Back over on Fricourt Spur, a small afternoon attack towards Shelter Wood by elements of the 21st’s 10th KOYLI and 15th Durham Light Infantry was a predicable failure. Orders arrived late. It began 10 minutes after British shellfire lifted off the wood at 1.30 p.m. Captain Liddle Hart, 9th KOYLI, explained why the attack was swiftly broken up:
The Germans swept the open [ground] between Crucifix Trench [just west of Shelter Wood] and Shelter Wood with a fire that it was impossible to live in, and a captain of the [15th] Durhams [Captain Denis Ely] who called on a few men to follow him in an attempt to reach the wood was shot down before he had gone many yards.197
The sniper who got Ely did not have long to live: ‘One of our [15th Durham Light Infantry] men, Private J[ohn] Jolley, saw him. They saw each other and fired. The German’s bullet grazed Jolley’s nose. Jolley’s bullet struck fair and square in the head.’ Ely is named on the Thiepval Memorial.
Consolidation of the 21st’s gains was quickly underway. Such limited German shellfire as there was continued to kill, maim and bury soldiers in Crucifix Trench and other forward positions, but the Sunken Road received rather more machine-gun fire in enfilade from both north and south along its length. ‘The majority of the survivors of the [64th] Brigade were digging themselves into shallow holes on the [road] bank nearest the Germans,’ wrote Liddle Hart.198 As the war diarist of 15th Durham Light Infantry noted, the Sunken Road soon formed a ‘line of resistance should the parties who had advanced in Shelter Wood have to withdraw.’199 Although 21st Division was still well short of its final objectives, its infantry had gone quite some way towards fulfilling Horne’s plan by isolating Fricourt and Fricourt Wood from the north.
That night Lieutenant Lancelot Spicer, 9th KOYLI, later a Liberal politician, dodged shellfire and snipers’ bullets on his way up Fricourt Spur: ‘Sure enough I heard the “ping” of a bullet behind me.’200 At about 9 p.m. he found the sunken Fricourt–Contalmaison road ‘simply full of men,’ which was ‘distinctly comforting.’201 Knots of soldiers sheltered in the lee of the road’s banks, which were 12–15 feet high. Here and there consolidation was underway. Captured dugouts became headquarters and dressing stations: ‘It was very difficult to get in without treading on the wounded.’202 He learned that two battalions of 62nd Brigade — 12th and 13th Northumberland Fusiliers — were on their way, but Spicer and the rest of the 64th had to remain until the fresh battalions had taken over. German shellfire was light. ‘At 3 a.m. we got all the men on to work at a systematic consolidation, and also served them out with bread and seltzer water.’203 Nearby, Major Nanson, RGA, had reached Lozenge Alley, which he found ‘so packed with our troops that you had to climb over men in places to get along it.’204 Ninety-seventh, 98th and 126th Field Companies, RE, had little work to do that night, Fricourt not having fallen, although sections of the 98th were involved in fighting throughout the day and were used to bolster 63rd Brigade’s right flank closest to the village.205
Feldwebel Robert Hauschild, RIR111, led a small group of men towards the front line through Mametz Wood and shellfire that screamed ‘like a herd of demons.’ He arrived at a trench just north of Fricourt, and there met some men from his home city of Pforzheim: ‘For a few moments one forgot all danger.’ The trench was shallow, almost devoid of shelter from shrapnel and bullet. Casualties quickly totted up. ‘Finally, as shadows lengthened it became darker, the shellfire lessened.’ An officer turned up and said the trench had to be held. ‘Oh, fine!’ Hauschild doubted the odds of success, but his men began digging in with bayonets regardless: ‘Not too far away we could hear the English likewise entrenching.’206
THE GERMAN DECISION to abandon Fricourt came with the realisation that RIR111 and RIR109 simply could not hold their forward battle zones any longer. There was no artillery support to speak of, and there were no reinforcements coming forward to either defend the ground still held or retake that lost. To stay would invite still more casualties in what was very obviously a one-outcome battle.207 RIR111 would withdraw to the first intermediate position, which was between 1000 and 2000 yards behind the old German front line, at about 11 p.m. and effectively surrender Fricourt, while RIR109 had abandoned Mametz in the early evening for positions further back. Runners darted from one shell hole to the next alerting the infantry, which filtered back silently in small groups, in some cases having to fight through British outposts. Walking wounded struggled along. The more seriously injured were lugged in tarpaulins, or abandoned.208 Hours before dawn on 2 July, the remnants of RIR111 held a crude defensive line that curved between Round Wood on Fricourt Spur, and Bottom Wood just north of Mametz, with a support line about 1000 yards further back held by elements of IR23, Landwehr Brigade Replacement Battalion 55 and more remnants of RIR111.209
In some parts of the battle zone German defenders continued to hold out. This was the case on Hill 110, where resistance continued until early on 2 July. It was a choice of risking death or injury while attempting to slip back, or surrendering. Oberstleutnant L. Knies, Pioneer Battalion 13, said his 2nd Reserve Company on Hill 110 was gradually fragmented, surrounded and then ‘overtaken by fate after a hard, fair fight.’210 Unteroffizier Rudolf Stadelbacher and Unteroffizier Otto Schüsle, both RIR111 and based on Hill 110, said the British were ‘so close that we could hear them talking.’211 Leutnant-der-Reserve Bauer, the Munich pioneer officer also fighting on Hill 110, was collared at about 9 p.m.: ‘The superior strength of the enemy had been so overwhelming that there was no longer a need for a formal surrender, but we were simply assembled in the middle under masses of Englishmen who then took us away.’212
Wilhelm Seebacher’s day was one of brushes with captivity and death. The Musketier in RIR111 raced up from his dugout near Bois Français on Hill 110 as the British barrage lifted, but ducked into another when he saw enemy soldiers approaching. Two British sentries were soon patrolling the trench, pacing a two-minute beat past his nook: ‘Fortunately it had not occurred at all to both Tommies to look in my dugout.’213 After watching and timing the sentries for more than an hour he chanced a late-afternoon dash for freedom:214 ‘Quickly I took to both of my legs and vanished in the opposite direction.’215 Seebacher soon linked up with a Bavarian soldier and returned to attack the British sentries: ‘They were probably not particularly pleasantly surprised when our first hand-grenades came flittering past.’216 More German soldiers arrived: ‘The fighting surged back and forth, but we maintained the position.’217 Overall, however, Hill 110 had become untenable, and shortly before midnight Seebacher’s rag-tag band decided all was lost and struck out for the new German line.218
Most of those German soldiers who made it back were pleased to be out of the inferno and sipping mineral water. Others were bitter at having yielded ground they believed would have been defensible with proper artillery and infantry support.219 Unteroffizier Friedrich Thomas, RIR109, said that Mametz and its surrounds were no longer tenable by mid-evening: ‘Exceedingly heavy losses forced a withdrawal via the road to Bazentin-le-Petit. A last attempt to face the enemy was made at 11 p.m., but it was in vain.’220 At an after-battle roll call the Karlsruhe law clerk counted just six survivors from a company of about 250 men. Similarly, the normally 2800-strong RIR111 comprised just 1000 men by 4 July,221 most of its losses having been incurred on 1 July. Feldwebel Eiser watched a haggard, stubble-faced string of parched soldiers straggle into Contalmaison: ‘They recounted the most appalling crimes committed by the British against their prisoners. We had to listen to the most terrible stories although we had no head for it.’222
Back in the British lines, Captain Brian Reeves, 1st Royal Welsh Fusiliers, believed Fricourt could have been taken that night, after the German withdrawal, rather than on 2 July as was already being planned. Bombing parties creeping along the sunken road from Hill 110 down into Fricourt found the carriageway littered with 20th Manchesters’ dead. They arrived in the village’s ruins about midnight. They found ‘little resistance, and were able to pass throu
gh the village from end to end, reporting the capture of Fricourt in the early hours of the morning 2nd July. It was some hours after this that patrols from the 17th [Northern] Division also penetrated the village.’223
Eight miles further back at Heilly, Horne appraised his corps’ performance in a letter laden with subtext and understatement. He made no direct comment on his abortive mid-afternoon Fricourt gamble, but did offer up some kind of oblique explanation: ‘The [III] Corps to the north of us have not got on too well. Not as well as I first heard. We have done pretty well — very hard fighting. The [XIII] Corps to the south [sic, should be east] of us has done very well. We shall have to stick on hard tonight and tomorrow against counterattacks, I expect.’224 Horne was obviously frustrated that III Corps had materially overstated its performance earlier in the day, this information having tempted him into a casualty-heavy and failed attempt to take Fricourt much earlier than planned. Horne’s statement that his corps had done ‘pretty well’ went to his moderate satisfaction with the results achieved, but also suggested he saw much room for improvement, although he never did expand fully on either that viewpoint or his decision to implement the attack on Fricourt ahead of schedule.
Horne’s XV Corps had done well overall, but had only partially achieved its objectives. Twenty-first Division had advanced about 1000 yards beyond the German front line on the upper slopes of Fricourt Spur, while the 7th had progressed 1000–1500 yards and taken Mametz. Together they had effectively outflanked Fricourt, which would effectively fall the next day. Some 1625 prisoners had been taken. The seven-day bombardment had mostly destroyed or neutralised Hahn’s supporting artillery, robbing the 28th of defensive shellfire. In places north of Fricourt and around Mametz the British artillery had wreaked enough destruction to facilitate localised break-ins, which were subsequently exploited. The creeping barrage had helped initial waves cross over — more so the 21st’s quick-time vanguard than the 7th, advancing at walking pace — but had thereafter outpaced the infantry. Sufficient enemy machine guns had survived the shellfire to either slow or, in the case of 50th Brigade before Fricourt, absolutely stop progress. Horne’s artillery had done well, but it had needed more guns, more shells and more-focused fire for the infantry to achieve an emphatic outcome. All of this said, Hahn’s command on 1 July amounted to a successful but costly salvage operation in positions that had been frequently poorly developed to begin with and then wrecked by shellfire.225 His tactical decision-making in a fluid situation — using RIR109 and RIR111 as ground-holding units while reinforcing intermediate positions further back — was timely and forward-looking, even if it ran counter to prevailing German defensive doctrine. Horne’s corps had managed a convincing break-in at Fricourt–Mametz, but Hahn was correct when he said that the British ‘attempt to break through failed due to the tenacious bravery of our troops.’226
Partial victory came at a bloody price. Early on 2 July, Sapper Francis Palmer-Cook, RE, saw a padre plucking identity discs from the dead of the previous day: ‘His arm was full of them, from his wrist right up past his elbow.’227 Seven battalion commanders were casualties — three killed, two dead from wounds and two wounded.228 The 7th recorded 3380 casualties, of whom 1032 were killed, 2321 were wounded and 27 were missing. The 21st suffered 4256 casualties, among them 1182 dead, 2962 wounded and 112 missing. Fiftieth Brigade’s two attacking battalions amassed 557 dead including one battalion commander,229 565 wounded and 33 missing, all for no gains of military value. Altogether, XV Corps ran up 8791 casualties, and of these 2771 were dead, 5848 were wounded and 172 were missing.
Horne later summed up his corps’ losses as ‘not very great, I am thankful to say.’230 It was a conclusion that — in light of the negligible gains and galling British losses elsewhere this same day — does not seem entirely unfounded. But this ignores the 50th’s sacrifice and the corps’ avoidable losses, particularly in 20th Brigade, by known German strongpoints that should have been destroyed or suppressed before battle. Horne’s assessment of the casualties was slippery, and his use of the phrase ‘not very great’ suggests they were much higher than he was comfortable with and certainly neither light nor moderate.
Losses among the German units facing XV Corps are more challenging to pin down. This has a lot to do with the difficulties in piecing together what happened to the shattered regiments involved, and the way in which German casualty statistics were compiled. RIR109 suffered up to 2089 casualties on 1 July, this number including about 556 dead and a further 943 prisoners.231 The other 590 soldiers were temporarily missing, wounded or both, mostly on 1 July. Broadly speaking, about 1044 of RIR109’s casualties were opposite XV Corps, of which about a quarter were dead.232 RIR111’s losses totalled 1826 for the period 24 June–4 July, among them 252 dead, 453 wounded and 1121 missing. Post-war tallies revealed that up to 1703 of the casualties occurred on 1 July,233 including 265 dead and the remaining 1438 either wounded, missing-to-return or prisoners.234 Pioneer Battalion 13’s 2nd Reserve Company lost 111 men,235 and the IR23 company near Mametz recorded 168 missing, including 43 dead.236 Bavarian Pioneer Regiment suffered at least 182 casualties, with 17 dead, 150 prisoners and 15 wounded.237 German casualties for the defence of Fricourt–Mametz salient therefore totalled up to 3208, or one for every 2.7 British.
Such bald statistics were of little interest to Baden, Bavarian and Prussian veterans who years later remembered close friends killed in battle:
A bullet came a-flying;
For me, or was it you?
It tore him clean away,
And at my feet he lay,
So part of me fell too.238
THE BONES OF 17,027 German soldiers are buried at the Soldatenfriedhof (Soldiers’ Cemetery) just north of Fricourt. Some 5057 are buried in graves marked by a simple metal cross, each with multiple names or the words ‘Ein Unbekannter Deutscher Soldat’ (‘An Unknown German Soldier’). Another 11,970 men are in four mass graves at the back of the cemetery, each plot fronted with zinc panels naming those buried or thought buried within. No fewer than 6477 are unidentified. It takes about three minutes to meander the length of the mass graves without reading the names. Year-round this is a sombre, dark place that sits in semiotic contrast with the triumphalism of the Thiepval Memorial and the white Portland stone of Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstones.
Pad up and down the moss-infested grass rides and you will find several 1 July casualties interred from various parts of the battlefield. Back in 1916 their corpses were dumped in shell holes and trenches, or lost in the bowels of deep underground dugouts. Some were later disinterred and reburied at Fricourt or one of the other German war cemeteries in the general area. Most of the pre–1 July burials at German cemeteries behind the lines have long since vanished. Several of these graves appear to have been cleared, but more were simply forgotten or ploughed into the ground as French landowners reclaimed their properties after the war.
The thought rankled with grief-stricken Mannheim veteran Waldemar Stöckle in 1926, when he returned to RIR111’s regimental cemetery at Le Sars, on the Albert–Bapaume road. There, with dusk upon him, the former Unteroffizier found the regiment’s war memorial broken and overgrown with nettles and shrubs as finches twittered hidden in the trees:
I searched around trying to discover if at least one of the gravestones, which had been carved so carefully by their comrades, was still there. But not one single little cross could be found. If only the sole surviving stone could have spoken and told me what had happened in the meantime and where our fallen now lay; but it remained dumb.239
The crumbling German memorial is still there, still forgotten and still circled by nettles as finches chirrup the evening in.
CHAPTER 9
The Straw Man of Montauban
XIII Corps’ two-speed operation around Montauban
‘Every man had had his job explained to him, and each battalion had its objective, and so everything was prepared for a real advance.’1
— Co
rporal Norman Menzies, 2nd Royal Scots Fusiliers
‘THE GUNS WERE blazing away; great black mushrooms were shooting up out of the surface of the white sea [of mist] in front as the big shells burst in the German trenches,’ wrote Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Bidder, 21st Machine-Gun Company.2 It was about 5 a.m. as he watched the first sunrays spill over the crater land before Montauban, catching dewdrops on the knee-length grass and throwing down long shadows from rusting barbed-wire pickets. ‘It was a strange scene & we stood about on the grass round our position, apparently alone in the world on this brilliant morning, only disturbed by the crashing of the guns behind & weird upheavals in the mist surface.’3 By 7 a.m. the silver-grey swirl was dissipating and the British trenches were alive with soldiers of 18th (Eastern) and 30th Divisions steeling themselves for battle, which was now just 30 minutes away.
Thirteenth Corps’ success around Montauban now depended on the preparations made by its commander, a 53-year-old asthmatic and Victoria Cross winner. Details-conscious Lieutenant-General Sir Walter Congreve, VC, had served in India and South Africa, winning the famed bronze cross for valour in the latter. He liked to go forward, see the lie of the land, speak with his men and assess the flow of battle.4 A shell blast in 1917 would snatch Congreve’s left hand away, the stump later crowned by a prosthetic hook, which made his hobby of solo yacht sailing much more challenging. Congreve’s obituary described him as a ‘perfect gentleman,’ but somewhat paradoxically added that he spoke in the ‘plainest language.’5 His lack of interest in courting popularity6 posed difficulties and produced several clashes with Fourth Army commander General Sir Henry Rawlinson, who always did prefer toadying subordinates. General Hubert Gough, Reserve Army commander, held a different view of Congreve: ‘Very spare and lightly built, a frame giving evidence of the fragility of his constitution, a firm and very English countenance, with an indomitable and courageous will, a character which could remain outwardly unmoved at times of great personal sorrow or of immense responsibility and danger, an energy which made him active of body in spite of ill-health.’7 But bullish Gough, with a polarising personality and no stranger to controversy, was biased. He inclined towards bold, decisive men like Congreve. His father, uncle and brother had all won the VC too.
First day of the Somme Page 34
