First day of the Somme

by Andrew Macdonald

  ‘The only thing to do was to crawl back,’ wrote Lance-Corporal Sidney Appleyard, Queen Victoria’s Rifles, of being wounded in no-man’s-land.98 Lieutenant-Colonel Vernon Dickins, same battalion, said his reserve company made a trinity of attempts to get across the fire-swept ground, but ‘all who started became casualties.’99 Rifleman Henry Barber, London Rifle Brigade, prayed ‘we would not have to go over in the face of that murderous fire,’ and was saved by a shrapnel ball that puckered several inches of flesh along his spine.100 Not far away, a grievously wounded Captain Arthur Moore, 1/4th Londons, wept in the lee of the Hébuterne–Bucquoy road when he overheard someone carelessly say he was going to die.101 The 32-year-old has no known grave and is named on the Thiepval Memorial. Numerous efforts to dig communication trenches across noman’s-land failed for precisely the same reason: ‘After three splendid efforts in the face of the overwhelming gun-fire we had to desist,’ wrote Private Sydney Newman, 1/3rd Londons (Royal Fusiliers), of attempting to dig one such trench.102 ‘This murderous fire continued.’103

  Ten miles away at his Henu headquarters, the 56th’s commander, Major-General Hull, knew from about 8.15 a.m. that his leading battalions had got into the German trenches but that all was not going smoothly.104 By 9.30 a.m., he reported the German defensive fire as severe and noted that heavy fighting continued in the just-captured enemy trenches. His division’s exact footprint remained unclear, however, with fragments of frequently out-of-date information coming in from a variety of sources.105 By midday he had ordered up a fresh bombardment on the Quadrilateral group of trenches east of Gommecourt to help the 169th ‘push on’ and link up with the 46th (North Midland) Division on the other side of the salient. He knew the 46th had experienced difficulties early on, but that it had men inside the German lines and planned to renew its attack.106 Still the German shellfire rained onto no-man’s-land.

  Süsskind-Schwendi and Borries were by this time well aware from battle reports arriving at their headquarters that VII Corps was attempting a pincer movement. They also knew Major-General Hull’s 56th had snatched a footing in the German front-line system of Gommecourt South.107 On the other hand, the 56th’s attack was already being disrupted by defensive shell- and machine-gun fire. All that remained was for the British gains to be squeezed out by concerted counterattacks. Süsskind-Schwendi and Borries probably did what most generals in such situations do: they told their subordinates to get on with the job and report back when done.108

  As German front-line infantry absorbed the attack, their officers were independently marshalling reserves forward.109 Fifty-one-year-old Major Otto von Ihlenfeld, commanding IR170, organised his regiment’s counterattacks, joined by 45-year-old Major Paul Tauscher’s battalion of RIR55. Their respective headquarters were in contact via one of the few remaining telephone wires.110 Tauscher was ordered to ‘drive out the enemy.’111 Ihlenfeld’s orders were probably no different. Tauscher had arrived forward east of Gommecourt at about 10 a.m. — his battalion marched through a seemingly endless warren of communication trenches running forward from Bucquoy — and learned the enemy was still ensconced in Gommecourt South.112 He and Ihlenfeld ordered up multipronged counterattacks, with no fewer than 11 companies of RIR55, IR170 and reserve regiment RIR15 converging on the 56th’s bridgehead from the east, north and west, joined by elements of mortar, pioneer and machine-gun units. They totalled about 2000 men,113 who were well armed, festooned with ‘potato masher’ grenades and extensively trained in counterattack tactics. The first organised groups tasked with retaking the lost ground set off at around 11.30 a.m., with more following over subsequent hours.114

  Rifleman Basil Houle, a teenage sniper in London Rifle Brigade, was there. In 1910 this chorister at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, sang at the funeral of Edward VII, and then the Coronation of George V and Queen Mary. ‘We could see the Germans moving up the trenches towards us. I shot one and he went down shouting. Another one looked round and I got him in the back. I got so mad and excited. . . . But they came back and absolutely showered us with bombs so we all scrambled back towards our own lines.’115

  By mid-afternoon the 56th’s vanguard had been driven back to the old German front line and split in two. The collapse had been swift. The third German trench was yielded from about 1 p.m., with the London line tightening further still as more counterattack groups closed, probing for weak points and exploiting gaps. Soldiers of IR170 held captive in dugouts were freed and recycled into the battle. The Londoners repeatedly used lamps to flash the signal ‘SOS BOMBS — SOS BOMBS’ towards their old front line.116 These were seen by observers. ‘But,’ wrote Rifleman Herbert Williams, London Rifle Brigade, it was ‘still quite impossible for anyone to get across [no-man’s-land], though several tried more than once.’117

  Back in the bridgehead, rifle ammunition was low, grenade supplies exhausted and casualties were still mounting. The Rangers’ thinly held niche was lost by 3.10 p.m., survivors fleeing into the metal storm of noman’s-land.118 What remained was a rag-tag 200 of the 169th wedged into about 400 yards of the trench adjacent to Gommecourt Park and, further south, probably no more than 50 of the 168th’s London Scottish in a besieged pocket with open flanks. Captain Hubert Sparks, London Scottish, walked overland, rallying his men in an act of signal bravery that ‘beggars the power of eulogy.’119 Come 4 p.m., the defiant Sparks’ choices were to stay and be killed, surrender or bolt: ‘Either of these first two alternatives is distasteful to me. I propose to adopt the latter.’120 Small groups of kilt-wearing men peeling away were pelted with bullets, the wounded and the so-far unscathed scrambling for the haven of shell holes or chancing a foot race against lead across no-man’s-land.

  Leutnant Wilhelm Kaiser’s counterattack group of RIR15 tackled the pocket of London Scottish behind a five-minute ad-hoc barrage:121 ‘We made no progress at all when we attempted to use the rolling up procedure [working from one trench bay to the next]. Instead we went up over the parapet and parados and attacked across country with hand grenades. At that the enemy pulled back rapidly and some Tommies surrendered.’ Within 30 minutes — with lots of shouts of ‘Hurra!’ — the trench was clear of London Scottish and back in German hands.122

  A thousand yards further north, Corporal Schuman and his small band of Londoners continued to fight on:

  Germans were in the same trench slinging over stick-bombs from both flanks. I must have been really mad, for in the heat of the moment, I quickly picked up a stick-bomb, certain that I had sufficient time to throw it back. But the trench being so high, it hit the top and fell back. With two or three others who were near me, we had to nip into the next bay very smartly.123

  After 10 hours of sweat-soaked killing all that remained by 5.30 p.m. was a 100-yard-long wedge of trench held by about 70 grubby-faced officers and men.124 One-and-a-half hours later their footprint was smaller still, thanks to trench-mortar fire, machine guns in enfilade and showers of stick grenades. Come 8.20 p.m. just 30 men were capable of defending what was now probably only 50 yards of the old German front line. Their choices: death, surrender or flight. The decision was made. Survivors dropped excess equipment, shook hands with the wounded they had to leave behind, bade good luck to their pals and drew breath for their dash back into no-man’s-land. The wedge was about to blow. Schuman was still there:

  I was just petrified. I knew that if I stayed in the trench I would have most certainly been killed. I hardly waited for the order, but it came — ‘Every man for himself.’ I did not wait to argue — over the top I went like greased-lightning — surviving a hail of bullets. I immediately fell flat. Then trying to imagine I was part of the earth, I wriggled along on my belly. Dead, dying, wounded, feigning death, who knows? The ground was covered with them. I sped from shell-hole to shell-hole. Never had I run faster.125

  As RIR55’s war diarist somewhat blandly told it, there was violent close-quarter fighting that saw the enemy take to his heels pursued by rifle, machine-gun and artillery fire.126
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br />   Teddy Bovill made it back, slithering, crawling and running across the 300-yard-wide graveyard that was no-man’s-land. Bullets buzzed about. Anxious soldiers watched. Some shouted the Queen’s Westminster Rifles’ subaltern on. Thirty minutes it took the bloody-faced central London corn merchant to reach the parapet. Then, bang! Sniper! Bovill fell fatally wounded into the trench. He died within minutes. His body was lost and he is today named on the Thiepval Memorial.

  Throughout the afternoon Major-General Hull was a bystander to the tragedy due to communication delays, difficulties with observation and the curtain of German shellfire. His battle log is laden with frustration at the steadily worsening situation in the German lines, his men’s successive withdrawals until jammed into a small section of enemy trench, multiple failed attempts to get munitions and reinforcements over, and the 46th’s repeatedly delayed and then stopped second attack.127 Hull could do nothing to alter the outcome, even with the late reallocation of artillery to provide defensive fire for the bridgehead and limited counter-battery work.128 By mid-afternoon he was thinking about protecting his own front line in case of a German counterattack, and this took precedence as evening faded in. Come 7.15 p.m., Hull had written off the 56th’s gains. He ordered the barely 100 men still in the German lines to be withdrawn after dark — they withdrew before receiving any such instruction — and the consolidation of his own shellfire-battered front line.129

  The 56th’s failure was essentially the story of Snow’s gunners having failed to suppress or destroy German artillery during the seven-day bombardment, and on battle day, when it put just three of 80 enemy guns out of action. If smoke cover, advanced assembly trenches, partially cut wire and speed of attack allowed the 56th’s leading battalions into the enemy lines, the quick defensive rejoinder from German gunners entirely isolated them from reinforcements and supplies of ammunition. It also annihilated subsequent waves of attacking infantry. This was exactly as Süsskind-Schwendi and Borries had intended, and their infantry fightback was organised by on-the-spot platoon, company and battalion commanders operating to a long-standing counterattack template. Hull later claimed that the 56th had reached the majority of its objectives. This was a moot point: Snow, Allenby and Haig had seen the division’s specific role — along with that of the 46th — as diverting German shellfire and infantry reserves away from VIII Corps’ advance at Serre rather than achieving any nominal gain in ground. That Hunter-Weston’s corps had failed almost immediately meant the 56th no longer had any tactical objectives of import to achieve and that its thousands of casualties were essentially for nothing.

  ‘This tragic adventure,’ was how Lieutenant-Colonel Southam, RFA, summed up the 56th’s ordeal.130 The division ran up 4314 casualties. Among them were 1353 killed, 2355 wounded, 373 missing and 233 prisoners. Its lasting gains were nil. Casualties in the three German regiments directly involved in Gommecourt South’s defence ran to at least 1072. This included about 282 casualties in RIR55, namely 92 dead, 154 wounded and 36 missing.131 IR170 lost 242 dead, 272 wounded and 136 missing, giving it a total 1 July casualty roll of 650.132 IR66 recorded 36 dead and 92 wounded,133 while RIR15 accrued at least 12 losses.134 Thus, for every German casualty opposite the 56th there were about four British. One officer, a Leutnant Petersen of RIR15, observed after battle that British dead in the sweep of land between the opposing lines lay ‘stretched out in rows.’135 Even he realised they had been ‘sacrificed for absolutely nothing.’136 Decades later, Gefreiter Hugo van Egeren, RIR55, reflected on it all: ‘We were hardened, experienced soldiers. It wasn’t fair to send these young soldiers against us. Some of them were only students and we felt very sorry for them.’137

  ‘FIX BAYONETS’ WAS the cry all along 46th (North Midland) Division’s assembly trenches just minutes before its attack began, remembered Private Thomas Higgins, 1/5th North Staffords.138 Bullets grazed the parapet, and in no-man’s-land scores of shrapnel and explosive shells erupted. ‘The Officer yelled at the top of his voice: “One. Two. Three.” Over we went.’139 Lieutenant Moore, 1/5th Leicesters, recalled that while few ‘expected to see the next day dawn,’140 one nervous wag hoped there ‘was a pub in Gommecourt and that it would be open!’141 What followed was an ordeal not really that much different from the 56th’s bloodletting. The 46th was to advance on a two-brigade frontage. Right to left, 137th and 139th Brigades would attack southeast towards the German front line in Gommecourt North, the former brigade’s right flank resting on the Foncquevillers–Gommecourt road.

  The leading waves of 137th Brigade advanced into the pall of dust and smoke blanketing no-man’s-land with some German artillery and machine guns already firing. On the left, 1/6th North Staffords* led off from the advanced assembly ditch, to which it had moved at about 7.27 a.m. To the right, 1/6th South Staffords† advanced from their original front line, as the forward jumping-off trench was too shallow and a mud slough. These two battalions were followed respectively by 1/5th North Staffords‡ and 1/5th South Staffords,§ and then, behind these, 1/5th Lincolns.¶ Together, they comprised nine waves across a frontage of about 650 yards. Their roughly 2500 soldiers were supposed to advance up to 700 yards behind the German front line before reaching their final objective. Each man was weighed down with no less than 66 pounds of kit and equipment. Those in support waves stumbled forward with all manner of hefty materiel for consolidating the captured ground. The 137th’s first wave moved forward at varying times at or just after 7.30 a.m. to the shrill of pea whistles, shouts and the wave of officers’ arms.

  Within moments the khaki of their uniforms had melted into the light-grey smoke swirl. Platoons and companies were soon jumbled. Equipment-laden soldiers squelching over the greasy pasture of no-man’sland were caught midway as soldiers of RIR91 and elements of RIR55 scurried from dugouts when the British shellfire stepped back.142 Within eight minutes the entire German front-line system was free of harassing shellfire, and, within 15 minutes, so was Gommecourt Wood. Riflemen and machine-gunners here and in the front line immediately south of the Foncquevillers road had free rein and shot the Staffords into the grassy mire as the southwest breeze swiftly dissipated the smoke. Machine guns in Schwalbenneste, which was about 1200 yards northeast of that road and could enfilade the entire length of Gommecourt North’s no-man’sland, probably inflicted casualties, too. Red flares fired skywards from the German trenches immediately invigorated the defensive barrage, which had begun a few minutes before 7.30 a.m. with the smoke release.143 Leutnant-der-Reserve Kümmel was there: ‘The dense veil of smoke gradually lifted, and the view became better, whereby the appearance of new English Storm troops was recognised and could be taken under well-aimed fire. Thereby through the well-placed barrage fire from our artillery any further attack was made impossible.’144

  British assembly and communication trenches were already jammed with wounded, dead and battle stragglers. Among them were men of subsequent waves trying to push along crowded communication trenches to their jumping-off lines, after their orders to deploy overland were changed as soon as the German shellfire thickened.145 This alteration to the plan derailed the forward flow of men in the rear waves and ultimately stalled the whole attack, but it did save lives.

  In no-man’s-land the living went to ground as bullets and shrapnel whirred overhead. Others continued amid the welter until cut down; the very few who made it beyond the mostly intact German wire and into the trench beyond were evicted, taken prisoner or killed. Still others sheltered in a 50-square-yard rectangle of shallow, collapsing trenches overgrown with nettles that had once marked the foundation of a sugar factory. All that was left of that factory were a few bullet-riddled old boilers and scraps of metal and wood. The 137th’s attack was over by 8 a.m. thanks to Süsskind-Schwendi’s crossfire death trap of artillery and machine guns.

  Survival was all about luck. ‘After having proceeded no more than 20 paces the whole line fell as one man, leaving me running,’ said Lance-Corporal Reg Tivey, 1/5th North Staffords.146 ‘I
did not know what had happened really, and surmised the line had been wiped out, since deliberate rifle fire and Maxim [machine-gun] fire was concentrated on us.’147 In the assembly trenches, Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Raymer, 1/5th South Staffords, said it was soon obvious the ‘attack had come to a standstill.’148 He told the 137th’s headquarters at 9.01 a.m.149 Private Harry Loake, 1/5th South Staffords, had made it halfway across: ‘A shell burst overhead, and, [shrapnel] striking my trenching tool, knocked me sick for a minute or two. If it had not been for that tool I should have been killed. Although slightly wounded, I got up again and made for the German trenches.’150 An ammunition pouch just above his heart also stopped a bullet. Then a shell splinter bruised his arm. He dived belly-to-earth near some other soldiers: ‘A shell burst over us, killing some of them and breaking my rifle, so I thought it was time to get somewhere a bit safe.’ Another bullet ripped Loake’s haversack as he rolled into a shell crater. Five near misses in 30 minutes: ‘I don’t think there is a luckier chap.’

  Others fared much worse. Private Thomas Tunnicliffe, 1/6th North Staffords, watched horrified as a German stick grenade blew near a Lewis gunner burdened with an ammunition haversack: ‘It set the pack on fire, exploded and the ammunition killed the man.’151 A wounded Lieutenant George Adams, 1/6th South Staffords, saw bullets pare off part of Lieutenant Samuel Evans’ nose, then his ear, while a third slammed into his left shoulder.152 Lieutenant Douglas Robinson was blown spreadeagled into the air and left deaf and mute.153 ‘Oh, I don’t know who else,’ wrote an overwrought Adams.154 Lieutenant Gavin Knowles, 1/5th South Staffords, was shot in the head within the German lines, collapsing into a soldier’s arms. Another, Private Alfred Hosell, same battalion, shook and shouted at Knowles’ corpse, hoping in vain that the usually cheerful officer might be revived.155 Knowles is named on the Thiepval Memorial. In the British lines the shellfire was equally indiscriminate. Next day, Lieutenant Moore saw the gore cleared: ‘A staggering number of bodies were unearthed.’156