First day of the Somme

by Andrew Macdonald

  Once, looking towards the barbed-wire, I started to think I saw posts taking shape and beginning to move. ‘Jack! Jack!’ I said to Pilky, my sergeant, ‘They’re coming over!’ ‘Come down,’ he said, ‘there’s now’t there.’ Just then, they came round with the rum ration — it was a big thing was the rum ration — I thought ‘Am I going to refuse?’ I was a teetotaller, but . . . I took it.19

  The drudgery of trench life brought with it physical and mental exhaustion, which in the wee small hours could play cruel tricks on the mind.

  Autumn of 1915 and winter of 1915–16 were despised for their kneeand thigh-deep mud. Private Squire Brookes, 16th Manchesters, said late-September 1915 marked the beginning of a ‘month or two of sheer misery. This was much the most horrible period of my war.’20 One officer likened clawing through trench gloop to ‘the sensations of flies in treacle.’21 Lieutenant Aubrey Moore, 1/5th Leicesters, hoped the ‘Germans were in the same state.’22 Makeshift sumps dug into trench floors sometimes worked, other times not. Duckboards floated with the rising water levels. Buckets were used to slop water and mud out, and hand-cranked pumps carried water over parapets. ‘Of course,’ wrote 36th (Ulster) Division’s historian, ‘it presently filtered back into the trench bottom.’23 Wet, mud-caked uniforms and greatcoats meant being chilled through for prolonged periods of time. ‘For warmth we had charcoal braziers in dugouts: charcoal was burned as it gave off no smoke,’ said Private Clarrie Jarman, 7th Queen’s Royal West Surreys.24 Hobnailed boots offered little protection from trench foot, which was an affliction that disgusted Lance-Corporal Cousins: ‘We all suffered from trench feet a condition brought on by the feet being wet for days on end. The skin seemed to swell and leave the flesh. Large blisters appeared and the stench was appalling. Body filthy, no washing, no water to wash, waterlogged shell holes were urine contaminated even reserve trenches were little better.’25 Gumboots, dry socks and tubs of water-resistant whale oil to be rubbed liberally on to the feet were the solutions to trench foot, but from mud there was no escape, as Captain Upcott explained: ‘Mud will kill anything, it gets into your soul, just as it oozes into your boots and hair and under your clothes. One becomes just a sticky machine, which carries on because it has got to.’26 Trench life through the autumn of 1915 and the winter of 1915–16 was miserable and sickness rates skipped higher. ‘I don’t know how the men stand it,’ wrote soon-to-be-dead Lieutenant Billy Goodwin, 8th York & Lancasters.27

  Corpse-fed rats scampered over sleeping soldiers, gnawed into food stores and spread whatever filth and bacteria they had picked up along the way. They nested in discarded kits, in earthy burrows and in the chest cavities of no-man’s-land’s dead. They urinated or defecated wherever they pleased. They were in every dugout and every trench traverse. ‘In one dugout called “Vermin Villa” if a match was struck the rats would scatter,’ wrote Corporal Henry Allen, 12th Middlesex.28 Lieutenant Eric Kirkland-Laman, 2nd South Wales Borderers, said ‘one impudent beggar actually sat on my chest during the night.’29 Some slashed at the pinktailed rodents with spades, stabbed at them furiously with bayonets, or hurled anything to hand at them. Shooting at them was forbidden. Out of the lines, soldiers and rats alike moved into billets and tents. ‘They came in droves to the villages,’ said Private Jarman.30 Rifleman Cecil Tennant, 1/9th Londons (Queen Victoria’s Rifles), recalled a barn near Bray where ‘they crawled over us in search of food and anything edible disappeared.’31 Controlling the rat plague was impossible: the vermin multiplied faster than they could be killed.

  Body lice were equally reviled. Soldiers were ‘lousy’ within weeks of arriving at the front, whether from sleeping on old, infested straw in some dugout or barn, or from inheriting poorly cleaned clothing from the stores.32 ‘Our clothing after being in the line was pretty lousy. In fact we were hardly ever free from lice,’ wrote Private Jarman.33 Lice bites could cause trench fever, its symptoms — high temperatures, headaches, rashes and leg pains — requiring hospital treatment.34 Itchy soldiers scoured their clothing for these parasites and their eggs. In the trenches there was no chance of washing, but behind the lines there were tepid showers, delousing baths and ineffective uniform-fumigation services. Rifleman Henry Barber, 1/5th Londons (London Rifle Brigade), explained:

  At about three week intervals our shirts and underwear were sent for fumigation but the process failed to kill the eggs which were laid in the seams of our clothing. We received a clean shirt & before putting it on a match was lit & run up & down the seams. The eggs exploded like a miniature Chinese Cracker.35

  Whether in the trenches or in the billets and barns far behind, there was no escape from the chronic irritation of body lice. ‘I learned to hate the place,’ said Gunner Victor Parker, Royal Field Artillery (RFA), frustrated by the vermin plague.36

  Shellfire was the main cause of casualties among the pruritic British soldiers on the Somme. Few forgot their baptism; few expected to live much longer. The initial elation of Rifleman Noel Lockhart, London Rifle Brigade, ‘did not last long as one saw men, one’s friends, drop one after another.’37 Dreaded Minenwerfer drums, or ‘sausages,’ somersaulted ‘over & over as they catapulted towards you,’ said Private Walter Aust, 10th East Yorkshires. It was, he said, ‘very unnerving’38 to see their parabola marked at night by a sparking fuse. Private Arthur England, 8th Norfolks, explained the early warning system: ‘Sentries gave warning by shouting “Sausage right” or “Sausage left.” . . . It was easy to avoid them [Minenwerfer drums] by moving into the next [trench] traverse. In the air they looked like jam tins. Actually they were more the size of oildrums.’39 Meantime, ‘Whizz-Bangs’ were invisible to the eye and gave only the briefest of screams before pitching quickly to earth and exploding.40 Bigger projectiles — ‘Jack Johnsons’ or ‘Coal Boxes’ — could be heard whistling down long before they struck. Private Pollard likened these to a train roaring towards him, but one that was ‘coming through the air and blowing up around me.’41 He was ‘never so scared in my life. I wee’d four times in the first five minutes.’42 Gunner James Brew, RFA, witnessed several infantrymen crying and praying under shellfire.43 Rifleman Lockhart saw one man shouting, ‘For Christ’s sake, stop it only for a few minutes!’44 Gas shells flopped to earth and burst with a distinctive pop. Goodwin said these lachrymatory shells gave off a ‘Spring smell’ and made ‘your eyes smart like blazes.’45 Private Jarman was one of many who learned to live on his wits, mastering the art of when ‘to take cover and when not to,’46 or when to don a gas mask in quick order. The audio-visual warning system for detecting where enemy shells would land was crude and fraught with danger, but it was all there was.

  Captain Richard Archer-Houblon, Royal Horse Artillery, was impressed by the staccato lights and thumping guns of nightly artillery activity:

  One could watch the flashes darting and spitting in the darkness, while hundreds and hundreds of Verey lights and coloured rockets soared up and hung flickering and spluttering in the air; the glowing parabolas of trench mortar bombs, each ending in the most appalling and shattering crash, would cut the sky; and over all roared the dull booming and thunder of batteries and batteries of guns.47

  Soldiers’ bodies were broken, eviscerated, vaporised by shell blasts, or by shrapnel that zipped about. Private Colin Coom, 16th Middlesex, never forgot stepping over a ‘torn, dead & mangled body.’48 Lieutenant Kirkland-Laman was horrified to report the fate of one soldier as ‘believed to be blown to bits’ and another as decapitated.49 Sergeant Roland Richardson, 1/5th Londons (London Rifle Brigade), recalled one length of trench that contained 11 corpses: ‘One [of the dead was] naked above the waist. A nose pushed through the floor of the trench and a scalped Tommy lay with exposed brain. A hand protruded from the earthy trench wall and some callous humourist had placed an Army biscuit in the dead fingers.’50 Other soldiers were killed by enemy marksmen and machine-gunners. Private Moakler suffered from survivor’s guilt when a friend was shot on the spot where he had been sitting moments b
efore. ‘He was hit in the throat and died instantly. I always felt that I had set up that sniper.’51 Cynicism and noir humour were used to avoid thinking about dead friends, or to postpone grief. Tenth East Yorkshires’ first Somme casualty was its football team goalkeeper. ‘He has stopped one at last,’ someone joked to Private Aust.52 Corpses of trench dead were carried out on stretchers, or their gore in horse-hair sacks; their remains were buried in cemeteries further back. The dead of no-man’s-land were harder to fetch in and, as Rifleman Lockhart said, were ‘left where they were if convenient.’53 At every turn the Somme trenches were sated with death and traumatic injury.

  Fourth Army’s casualty figures for the period from the start of March to 23 June 1916, for instance, give a sobering glimpse of death and its many causes prior to the Somme offensive. The army recorded about 10,000 total casualties, of which 1678 were killed, 7955 were wounded and 260 were missing.54 This equated to about 10 battalions, almost the entire infantry component of a single division, even before the preparatory bombardment for the first day of the Somme began. Other data showed that of the army’s 5742 casualties in April and May, 3428 (59.7%) were due to shellfire, 1090 (19%) were caused by grenades, 963 (16.8%) were the result of rifle fire, while a further 191 (3.3%) men went missing and 70 (1.2%) casualties were attributed to enemy mines.55 This data excluded VII Corps’ casualties, and was devoid of the human element. Bombardier Ben Bloye, Royal Garrison Artillery (RGA), lost his friend, Corporal Thomas Flavel, RGA, to a fatal wound. He died on 11 April 1916 and is buried at Wimereux Communal Cemetery. ‘He was a great chap, always cool, calm and collected, debonair and a great favourite with the girls, and he had lots of fun, but he did not grow old — like me.’56

  Death in the skies was less frequent. Thirty-two Royal Flying Corps (RFC) aircrew died on operations for Fourth and Third Armies in the period between 1 August 1915 and 23 June 1916. Six were killed by Saxon ace Leutnant Max Immelmann, a man with unfathomable eyes and a cleft chin who was a holder of the famed Pour-le-Merite medal. He was killed aged 25 in mid-June 1916. Immelmann, Field Flying Detachment 62, was lionised by the German press and soldiers at the front faithfully followed his tally of aerial victories. ‘I thought you would like to know that Immelmann has shot down his eleventh airplane near here,’ wrote an impressed Gefreiter Leo Graü, Reserve Field Artillery Regiment 26.57

  In all, the RFC amassed 185 aircraft across 11 squadrons on the Somme. These were deployed at GHQ (21st, 27th and 60th Squadrons and part of 70th), Fourth Army headquarters (22nd and 24th Squadrons) or army corps headquarters (3rd, 4th, 8th, 9th and 15th Squadrons). These 18-aircraft squadrons — variously equipped with BE2c, FE2b, RE7, Morane-Saulnier N, Martinsyde Elephant, Sopwith 1½ strutters and DH2 planes — had mostly arrived in France in late 1915 and the first half of 1916. They were quickly put to work locating enemy artillery guns for counter-battery shoots, photographing German defensive positions, bombing more-distant targets and various other missions that included destroying hostile observation balloons.58 In May and June the RFC extensively photographed the German XIV Reserve Corps’ positions north of the River Somme and the images were pored over by intelligence officers for any snippet of information — perhaps a new trench here, a dugout or a thickening of barbed-wire entanglements there. There were two Kite Balloon Sections (1st and 5th), whose observers kept a vigil on the German lines day and night, while aircraft of other squadrons assisted on long-range bombing missions. The aircrews’ job was dangerous — they risked mechanical failure, pilot error, roving enemy fighters and anti-aircraft batteries — but it was essential to both building up a detailed picture of and harassing the German defences.

  Lieutenant Alfred Evans, 3rd Squadron, RFC, soon tired of helping III and XV Corps’ gunners register their fall of shot behind La Boisselle, Fricourt and Mametz as anti-aircraft shells spluttered around his Morane monoplane. He reckoned that only an expert observer could spot German light-gauge railway lines, infantry badger trails and water pipes from several thousand feet aloft:

  The shading which crept and thickened along the German reserve trenches showed that the German working parties were active at night if invisible in the day time. For the shading spelt barbed wire. Only about half a dozen times during those three months did I have the luck to catch a German battery firing. When that happened one ceased the ranging work and called up something really heavy, for preference a nine-inch howitzer battery, which pulverised the Hun.59

  IN THE ARTILLERY lines the accumulation of field and heavy batteries accelerated throughout March–June 1916, alongside planning for the upcoming offensive. Haig amassed 1769 guns to support the attacking corps of Fourth and Third Armies. Of these, 1537 belonged to Rawlinson’s army and a further 232 were behind VII Corps, part of Third Army, at Gommecourt. Most of the field artillery brigades had arrived with the divisions to which they were attached, while the heavy batteries turned up separately, some towards late-June. Work immediately began to prepare the gun positions, which included digging camouflaged pits to house the weapons, constructing stable platforms to ensure accurate firing, laying telephone lines between batteries and various headquarters, and sinking dugouts for the crew and ammunition storage, among myriad other tasks. To even the most casual of observers, great confidence was derived from what appeared to be an overwhelming number of guns and with what seemed an endless supply of ammunition stored up for the offensive.60

  For the gun crews the eight weeks to 23 June, the eve of the preparatory bombardment, were busy with the labour of readying their fire positions. Captain Cecil Brownlow, RFA, said the soft chalkstone allowed elaborate emplacements for his 18-pounders: ‘Pit props and steel rails formed the frame work carrying four to six feet of cover which was sodded over. Intricate systems of cable connected guns to OP [Observation Posts], to infantry battalion and to brigade headquarters.’61 Bombardier Leonard Ounsworth, RGA, reckoned it took a week to dig a firing position near Bray for his 60-pounder heavy gun ‘with pick and shovel.’62 Second-Lieutenant Archibald Laporte, RFA, expanded on the type of work involved:

  Nightly we imported large quantities of sandbags, pit props, concrete bursters [to detonate enemy shells before they penetrated the gun pits], cupola iron, revetting material, iron girders, rations, water and what-not, for we had to construct gun-pits with overhead cover, dig dug-outs for Officers, Sergeants, gun detachments and signallers and for the storage of ammunition, and to lay down a system of telephonic communication. All this material had to be obtained from the dumps by ceaseless importunity and carted by night from distant wagon lines.63

  Each of the field and heavy guns had to be ranged, which meant landing shot at specific points with a certain margin of error. Artillerymen were put through refresher courses on ranging their weapons according to fuse and cartridge settings, wind direction and speed, temperature, muzzle velocity and shell type. Ammunition was stored by each battery (for example: 18-pounders, 354 rounds per gun; 6-inch howitzers, 200; 8-inch howitzers, 90) and there were dumps near each (18-pounders, 1000 per gun; 6-inch howitzers, 650; 8-inch howitzers, 500), plus thousands more shells held at depots. When all that was done the gunners made up numbers on fatigue parties, which meant more digging and hauling work under cover of darkness.64

  The work of fatigue parties included lugging rations up to the trenches. The fare was the Maconochie’s brand of tinned meat and vegetable stew, along with canned bully beef, rissoles, bread, cheese and the infamously tough army biscuits.65 ‘Tins of hard biscuits were placed in the front line for us to eat as we liked: they were like dog biscuits,’ wrote Private Jarman.66 The ideal was to eat the meat rations hot, but they could also be consumed cold. All this was washed down with hot char (tea) and topped off with a Ruby Queen cigarette. ‘“Rations up!” was a welcome cry down the trenches,’ said an unconvincing Private Coom.67 His preferred ‘feast’ was rissoles, which were carried up to the line in sacks and tasted ‘delicious when most of the canvas fibres were removed.’68 Food often lacked h
ygiene. ‘Meat brought up to us in the front line was ALIVE, frequently,’ wrote a disgusted Rifleman Lockhart.69 Private William Senescall, 11th Suffolks, saw a ration party serve up some stew not long after a gas-shell bombardment, and fumes were still in the air: ‘As they bent over to dish out their eyes were streaming tears into the stew. It tasted no worse anyway.’70 Food parcels from home were keenly anticipated. Sweets were popular, as were OXO cubes, Bovril sachets and packets of raisins to tart up the army menu.71 ‘I had sent to me a 4lb box of chocolates which miraculously reached me intact,’ wrote Private Cyril Mawbey, 7th Loyal North Lancashires. ‘I was the most popular man in the platoon for days.’72 If the army fare did not taste all that pleasant, it was at least plentiful, and with patience, a pinch of imagination and supplements sent over from Blighty could be made at least palatable.73

  By night the trenches were alive with soldiers toiling to complete lengthy lists of tasks before first light and a well-aimed bullet. That meant plenty of spade labour to clear old trenches and cut new ones, complete with firing steps, dugouts and observation posts. Just as much time was spent installing timber revetments to support trench walls, burying cables and doing numerous other jobs such as repairing or laying barbedwire entanglements. It was this work that Lieutenant Edgar Willmer, 17th King’s, described when he said his nightly routine was one of ‘trying to make the trenches fit for occupation by human beings. . . . One waited till nightfall and then walked over the top to the front line.’74 Private Brookes added that ‘Wiring parties, pumping [water] in addition to sentry duty kept us busy most of the day & night. We were just as well doing those things as there was no way we could rest.’75 The exhausting, relentless work of maintaining a defensible and liveable trench system continued on through late 1915 and through the first half of 1916.