ I forget whether seventh or eighth.24

  Second Lieutenant Emmett Dalton, 9th Battalion, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, 48th Brigade, 16th (Irish) Division

  The bullet that struck down Tom Kettle also killed part of the hope for a peaceful solution to the long standing ‘Irish problem’. His body was never found after the fighting had ceased and he eventually took his place amongst the legions of the lost commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial. His little daughter, Betty, would live her life without ever knowing her father except perhaps through the medium of the sad poem he wrote her. She would die some eighty years later in a Dublin nursing home on 20 December 1996.

  Kettle had been hit early on in the attack, but the men of 48th Brigade moved gradually forward across No Man’s Land. They were joined by the 7th Royal Irish Fusiliers from the divisional reserve of 49th Brigade.

  Our shells bursting in the village of Ginchy made it belch forth smoke like a volcano. We couldn’t run. We advanced at a steady walking pace, stumbling here and there, but going ever onward and upward. [A shell] landed in the midst of a bunch of men about 70 yards away on my right. I have a most vivid recollection of seeing a tremendous burst of clay and earth go shooting up into the air—yes, and even parts of human bodies—and that when the smoke cleared away there was nothing left.25

  Second Lieutenant Young, 7th Battalion, Royal Irish Fusiliers, 49th Brigade, 16th (Irish) Division

  Still the men went on against what was officially described as ‘slight opposition’. They overran the German front line and burst through to the powdered remnants of Ginchy, which they eventually managed to consolidate. Alongside the 48th Brigade, the 1/6th Connaught Rangers, commanded by Colonel Rowland Feilding, found themselves in even more trouble. Colonel Feilding had only just taken over command of the battalion, which had already suffered severe casualties early in the month.

  The commanding officer had been killed, the second in command had been killed. Various other people had been killed and we were sort of re-forming under a new CO—a Guards officer. We got this Colonel Feilding, an elderly gent in the Coldstream Guards who was not a regular soldier, but a nice man. But he was a Roman Catholic they thought ‘Ah, Send him to the Connaught Rangers!’ So Feilding turned up, a very large rubicund man.26

  Second Lieutenant Francis Jourdain, 6th Battalion, Connaught Rangers, 47th Brigade, 16th (Irish) Division

  Colonel Feilding brought his new battalion no luck at all. The increasingly flexible new German defensive arrangements had fooled the British artillery and the Connaught Rangers were facing an untouched strong point.

  The trench in front of us, hidden and believed innocuous, which had in consequence been more or less ignored in the preliminary artillery programme, had—perhaps for this very reason—developed as the enemy’s main resistance. This, in fact, being believed to be the easiest section of the attack, had been allotted to the tired and battered 47th Brigade. Such are the surprises of war! Supplemented by machine-gun nests in shell holes, the trench was found by the few who reached close enough to see into it to be a veritable hornets’ nest. Moreover, it had escaped our bombardment altogether, or nearly so.27

  Lieutenant Colonel Rowland Feilding, 6th Battalion, Connaught Rangers, 47th Brigade, 16th (Irish) Division

  It was the 18-year-old Second Lieutenant Jourdain’s first experience of battle. He found it an experience that tested him to his limits.

  When the battle started it was all very horrifying, shells shooting over the trench and knocking the sand off the parapet. The troops went forward and they very soon came back, they were really knocked to bits by the Germans. I did not take part in the actual movement because it wasn’t my business to do so. I was the signal officer and I wa
s in the front-line trench looking after whatever signal communications there were, D3 telephone and lines which kept on being broken. The only useful communication was back to brigade. I had one or two NCOs and soldiers with me trying to keep a line going down the communications trench. One single wire on which everything depended. That kept on being bombarded and the thing got cut and several brave men kept on mending it. The whole thing developed into some glorious muddle and there wasn’t anything very coherent sent back. In the middle of the battle the adjutant decided to go sick with trench fever! He retired from the war in fact and was never seen again. Which was not a very good thing for an adjutant to do in the middle of a battle! Feilding, who took a certain liking to me, thought I was reasonably intelligent and made me the adjutant on the spot. I was militarily speaking of no height and only 18! The point was I was there! The thing finished as a shambles.28

  Second Lieutenant Francis Jourdain, 6th Battalion, Connaught Rangers, 47th Brigade, 16th (Irish) Division

  Jourdain’s efforts were appreciated by his colonel. In his published memoirs, Feilding mentions Jourdain as having, ‘wisdom far beyond his years’29 and found he performed well under pressure: ‘The boy Jourdain is still acting adjutant and is doing it marvellously well, in spite of his extreme youth.’30

  In some ways the study of August and early September is the least rewarding and most utterly depressing chapter in the whole tragic epic of the Somme offensive. The British had the troops, the guns, the ammunition and even the weather—the perpetual enemy of British generals—was reasonably favourable. Yet the period went by unredeemed by anything that could be considered a success. At the end of 9 September the Fourth Army had still not been able to capture High Wood, Wood Trench or Falfemont Farm. All in all, nothing had changed, nothing had been achieved. As the fresh troops moved up they were soon made aware of what lay before them.

  We had to go up to the top of a little rise. Strewn up the hill, in rows like corn that had been mown, lay hundreds of our chaps that looked as though they had run into a machine-gun nest. It was a warm muggy day and the poor chaps’ faces and exposed flesh were smothered in flies. The smell was awful. They lay so thick we simply could not avoid running over some of them. The horses of course stepped over, as a horse, unless absolutely forced to, will not tread on a prone body. But we could not help the wheels going over a few.31

  Driver James Reynolds, 55th Field Company, Royal Engineers, 3rd Guards Brigade, Guards Division

  And all this sacrifice for what? A few German trenches and strong points had been captured, but new ones had blossomed behind the German front. There seemed to be no end in sight.

  I am afraid we are settling down to siege warfare in earnest and of a most sanguinary kind, very far from our hopes in July. But it’s always the same: Festubert, Loos, and now this. Both sides are too strong for a finish yet. God knows how long it will be at this rate. None of us will ever see its end and children still at school will have to take over.32

  Captain Philip Pilditch, C Battery, 235th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 47th Division

  After 9 September it was obvious that nothing more could be done before the next great leap into the unknown that was being planned by Haig and Rawlinson for 15 September. The stage was set for the decisive phase of the Battle of the Somme. This was to be the great offensive that would make all the losses and suffering worthwhile by finally breaking the power of the German Army—or condemn the BEF to at least another year in the trenches.

  CHAPTER NINE

  You are not Alone

  THERE IS AN UNDERSTANDABLE tendency in considering the massacres of the Somme to concentrate on the legions of the dead. Yet, throughout the Battle of the Somme, as in most battles, three or four were wounded for every man that was killed. The term ‘wounded’ covered a multitude of varying conditions, and there was no denying that a relatively minor ‘Blighty’ wound could come as a blessed relief to some:

  Fred and I smoked, shielding with our cupped hands the glowing tip of our fags. We had to keep pressing back against the side of the trench to allow small parties of walking wounded to pass. I had my leg braced against the trench when I was jolted out of my sleep by a sharp blow on the inside of my left leg, just below the kneecap. It was just as though somebody had kicked me. I felt it with my hand in the darkness and my hand came away sticky and wet. I knew that the flesh was torn. A piece of shrapnel had gone deep in my leg. I had received what every soldier prayed for—a perfect ‘Blighty’! I told Fred, he, too, felt the edges of a jagged wound, tied a field bandage on it and called me a lucky bastard.1

  Private Albert Conn, 8th Battalion, Devonshire Regiment, 20th Brigade, 7th Division

  The problem was that no one knew where the bullet or shrapnel might hit. It was a complete lottery. Corporal Arthur Razzell was another of the lucky ones. When he was hit it was almost an anti-climax as a shell exploded right next to him. For a moment he went into a surrealistic, muffled dream world.

  I had no sense of pain, I was sort of deafened and the noise in my head from the blowing in of my ears. When I realised I could walk I did the same as everybody else—you got back. I scrambled over a heap of soil that was in front of me, blown up by the shell and as I scrambled across it I felt it moving. There were evidently people buried underneath who were struggling to get out. A few more yards along the communicating trench I realised where I was, I suppose I’d recovered from the blow. I realised if I kept to the communicating trench I’d have about a mile to go, whereas there was a road nearby that went direct towards Albert.2

  Corporal Arthur Razzell, 8th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, 36th Brigade, 12th Division

  Razzell found he had been wounded in the face and as one of the walking wounded he was therefore in the vast majority. There was no chance of them all being stretchered back—there were simply not enough stretchers. And the longer they waited in the front-line area the more likely they were to be hit again. Slowly the wounded staggered back, stumbling and struggling as best they could.

  So I climbed up on to the road and walked as fast as I could until I came to the glow of a cigarette burning on the side of the road. I said to the fellow who was smoking, ‘Can you tell me where there is a dressing station?’ And he pulled back a blanket that had been screening a little dugout in the bank of the road. He was an RAMC man. Inside there were a couple of stretchers with some wounded men on them. He sat me on a box and fumbled with my breast tunic buttons. I said, ‘Oh, it’s not there, it’s my face—my jaw!’ He said, ‘Yes, OK!’ and still went on. What he was doing was giving me an anti-tetanus injection in the chest. They’d found out in France that so many wounds were getting tetanus, the soil was infected quite heavily with tetanus germs. I said to him, ‘Is this a Blighty one?’ He said, ‘My lad, this time next week, you’ll be sitting in a deckchair drinking iced drinks through a straw!’ He was right!3

  Corporal Arthur Razzell, 8th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, 36th Brigade, 12th Division

  Many men who walked were actually quite severely wounded and the journey back taxed them to the utmost. Often they helped each other along as best they could. Guardsman Norman Cliff was wounded in the right thigh and could hardly walk when his officer sent him back.

  On the way I caught up with another man staggering along and we clung to one another, each holding the other up. I was shocked to see that the top of his head was a mass of blood and the crown seemed to be missing. I marvelled that he was still conscious and still able to use his limbs. Encouraging one another to keep going, we finally stumbled into an advance first aid post and dropped exhausted.4

  Private Norman Cliff, 1st Battalion, Grenadier Guards, 3rd Brigade, Guards Division

  For the seriously wounded there was no chance of walking. Most had no option but to lie where they fell. In a pregnant second they had been dashed from the peak of manhood to utter ruin. Sergeant Kerr was one of those who went over the top in a state of exaltation.

  Fear? I had no fear at
all. All the pent up dread and tension had completely left me. Like a shot I was up and over the top of the trench. In no time bullets were flying, and a wicked machine gun had opened up against us on my right. One or two of my section who had had most difficulty climbing out of the trench had barely got up into line and I gave them an encouraging wave of my arm. Barely had I straightened myself forward again, when something with the force of a cannon ball hit me full in the chest. I believed I had been killed, and in the two seconds it took me to crumple up, my lips had only time to murmur, ‘Oh mother!’ Then nothingness.5

  Sergeant William Kerr, 5th (Western Cavalry) Battalion, 2nd Canadian Brigade, 1st Canadian Division

  For so many men, such thoughts were the end. But although he had indeed been terribly wounded Sergeant Kerr had also, in a warped sense, been fantastically lucky. When he was later examined, he was told that from the location of the entry and exit wounds his heart must have been in the act of contracting at the instant the bullet smashed through his chest. The battlefield was the most hostile environment in the world and hardly any one had the time to dawdle and help such severely wounded men. If they were to have any chance of survival, the first thing a wounded man had to do was to care for himself as best he could. Every soldier carried a field dressing in the inside pocket of his tunic and this was to prove a life-saver for Sergeant Kerr.