by John Keegan
2. Offensive on the Somme
Verdun had been planned by Falkenhayn as an operation to “bleed white” the French army and knock Britain’s “best sword” out of her hand. Even by June, when the battle still had six months to run, it had failed in both its purposes and, as it failed, Falkenhayn’s credibility as Chief of Staff had waned also. Dominating though he was in personality and intellect, handsome and forthright, self-assured to the point of arrogance and of proven ability as a staff officer and Minister of War, he suffered from the disadvantage of association, in the popular mind, with defeat rather than victory.39 Responsibility for the failure of the Schlieffen Plan—intrinsic though failure was in the plan’s defects—and for the entrenchment of the Western Front, though it properly lay in both cases at Moltke’s door, nevertheless attached in practice to him as Moltke’s immediate successor. The victories of the Eastern Front, Tannenberg, even Gorlice-Tarnow, seemed the achievement of Hindenburg, and of his alter ego, Ludendorff. Falkenhayn’s confederality with the Austrian Chief of Staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, landed him with shared culpability for the poor showing of the Austro-Hungarian army against the Serbs and Russians and even for the entry of Italy into the war, since Italy’s motivation was essentially anti-Austrian. The only initiative undoubtedly his own, and for which he might have taken credit were it a success, was Verdun, which, by midsummer, was palpably a terrible failure. Even before the great bombardment that would usher in the Anglo-French offensive on the Somme had opened, Falkenhayn’s grip on high command was weakening, the star of his ascent and zenith already passing to the eastern titan, Hindenburg, who would replace him in August.
The Somme was to be the enterprise of another ascendant general, Douglas Haig. John French, “the little field marshal” who had taken the BEF to France, had been worn down by the attrition of his beloved army of regulars, the old sweats of his Boer War glory days, the keen young troopers of the cavalry in which he had been raised, the eager Sandhurst subalterns, the generation of decent, dutiful majors and colonels who had been his companions on the veldt and in the hunting field.40 The death of so many of them—there had been 90,000 casualties among the original seven infantry divisions by November 1914, rather more than a hundred per cent of mobilised strength—afflicted him, and he added to the pain he felt by his apparently compulsive need to tour the military hospitals and talk to the wounded. “Horribly sad and very pathetic to see how good and cheery and patient the dear fellows are … I hate it all so! … such horrible sadness and depression.”41 French was not made for modern war or for the politics of a national conflict. He could not feel for the citizen soldiers coming forward in their hundreds of thousands as he did instinctively for the vanishing seven-year men of the feudal order he had known as a young officer, nor could he play the ministerial game at which his War Office equals and younger subordinates were adept. Douglas Haig, commander of the BEF’s First Army, was sinuous in his relationships with the great, particularly at court. He had precipitately married a royal lady-in-waiting after the briefest of introductions and had accepted an invitation to correspond privately with King George V soon after the Western Front had relapsed into stalemate. Others in the BEF hierarchy shared by the end of 1915 the belief that French had proved his incapacity to continue in supreme command, and their views were made known to the government. It was Haig, however, who wielded the dagger. During a visit by the King to France at the end of October, he told him directly that French was “a source of great weakness to the army, and no one had confidence in him any more.” All that was true, but it would have come better from Haig had he not added that he himself was ready to do his duty in any capacity. “Any capacity” clearly meant as French’s successor which, after further consultations between the King, the Prime Minister and Kitchener, still Secretary of State for War, though his perch was creaking also, he became on 16 December 1915.42
The battle of the Somme
Haig, whom his contemporaries found difficult to know, has become today an enigma. The successful generals of the First World War, those who did not crack outright or decline gradually into pessimism, were a hard lot, as they had to be with the casualty figures accumulating on their desks. Some, nevertheless, managed to combine toughness of mind with some striking human characteristic: Joffre, imperturbability; Hindenburg, gravity; Foch, fire; Kemal, certainty. Haig, in whose public manner and private diaries no concern for human suffering was or is discernible, compensated for his aloofness with nothing whatsoever of the common touch. He seemed to move through the horrors of the First World War as if guided by some inner voice, speaking of a higher purpose and a personal destiny. That, we now know, was not just appearance. Haig was a devotee both of spiritualist practices and of fundamentalist religion.43 As a young officer he had taken to attending seances, where a medium put him in touch with Napoleon; as Commander-in-Chief he fell under the influence of a Presbyterian chaplain whose sermons confirmed him in his belief that he was in direct communication with God and had a major part to play in a divine plan for the world. His own simple religion, he was convinced, was shared by his soldiers, who were inspired thereby to bear the dangers and sufferings which were their part of the war he was directing.44
Despite his strangeness, Haig was an efficient soldier, the superior to French in every branch of modern military practice, and his skills were not better shown than in his preparations for the Somme. That high and empty battlefield had not been contested since the first weeks of the war. On the enemy side, the Germans had profited from the peace in which they had been left since 1914 to construct the strongest position on the Western Front. The hard, dry, chalky soil was easily mined and they had driven dugouts thirty feet below ground, impervious to artillery fire, provisioned to withstand siege and linked to the rear by buried telephone cable and deep communication trenches. On the surface they had constructed a network of machine-gun posts, covering all angles of approach across the treeless downs, and in front of their fire trenches laid dense entanglements of barbed wire. They had time to do so. Among the half-dozen divisions garrisoning the Somme sector, the 52nd had been there since April 1915, the 12th since October and the 26th and 28th Reserve Divisions since September 1914. They had made themselves secure.45
On the other side of no man’s land, little had been done since 1914. The French, who had occupied the sector until the extension of the British line southward in August 1915, held it as a “quiet front,” defended by artillery with few infantry in the front line. The British had introduced a more aggressive mood but the infrastructure for a great offensive was still not in place when Haig took command. Under his direction, the back area of the Somme, from the little market town of Albert to the departmental capital of Amiens twenty-five miles behind, was transformed into an enormous military encampment, cut by new roads leading towards the front and covered with shell dumps, gun positions and encampments for the army that would launch the attack. As a military technician, Haig could not be faulted. His talents as a tactician remained to be proved.
The army assembling on the Somme had no doubts in the high command or in itself. It consisted of twenty divisions, most grouped, under the command of General Sir Henry Rawlinson, in the new Fourth Army. The majority of the divisions were new to the war also. A handful were old regular formations, the 4th, 7th and 8th, and the 29th, all greatly changed since their ordeals in the original BEF and at Gallipoli. Four were Territorial, the 46th, 56th, 48th and 49th, which had been in France since the spring of 1915. The rest were “Kitchener” formations of citizen volunteers, many organised round “Pals” or “Chums” battalions, for which the Somme would be their first battle. There were ten of these Kitchener divisions, of which the senior, the 9th Scottish, had arrived in France in May 1915 but the 34th only in January 1916.46 Perhaps the most unusual was the 36th (Ulster) Division, a wholesale embodiment in khaki of the Ulster Volunteer Force of Irish Protestants opposed to Irish Home Rule who, on the outbreak of war, had collectively volunteered.
The Ulstermen differed from their other Kitchener comrades only in their pre-war experience of military drill. With the reality of battle they had no more familiarity than the rest. Their infantry battalions were wholly inexperienced; so, too, and more critically, were their batteries of supporting artillery, on whose accurate shooting and prompt changing of target the success of the coming offensive depended.
Haig’s plan for the Somme was simple, akin in outline to Falkenhayn’s for Verdun, with the difference that he hoped to break the enemy’s line rather than force him to stand and fight for it in a struggle of attrition. An enormous bombardment, to last a week and consume a million shells, was to precede the attack. As it died away on the date chosen for assault, 1 July, nineteen British divisions and, south of the River Somme, three French, all that could be spared while Verdun still raged, were to move forward across no man’s land and, in the expectation that the enemy surviving the shelling would have been stunned into inactivity, pass through the broken wire entanglements, enter the trenches, take possession and move on to the open country in the rear. So certain were Haig and most of his subordinates of the crushing effect the artillery would produce, that they had decided not to allow the inexperienced infantry to advance by the tried and tested means of “fire and movement,” when some lay down to cover with rifle volleys the advance of the rest, but to keep them moving forward upright and in straight lines. At the battle of Loos the preoccupation of the General Staff had been to “keep the troops in hand,” with the result that the reserves had been kept too far behind the lines and, when sent forward too late, deployed in dense masses.47 The preoccupation before the Somme was with the danger of the troops taking cover and not restarting the advance once they had lain down. The tactical instruction for the battle, “Training Divisions for Offensive Action” (SS 109), and the associated instruction issued by Fourth Army, “Tactical Notes,” both prescribe an advance by successive waves or lines of troops and a continuous movement forward by all involved. “The assaulting troops must push forward at a steady pace in successive lines, each line adding fresh impetus to the preceding line.”48
Haig, as Commander-in-Chief, and Rawlinson, commanding the attacking troops, though agreeing on the tactics to be followed, differed over the offensive’s objects. Haig expected a breakthrough, to as far as Bapaume, the little market town on the far side of the Somme uplands seven miles from the start line. Rawlinson foresaw a more limited result, a “bite” into the German trench system, to be followed by further bites to gain more territory. Rawlinson, as events would prove, was the more realistic. Both generals, however, were equally unrealistic in their expectations of what the preliminaries would achieve. Nearly three million shells had been dumped forward for the preparatory bombardment, to feed 1,000 field guns, 180 heavy guns and 245 heavy howitzers, giving a density of one field gun per twenty yards of front and one heavy gun or howitzer to fifty-eight yards.49 The artillery plan was for the field guns to concentrate, before the battle, on cutting the enemy’s wire in front of his trenches, while the heavy guns were to attack the enemy’s artillery with “counter-battery” fire and destroy his trenches and strongpoints. At the moment of assault, as the British infantry left their trenches to advance across no man’s land, the field artillery was to lay a “creeping barrage” ahead of the leading wave, which was intended to prevent the German defenders from manning the parapet opposite so that, in theory, the German trenches would be empty when the British arrived.
Almost everything that Haig and Rawlinson expected of the enormous artillery effort they had prepared was not to occur. The German position, for one thing, was far stronger than British intelligence had estimated. The thirty-foot dugouts in which the German front-line garrison sheltered were almost impervious to any shell the British could fire and had survived intact right up to the last days before the attack. A trench raid launched on the night of 26/27 June revealed, for example, that “the dugouts are still good. The [Germans] appear to remain in these dugouts all the time and are completely sheltered.”50 So it was to prove on the day. Even more ominous was the failure to cut wire. Later in the war a sensitive “graze” fuse would come into use, which exploded a shell when it touched something as slender even as a single wire strand. In 1916 shells only detonated on hitting the ground and bombardments fired at wire entanglements therefore merely tossed them about, creating a barrier yet more dense than that laid by the enemy in the first place. The general commanding the British VIII Corps, Hunter-Weston, who had been at Gallipoli and should have known how tough wire was, reported before 1 July that the enemy wire on his front was blown away and “the troops could walk in,” but one of his junior officers “could see it standing strong and well.”51 Since uncut wire in front of defended trenches was death to attacking infantry, this complacent misappreciation by the staff was literally lethal.
Finally, the confidence shown in the artillery to lay a creeping barrage was misplaced. The movement of a line of exploding shells just in front of a line of advancing infantry, ideally fifty yards in front or less, was a new technique and demanded high gunnery skills. Without communication between infantry battalions and artillery batteries—and there could be none without tactical radio, a development of the future—the artillery had to fire by timetable, calculated by the speed at which the infantry was expected to advance, roughly fifty yards a minute. The guns would lay a barrage on an identified trench line, then “lift” to the next at a moment when the infantry was deemed to have arrived. In practice, because the artillery feared killing its own infantry, the intervals in distance between “lifts” was made too long, in time too short, with the result that the experience of attacking waves would be, too often, to see the barrage creeping away in front of them, beyond trenches still strongly held by the enemy, without any means of recalling it. The corrective, to be adopted by some corps, of bringing the barrage back and then forward, would not work either, since its return frightened the infantry into taking cover from “friendly fire,” the protection being lost when the barrage crept off again without warning. The worst feature of artillery precaution was to be the lifting of the barrage from the enemy’s front line too soon before the assault, while the infantry was still in no man’s land and the wrong side of often uncut wire. A veteran of Gallipoli, commanding a heavy battery in Hunter-Weston’s III Corps, “knew that the attack … in his sector was doomed when [the corps commander] ordered the heavy artillery to lift off the enemy front line trenches ten minutes before zero, and the field artillery two minutes before zero hour.”52 It was not only in his sector that the barrage was to lift too soon. Almost everywhere on the front of Fourth Army on 1 July the artillery fire was to depart prematurely from the infantry, who were to advance against wire badly cut or not cut at all, against trenches filled with Germans fighting for their lives.
What the infantry should have done in such circumstances has generated an enormous literature, much of it quite recent. A new generation of young military historians has taken to re-fighting the battles of the British Expeditionary Force with a passion more understandable in survivors of the trench warfare disasters than in posthumous academic analysts. An underlying theme is that, dreadful as the experience of the early offensives was, it provided a learning process through which the survivors and their successors won the eventual victories of 1918, an argument akin to the thought that Dunkirk was a valuable rehearsal in amphibious operations for D-Day. At a more detailed technical level, the new Western Front historians explore such issues as what was the proper relationship between riflemen, light-machine gunners and grenadiers, how the potentialities of improved infantry weapons might have best been exploited and which was the ideal infantry formation, column, line or infiltrating “blob.”53 The energy expended in such reconsiderations seems, to this author at any rate, a pointless waste. The simple truth of 1914–18 trench warfare is that the massing of large numbers of soldiers unprotected by anything but cloth uniforms, however they were trained, however equipped, ag
ainst large masses of other soldiers, protected by earthworks and barbed wire and provided with rapid-fire weapons, was bound to result in very heavy casualties among the attackers. That was proved to be the case, whatever the variation in tactics and equipment, and there was much variation, from the beginning on the Aisne in 1914 to the end on the Sambre and Meuse in 1918. The effect of artillery added to the slaughter, as did that of bayonets and grenades when fighting came to close quarters in the trench labyrinths. The basic and stark fact, nevertheless, was that the conditions of warfare between 1914 and 1918 predisposed towards slaughter and that only an entirely different technology, one not available until a generation later, could have averted such an outcome.
The first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, was to be an awful demonstration of that truth. Its reality remains evident even today to anyone who returns to the centre of the Somme battlefield at Thiepval, near the memorial to the 36th Ulster Division, and glances north and south down the old front line. The view northward is particularly poignant. Along it, at intervals of a few hundred yards, runs a line of the Commonwealth War Grave Commission’s beautiful garden cemeteries, ablaze near the anniversary of the battle with rose and wisteria blossom, the white Portland stone of headstones and memorial crosses gleaming in the sun. The farthest, on the ridge near Beaumont Hamel, contains graves of the regular 4th Division, the nearest, in the valley of the Ancre, the Somme’s little tributary, those of the Kitchener 32nd Division. A few, like those of the Ulster Division, stand a little forward of the rest, and mark the furthest limit of advance. The majority stand on the front line or in no man’s land just outside the German wire. The soldiers who died there were later buried where they had fallen. Thus the cemeteries are a map of the battle. The map tells a simple and terrible story. The men of the Fourth Army, the majority citizen volunteers going into action for the first time, rose from their trenches at zero hour, advanced in steady formation, were almost everywhere checked by uncut barbed wire and were shot down. Five divisions of the seventeen attacking entered the German positions. The infantry of the remainder were stopped in no man’s land.
