Last Man Standing
Page 9
The bombing section of A Company, 6th Seaforths, a few weeks prior to their assault on Beaumont Hamel on 13th November.
I’ve met a lot of chaps out here whom I haven’t seen for over a year.
The food is pretty decent. It is nearly all tinned stuff but we’ve got a gem of a cook who can disguise a cat as a rabbit or turn horseflesh into mutton. We never enquire what the dinner is made of. Every morning (out of the trenches) we get porridge and two eggs! We are only allowed to drink sterilized water and water for ablution purposes is very scarce. However, few people die of under-washing. You ask if I got the flannels. I bought a vest at the Base; that is all. It is now in need of a wash.
Well, I will close now as I have my platoon’s letters to censor.
Hope you are quite well
Your loving son, Norman
PS I am posting two letters, one to Hesleden and one to H’pool. Let me know if you get them at different times.
7/11/16
Dear Bolton
Thanks muchly for your welcome letter. It took only five days to come. In one letter I asked for a Wolseley vest, long sleeves and also socks. It is fearfully cold here and I had no time to get a vest at Base. Will you also send me a woollen shirt with collar attached if possible. I will let you have the money when I get back. It is raining as per usual today… I am looking forward to getting the parcel. Hope it is well packed to stand the five days journey. I expect they get roughly treated en route as the men travel in cattle trucks so I don’t know what parcels travel in. The brand of cigarettes I like is Army Club, Crayol or any kind almost, preferably Virginia. There is no news here except that last night our slumbers were disturbed by an aeroplane raid.
Ta ta the noo. I will write when your parcel arrives.
Yours to a cinder, Norman
PS Have any of my letters been opened by the base censor?
Nov 9th 1916
Dear Bolton
Rec’d your letter with enclosures last night.
Parcel not yet arrived. It is not overdue yet however as they sometimes take a fortnight to come.
Been cleaning roads today. Going into trenches again tomorrow. Just been giving my feet a good dose of whale oil to prevent frost bite. This is supplied by the Government.
Most interesting today watching our gunners shell Bosche aeroplanes. It is a beautiful sight. The weather was lovely and the sky almost cloudless. The shells usually burst in groups of half-a-dozen and are like stars slowly turning into feathers of smoke. I should think there were about 500 shells fired in half-an-hour.
One was brought down. I hope it will keep fine for a few days, as it is miserable in wet weather.
I have just been having a bottle of champagne with old Henderson of the Argylls. I met him also cleaning roads.
It was like old times. He is also going up the line tomorrow.
…Well I will ring off as I am Orderly Officer and have to be at roll call.
Good night
Yours to a cinder, Norman
PS Best love to Mother and Father. Hope you are all in the pink.
Editor: Strict censorship would have prevented Norman from giving any indication about the forthcoming attack. Nevertheless, knowing that an attack was imminent, Norman’s letters give no impression of nerves or fear; on the contrary, they are upbeat and quite resilient.
The attack on Beaumont Hamel was part of a wider assault known as The Battle of the Ancre, in which several divisions would attack over a four mile front to take ground which had been stubbornly held by the Germans throughout the Somme offensive. Owing to the weather the attack had been postponed on several occasions but on Friday 10th operations were re-instituted owing to the relatively fine weather of the previous days, ‘Z day’ or the day of the attack being fixed for the l3th. In the meantime the battalion was kept out of the line so that lectures on discipline could be passed on by company commanders to the NCOs and men. Preparations continued. The following day, Saturday 12th, conferences were held at Battalion Headquarters, during which time precise details of the forthcoming attack were discussed with officers. Elsewhere football matches were played, the Battalion diary noting that D Company beat the Headquarters Company 5 – 0. That evening a concert was given in the Scottish Churches Hut. The next day the Battalion’s War Diary noted on Sunday 12th:
Going over the top. IWM Q2104
‘The Battalion rested all day on account of move to trenches at night… At night the men had a good meal, and at 9.20pm the first Company moved off to the trenches. A B and HQ Coys proceeded to Windmill outside Mailly Maillet and C and D Coys went through Mailly Maillet to Auchonvilliers. At these points men were given tea and after a short rest each Company was guided to its position by a guide.’
Owing to the terrible state of the roads and the weight of supplies given to each man to carry, it took all of the six hours allotted to reach the line. Even then the poor state of the communication and assembly trenches ensured the men struggled up to the front, arriving in their allotted positions less than an hour and a half before zero hour at 5.45am. It had been an onerous night although the Battalion diary still felt able to note that all the men were ‘in good form and eager.’Norman Collins would lead his men, 6th Platoon, B Company, in the forthcoming assault.
Norman
The night before the attack, my batman, a lad called Griger, came to see me and asked if I could provide him with the means of buying a small bottle of whisky – quite illegal of course, but I gave him the money to do it. He would be going over the top with me and he was likely to be killed, as I thought I would be. I thought my chances of coming back were very small, but it doesn’t deter you because you have no choice, no alternative. We had been told that we would go over the top in the second wave at six o’clock, so our watches were synchronised and we waited for the creeping barrage that was to cover our advance.
In the hours before the attack I recall speaking with two fellow officers, Lieutenants Smith and Mclean. We’d chatted and joked and I remember Lieutenant Smith telling me one curious thing and that was that he was going to go sick but not until after the attack, if he survived. He had developed a severe rupture and he wanted the hernia attended to in hospital, but he wouldn’t go sick beforehand as he had been nominated for the attack and his absence would seem cowardly. I thought that was very brave of him because he could have gone sick and saved his life. In the event he was killed.
As the time to go approaches, you’re looking at your watch to see the hour, and then you’re looking in front to see when the barrage will open, and then you look and see that your men – the men you’re standing to go over the top with – are equipped and ready to go, and that nobody’s turned around and gone back.
An artist’s vivid (and inaccurate) idea of how the assault on Beaumont Hamel progressed. The tanks, far from mounting the German front line, became bogged down in No Man’s Land. Over the page. The jumping-off trenches for the 51st Division can be clearly seen, as can the damage to the German lines. This picture was taken four days after the advance. One of two ditched tanks is marked ‘A’ on the photograph.
Everyone went in with fixed bayonets and as many mills bombs as they could carry, except Lewis gunners who carried a revolver and mills bombs. The officers carried a cane, a walking stick, a .45 revolver and they also carried a few bombs. The cane was no use to us whatever, but every officer carried a walking stick, it was just a bit of show. Although I carried a .45 revolver it wasn’t until much later, when I went on a shooting course, that I was shown how to use it, because a .45 kicks so heavily that you couldn’t hit a barn door at ten yards.
At 6.00am it was still dark and there was a thick fog, then suddenly a mine went up under the enemy line and two thousand guns opened fire and dropped on their trenches. The whole of the horizon seemed to go up in flames. It was so loud you could not pick out individual shells, it was just a continuous drumming. A solid canopy of steel went over our heads.
Then there was dead sile
nce, and the silence was itself stunning; the contrast, and then about two minutes later our artillery raised their sights and dished out their barrage on to their second line. The noise was terrific, although after the main barrage had stopped I could certainly have spoken to those near to me. I can’t recall anything I said, something absolutely ridiculous probably. Even so the men looked to me for encouragement, and you made jokes if you could.
I suppose I might have blown a whistle but it didn’t mean anything, so you sort of shepherded the men over. You are very aware of the example you are setting the men; if they saw you funking it – showing fear – they wouldn’t think much of you. I went out and saw men dropping right and left; I’ve a vision of a Gordon Highlander pitching forward with his rifle and bayonet on to his hands and knees. I went up to him and he was stone dead, his kilt raised showing his backside.
You’re working in a very small area, the rest of the Front is nothing. You quickly look to see if a man who had dropped is dead or not or if there was anything you could do for him, but you hadn’t time to stop. I had to keep up a certain bearing in front of the men and when you saw men wandering about, which did happen, because to begin with it was dark, and if they had got a bit lost, it was the officer’s job to form them into a fighting unit, no matter what regiment they were in. Knowing one’s duty took one’s mind off the horrible things.
The morass of Beaumont Hamel. Norman saw almost nothing to suggest a village had ever existed there save for a single washing mangle,
IWM Q1546
There was a thick mist; then, I remember, when the mist rose and the sun came out, the sun shone on the shell holes full of water and they were all different colours, the chemicals I suppose. My servant went with me, Grigor, and he stuck with me as far as he could all the time. Then you encourage them, right and left, to go with you, all go together and you keep looking as they drop occasionally.
The Germans were taken entirely by surprise and their front line was captured quite easily with few losses. We had cut quite a bit of their defensive wire beforehand and the main German defensive position, known as Y Ravine with its deep dugouts, was taken. I wasn’t in the first wave that captured the front line, we advanced through the first waves and went on under a canopy of steel to the second and third lines, where, farther back, the Germans managed to get their machine guns up and they opened fire on our second wave. I must say this, the Germans were good soldiers, many fought to the end. I saw one machine gun nest fight to the last round. I really admired them as soldiers and, if I had to have a battalion on my right it would be a German battalion and I would never need worry that they would fall back
A small number of men came up on our right from the Naval Division, led by Colonel Freyberg, and entered Beaumont Hamel in front of us at an angle. You couldn’t avoid the bullets, or the shells; it was sheer chance. When machine guns are firing, it’s like a solid wall of lead. You can smell the gunpowder, well, I suppose nitrates, the high explosives. I was not defenceless, and I fought when the opportunity came. My role was to get into their trenches and throw mills bombs down into the dugouts where the Germans were, I suppose killing quite a number. You throw the bombs down and say ‘Share that amongst you’; that’s what you said as a rule and all the time I’ve no doubt whatever that I was as frightened as anything and hoping, a faint hope, that I would survive.
They detached a couple of platoons to clear out the dugouts and we took some hundreds of prisoners. They just said ‘Kamarad’ and put their hands up before a lance corporal was given the job of taking them out of the line. I remember a young German prisoner coming in, hopping along using a piece of wood as a crutch. I could speak a few words of German and I just asked him how he felt. I had him put on to a stretcher and taken back with our own wounded behind the lines, and I could see that I wasn’t very popular at all for that. I was seen as using up a stretcher and a valuable service to help a German at the expense of our own. He was a young fellow and was probably no more than 18; he was badly wounded and he could only hop, and I suppose I felt sorry for him. I couldn’t say that German ever got back because I did hear stories of one or two prisoners being killed and in one instance I know one soldier did kill a prisoner, but he had lost two brothers and was a bit demented himself. All I know is that I saw them set off from the trenches to the cages.
There was nothing left of the village of Beaumont Hamel. It had been so badly pulverised by shelling that effectively it could only have been identified by map references. As I walked around I saw in the mud and bricks a washing mangle, two rollers and a cast iron frame and that was practically the only thing left in the village which showed that human beings had ever lived there. A day or two afterwards I had a good look round the German dugouts in Y Ravine. An enormous amount of ammunition and bombs of various descriptions were liberated from the German dugouts. I found one box of German egg grenades, a whole case of them untouched.
The dugouts themselves were very deep and had flights of stairs down to the bottom and wire beds. There was even a system of brass bells, like you would see in a house, which a batman could ring before entry into the innermost rooms. In fact I have a bell that I took from one of the dugouts; it is cracked from the explosions. These dugouts were such a contrast to our own. Because we were meant to be on the offensive, the British trenches had no deep dugouts, just an old door or whatever you could scavenge over the top of the trench and a few sandbags on top of that. It wouldn’t stop anything but splinters of course.
Senior German officers await collection and interrogation after their capture during the attack. The legs in the background standing behind the tripod belong to the famous war cinematographer Geoffrey Malins. IWM Q4503
Some of the booty seized from the German dugouts including ‘dancing slippers’ and a ‘piano’.
The bell taken as a souvenir by Norman from a dugout in Y Ravine.
Editor: The following day, Tuesday 14th November, the Seaforths’War Diary curtly noted that the Battalion was ‘holding captured positions but men very scattered’. On the 15th the men were withdrawn to the support lines and awaited relief which duly arrived, allowing the exhausted men to march back to camp at Mailly Maillet, where, as the diary records, the ‘men received a hot meal and were made as comfortable as possible. A few men who had been slightly wounded on the 13th rejoined the Battalion’. The next day the Battalion paraded on a hill close to camp where the Roll was called and the Commanding Officer offered his congratulations for the excellent work during the assault. The men spent the remainder of the day cleaning their uniform and kit.
It is interesting to note that, as an assaulting division, the Highland Division suffered disproportionately during such major engagements. Many units during the war suffered almost as many casualties simply holding the line as they did in attacking the enemy. This is not true for those units held back for assaults in which breaking well-entrenched enemy soldiers would be ‘difficult’. A look at the casualty figures shows that during October the four battalions of 152 Brigade, 51st Division, suffered only 44 casualties, of whom just eight were killed. In November, after the attack on Beaumont Hamel, the total casualties were no less than 1,022, of whom at least 285 officers and men were killed. More stark still are the casualty rates suffered by the 6th Seaforth Highlanders. In October the 923 officers and men of the battalion suffered one casualty. In November, of the 587 officers and men who took part in the attack at Beaumont Hamel, some 277 were killed, wounded or missing, including 14 officers. The Battalion diary notes that ‘Those who went over the parapet in the actual assault suffered 45% losses,’ optimistically adding that ‘It will be seen, however, that the total losses suffered by the Brigade did not exceed the number of prisoners captured;’ – some comfort to the men of the Battalion, perhaps. As a young Second Lieutenant new to the rigours of trench warfare, Norman had been very lucky to come out unscathed.
The Battalion diary records the fate of those officers who were less fortunate:
&n
bsp; ‘Monday 20th
Battalion in reserve in line near dugouts in Seaforth Trench. Salvage of tools bombs etc. Bodies of those killed on 13th being brought in. Bodies of Captain EJ Anderson, 2Lt RA Mclean, RJ Smith taken down to cemetery at Mailly Maillet.
‘Tuesday 21st
Salvage work continues. Captain EJ Anderson, 2/Lts RA Mclean and RJ Smith buried this morning in Mailly Maillet Cemetery at 9. am Captain AH Macgregor’s body recovered this morning and taken to cemetery at Mailly Maillet.’
Above. Pte Percy Dickin of A Company, 6th Seaforths, who was killed in the attack. Pte Dickin kept a diary during his service in France in 1916 and handed it to his platoon sergeant for safe-keeping during the fighting. The last entry, written on 12th November, simply states ‘preparations for attack’. In the event, Pte Dickin’s body was lost and his name is now commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial to the missing of the Somme. Below, dead Highlanders left on the battlefield. IWM Q11657
Norman
I remember writing a little poem later, when I was in hospital, in memory of my two friends Lieutenants Smith and Mclean, killed in the attack and who now lie side by side. I still have this little poem which is just doggerel, it is not poetry at all, but it expresses my feelings at the time.
In Memoriam Lieutenants RJ Smith and RA McLean, killed at Beaumont Hamel the 13 November 1916.
When this blessed war is over
And the roar of the guns shall cease
We shall soon get tried of working
And the monotony of peace.
We shall think of the days behind us
Of the barrage’s devilish roar
Of the machine guns’ steady rattle
And dream we are back once more
No more in the cold wet trenches