Atkins’s second-in-command, rejoicing in the rank of temporary, unpaid lance corporal, is Henry Adnam, a solicitor’s articled clerk and public school man who volunteered in late 1915, not long before conscription came into force. Had he joined a year before he might have got straight in with a commission, but those easy days have gone, and if he wants one now he will have to prove himself on mornings like this, and seems in a fair way to be doing so. There are four long-standing members of the section, Abraham, Bertorelli, Jarvis and Wolverton, all also from south London, a reflection of the regiment’s pre-war recruiting base. They are known quantities and men of proven value – Jake, Bertie, Jackie and the Wolf amongst themselves, and to Atkins too, when the presence of an officer does not impose formality. Their preference for holding rations and food parcels in common is tinged with disregard of the property rights of those outside the charmed circle. If the company finds itself diffy (that is, deficient) of any of its stores when they are next checked by the regimental quartermaster sergeant, the Wolf will be let out to prowl and the missing items will be ‘found’, perhaps with file marks where serial numbers used to be.
The remaining three members of the section, Arlington, Kersley and Pryce-Owen, are recent arrivals, young 1916 conscripts drafted in through Etaples to replace men killed or wounded in the steady low-level attrition of a winter’s line-holding. Arlington is from Middlesbrough, Kersley from Shaftesbury and Pryce-Owen from North Wales. Nowadays men are sent forward from the base without much regard for cap badge or local origin: these three became Queensmen at Etaples, and, as Jacques puts it, do not know ‘Braganza’ (the regimental march) from a Number One burner. It is too early to know what to make of them. The three are inclined to chum up, and this morning they lie side by side. Disregarding the allotted spacing of three yards between men, Kersley has wriggled across to Pryce-Owen, whose first battle this will be, and the tips of their boots are touching.
Only Atkins, Wolverton and Pryce-Owen have wristwatches: Wolverton’s belonged to a previous platoon commander who mislaid it somewhere between the front-line trench where he was sniped and the regimental aid post only 250 yards behind. The worst thing about being watchless on a morning like this is not knowing how close the battle is: for many soldiers it is like standing on the scaffold with no idea of when the trap will be sprung. Even the fortunate few find their watches little help, for their hands seem to be sticking: this is the longest 5 o’clock in the history of the world.
All wear khaki tunic and trousers, with long puttees wound from ankle to calf. The comfortable service caps of the past have been replaced by battle bowlers, the broad-brimmed steel helmet, screened against shine by stretched hessian. The men have khaki webbing – a broad waistbelt, with water bottle on the right, entrenching tool and bayonet scabbard on the left, and braces which support ammunition pouches at the front and a haversack (containing ‘the unexpired portion of the day’s rations’, a notionally waterproof ‘gas cape’ and a spare pair of socks) in the centre of the back. Large packs, now almost never carried at times like this, have been left with the transport in a village three miles back. It may be days before they are seen again, and there is always the danger that somebody else will have seen to them first. Four of Atkins’s men are bombers, whose rifles will be slung from their left shoulders during the battle, and who will throw hand grenades, the popular and (generally) reliable Mills bomb, carried in the pouches of a webbing waistcoat. Four are bayonet men, who will work in concert with the bombers, clashing around the Grecian key traverses of German trenches as soon as the grenades explode, and then holding their ground while the bombers come up to repeat the process.
For the advance all, save the bombers, will carry their Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifles with long sword-bayonets fixed, at the high port, obliquely across the chest. The section immediately behind comprises Lewis-gunners, their fat-barrelled machine guns with drum magazines on top. Corporal Chamberlain of No. 2 Section is kneeling over a Lewis gun whose ‘No. 1’, who carries and fires the weapon, is having trouble with the magazine. A dry snap tells us that Chamberlain has clipped it with the heel of his hand and it is now securely seated. His is that sort of hand.
Second Lieutenant Baker, the platoon commander, ghosts gently past Corporal Atkins’s section with a glance and a grin. He wears the same uniform as his men and carries rifle and bayonet. Only a bronze star on each shoulder shows that he is an officer, and the ribbon of the Distinguished Conduct Medal (which he won as a corporal at the first battle of Ypres in November 1914) reveals that he is no stranger to this sort of morning. The company commander, Captain Roseveare, stands alongside Company Sergeant Major O’Hara 100 yards back, squarely in the middle of his company. Roseveare is taking occasional glances at his watch (his, too, seems stuck fast) and looking across to his left where his colleague, the commander of B Company, is just visible against the first hint of dawn’s light.
They will never be quite sure what caused it, though first guesses are right, and it was in fact the repositioning of Private Desmond that alerted a German sentry. There is just enough light for his NCO to make out shapes beyond the wire, and a signal rocket shoots up from the German front line, and bursts into a spectacular golden shower. This is an urgent appeal for fire on what the British call the SOS, on which guns are laid when not otherwise engaged: in this case it is the valley west of the spur, where attackers might reasonably be expected to form up. And, sure enough, the call is promptly answered. The shells arrive before the sound of the 77-mm field guns that fired them, and a barrage of tightly-packed explosions, with six guns firing ten rounds a minute, falls in the bottom of the little valley. It is as well that the Germans are firing blind. An hour before they would have caught the battalion moving up, but now the valley floor is empty. Indeed, the barrage is so regular and methodical that the rear companies of the Manchesters, moving up towards the right, are able to advance to their forming up place by avoiding it as if it was a physical obstacle.
The German guns are still firing when there is a single dull thump somewhere behind the battalion, like dad slamming the front door after an evening on the town, thinks Atkins. It is a single 18-pounder of 7th Division’s artillery, seconds ahead of the barrage programme. Almost immediately the other field guns join in, twelve six-gun batteries of 18-pounders and a single battery of 4.5-inch howitzers. Bigger, heavier guns further back add their lethal contribution: four 60-pounders, and two mighty 9.2-inch guns of a siege battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, named Charlie Chaplin and Vesta Tilley by popular vote of their gunners. The shells sound like trains rushing overhead: for the infantry the sensation is like nothing so much as standing under a railway bridge on a busy line, with the shells sounding ‘like an iron shod tyre going round a gritty corner of a road’. Although the closest shells are bursting over the German front line, about 200 yards away, their din is terrific. Normal conversation would be impossible and the shock of each explosion, even at this distance, tugs at loose clothing and equipment.
Although Atkins does not know it, the gunners are not trying to destroy the German front line: that will take more time and metal than they have available. Instead, they seek to neutralise it by keeping its garrison underground, and so the field guns burst their shrapnel 30 feet over the German trenches, scattering them with lead balls. Most German gun positions were identified from the air in the days leading up to the attack, and the fire of the one hostile battery already in action audibly slackens as Vesta Tilley plants a monstrous high-explosive shell between two gunpits, half filling them with earth, and killing, wounding or concussing men for a hundred yards around.
At 5.15 the platoon commanders blow their whistles and the men rise to their feet and move forwards at a walk. As they breast the rise they can clearly see the bursts of shrapnel, white against the grey dawn, over the German trenches, and the German barbed wire, gapped by shelling and patrols over the past week, offers little obstacle. The leading platoons are in the German forward trench,
just in front of the railway embankment, without losing a man. Once there, the drills take over.
The trench, an outpost of the main Hindenburg line, prepared the previous year when the old Somme defences lay in front of it, is good even by German standards. Its sides are stoutly revetted with wood, and thick duckboards on its floor cover a deep drainage sump. Jumping in is easy, for the firestep rises from the trench bottom along the side facing the British. Getting out will be harder, for the back wall of the trench, topped by a broad earth parados, rises up like a cliff. The only sign of human occupation is a single dead German lying on his back on the duckboards staring at the sky. But when Abraham and Jarvis throw grenades down the steps of a dugout there are shrieks from below and a desperate cry of ‘Kamerad’. Two Germans struggle up the steps half carrying a third. Kersley and Pryce-Owen, bayonet men for the bombers here, seem torn between aggression and embarrassment as they shove the prisoners against the side of the trench. Lance Corporal Henry Adnam will watch them until the company commander allocates men from one of the follow-up waves to escort them back across No Man’s Land.
Atkins stands behind Abraham and Jarvis as they lob grenades over the next traverse. Two grenades, two explosions, a point so often taught but so easily and fatally forgotten. Atkins leads the way round the corner to find a short run of empty trench reeking of freshly-turned earth, wet wood and explosive. Kersley and Pryce-Owen pause at the next turning, and the bombers throw two more grenades. This time something is different. There is the scuffling of feet on duckboards before the grenades explode, and Atkins arrives in the next section of trench at the same time as a German senior NCO enters it from the other side.
Although he has been in France for about two years, most of the Germans Atkins has seen have been either dead or prisoners. There is certainly no mistaking this one’s purpose or determination. He has a trim beard, and wears a cap rather than the coal-scuttle helmets of the two soldiers behind him. A thick row of silver braid round his collar marks his rank; on his left breast is an Iron Cross. He fires his automatic pistol twice: time stands still as the empty cartridge cases catch the light as they spin up and away. There is a crash behind Atkins as Abraham falls forwards, hit in the chest, and then the German’s momentum carries him straight onto Atkins’s bayonet. He has no time to think, but leans forward onto his rifle, setting the bayonet firmly: he then gives it a quarter-turn (‘making the wound not only fatal, but immortal’, as base warriors, who have never seen a trench, like to say) and tugs it out easily enough. The German falls backwards with blood pulsing from his throat, but it is a measure of his resolve that he fires once more, at the very doors of death, missing Atkins by a hair’s breadth. Then he drums his heels on the duckboards and is still.
The other two Germans take the hint, drop their rifles and raise their hands, crying Kamerad. There is a deafening bang just behind Atkins as Jarvis shoots one straight between the eyes: only the seconds spent working his bolt to chamber another round enable Atkins to grab his rifle by the fore-end, jerk the muzzle upwards and yell: ‘No, no! They’ve jacked!’ Jarvis stops at once, like a drunk suddenly sobering up, turns to look at Abraham lying on the trench floor too obviously dead, swears, spits, slings his rifle and takes another grenade out of his waistcoat. He is just about to throw it when there is a loud shout of ‘Manchester, Manchester’ from behind the next traverse. And round it stalks a little corporal with a toothless grin, a grenade in his hand, and a lanky bayonet man behind him. ‘’Ello, choom,’ he says. The junction is complete.1
SWITZERLAND TO THE SEA
The Western Front drew men of my grandfathers’ generation to it like a malign and irresistible magnet. During the course of the First World War about 4 million British soldiers served there. From March 1916 there were never less than a million on the Western Front, and the total peaked at 1,721,056 on 1 August 1917. Although this book is concerned primarily with the British soldier, it is important not to forget that the British Expeditionary Force in France contained substantial Empire and Dominion contingents (from India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa), and adding these to the narrowly British figure sees the total number of men under British command top two million in the summer of 1917.2 Some 1,724,000 British officers and men were killed, wounded or reported missing on the Western Front, about five casualties for every nine men sent out.3
Almost 400,000 Canadians went to France, where 210,000 were killed or wounded. Newfoundland, then not legally part of Canada, lost 3,661 casualties, not including Newfoundlanders serving, as many did, in other national contingents. The Australians, with over 300,000 men in France, suffered over 180,000 casualties, and the New Zealanders, with about 90,000 in Europe, almost 47,000. The Indian Army sent almost 160,000 men to France, and some 25,000 of them were killed or wounded. Although the bulk of South African soldiers fought in Africa, more than 14,000 were killed or wounded in France. There was inevitably friction between British and Dominion contingents, with Poms v. Aussies spats the best known. The tendency for popular history to emphasise national achievements at the expense of collective effort often makes it hard to remember that this was a giant imperial endeavour. But just as there was suffering and misery enough for all, so too ought the credit to be more evenly distributed.
From Britain’s point of view the Western Front was easily the most expensive of the war’s theatres: Gallipoli, the next most deadly (though it lasted less than a year), killed or wounded two of every nine men sent out. Although the Second World War was a far greater tragedy in human affairs (for instance, Russian military dead probably numbered 10 million) the British armed forces lost 264,000 killed in all theatres, far less than half those killed on the Western Front a generation earlier. The Western Front thus has the melancholy distinction of being the costliest theatre in which British troops have ever fought.
And yet the front needs to be kept in proper perspective. It would be wrong to suggest that it was more dreadful, in the First World War, than Gallipoli in its scorching, stinking summer or, on the Italian front, than the Julian Alps in mid-winter. And it would be equally wrong to rank it worse than some Second World War clashes, such as ‘The Kokoda Trail in New Guinea, flooded Dutch polders, the Hurtgen forest and the Reichswald, an Arakan monsoon, frozen foxholes in the Ardennes and the Apennines, the beaches of Tarawa and the putrid slime of Okinawa’.4 But what distinguishes the Western Front is its dreadful combination of loss of life, qualitative misery and its sheer, mind-numbing scale, made somehow more strange by its ‘ridiculous proximity’ to Britain.
In all, nearly 750,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers, sailors and airmen died on the Western Front. They rest in more than 1,000 military and 2,000 civilian cemeteries, Over 300,000 have no known graves, and are commemorated on Memorials to the Missing like the Menin Gate in Ypres and the Thiepval Memorial on the Somme. These cemeteries and memorials mark the course of the old front line as it weaves across Belgium and down into France, with concrete pillboxes, preserved (and some more evocatively unpreserved) trenches, whilst starkly rebuilt villages trace the war’s path.
The Western Front ran for about 460 miles, depending on the ebb and flow of battle, from the dunes of the North Sea coast, across alluvial Flanders, laced with drainage ditches and speckled with pollarded willows. Even the salient which bulged round the little Belgian town of Ypres had once looked handsome, as Lieutenant Guy Chapman reflected when he looked at it in the spring of 1917.
Two mornings later we sat on the Tower Hamlets ridge and surveyed the desolation. Many months hence, I was standing on this spot with a major in the Bedfords. ‘I was here in nineteen-fourteen,’ he said; ‘then you could not see half a mile for the woods.’ It was scarcely credible. In nineteen-seventeen, it was as bare as a man’s hand. It could not, one thought, ever have been otherwise. Could such destruction have been wreaked? Were these puke acres ever growing fields of clover, beet or cabbage? Did a clear stream ever run through this squalmy glen? This, the map tells yo
u, was once a magnate’s estate. Now the lawns are bare of grass. The ornamental water has been replaced by more recent landscape gardeners; it is a quag of islands and stagnant pools, over which foul gases hang.5
Henry Williamson, who knew the salient as a private in the London Rifle Brigade in 1914 and later as an officer in the Bedfords, observed that it:
had the outline of a skull, with teeth trying to crack Ypres … A fit man can easily walk round the skull’s outline in a day; but in ’17, could he have walked without human interference, he would have dropped exhausted, before he had finished a hundredth part of the way, and been drowned with his face under the thin top mud.6
Graham Seton-Hutchison, infantry officer turned machine-gunner, mused on the way that nicknames, chosen when the world was green, now veiled nameless horrors. ‘God knows what cynical wit christened these splintered stumps Inverness Copse or Stirling Wood,’ he wrote. ‘And who ordained that these treacherous heaps of filth should be known as Stirling Castle or Northampton Farm?’7
Further south came the Lens coalfield with its winding gear, slag heaps and miners’ cottages, and then the escarpment of Vimy Ridge north of Arras. There the front line climbed onto the great chalk expanse of Artois and Picardy – open, confident countryside which lifted the spirits of soldiers marching down from the mud of the Ypres salient, partly because it looked like the last bit of England that most of them had seen, for it was ‘effectively an extension of the Weald anticline in southern England’.8 Lieutenant G. F. Ellenberger of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry described his arrival on the uplands above the Somme in the spring of 1916:
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