Somme

by Peter Hart

  Lieutenant Colonel Alfred Irwin, 8th Battalion, East Surrey Regiment, 55th Brigade, 18th Division

  In the circumstances, the II Corps troops did relatively well south of the Ancre, capturing Desire Trench, although falling short of the village of Grandcourt. North of the Ancre, the V Corps made some small advances and successfully consolidated the new line. At the end of it all the tactical situation had not materially altered but the cost had been high and the morale of the men began to suffer serious damage.

  The suffering is terrible and some of the men are about mad with the cold and the exposure. Snow in the morning followed by rain all day has made things pitiable. What I am seriously thinking now is that those boys lying stiff and cold all around Beaumont Hamel, insensible to it all, are perhaps lucky, and better off now than we are. This is what is called dying for your country, but it is actually selling your soul to a few profiteers for a shilling, and being massacred to satisfy their selfish purposes. And they call it WAR—and a legitimate thing at that.57

  Private Arthur Wrench, Headquarters, 154th Brigade, 51st Division

  Behind the waves of attacking troops came the medical officers working as part of the teams of men clearing up the battlefield. They were searching everywhere and anywhere that a wounded man, whether British or German, might have sought shelter in extremis. Some of the sights they saw stretched them to the limit.

  On descending about forty steps one was in a large floored and timbered chamber, some 50 feet long; and at the further end a second set of steps led to a similar chamber, one side of each being lined with a double layer of bunks filled with dead and wounded Germans, the majority of whom had become casualties early on the morning of the 13th. The place was, of course, in utter darkness; and, when we flashed our lights on and the wounded saw our escort with rifles ready, there was an outbreak of, ‘Kamerad!’ while a big bevy of rats squeaked and scuttled away from their feast on the dead bodies on the floor. The stench was indescribably abominable: for many of the cases were gas-gangrenous.58

  Captain David Rorie, 1/2nd Highland Field Ambulance, 51st (Highland) Division

  In the end they found fourteen Germans still alive. The plight of such wounded men can hardly be imagined: in total darkness, without food or water, drifting in and out of consciousness and with no way of getting help. In such cases it must have been a blessed relief as they slowly slipped away into oblivion. After that it was only a matter of time before the seeds of their dissolution hatched forth into maggots. The last two months on the Somme had brought a dark Gothic horror to the battlefields.

  I have found a Hun aid post and dwell undisturbed beneath many tons of chalk. I regard this aid post as my very own as I was there first and had to clean it out. The chief amusement was the removal of a very dead Hun in a waterproof sheet. He was of a piebald hue and dropped maggots wherever he was carried. He would insist on sliding out of the sheet, and the scooping of him back was not only difficult, but at times impossible. It was not the whole of him at all when we got him outside.59

  Medical Officer Captain Charles McKerrow, 10th Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers, 68th Brigade, 23rd Division

  Many soldiers attained, through necessity, an impervious callousness to the horrors that they encountered. They seemed oblivious to the graveyard that surrounded them and in which they lived day by day. Hard pragmatism was the underlying principle; if they were to survive they must conquer the environment that threatened them.

  I had some German canned horse and bully beef for dinner which I heated up in a ‘billy cooker’. We were drinking Fritz’s coffee we found in some of their water bottles in No Man’s Land about three to four weeks old. Eating your meals with dead Germans’ boots staring you in the face out of the parapet. Also we are using the dead bodies of Fritz to step on in the trenches to get out of the mud—we don’t take any more notice of a dead person now than we do of a rat.60

  Private Herbert Butt, 102nd Battalion, 11th Canadian Brigade, 4th Canadian Division

  But even the most hard-bitten soldiers could feel revulsion or nausea at the dissolute state that some bodies had attained. It was impossible to conceive that the mess in front of them had once been a man just like them.

  On my preliminary investigation in the dim light I could see only his field boots. I had come without my torch. Subsequently, on looking closer, I found that his flesh was moving with maggots. More precisely, I noticed that portions of his uniform were heaving up and down at points where they touched the seething mass below. The smell was pretty awful. None of the men would touch him, although troops as a rule are not noticeably fastidious. The job was unanimously voted to me, because it’s supposed, quite wrongly, that doctors don’t mind. I went down the stairway with a length of telephone wire and lashed it round the poor fellow’s feet. We hauled him up and dragged him away for some distance. The corpse left behind it a trail of wriggling, sightless maggots, which recalled the trail in a paper-chase. Having moulded a shell hole as a grave, we erected a board at the man’s head, ‘An unknown German Soldier’ with date of burial.61

  Medical Officer Lieutenant Lawrence Gameson, 73rd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 15th Division

  The heedless shells ripped up the ground paying no respect to the burial grounds where the previous victims of the fighting had been interred. Now they were roughly exhumed and splattered across the shell holes once more.

  Not a single cross is left standing over a German soldier’s grave, but some of the bodies buried there are torn up again and lie scattered all over the place. It is horrible to see. Perhaps the Germans are not even human to violate the last resting place of their own men who have given their lives for their country, and it strikes the there is not much glory these days in dying for your country.62

  Private Arthur Wrench, Headquarters, 154th Brigade, 51st Division

  It was not, however, such horrors that persuaded Haig that it was necessary to close down the Somme offensive after the attack of 18 November 1916. Sheer military logic dictated that the cost of making further major efforts to try and radically improve the tactical position would be too high. It was simply impossible for the men to get forward in such extreme ground and weather conditions. This was not just wearing out the Germans; it was fast eroding the body and soul of the British Army.

  A new set of plans had been drawn up under the general control of the French commander-in-chief, General Joseph Joffre at the Chantilly Conference of 15 November 1916. According to the new plans 1917 would be the new ‘year of victory’. During the winter the pressure would be maintained on the Western Front, at least so far as weather permitted. The Allies would then launch twin British and French offensives north and south of the Somme. Rawlinson was very concerned to limit the degree of any winter fighting. He was firmly of the opinion that his divisions had reached the end of their tether.

  All the divisions allotted to the Fourth Army for the winter operations have taken part in the Battle of the Somme twice, most of them three or four times. They have had very heavy losses amounting in some cases from 7,000 to 10,000 men, and have suffered very severely in officers, NCOs and specialists. Experience proves that after severe periods of fighting in which divisions have had heavy losses, the time taken by a battalion to recover and regain its state of efficiency depends almost entirely on what nucleus of trained officers and NCOs remains available to train and weld together the old and new elements. In every offensive action that is carried out an ever increasing toll is taken of these priceless instructors and if battalions are bled dry there is serious risk of lowering the standard of fighting efficiency to a point which may render doubtful the success of the operations in the coming spring campaign.63

  Lieutenant General Sir Henry Rawlinson, Headquarters, Fourth Army

  For the time being at least it was clear that the British offensive was over.

  But what of the Germans? They had survived the great crisis at the end of September only by the skin of their teeth. They lo
oked forward to a gloomy future as defeat seemed to be the only likely outcome to the war.

  GHQ had to bear in mind that the enemy’s great superiority in men and material would be even more painfully felt in 1917 than in 1916. They had to face the danger that ‘Somme fighting’ would soon break out at various points on our fronts, and that even our troops would not be able to withstand such attacks indefinitely, especially if the enemy gave us no time for rest and for the accumulation of material. Our position was uncommonly difficult and a way out hard to find. We could not contemplate an offensive ourselves, having to keep our reserves available for defence. There was no hope of a collapse of any of the Entente Powers. If the war lasted our defeat seemed inevitable. Economically we were in a highly unfavourable position for a war of exhaustion. At home our strength was badly shaken. Questions of the supply of foodstuffs caused great anxiety, and so, too, did questions of morale. We were not undermining the spirits of the enemy populations with starvation blockades and propaganda. The future looked dark.64

  General Erich Ludendorff, German Headquarters

  Haig and his Intelligence Officer Brigadier Sir John Charteris had not been wrong in detecting signs of deterioration in the German position, but they had underestimated the ability of a mighty nation state to withstand hardship and loss.

  The Germans began to look elsewhere for a chance of long-term victory and, unhappily for them, looked to a return to unrestricted submarine warfare in an effort to ‘starve’ the British of the food and resources they needed as an island to survive. This ultimately led to the United States joining the war and merely worsened the overall German situation. On the Western Front they adopted an essentially defensive stance, chastened by their experiences on the offensive at Verdun as well as the long horror of the Somme. New defensive techniques were slowly emerging to counter the ever-increasing sophistication of the British massed artillery. The success of using shell holes as machine-gun posts led inexorably to the idea of an elastic defence system, dominated by concrete pillbox strong points with interconnected fields of machine-gun fire dominating vast fields of barbed wire. Instead of always fighting to the last with reserve troops committed to counter-attacking, the front-line troops were henceforth permitted to retreat rather than be overrun. Counter-attack divisions were held further back, beyond the range of the British field artillery, ready to strike just as any British attack was running out of steam. Much of the fighting of 1917 would be a complex clash between the concept of ‘bite and hold’ and ‘elastic’ defence.

  The great Somme offensive had ended, but the fighting could not simply be switched off and many of the men in the front line would not have known that ‘The Battle’ was over. Minor piecemeal operations continued to flare up as both sides squabbled over the exact final course of the trenches that wove their complex interlocked pattern across the desolate lunarscape of the Somme. The guns still roared out their message of hate and all that long miserable winter men would continue to die in a welter of frozen mud and blood.

  As the dust settled on the human catastrophe there were sad discoveries that seemed to bring the battle full circle to the opening tragedy. The late advances towards Beaumont Hamel and Thiepval allowed those soldiers lucky enough to survive the intervening five months to search the original No Man’s Land for traces of their old friends and companions who had been killed during the first failed attack on 1 July—it seemed a lifetime ago. So it was that Lieutenant Edgar Lord once again tried to find the body of his long-lost best friend.

  I decided to look at the Thiepval battlefield, thinking as a vain hope I might look for Ivan Doncaster. A miracle took me to the place where he lay. I might have been a mile away in any direction as I had not been on the ground before. We found him about 30 yards from the German wire along with many of his comrades. They must have gone steadily forward to their deaths amid a murderous hail of machine-gun bullets. What a sad task it was identifying his skeleton by his hair, shirt, breeches and lastly by his identity disc, which I removed to send to his people. With a volunteer or two, we fashioned a shell hole into a form of a grave and reverently laid him to rest, covering his body with earth and saying a prayer for his parents, who were even yet, possibly hoping he was a prisoner. I fashioned a cross from pieces of wood, inscribed his name and regiment, and took a photograph of his grave in front of the Boche wire. A skeleton hanging on the wire with a tattered shirt fluttering in the breeze made a very grisly background to the scene. There but for the grace of God was I!65

  Lieutenant Edgar Lord, 15th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, 96th Brigade, 32nd Division

  Despite the sacrifice of Ivan Doncaster and so many of his men there would certainly be no breakthrough on the Somme in 1916. The Germans had held the British onslaught. The war would go on deep into 1917 at the very least. The Germans would have the winter months to rebuild their defences, dig new lines of trenches across the fields of France and Belgium, build new pillboxes, replenish stocks of munitions and train a whole new generation of young soldiers to take their place in the line of battle. For the British there was the grim prospect of doing it all over again almost from scratch. Although they could not know it, the new killing fields of Arras, Ypres and the dread Passchendaele Ridge beckoned them all. The Somme had raised the threshold of total war and presaged a new era of even greater horror on the Western Front.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Assessment

  THE SHEER HORROR OF the Somme has for a long time been part of British twentieth century mythology. The overall context of the Great War has long been forgotten and the teaching of the subject reduced to an adjunct of English literature that can be brutally summarised in just five words: ‘the pity of it all’. Politicians are portrayed as Machiavellian, but simultaneously weak, generals are stupid, soldiers are brave helpless victims and war poets—war poets are the latter-day saints made flesh. A typical example of this crude sentimental approach is the treatment given to the first disastrous casualty figures from 1 July—the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Often the figure of 57,470, of which 19,240 were killed, is not enough and emotional vampires wilfully exaggerate this to a claim of 60,000 dead. The overall British casualties during the battle are, indeed, higher than any sane individual would like to comprehend at 419,654, of which some 131,000 were dead. To this should be added the 204,253 French casualties and the approximately 450,000—600,000 German casualties. Each and every one was a tragedy, especially if one believes that every life has a value that transcends mere numbers. Yet it is still commonplace to see journalists referring to the ‘millions’ of British dead. In fact, the whole British Empire lost 908,371 dead in the entire course of the Great War. It is asserted that the flower of British manhood had been slaughtered; indeed, that Britain had sacrificed her future virility on the Western Front. Communities are pictured absolutely denuded of men and the decline of the whole empire is put down to this ‘blood’ forfeit. This is simply nonsense: the casualties were dreadful, but hyperbolic magnification surely only diminishes their sacrifice in trying to pretend that it was somehow greater than it was.

  The Somme was so awful not because of the venality or stupidity of individuals, but because the leaders of the great Western nations had set themselves to resolve long-standing problems through war, with the active or passive encouragement of much of their civilian populations. War demanded that these nations strain every sinew to defeat each other. War meant the mobilisation of all their men and resources: the very power of the European nation states meant that the numbers of armed men and the powers of destruction they wielded exceeded anything that had previously been dreamed of. As soldiers struck down their enemies, more appeared, springing forward from the schools and railheads; new weapons took an ever greater toll on flesh and blood. Killing a few thousand men barely dented the manpower resources of the modern industrial state; millions marched to the drum and millions would be killed, maimed and mentally crippled before one side or the other was so worn down they co
uld no longer struggle on. Once such a global war had been declared then the future of a generation was handed to cold-hearted military professionals like Sir Douglas Haig, Erich von Falkenhayn and Joseph Joffre. The fighting was not futile unless the war was futile. The responsibility for all the manifold sacrifices lies not so much with the generals as with the enthusiasm with which the world embraced war in 1914.

  The Battle of the Somme demonstrated that until an enemy nation state had been defeated or at least ground down, then there geographical objectives mattered very little—the only objective was the long-term destruction of the German Army. Bapaume was a first-day objective on 1 July; when the battle finished on 18 November it may have been a little closer to hand, but it still lay behind three lines of German defence works. Yet the desire to avoid more ‘Somme fighting’ led the Germans voluntarily to withdraw to the new Hindenburg Line some 25 miles further back in the spring of 1917. This extended retreat was not a coincidence or some fanciful whim of the Germans—they did it to shorten their line and forestall the imminent renewal of British and French pressure on the Somme. They abandoned the tactical position imposed on them by the incremental advances of the British and French and retreated to one of their own choosing—while they still could. The Allies gained much ground, but the tactical advantage had passed once more to the Germans. The destroyed strip of ground they gained availed the Allies little when push came to shove once more in 1917.

  The Somme shows why the hopes and plans of the ‘Easterners’ such as David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, were an irrelevance to the main battle; they only diffused the Allies strength on sideshows that could not materially influence the main battles on the Western Front where the war would be decided. All the divisions despatched to Gallipoli, Salonika and Mesopotamia merely allowed the peripheral Turkish and Bulgarian allies of the Germans the opportunity to strike painful blows at the British and French, sucking in ever more of their precious troops, guns and munitions that would have been far better deployed on the Western Front. Defeat at Gallipoli probably did greater damage to the standing of the British Empire than any imaginary victory could ever have achieved. A defensive posture against Turkey and Bulgaria would have been far more conducive to a shortened war than any pipedreams of an easy ‘back-door’ route to Germany that, in the desire for an easy option, flagrantly ignored the tactical and strategical imperatives of Continental war. Where, indeed, would the German High Command have preferred to see the half a million men diverted to Mesopotamia? Fighting their way up the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers through a disease-infested swampy plain or providing another two army corps to be thrown into the decisive actions of the Western Front? The answer is obvious.