by John Garth
The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers limped back into Bouzincourt on the morning of Monday 10 July 1916 and collapsed into their billets. After a few hours’ sleep, the men were roused and the battalion moved to Senlis, another crowded hamlet a mile further from the front, to rest in more comfortable billets and to take stock. They had found La Boisselle thick with the bodies of the dead, hundreds of them wherever the eye looked, and far more in British khaki than German field-grey. In several assaults on the German lines to the south of Ovillers they had added to the carnage fifty-six of their own men, killed or missing; twice that number were wounded. Even counting those who had remained at Bouzincourt, only a dozen soldiers of ‘C’ Company were left.
Though the full-scale assault had now given way to many smaller skirmishes, the chance of injury was still high, and the chance of being killed considerable. If you were an officer, it was clear, the odds were stacked against you. One subaltern was dead, one had been left to succumb to his wounds in a German dugout, and one (who had simply been carrying supplies) had been shot in the knee. Frederick Dunn, the 23-year-old captain of ‘A’ Company, had been shot through the head. Such were the facts before Tolkien as he headed for the first time into the trenches of the Western Front.
The orders to move came on 14 July, after a night interrupted by sudden, thunderous noise. With its French ally in mind, the British High Command had planned a decisive stroke for Bastille Day: as dawn reached Tolkien at Senlis, 22,000 soldiers were sweeping across the German second line from the southern British positions on the Somme. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers marched off at mid-morning through Bouzincourt and down into the Ancre valley. The road was flanked by resting soldiers and bustling with men, wagons, horses, and mules in motion. Old and new flowed together: for every motorized vehicle, there were roughly two horse-drawn wagons or carts and three riding horses. ‘That road was like a pageant,’ wrote Charles Carrington, a subaltern of the Royal Warwickshires whose experiences over the next few days closely relate to Tolkien’s. ‘The quieter men lay down, but the younger ones, officers and men, ran about like children to see the sights.’ Further down towards Albert, big pieces of artillery boomed away in hollow or copse or ruinous house. On top of the town’s war-damaged basilica glimmered a golden statue of the Virgin Mary, half-toppled, with the infant Christ in her outstretched arms. Superstition held that when she fell the war would end.
Tolkien’s brigade skirted the northern edge of the town, crossed the river, and bivouacked by an embankment, where the stream ran out of a wood at the foot of the long chalk down that rose to the German heights. Around the Roman road running north-east from Albert was a panorama of tentless bivouacs where soldiers brewed tea around stacks of rifles, or hurried on errands, or aimlessly foraged for souvenirs among the strewn detritus of armies. Some even managed to sleep, though the ground here was shelled intermittently. The land now was scarred, and the rural backdrop of the hinterland torn away.
As the afternoon waned, Tolkien’s battalion and the Royal Irish regulars were told that they were to take part in a ‘show’, as soldierly euphemism had it. They left the rest of the 74th Brigade by the embankment and headed up the busy road lined by scorched, stunted trees, turning left in the lee of a ridge to find the entrenched headquarters of their two divisional sister brigades. Beyond the grey ridge lay No Man’s Land. Bodies lay out there still from 1 July. To the right glimmered a vast white crater, where Rob Gilson had watched the enormous mine explode at the start of the battle. To the left, the height of Ovillers thrust forward like a finger from the chalk uplands behind it.
‘Something in the make of this hill, in its shape, or in the way it catches the light, gives it a strangeness which other parts of the battlefield have not,’ wrote John Masefield in his 1917 survey of the area, The Old Front Line. The height does not seem especially prominent, yet from here the German invaders could survey the battlefield from Bécourt, where the Cambridgeshires had launched their attack, to Leipzig Salient, where so many Salford Pals died. Trying to take the hill of Ovillers on the day of the Big Push, five thousand men had been wounded or killed. Two days later, the tally had risen by half as many again. While Tolkien was meeting with G. B. Smith at Bouzincourt, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had joined a third assault, which petered out in costly and inconclusive manoeuvres. In recent days, with La Boisselle in British hands, Smith had seen battle inside the strongpoint on the hilltop itself.
Ovillers remained a powerful obstacle, fiercely defended. In the southern face of the hill, just below its crest and amid the rubble of a French hamlet with its burnt-down church, a labyrinth of trenches had been cut, guarded by hidden machine guns. At dawn that Bastille Day the garrison at Ovillers had fought off battalions advancing from north-west, south, and south-east. Though the attack was no more than a diversion from the main assault further along the front line, Ovillers had appeared (as The Times said) ‘like a volcano in violent eruption’. Now the 7th Brigade, part of Tolkien’s division, was renewing its assault on the south-eastern defences, but it was battle-weary and depleted. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers and the Royal Irish were being sent up to lend a hand.
As dusk fell on 14 July, Tolkien tramped with his companions up into La Boisselle. Sewn into his uniform was the regulation first-aid packet, containing a sterile field dressing in case he was wounded. Underfoot the ground was clay, stiff yet sodden from the rains and torn by traffic. Nightfall inevitably brought movement in the other direction: the wounded being evacuated from the battlefield. The moon was brilliant, and the sky full of starburst shells and flares. Many small wooden crosses could be glimpsed as the old British front line fell behind. It was, wrote Carrington, ‘a new country…a desert of broken chalk – ditches, holes, craters, mounds and ridges, dry and thinly overgrown with weeds, and all interlaced with rusty strands of barbed wire’. The village of La Boisselle itself had been erased, yet still shells fell on it with a rising shriek, a roar and a crash. Then suddenly the trenchworks changed: the churned muck underfoot was replaced by straight duckboards and the walls now soared fifteen feet up, each fire-bay equipped with its own ladder. This was a monument of German engineering, and it showed scant sign of damage after the great bombardment.
The Lancashire Fusiliers passed into the maze and on uphill by German trenches to the right of the Roman way. The road was now raised on an embankment, but no longer lined by trees: they had been blasted out of existence. Going was slow, and single-file. Part way along they passed through an open area containing a broken-down ambulance wagon. This was land newly taken from the Germans, and at high cost. So it was on the approach to Ovillers that Tolkien first encountered the lost of the Somme: heralded by their stench, darkly hunched or prone, or hanging on the wire until a stab of brightness revealed them, the bloated and putrescent dead.
With the old front line a mile behind them, they turned left into a trench that cut across the road, dipped into Mash Valley, and climbed again directly towards Ovillers, a low silhouette of hedges and ruins against the black sky. The trench was soon crammed with anxious soldiers, jostling with a digging party of Royal Engineers.
The hill ahead erupted in light and noise shortly before midnight on 14 July 1916 as the 7th Brigade attacked. The Lancashire Fusiliers watched, waiting in reserve and ready to move into the captured ground to hold it against any counterattacks. But the brigade was beaten back. Abruptly, the order came for the reserve troops to join in a second attack at two o’clock. There was barely time for the Fusiliers to line up to the right of the survivors of the previous charge before they were launched, bayonets fixed, into the assault.
The first objective, the trench guarding Ovillers’ south-eastern perimeter, lay 120 yards uphill, opposite a parallel trench tenuously held by the British. But the two were actually linked at their eastern ends by a third, perpendicular trench, where German soldiers lurked around the corner. Thus the attackers would have to traverse an open square held on two sides by the enemy and swept by up to six
machine guns.
The Lancashire Fusiliers, however, never entered the fatal square. First they had to negotiate an obstacle course. Farmers had cut the slope into terraces, the Germans had sown it with barbed wire, and the British had ploughed it up again with enormous shellholes. The Fusiliers walked into a storm of bullets and a chaos of wire entanglements, and they scarcely reached their own forward trench.
One subaltern, a 30-year-old Lancastrian, died leading his platoon in the charge that night. Five officers were wounded. Tolkien, it seems, was there to wrestle with the muddled and inadequate communications system: a safer job, but certainly not peripheral. In this war of men and machines, the infantry counted little, the artillery rather more, and the word most of all: without fast and accurate communications, no one could hope to have the upper hand. A vast buried cable system had been installed prior to the Battle of the Somme, but of course it extended no further than the front line. Beyond its reach soldiers worked in a zone of mystery, in which thousands of them simply disappeared. The job of the signaller was to shed some light on the mystery by helping to set up a battlefield communications system and using it.
In practice this was an almost hopeless task, as Tolkien learned at Ovillers. There were now surface lines running back to La Boisselle, and field telephones. The battalion’s signallers carried coils of wire ready to set up new phone stations in captured territory. The surface lines, however, were easily tapped and Morse buzzers could be heard within three hundred yards as the signal leaked into the chalky ground. The phone was meant as a last resort, to be used with ‘station call signs’ that Tolkien had to memorize (‘AE’ for the Fusiliers, ‘CB’ for the brigade, and so on). Flags, lamps, and flares simply drew fire from the enemy ramparts. Most messages were sent by runner, but runners were reluctant to run headlong across danger areas under fire. Orders from the generals at corps HQ took at least eight hours to reach the attacking troops.
The three battalions fell back; there would be no more attacks that night. Saturday 15 July broke grey and misty over the slope up to Ovillers, strewn with fallen figures. The Fusiliers left one company to hold the forward trench and drew back to a safer distance. In the afternoon they returned to La Boisselle to provide carrying parties for their own brigade, which now took over the siege.
Daylight only reinforced the sense of horror brooding over the desolation. The artist Gerald Brenan, likening it to ‘a treacherous, chaotic region recently abandoned by the tide’, recalled that the ground between the two villages was ‘torn up by shells and littered with dead bodies, some of which had been lying around for three weeks…In the first attack on 1 July it had been impossible to rescue the wounded and one could see how they had crowded into shell-holes, drawn their waterproof sheets over them and died like that. Some of them – they were north-country lads – had taken out their Bibles.’ The forest of barbed wire towards Ovillers was thick with bodies, their faces purple-black. ‘The flies were buzzing obscenely over the damp earth,’ Charles Carrington recalled; ‘morbid scarlet poppies grew scantily along the white chalk mounds; the air was thick and heavy with rank pungent explosives and the sickly stench of corruption.’
But there were rumours of a great cavalry breakthrough at High Wood to the east, and at least the enemy artillery was no longer shelling La Boisselle. The German dugouts were also quite secure, barring a direct hit on the entrance. ‘Ours compared very unfavourably…a hole dug out of the side of the trench with a bit of corrugated iron for its use, whereas theirs led down by steps some fifty feet or so and were even lit by electric light,’ the Fusiliers’ padre, Evers, wrote later. ‘When one compares their arrangements with ours one wonders how in all conscience we managed to win the war!’ Here a garrison had laid low under the great bombardment: a rank smell of sweat, wet paper, and unfamiliar foods pervaded the subterranean halls, and they were filthy. Tolkien found a space in one of these dugouts and bedded down.
His battalion was called out again that evening to line up in reserve in the trenches to the right of the Roman road. Now the Royal Irish regulars were up ahead holding the British forward trench. The attack was set for ten o’clock, but then postponed for three hours. The was a hint of drizzle in the air. The German resistance seemed undented, and the charge proved a virtual re-run of the night before. This time, though, the Fusiliers watched the Sturm und Drang from the rear. Among the orders that Tolkien passed was one for fifty men from ‘A’ Company to go to the ammunition dump near La Boisselle to collect bombs for the fighting line. But signals problems recurred and it was an hour or more before news reached the division back at Bouzincourt that the attack had failed. None of its objectives had been gained, and its sole success – distracting the Germans so that a British battalion could cut them off from behind – almost proved disastrous.
A battalion to the right, the Warwickshires, had reached unopposed a trench running north-east from Ovillers – the Germans’ final link with reinforcements and rations; but when the bleared sun rose on 16 July, the Warwickshires were stranded. ‘To look for help we must turn back across the 1,000 yards of rough grass, impassable by day, which we had rushed across at night,’ wrote Charles Carrington, who was one of the officers in the stranded battalion, in a memoir. Prussian Guardsmen were now sniping and throwing bombs at them in a bid to relieve the embattled garrison.
Through the muggy day, Tolkien’s brigade tried to reach the Warwickshires from their position in front of Ovillers. There could be no daylight charge across open ground, so the Lancashire Fusiliers brought up bombs, which the Royal Irish hurled around the guarded angle of their trench at the German defenders. But the enemy had roofs and deep dugouts, and retaliatory bombs wore the Royal Irish down.
Tolkien’s battalion finally broke the deadlock as the day ran out, sending in fresh men with a rain of rifle- and hand-grenades. Just before sunset a white flag appeared, followed by a soldier in field-grey. So the garrison of Ovillers surrendered: 2 officers and 124 soldiers, all unwounded. The Fusiliers pushed on until they reached the stranded Warwickshires and came back out of Ovillers with trophies: machine guns and other matériel.
By the time the last pockets of resistance were driven out the next day, Monday 17 July, Tolkien was asleep. He had been relieved an hour after midnight and reached Bouzincourt at six o’clock, after some fifty hours in battle.
In the midst of his own trials at Ovillers, five days earlier, G. B. Smith had sent him a field postcard – the official kind printed with various routine messages to be deleted as appropriate – declaring simply ‘I am quite well’. Arriving at Bouzincourt Tolkien found a letter from him. Smith had returned from Ovillers just as Tolkien was going in, and on Saturday he had seen in the newspaper Rob’s name among the lists of dead. ‘I am safe but what does that matter?’ he said. ‘Do please stick to me, you and Christopher. I am very tired and most frightfully depressed at this worst of news. Now one realises in despair what the TCBS really was. O my dear John Ronald what ever are we going to do?’
NINE
‘Something has gone crack’
The Somme offensive had been a secret so widely shared that the name ‘Albert’ was on everyone’s lips back in England well before 1 July 1916. News of the attack broke the afternoon of that terrible Saturday, but there was no indication of casualties or intimation of disaster. The following Thursday Cary Gilson arrived back with his wife from a trip to London to find a multiple-choice field postcard from his son stating, ‘I am quite well. Letter follows at first opportunity.’ That evening the Headmaster wrote a teasing reply mentioning a family friend who ‘never sends anything but cards, and never crosses out anything, so that each missive announces his perfect health, the fact that he is wounded and has been conveyed to a base hospital, etc.’ Reflecting the general view that 1 July had been a turning point, he added: ‘The Germans have the wolf at their door.’ But by now family after family had heard of the loss or injury of a son. The Gilsons knew Rob had been around Albert. On Friday 6 July, R
ob’s stepmother Donna could hardly bear to go home because she felt sure a War Office telegram would be awaiting her. On the Saturday a letter arrived that dashed all hopes. Arthur Seddon, one of Rob’s best friends among the Cambridgeshire Battalion officers, sent condolences on his death.
Cary Gilson mastered or masked his grief with expressions of glorious sacrifice, and busied himself making further inquiries and writing an obituary. Rob’s sister Molly threw herself into her war work, dressing wounds at the hospital set up in Birmingham University. But Rob’s half-brothers, six-year-old Hugh and John, not quite four, wept bitterly when they learned their beloved ‘Roddie’ was gone. Donna was crushed by the loss of her ‘greatest friend’. She prayed that Estelle King, who happened to be on her way back from Holland, had not seen the newspapers.
Seddon’s letter said that Rob ‘was loved by all those with whom he came into contact’. The loyal Bradnam declared that he had been ‘loved by all the men in the platoon and, I may say, company, as he was a very good officer and a good leader.’ Old Major Morton said Gilson had been like a son to him, adding: ‘I am almost glad to be incapable of going back to my company, I feel I should miss him so at every turn.’* Wright, the subaltern who had shared huts and billets with Gilson for eighteen months, wrote that their friendship had been ‘everything to me in a life I cannot love’ and said, ‘I looked forward to a time when it should grow to immeasurable maturity in days of Peace.’
