John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  [source: Manchester Guardian, 14 November 1918, p.10]

  What First?

  Mr. John Masefield – Help Belgium and Serbia.

  Belgium and Serbia – these come first in the opinion of one of our finest authors.

  You ask me “What first, after the peace?”

  First, I hope, a general giving of thanks for our victory and preservation, but after that a great national effort to help Belgium and Serbia, the lands which have suffered most in this war, to support themselves as in the past. After that, I hope that we may turn to upon the tasks of peace with the passionate self-sacrifice and courage with which our nation has faced the tasks of war.

  [source: Answers, 14 December 1918, p.43]

  The Battle of the Somme

  TO

  MAJOR THE HON. NEVILLE LYTTON

  Foreword

  I have been asked to write a few words of preface to this little book.

  While I was in France, in the late summer and autumn of 1916, it was suggested that I should write a History of the Battle of the Somme, then in its second stage or act. In discussing the plan of the book, it was decided that I should begin with some account of the attacks upon Verdun (which the Battle of the Somme ended), and end with the taking of Bapaume, then hoped for, but not expected to happen at once. In order that I might write with full knowledge, some arrangements were planned, by which I could go again to Verdun, to visit some positions which I had not seen. It was made possible for me to go to the Somme, certain introductions were given to me, and I was formally requested to write the History.

  After some delay, I was permitted to go again to the Somme battlefield, and to live on or near it for those months of 1917 when our Armies were advancing in all that area. It was made possible for me to watch the advance of our Armies from point to point and from valley to crest, and to trace those old, much more grim advances, in the area from which the enemy had been beaten in the first months of the attack. During those months I walked over every part of the Somme battlefield in which British troops had been engaged, over every part at least twice, and over many parts, which specially moved me, such as Delville Wood, High Wood, Pozières, Mouquet Farm, Thiepval, and the Hawthorn Ridge, more times than I can remember. I came to know that blasted field as well as I know my own home. I saw much there which I am not likely to forget.

  In June, 1917, when I felt that I knew the ground so intimately well, from every point of view, that I could follow any written record or report of the fighting, I returned to England, hoping to be permitted to consult the Brigade and Battalion diaries, as in 1916, when I wrote a history of the campaign in Gallipoli. It was not possible for me to obtain access to these documents, and as only four others, of any worth, existed, my plan for the book had to be abandoned.

  Feeling that perhaps some who had lost friends in the battle might care to know something of the landscape in which the battle was fought, I wrote a little study of the position of the lines, as they stood on July 1, 1916. This study, under the title The Old Front Line, was published at the end of 1917. I then attempted to write an account of the battle from what I had seen and heard, and had written as much as is here printed, when I was turned to other work, of another kind, many miles from Europe and the war.

  Scanty as the books are, they would have been scantier but for him to whom I dedicate them. By his kindness and forethought much which would have been difficult and disappointing was made possible and pleasant. The disappointment of having to forego the task of writing of our Armies in their victory was but a small thing when set beside the memory of so much that was an inspiration and a delight.

  JOHN MASEFIELD.

  The Battle of The Somme

  A moment before the whistles blew, in the morning of July 1, 1916, when the Battle of the Somme began, the No Man’s Land, into which our men advanced, was a strip of earth without life, made smoky, dusty, and dim by explosions which came out of the air upon it, and left black, curling, slowly fading, dust and smoke-devils behind them. Into this smoke and dust and dimness, made intenser by the stillness of the blue summer morning, came suddenly the run of many thousands of men at the point of death. Not less than twenty thousand men clambered up the parapet at that instant. They tripped and tore through the wire, already in lanes, and went on to their fronts, into the darkness of death, cheering each other with cries that could be heard above the roaring and the crashing of the battle. On the instant, before all the men were out of the trenches, the roaring lifted up its voice as the fire doubled and the enemy machine guns opened.

  Many men among those thousands were hit as they showed above the parapet, many others never cleared the wire; but the rest drew clear and went forward, some walking, some running, most of them in a kind of jog-trot, some aligned in a slow advance or in rushes of platoons, till the green river of the No Man’s Land was dotted with their moving bodies throughout the sector. Perhaps not many of all those thousands knew what was happening even quite close at hand, for in those times all souls are shaken, and the air was dim, and the tumult terrible. Watchers in our old lines saw only a multitude of men crossing a dimness which kept glittering. They saw many of the runners falling as they ran, some getting up and going on, others moving a little, others lying still. They saw as it were dead lines, where all the runners fell, even the strongest. They saw promising swarms of men dropping in twos or threes, till the rush was only a few men, who went on until they fell like the others and lay in little heaps in their tracks. There was nothing to show why they fell. Men looked for them to rise and go on with the few little leading figures who were drawing near to the enemy wire. They could see no enemy. They could not even see the jets of smoke, hardly bigger than the puffs blown from a kettle at the instant of boiling, which spurted from enemy machine guns along the whole line.

  Within a few minutes, the second and third waves were following on the first, not knowing, in that darkness of dust and tumult, what success had been won, if any.

  Our attack was made on a front of sixteen miles. To the south of this, at the same moment, the French attacked on a front of nine miles. Let the reader imagine any narrow strip of twenty-five miles known to him – the course of the Thames, say, from London to Maidenhead, or from Pangbourne to Oxford – suddenly rushed by many thousands of men, many of them falling dead or maimed upon the way. For the look of the charge let him remember some gust of wind on a road in autumn when the leaves are lying. The gust sweeps some array of leaves into the road and flings them forward in a rush strangely like the rush of men as seen from a distance. As in the rush of men, many leaves drop out, crawl again forward, cease, quiver, and lie still; many others lose touch or direction, the impulse may falter, the course swerve, but some are whirled across the road into the gutters at the other side.

  To cross the No Man’s Land took from a minute to two minutes of time. Perhaps most of those who were in that attack were too dizzy with the confusion and tumult, the effort to keep touch and the straining to find out what was happening to the flanks and in front, to take stock of their own sensations. These things have been said about the attack:

  (a) “I heard the man behind me slip on the ladder. ‘The damned thing,’ he said. ‘I’ll miss the bloody train.’ They were putting over whizz-bangs rather a lot; but I didn’t notice any near me. I felt just ordinary. “Their wire had been nicely cut. I’d been afraid we might be hung up while we cut it. I heard a whut-whut-whut, just like that, just alongside my ears. ‘You – – – – – – s,’ I said, ‘that’s a bloody machine gun in your bloody wire,’ I said. So afterwards, when it was all over, I went back, and they’d got a bloody little machine gun covered over in a shell-hole, shooting through a kind of box in a sort of funnel, along with two Boches; but they’d been caught with a bomb, it looked like.”

  (b) “I’d had a bet with one of our fellows that there was a sniper’s post just where I said it was, ’cos I’d figured it out it must be about there. So when I went over I thought, ‘We’ll
see now who’ll get them fags.’ The funny part of it was we were both wrong about the sniper. I don’t know where he was.”

  (c) “About an hour before we went over, they got onto our jumping-off trenches and fairly plugged us with a lot of heavy stuff as well; so when we went across I said, ‘You – – – – – – s, you wait till I get in among you; I’ll get some of my own back.’”

  (d) “Going across wasn’t so bad, but when we started to consolidate our bit of trench we kept running out of bombs. If we could have had a good supply of bombs all day the Fritzes would have had no show at all. Bombs are heavy to carry. One of our bombers must have been hit as he was coming up. He was wearing his bomber’s jacket all full of bombs, and they blew him all to pieces. They bombed us out afterwards. They held us up at the end where we were, up against the sandbags, and then they got up like to the side and bombed us clean out. Just before they got us out we found some hairbrush bombs; they don’t have them much now, but they had that lot all right.”

  (e) “What did I think while I was going over? I thought my last hour had come. They’d got a machine gun every five yards, it sounded like. ‘By God,’ I said, ‘give me London every time.’”

  (f) “It’s my opinion there’ll be some queer revelations about this war after it’s all over. I often thought of that when we were in it; not about the soldiers so much, but about the financiers.”

  (g) “After we’d got back into our trenches we saw a big Boche jump up onto the parapet and wave a great big Red Cross flag, and we saw their men go out with stretchers, to bring in our wounded, we thought. Then we saw they were shooting at our wounded. Whenever they stirred they turned machine guns on them; we could see the bullets going phut all round them. So then we looked to see what they were doing with the stretchers. What they were bringing in under the Red Cross flag was our Lewis guns which our poor chaps had been carrying. “All day long they kept us from bringing in any of our wounded. Whenever our stretcher-bearers went out they turned machine guns onto them at once. But one of our fellows went out and brought in about twenty, one after the other. He carried them in on his back till he was quite worn out. His name was Smiley or some such name.”

  (h) “The Boche varied from place to place. Just near where we were he was very decent, and sent us in a list of the names of the prisoners he’d taken. Afterwards we found that he’d buried our dead and put up crosses to them: ‘To a brave Englander.’ ‘To brave English soldiers.’ This was a fine thing to have done; for it wasn’t healthy by any means out in front of his wire. They were Bavarians who did this.”

  (i) “Before we went over we were in a shallow jumping-off trench. It wasn’t a trench, it was really the bank beside a road. We were being shelled with whizz-bangs. We hadn’t any real shelter, but were crouched down under the bank. I looked along my men. Some were cursing and mad; I don’t think they knew what they were doing, but about every other man was praying.”

  (j) “I noticed that several men were inclined to take off their clothes before the attack. It may be fear in some cases, but then it was very hot, and there was the feeling that one would advance better free. One wants all one’s strength, and the things pressing on the body seem to choke you. During the attack I saw one man who was stark mad and stark naked, both, running round in the No Man’s Land, yelling at the top of his voice. They got him into a dressing-station, and they had a bad time with him, for he wouldn’t speak, he would only yell, and they couldn’t make out whether he was a Boche or one of our own chaps. I don’t know what became of him. Probably when they got him down and gave him a bath and cut his hair he remembered himself.”

  (k) “They call us ‘the poor bloody infantry.’ We deserve the name, for we get into most of the trouble when there is any, and all of the mud when there isn’t. But I say that the airmen have the hardest time, for they’re in danger the instant they leave the ground; and they live over the enemy lines, in a cloud of shrapnel, and they come right down to take photographs, or to draw fire when they are spotting batteries, or to scatter infantry. On the 1st of July they were just over our heads, as bold as brass. They spotted for us, and when the Boche counter-attacked they dived right down and took them on with their machine guns. When they come down, I believe they fall asleep at once from nervous strain.”

  (l) “I made up my mind that I was going to be killed. I was to be in the third wave. While I was waiting, during the last half-hour, I kept saying to myself: ‘In half an hour you will be dead. In twenty-five minutes you will be dead. In twenty minutes you will be dead. In a quarter of an hour you will be dead.’ I wondered what it would feel like to be dead. I thought of all the people I liked, and the things I wanted to do, and told myself that that was all over, that I had done with that; but I was sick with sorrow all the same. Sorrow isn’t the word either: it is an ache and anger and longing to be alive. There was a terrific noise and confusion, but I kept thinking that I heard a lark; I think a lark had been singing there before the shelling increased. A rat dodged down the trench among the men, and the men hit at it, but it got away. I felt very fond of all my men. I hoped that they would all come through it. I had told them some time before to ‘fix swords.’ I wondered how many of them would unfix swords, and when. Then I thought, ‘When I start I must keep a clear head. I must remember this and this and this.’ Then I thought again, ‘In about five minutes now I shall be dead.’ I envied people whom I had seen in billets two nights before. I thought, ‘They will be alive at dinner-time today, and tonight they’ll be snug in bed; but where shall I be? My body will be out there in No Man’s Land; but where shall I be? What is done to people when they die?’ The time seemed to drag like hours and at the same to race. The noise became a perfect hell of noise, and the barrage came down on us, and I knew that the first wave had started. After that I had no leisure for thought, for we went over.”

  (m) “I was in a blue funk lest I should show that I was. We had a sergeant, who was killed afterwards at Le Sars, an Englishman. I really believe he enjoyed it. He was an old soldier who had been in South Africa, an elderly man; quite forty-five or more. He walked up and down in the bay smoking his pipe, with his eyes shining, and every now and then he would say something about South Africa; not about the fighting there, but about some man or other who had got drunk or deserted, or stolen something. He made me feel that, after all, that is what life is: you get together with a lot of other fellows, in a pub or somewhere, and swap a story or two about the blackguards you’ve known, and then you go out and get knocked on the head by a set of corner-boys.”

  (n) “I tried to tell myself that I was doing it for this or that reason, to make it sound better; but it didn’t make it any better, I didn’t believe those grand things. When you are waiting to be killed, those damned newspapers seem damned thin, and so do those damned poets about the Huns. The Fritzes are a dirty lot, but they are damned brave, you may say what you like. And being killed by a lot of damned Fritzes is a damned bad egg, and no amount of tosh will alter it.”

  North of the Ancre River the fight was to contain the enemy; south of the Ancre we fought to advance. In this volume nothing will be said of the containing fighting to the north of the river, except that it was severe and continuous. It needs, and will receive, a volume to itself. In this volume the story will be that of the advance, during the first stage of the battle, which ended on the 14th of July, and of the great attack on the night of the 14th of July, which ended some three weeks later in the capture of Pozières, and the vital, highest points in the enemy’s second line.

  In the attack of the 1st of July it happened that our first success in the advance was at the eastern flank of our sector, at the village of Maricourt, where our extreme right joined the extreme left of the French. This account of the battle will begin with this eastern, or right flank of the advance, and will proceed from point to point, westward and northward, to the Leipzig above the Ancre, where the tide of our success was stayed during these first two stages of the battle.r />
  From Maricourt, where the French were fighting beside us, the thrust of the attack was in two directions: towards the east, to the romantic dingle of Favière Wood, and towards the north, to the brickworks of Montauban. These works stood beside a road from Maricourt to Longueval, about half a mile from Montauban village. They consisted of two big blocks of building, one on each side of the road, with outlying offices and furnaces. The enemy had burrowed under them, so as to make an underground fort, to which the ruins of the works, soon nothing more than a heap of bricks, made excellent head-cover. The fort was strengthened with concrete, reinforced with iron girders. It contained living rooms for many men, and emplacements for many machine guns. As it lay on a plateau-top, well back from a contour line, it had a good field of fire in all directions. As at Mouquet Farm, later in the battle, all that could be seen from outside it was a heap of brick. This fort of the brickworks was linked by communication trenches to a strong enemy line which defended Montauban and the two big adjacent woods of Bernafay and Trones. It made an advanced redoubt to these works, just as Mouquet Farm did to the Zollern Trench. Two other outlying forts covered the Montauban-Mametz Road, but, though these were wired, it was thought that they were not likely to be so dangerous as the brickworks. Our preliminary fire upon the brickworks and Montauban was exceedingly heavy, constant, and accurate. It could be well-observed and corrected from observation posts in the trees behind our lines, and the enemy at this part of the line had not, at that stage of the battle, any great concentration of men and guns. It happened that our attack upon the brickworks, Montauban village, and the road down to Mametz, all the extreme right wing of our battle, was swiftly successful, and without great losses. The brickworks had been so rained upon with shells that they gave little trouble, and the Manchesters were established there and in Montauban village before noon. On the left of this successful attack, where our men had to storm the steep little hill on which Mametz stands, the approach was slower; but in the late afternoon Mametz, or what was left of it, was ours, and the cellars and piles of rubble covering machine guns had been bombed quiet.