Seasoned soldiers had heard it all before and such talk washed over them; they knew what they had to do. Yet regardless of any misgivings the men might have, the anticipation was such that most simply wanted to get on with the job. As the hours ground down to zero, anxiety grew exponentially. Adrenalin and personal fears of failure or letting mates down allowed few to get any rest, let alone sleep. Each man would be wrapped up in his own thoughts. There was no chance of turning back, no option but to go on and leave fate to decide who lived and who died.
The moment of going over the top, as one soldier wrote, was like plunging into a pool of freezing water. Only as soldiers were on their way, did wretched anxiety dissipate as they were forced to focus on the job ahead. But how to describe the ensuing chaos, as men began to approach the enemy’s trench where, for the first time, they might see the grey hue of a German uniform?
Private Bernard Stevenson’s terse, staccato description of the fighting on 1 July 1916 gives a good impression. He was serving with the 1/7th Sherwood Foresters, also known as the Robin Hood Rifles.
We go over the top. Lieutenant Wilkins leads five platoon. ‘Come on the Robins’. Out of the smoke come bullets. Someone falls dead. On we go. Thro’ the German wire and into their front line trench. Our artillery has not stopped and is dropping shells near us. A red light is burned to try and stop them. Wilkins wounded in the arm. Sergeant Buckley slightly wounded, also Berry. Captain Leman sees Germans emerging from the smoke between their first and second lines. Shoots at them with his revolver. Is shot in arm and face. Germans advance with bombs from right and left. Everyone attends to himself. I tumble out of trench and see small trench just behind their wire, about six yards away. Get in this. Germans throw a bomb into it and the dirt half buries me. Lie doggo.
Driven on by fear and aggression, the violence perpetrated by both sides was unspeakable, and the vast majority of soldiers who would talk about the war, write diaries or memoirs, even those willing to impart gruesome details, still glossed over the worst features of hand-to-hand combat. One anonymous account of the aftermath of the fighting around the German stronghold known as the Quadrilateral gave, in a single sentence, some indication of the frenzied fighting that had gone on there. ‘I entered their trenches later in the day,’ the man wrote, ‘and I saw, among the men dead, a German with a Durham pick-axe in his chest from side to side, embedded under his left arm-pit right up to the helve – surely a blow that only a Durham pitman could deal.’
Not many wrote like this but Private Frank Harris, serving with 6th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, was more descriptive than most.
Here the bastards come. There are, however, many Yorkshire Light Infantry, also Durham Light Infantry, who have managed to survive, and, whilst we are famished, parched, unbelievably fatigued, plastered with muck and filth in our eyes and teeth. Whilst we are more or less resigned, light a woodbine if you have one, we accept this bloody challenge, pull our belts in, deploy, spit on our hands, and wait, for Fritz to come a little nearer . . . This lot though, pal, sure hate our guts as we hate theirs. Maybe the equivalent of our Guards, certainly tall and burly enough. They have also, like us, been taught to kill, the creed of war of course.
I was a bloody fool I suppose when I fell on top of a Boche who had just sunk his bayonet into one of my best pals a foot or so away. I lunged myself, missed, parried, then got the ‘Squarehead’ in the breast, but then, not content with that, followed him to ground, thumbs gouging at his throat until a bloke dragged me away. ‘You can only kill the bastards once,’ he observed. I shot a glance at my pal, with a penetrated artery, undoubtedly no chance, gave the Boche some boot, and resumed the melee, and what a ghastly bloody business it was.
Clearing trenches was mayhem but it was organised mayhem, and techniques for doing so were developed and perfected: bombs round the next corner of the trench and, following the explosions, a dart round the traverse by the bayonet men to finish off anyone resisting or not. Soldiers would systematically work their way down the line as the enemy fought to the last, attempted to surrender or took flight over the top back to the next line of trenches. The murderous trade of taking and consolidating the trench was assumed by men who, by their training, were automatons in action, temporarily devoid of humanity. They had to be; circumstances demanded it.
Guy Chapman, an officer with the Royal Fusiliers, recalled an incident in which an enemy officer was killed after offering a pair of field glasses to a sergeant as a token of surrender. The sergeant took the glasses, thanked the officer, then shot him through the head, killing him instantly. A fellow officer of Chapman’s witnessed the shooting and was at a loss what to do.
‘I don’t see that you can do anything,’ Chapman cautioned the officer. ‘He must have been half mad with excitement by the time he got into that trench. I don’t suppose he ever thought what he was doing. If you start a man killing, you can’t turn him off again like an engine. After all, he is a good man.’
But now and again something would happen that would bring a man to his senses, something completely out of the ordinary. Private Percy Clare of the 7th East Surrey Regiment had waited for the barrage to lift from the German trenches before he and his comrades rose to their feet and advanced with levelled bayonets.
The resistance was greater than one would have expected after such a pounding from our artillery. In the portion of trench that I entered I found two stricken Huns very badly wounded from our shellfire. One was about 48-50 years of age I guessed; the other a mere boy possibly 20 years, bearing a remarkable resemblance to the other. I next noticed that their hands were interlocked as though they had determined to die together. It was easy to see that they were father and son, and deep compassion for them took possession of me. It distressed me to see them in such a case. In spite of the entreaty of our C.O., voicing higher commands, to show no mercy, I felt as sorry for them as I should had they been my own friends instead of my enemies. I would have stayed by them had it been possible to see that they were spared and handed over to our stretcher-bearers.
The faces of those two fellows, so ghastly white, their features livid and quivering, their eyes so full of pain, horror and terror, perhaps each on account of the other. Their breasts were bare showing horrible gaping wounds which without doubt were mortal. One or two of our fellows passing by raised their bayonets as if to thrust them through when their cries for mercy were truly piteous. Plenty of men could be found who never bayoneted any but wounded Germans, and I stood for a few moments restraining any who in the lust of killing, and having in mind our C.O.’s lecture, might thrust them through. Poor fellows, they were doomed. I had to go forward.
The third German trench was some way ahead, and our wave of attackers had dwindled so that reinforcement was necessary. This was effected by combing in half the moppers-up wave behind us. One of these was a man named Bean, a butcher by trade. I discovered from him that he had come across those two poor wounded Huns in mopping up and had thrust them both through the abdomen with his bayonet, not even troubling to see that he had really put an immediate end to their miseries. My indignation consumed me, and friends though we had been I told him what I thought of it and from this moment we had no use for each other. I told him he would never survive this action; that I didn’t believe God would suffer so cowardly and cruel a deed to go unpunished. Bean himself was killed on 3 May, and it was I who first discovered his body.
Often the first Germans anyone saw were those who, half stupefied by the bombardment, robbed of all will to fight, surrendered tamely as their trenches were approached. Private Albert Andrews of the 19th Manchester Regiment watched as dozens ran through the advancing Tommies, hands in the air, desperate to reach Allied lines and captivity. Those Germans who stayed to fight, shooting until the last moment before throwing up their hands, were usually given short shrift. There were no rules of war, no rights of the prisoner in these moments. Individuals chose in their own maddened state whether prisoners would be accepted.
Private Andrews jumped into the front-line German trench, or, rather, what was left of it.
Just near a dugout door there was a big barrel. As soon as I jumped in, a German leapt from behind the barrel but I was already on my guard and I had my bayonet on his chest. He was trembling and looked half mad with his hands above his head, saying something to me which I did not understand. All I could make out was that he did not want me to kill him! It was here I noticed my bayonet was broken and I couldn’t have stuck him with it. Of course, I had ‘one up the chimney’ as we called it – that is, a bullet in the breech, so that you only have to press your trigger. I pointed to his belt and bayonet. He took these off, and his hat and water bottle as well, emptied his pockets and offered the lot to me. Just then one of my mates was coming up the trench. ‘Get out of the way, Andy. Leave him to me. I’ll give him one to himself,’ he meant he would throw a bomb at him, which would have blown him to pieces. ‘Come here,’ I said. He was on his knees in front of me now, fairly pleading. I said, ‘He’s an old man’, he looked sixty. At the finish I pointed my thumb upwards towards our lines, never taking my bayonet off his chest. He jumped up and with his hands above his head ran out of the trench towards our lines, calling all the time. He was trembling from head to foot and frightened to death. I honestly believe he could have done me as I jumped into the trench if he had not been so afraid.
Given the intense nature of trench fighting, soldiers’ encounters with the enemy were necessarily brief. An incident might impress itself on the mind, but rarely did individual combat last more than seconds and took longer in the retelling that it did in the event. Private Ginger Byrne was an exception, his one-sided meeting with the enemy lasting most of the day. After going into action near the German-held village of Beaumont Hamel, he had been forced to take refuge in a shell hole close to the enemy wire but, in doing so, was spotted by a German machine-gunner. Byrne lay there with the ammunition boxes he was carrying and just four inches of earth above his head as protection.
I lay as I fell because I daren’t move. I had my legs folded under me and my bloomin’ bayonet was on my left-hand side. I was dying to move that bayonet out of the way so I could get my hip down lower. But that Jerry decided he hadn’t anything better to do than play his gun across my shell-hole. He knew I wasn’t hit. I knew what he was doing. I was a machine gunner myself, wasn’t I? He’d be holding the two handles of his gun, then he’d tap, tap so it played right across the top of the hole; then he’d turn the wheel at the bottom to lower the barrel and then he’d tap, tap the other side to bring it back again. He was hitting the dust just above my head and he smashed the bloomin’ boxes. Bits of ammo flew about everywhere. In a queer sort of way I was lying there almost admiring what he was doing, as though it wasn’t me he was aiming at. He was a fellow machine-gunner, wasn’t he? And he certainly knew his job. But he just couldn’t get that trajectory low enough.
As it was summertime, Byrne had to wait fourteen hours for darkness as the German machine-gunner kept ‘nagging away’, firing just over the hole. ‘Sometimes he’d stop for a bit and turn the gun on someone else; but he’d got right fond of me. Wasted a lot of ammo on me that Jerry did.’ When it was dark, Byrne crawled, then ran, across no-man’s-land and escaped the carnage. He was entirely uninjured.
While in action, it was not always easy to discern the ebb and flow of battle. Men saw only what was within instant comprehension; there was no standing about surveying the ground. Normally, shelter was, as in Byrne’s example, a shell hole from which observation was limited, or the inside of a trench, in which case the fighting was immediate and the wider context of who was winning or losing of practical irrelevance.
Under such circumstances, it was possible to take prisoners when it was in fact the enemy who was gaining the upper hand. One extraordinary incident took place as a platoon of the 1/6th Seaforth Highlanders was involved in the second assault on Beaumont Hamel, in November 1916. With his platoon, Second Lieutenant George Edwards was given the special job of capturing a battalion headquarters. Despite persistent fog, Edwards worked his way round to the objective, surprising and taking prisoner a large number of the Germans without opposition. The headquarters was in a deep dugout and the men surrendered when told that there were strong reinforcements at hand. These, however, failed to materialise and Edwards’s platoon was heavily outnumbered.
The story of what happened next was told by Edwards to General Burn and a fellow officer back at brigade headquarters. Edwards was killed in November 1917 but his story, as related by a fellow officer, was not forgotten.
The German Commanding Officer told him [Edwards] quite nicely and politely that the position was reversed and that he and his men were now the prisoners. There was nothing for it but to submit and Edwards accompanied the C.O. down into the dugout. Here he was given a drink, treated with every consideration and even invited to look through the periscope – a huge affair which gave its owners a commanding view of the surrounding country.
It was then, the fog having lifted somewhat, that Edwards spotted the arrival of the long expected reinforcements. Not to be outdone in courtesy by his German hosts he begged them to consider themselves once more as his prisoners and, as such, to accompany him to the surface. This they did, only to find on arrival that they were called upon to surrender for a third time – on this occasion by a chaplain and a party of Dublin Fusiliers.
Edwards went up to the Chaplain to explain the situation; the Chaplain promptly knocked him down and disappeared in the fog with his captives.
Critical to the process of being taken prisoner was making a connection with the prospective captor and the act of surrender unequivocal. It was vital that the would-be prisoner made himself appear unthreatening, that he was just as much an ordinary family man, sick of war, and not the stereotypical enemy of propaganda. Holding up a crucifix or pictures of wives and children helped, as did removing the paraphernalia of war, such as a helmet, although with so many bits and pieces flying around this was in itself a calculated risk. Conversely, hands in the air but eyes that glistened hatred or aggression was a stance unlikely to gain much other than a bullet, as indeed would shooting until the moment when defence was no longer tenable, then calling out ‘Kamerad’.
Emptying pockets, offering gifts, bought time for prisoners during which fever-pitch tension might ease. Chapman’s friend was morally shocked at the shooting of the German officer because, in handing over his field glasses, the unspoken transaction of turning a soldier into a prisoner was seemingly cemented. And in just the same way that transactions are completed by the shaking of hands, so it was astute, if possible, to make physical contact too, as Lieutenant Bradford Gordon, of the 9th Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry witnessed, when one haggard-looking German surrendered to him.
Several of my men were about to stick him with their bayonets, but he had been badly wounded in the face, and was unarmed, so I stopped them. Seeing this, he tried to shake my hand, and said ‘Kamerad’. But I shook him off, and searched him . . . When he understood he was not to be killed, his gratitude was extraordinary. As I would not shake hands, he insisted on shaking hands with a Somerset, who, a few minutes before, had been about to bayonet him.
During the fighting around the Somme village of Lesboufs, Guardsman Norman Cliff was also approached by a German who offered his hand, though whether Cliff took it is not clear from his memoirs. What helped broker the German’s surrender was his excellent English.
As our section advanced across open country with bullets whistling around we sighted a machine gun post, and as we cautiously drew nearer, the German team sprang to their feet, threw up their hands and came forward led by a young officer with an Iron Cross dangling from his chest. Automatically we lowered our rifles and the officer held out his hand, and in English asked us to accept his surrender.
‘Where did you learn your English?’ I asked.
‘In London where I worked,’ he replied.
I was struck by h
is dignity in a desperate situation, and there was no question of butchering them. Realising that he and his team were to be spared, he burst out, addressing me: ‘You’ve been so decent to us I would like to present you with this,’ indicating his Iron Cross.
‘No! You must have done something fine to get it, and I wouldn’t dream of taking it from you.’
Suddenly one of our young officers and a sergeant appeared, and the officer yelled: ‘What’s going on here? Send those Huns to the rear immediately!’ Then, noticing the Iron Cross, he exclaimed: ‘Oh, Sergeant, he’s got an Iron Cross. I want that!’ Whereupon the Sergeant snatched the medal from the German’s chest, kicked him in the backside and prodded the group like cattle towards the rear. I felt ashamed and could not refrain from comparing the disgusting behaviour of this perhaps untypical British gentleman with the good manners of the ‘uncivilized Hun’.
A soldier’s status as prisoner was never entirely secure and making oneself as useful as possible was a good idea. Cliff watched at Lesboufs how a number of Germans ‘surprised and relieved not to be bayoneted, helped to buttress the captured trenches’. It was, he claimed, ‘one of the few occasions when live Germans were calculated to be better than dead ones’. Such impressed work was illegal but who was there to argue? At the fighting at Gommecourt on 1 July 1916, the Regimental Sergeant Major of the 1/5th Sherwood Foresters was captured deep in the enemy lines when Germans unexpectedly emerged from a dugout. He testified that the Germans set him to work carrying bombs from a dugout to the Germans in the front line. With self-preservation in mind, the RSM did as ordered until he seized an opportunity to jump over the top and make a dash for a shell hole where he lay until dark before regaining his own lines and telling the story to the Commanding Officer. More generally, prisoners were ready to tend or dress enemy wounded, and were quite happy to be given a stretcher case to carry so that both patient and prisoner could extricate themselves from the battlefield. Those who stood on their dignity and refused to help were being foolish in the extreme.
Meeting the Enemy Page 19
