by Peter Hart
2.50 p.m. Fifty per cent of company already down. Whole brigade appears to be held up. Lance Corporal Fenton, one of my Lewis gunners, has got his gun going in a shell hole on my left. Awful din, can hardly hear it. Yelled at Sergeant Manin to take the first wave on. He’s lying just behind me. Hodgkinson says he is dead. Sergeant Mann on my right, of 7 Platoon, also dead. Most of the men appear to be dead. Shout at the rest and get up to take them on. Find myself sitting on the ground facing our own line with a great hole in my thigh. Hodgkinson also hit in the wrist. Awful din still. Most of the company now out. I put my tie round my leg as a tourniquet. Fortescue about 5 yards on my right still alive. Yell at him to come over to me. Show him my leg and tell him what to carry on. He gets into a shell hole to listen while I tell him what to do. Shot through the heart while I’m talking to him. Addison also wounded and crawling back to our lines. That’s all the officers and most of the NCOs. Can’t see anything of Sergeant Bolton and 8 Platoon.26
Lieutenant Victor Hawkins, 2nd Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, 88th Brigade, (attached) 12th Division
Further to their left the 2nd Royal Scots of the 30th Division were cut to ribbons as they breasted the ridge and came under heavy fire.
We had to attack up a reverse slope, where we were quite protected from the Boche, and then over the top of the hill, the Boche had his lines down there. The Boche had a very powerful machine-gun barrage rigged up and the preliminary bombardment didn’t disturb it. The result was we attacked in four lines, one after the other, and as each one went over the top, it got caught in this machine gun barrage and pretty well wiped out. I was in the last line; I found myself the only one on his feet—as far as I could see—so I got down into a hole and stayed there until it was dark. How I wasn’t hit in that attack.... I had bullets through my hat, I had a belt with a pistol and a bullet had gone inside the belt and out through the buckle, through my trousers—all over the place. I wasn’t touched.27
Lieutenant Ralph Cooney, 2nd Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers, 90th Brigade, 30th Division
The attacks were a failure. Very little progress had been achieved and any minimal successes had been pyrrhic victories. The German defensive tactics were still mutating under the direct pressure of the British artillery barrages. Not only were the Germans utilising the scattered shell holes that surrounded their trenches as part of their defensive structure, but they were also establishing hidden machine-gun posts farther back beyond the main barrage lines of the British field artillery, but still with sufficient range to allow them to cover the open ground near their front line. They had used their breathing space well and once again the German front seemed solid.
From mid-October the sombre complexion of the Somme nightmare darkened still further to match the lengthening nights. The long cold frontal depressions of late autumn began to sweep across in ever-increasing frequency. Even when it wasn’t raining it was still damp and the ground had little or no chance to dry out.
A wretched place it was, I can assure you, in many senses. The trenches were flooded through the heavy rains, we were exposed to all observers, the trench being only about three feet deep, instead of at least six. The sight of the dead in front and behind us, told us of a recent engagement for the possession of a most important position. Not far from our bombing post was a sergeant quite dead and who, apparently, died in the attitude of prayer. His hands were clasped and his head bowed in reverence. I went close to him at dusk and his face had a beautiful expression upon it. Evidently the man had died of shock, but I thought as I went away that that man was one who had known and experienced a Godly life. I thought he was a splendid example for the men who passed that spot continually, all of whom had come there with the same object—to work, to watch, to fight, and to die if need be for the maintenance of nation’s honour, liberty and justice.28
Private John Lawton, 1/5th Battalion, King’s Liverpool Regiment, 165th Brigade, 55th Division
The rain made life a misery for the infantry, but it also led to the onset of swampy ground conditions, which severely hampered the effective deployment of the artillery. It was difficult to move the heavy guns and limbers, and the thousands of shells across the flooded moonscape. The roads leading forward to the front line had been destroyed by the relentless action of countless wheels, tracks, hooves and feet pounding away at them—to say nothing of the thousands of shells crashing down day in and day out for months on end. When new artillery units moved forward into the line they could no longer bring up their long cherished guns. It was simply impossible to get them forward.
We got our orders to leave horses and guns and to take our gunners and officers up the line to take over the battery we were to relieve in situ. We knew it meant handing over our good, well-tended weapons for old, filthy, worn out guns, and we didn’t like it. A subaltern from the other battery arrived to guide us up. We didn’t quite like the undue haste he showed to get us up there, nor his relief at handing over. In fact he gave the impression that all he wanted was to get away out of it as quickly as possible.29
Lieutenant Kenneth Mealing, A Battery, 308th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 61st Division
When the gunners got to their gun positions it was worlds apart from anything they could have dreamed of. Nothing could have prepared them for the vista of desolation that lay before them.
Not a blade of grass nor anything green was in sight. We were in a huge morass extending almost as far as the eye could see—mud and shell holes and wreckage. Dotted around were little mounds with small khaki figures moving about them. Occasionally a stab of bright flame would shoot eastward from one of the mounds and simultaneously the ‘Bang-zee-eew!’ of the departing shell would reach the ear. At last we reached a small collection of four of these mounds and were met by the captain commanding the battery we were to relieve. He promptly invited us to the mess, and the skipper and I went with him, while Smith went off with their subaltern to ‘take over’ and install our gunners in their new quarters. The mess was dug out of the ground, 6 feet down with timber rafters laid across at ground level, corrugated iron and two layers of mud-filled sandbags on the top. The stairway was a mud slide, the floor was six inches deep in wet watery mud. The furniture, one rickety kitchen table, two benches cut out of the earth and covered in sandbags. Nothing else, just room for four men to stand upright inside! And still the rain came down—the mud oozed down the ‘stairway’ and dripped down the walls. The men’s quarters were, if possible, worse. In fact they mostly slept round and under the guns.30
Lieutenant Kenneth Mealing, A Battery, 308th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 61st Division
As a junior officer Lieutenant Mealing was required to go up to the forward observation post. It was located near the once dreaded Zollern Redoubt, which was now in British hands.
I set off with Captain Smith, to find the observation post. This was close to the Zollern Redoubt, in the remnants of a trench, now reduced to a shallow ditch half full of water and dead bodies, both British and German. It was about 200 yards behind the front line—which was a similar ditch only without the dead bodies. To get to the OP we had to dodge from shell hole to shell hole for the last few hundred yards as we were well in sniping range and on the wrong side of a slope. By the time we arrived there we were, of course, soaked to the skin and covered in mud and thus we sat, peering over the edge through our field glasses, picking out the salient points, stumps of trees, bits of trench, contours to the ground etc. behind the German Line and identifying them on our maps. Our telephone line to the battery was useless and a fresh one had to be laid. Apart from keeping our guns ranged the OP work was practically useless, but had to be done, day in and day out by the three of us. And how we hated that hour of hard struggle, mostly under fire, through the clogging mud, those eight or nine hours in the stinking bullet riddled ditch, and the struggle ‘home’ to the battery, which formed our OP duty every third day.31
Lieutenant Kenneth Mealing, A Battery, 308th Brigade, Royal Fi
eld Artillery, 61st Division
Every so often the benighted infantry would be sent forward into the cloying mud. Unfortunately, the German batteries were beginning to recover their confidence as the problems multiplied for the Royal Artillery. As the British guns opened up they found that they themselves became a target.
About a week after we had settled in, orders came round for a special night firing programme to last until 3 a.m., then to be followed by a half-hour’s barrage on the German reserve line, an intrusive ten minutes on their front system, and raise on to their reserve line. The infantry were to ‘go over’ at 3.40 a.m. It was a night of horror. The Germans knew something was in the wind and shortly after midnight they opened up their artillery on the British batteries who were harassing them. Their fire, on counter-battery work, was better organised than ours. They would put four or five batteries—two 5.9-in, two 4.2-in and a 77-mm all on the same target. High explosive, shrapnel and gas, all at once, for ten minutes. Then they would move on to another target. Twice they came on to us that night. A gun was blown up, a small heap of ammunition went up, an NCO killed and several men were wounded. We were lucky to get off so lightly. With our three remaining guns we turned on the intensive stuff at 3.30 a.m. and from then on we lived in one screaming holocaust of light and sound. Sound! Deafening, screaming, shrieking sound, the whole range of the eardrum, like 50,000 express trains tearing through the air—colliding and tearing on again. Orders could only be passed by signal, no one could hear a verbal order however loudly shouted. It was like daylight. The flickers and flashes as the shells left the guns, not only our gun, but every gun for miles, the yellow flash of bursting shells, the white glare of Very lights and star shells lit up the landscape as in one continuous lightning storm. Indeed man’s efforts outdid the worst electric storm I have ever seen both in light and sound—rendered it a puny imitation—yet it is the only thing I know which gives any idea of the sensations of that night.32
Lieutenant Kenneth Mealing, A Battery, 308th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 61st Division
After only a few days the men’s morale was rotting away in the mud, blood and gathering exhaustion. Everything was so difficult; nothing was easy; there never seemed to be any respite from the tension.
Nights like the first attack were becoming more frequent. Our smashed gun was replaced from another battery—it took us four hours to manhandle it 200 yards through the mud. Our senses were becoming numbed—we were fatalists, but jumpy ones at that. I had stopped trying to sleep in the mess and had made myself a shelter of earth-filled ammunition boxes with one sheet of corrugated iron above and one below. Rather like a tin coffin on the ground. Bits and pieces rattled on my roof, but none came through and I had no dread of the roof falling in as it had no heavy load of sandbags to bury me. We only left our guns to go forward to our OPs. We were never dry or clean, our food was always cold, gritty, out of tins, bread generally wet, nothing ever appetising, the noise of gunfire was practically continuous, if not in our immediate neighbourhood, then up or down the line to the north or south of us, so that the nerves were constantly stretched, listening and assaying continuously or subconsciously the depth and nearness of shell bursts. The skipper was getting nervy and jumpy. He was a decent chap, but sensitive and somewhat depressing to live with. He had a conviction he would be killed, although I believe I saw him in a London crowd after the war, so his premonition was not justified, but his moral force was not towards that Spartan attitude which a commander needed to inculcate in his command. I had no such premonition, but the Battle of the Somme seemed as if it might go on forever! Shells could not go on missing one for ever—the time must come when one would be standing on an unlucky spot at the wrong time—and then? The ever-present unforgettable knowledge that, if not today, then tomorrow, if not tomorrow, then some day later, but in any case eventually, your turn would come. That conviction would grow as the stalemate continued, week after week, month after month, world without end, Amen. This was what caused all your pals to get thin in the face, haggard and jumpy. They knew it too; that some day some beer-swilling Kraut would load a shell into a Krupp gun, and an invisible hand would write in invisible ink your name on that shell before the trigger was pulled. And what would it do to you? A clean ‘blot out’ or blinding insanity, incurable crippling—searing white-hot pain?33
Lieutenant Kenneth. Mealing, A Battery, 308th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 61st Division
Some could not stand it and used all their wiles to get away. The men they left behind had little sympathy and saw this as a simple case of desertion.
We were already short-handed and a casualty set us back to three officers only. A fourth was sent us. A nasty little worm whose name I forget. He was with us three days and then disappeared, an official note coming up from the local casualty clearing station to say that, ‘Lieutenant “X” had reported sick and been sent down the line with scabies!’ Hard words went after him from us: three days in the line and gets scabies.34
Lieutenant Kenneth Mealing, A Battery, 308th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 61st Division
After a few days Lieutenant Mealing was appointed as liaison officer to an infantry brigade with its headquarters deep in the bowels of the captured German fortress at Mouquet Farm.
I reported there to the General and his staff and was allotted a tiny room 30 feet below ground. It was indeed a marvellous place. Fully timbered, it had five entrances, a large mess, private rooms for the General, the members of his staff, for the telephonists, runners, ambulance men and clerks. My duty was to keep in touch with my divisional artillery headquarters by telephone, and with the three brigades of artillery covering the front under this general’s command. I was not supposed to leave the place from the time of my arrival until I was relieved. I had little desire to do so as, for whilst one was safe enough in Mouquet Farm, one was by no means safe going to or from it. Shells fell on, or near it, practically day and night—but it was impregnable with 30 feet of solid earth as its roof!35
Lieutenant Kenneth Mealing, A Battery, 308th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 61st Division
Relative physical safety may have been secured, but Mealing found there were moral dilemmas that could turn a man’s knees just as surely to water.
My telephone buzzed and an excited voice came over the wire, ‘SOS! Gas! SOS! Gas!’ At any time an attack might develop—a cloud of grey-coated Germans rise out of the ground and steadily march over No Man’s Land to attack our trenches. In this case the infantry would fire a rocket which would burst into three vertical red lights. These would hang in the sky, the artillery lookouts would call the guns into action, and within thirty seconds a hail of shells would descend on No Man’s Land to discourage the German advance. Sometimes the grey cloud would be gas, with gas-masked Germans following it, in this case a rocket with two greens and a red light would go up and the batteries respond, whilst all the men were warned to don their gas masks. When this message came through therefore if it were authentic no time was to be lost. But was it authentic? It was at night. I knew our infantry had a number of working parties out putting up barbed wire in No Man’s Land. If we ‘opened’ on our gas lines of fire, these men would be wiped out by our own guns. On the other hand men lived with their fingers on a hair-trigger, and if a gas attack was developing, failure of the artillery to get busy at once might cause a great disaster. For a young man of 21 this was no light responsibility. I dashed into the General’s room, ‘Have you any confirmation of SOS Gas, Sir?’ I asked. He said he had not, but that the brigade major was finding out. ‘Do you authorise the artillery to open fire on the gas lines, Sir?’ I asked. ‘No, I don’t,’ he said, ‘but that doesn’t relieve you of responsibility if it is confirmed!’ he added. ‘Then I ask your instructions, Sir, do you want artillery support or not?’ Before I got a reply, my signaller rang up to say that division wanted me on the line. The other end was the divisional artillery general. ‘What’s this about SOS gas?’ he said. ‘And why have
n’t we heard from you?’ I replied that the infantry-general refused to confirm or ask for artillery support and until I could obtain some confirmation I was not ordering fire to be opened. To my great relief he agreed with me—and to my greater relief, the alarm proved to be a false one, so no more was heard of it. There is no doubt I saved many men’s lives that night by keeping my head, but was I right? Supposing it had not been a false alarm—we should have ‘opened’ too late!36
Lieutenant Kenneth Mealing, A Battery, 308th Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 61st Division
Many of the gunners were becoming dispirited as the power of the guns faded and they found themselves unable to help the infantry, who were desperately struggling for their very existence in front of them.
The difficulty here is that we have to advance up a gentle slope giving absolutely no cover at all, and the Boche puts machine guns by the dozen in shell holes and bits of trenches well back (say 1,500 yards) from his real trenches. This means that there is a tremendous extent of ground for our artillery to try and cover, and although we sweep and search thoroughly, as soon as we lift from one spot, a machine gun jumps up there, and when our fire comes back there it goes to ground, and they come up in other places. It is costing us thousands of men to take two or three hundred yards of trenches, and until we have worked our way right up to the crest (the Bapaume—Péronne road) we shall always have to suffer the same. It is simply heart-breaking for the infantry who call it ‘pure murder’, but we gunners cannot possibly help more than we are doing, and the infantry don’t blame us at all. In fact they say our fire is very good, and that we are killing large numbers of the enemy for them.37
