Elegy

by Andrew Roberts

  Walking today from the magnificent, Edwin Lutyens-designed Thiepval Memorial to the Missing out to the Leipzig Redoubt, one can see the panoramic view of the British lines that the German machine-gunners on the ridge enjoyed on 1 July 1916. In a terrain of fields and small woods on undulating slopes, the long chalk ridge runs from Thiepval to Morval with the village of Pozières at its highest point. There is a straight Roman road from Albert (which was behind the British front line) to Bapaume (which was behind the German positions). The German forward posts tended to be on the leading edge of the ridge, which included the highly fortified, stone-built villages of (from north to south) Serre, Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, Ovillers, La Boisselle, Fricourt, Mametz and Curlu, many of whose houses were built over deep and protective cellars.

  Maj. Richard Spencer Smith, second-in-command of the 2nd Battalion Hampshire Regiment, ably summed up the immense strength of the German defences:

  For defensive purposes the siting of the German trenches could hardly have been better. It possessed the following advantages:

  1 Front line system almost immune from high velocity shellfire owing to configuration of the ground;

  2 Irregularity of design, making exact ranging difficult and minor salient… giving opportunity for crossfire of machine guns from well concealed positions. And concealments for redoubts and strongpoints;

  3 Excellent natural cover for supports and reserves and immunity from shellfire in caves, cellars and dugouts;

  4 Covered communications immune from shellfire;

  5 The Germans had good observation from high ground… opposite Thiepval;

  6 The trench system was protected by very strong wire entanglements; the British had to advance over a crest line making a splendid target for artillery and machine guns.36

  The Germans had undoubtedly used their time well in constructing the strongest position on the Western Front.37 With dugouts linked by buried telephone cables and with deep communications trenches, hidden machine gun posts offering wide fields of fire across treeless fields, dense thickets of barbed wire several feet deep and up to 5 feet (1.5 m) high, it was a formidable obstacle.

  However, after visiting the Somme sector in February 1916, Gen. Sir Henry ‘Rawly’ Rawlinson, commander of the BEF’s 4th Army, had been encouraged to see the German positions on the forward slopes of the ridge, thinking this meant that they could be bombarded with greater accuracy than if they had been sheltered behind the crest. He called it ‘capital country in which to undertake an offensive… for the observation is excellent and with plenty of guns and ammunition we ought to be able to avoid the heavy losses which the infantry have always suffered on previous occasions’.38 Yet for all their vulnerablity, the forward slope positions also gave the Germans superb visibility over the ground across which the British and French would have to advance.

  When the 4th Army arrived to prepare for the battle from the north in March 1916, its formations found that the trenches held by the 3rd Army since the summer of 1915 had been well kept and laid out properly. There were fire trenches with traverses, preventing an attacker firing down the whole length of a front-line trench; support trenches two hundred yards (182.8 m) or so behind the forward entrenchments; reserve trenches a further two hundred yards behind the supports; detailed trench maps, well-defined parapets and firing-steps, latrines and dugouts, though no shelters as sophisticated or deep as the German equivalents.39

  The brigades of the 4th Army typically rotated each of their four battalions through the front line and the reserve trenches and then sent them for rest and recuperation behind the lines every sixteen days, and they had only had three months in their new posts before the great offensive began.40 They settled in quickly, and indulged in the British Tommies’ traditional penchant for anglicizing French names, so that Mouquet Ferme became Mucky Farm, Auchonvillers became Ocean Villas, and it requires little imagination to guess what the soldiers called Assevillers and Fouquevillers.*5 Other place names invented by the British army on the Somme, sometimes on the flimsiest of pretexts, included Caterpillar Valley, Wellington Redoubt, Shrine Alley, Casino Point, Bottom Wood, Bucket Trench, Strip Trench, Crucifix Trench, Quadrangle Trench, Pearl Alley, Acid Drop Copse, Beetle Alley, Willow Avenue, Lozenge Wood, The Dingle, Wine Street, Paradise Alley, Sandbag Corner and Salop Avenue.41

  The men made the best they could of trench life, where the atmosphere was claustrophobic and one had to crouch for much of the time in order not to offer a target to snipers. Lice infestations were sometimes found even in the ‘clean’ clothing that was issued to the men. One of the reasons that officers’ terriers were popular in the trenches was that there were rats ‘the size of cats’ in the trenches and in no man’s land, which fed off the corpses (as did carrion crows and flies). Trenches were commonly between six feet (1.8 m) and six foot six inches (2 m) deep, and provided protection (except from the dreaded mortar fire) for British soldiers who averaged five foot six inches (1.68 m) in height. They needed a firing-step from which to shoot at the enemy, and often had foliage or wicker on top to break up their outlines against sniper fire.*6 Trenches were shaped in a continuous zig-zag pattern so as to absorb blast waves in the event of a successful mortar hit, and to prevent enfilading fire in the event of the Germans capturing a trench.

  Trenches came in five types: a ‘front’ or ‘fire’ trench was out in the most exposed position, with a ‘support’ trench behind it and a ‘reserve’ trench behind that. A ‘communication’ trench ran between them. The ‘assembly’ trenches, from where attacks were launched, were usually the fire trenches. Sometimes a new assembly trench might be built if the German artillery had already found the range of the fire trench.

  The best novel to be published about the first day of the Somme is Covenant with Death, by John Harris. Published in 1961, the same year in which Alan Clark’s denunciation of Haig appeared, it captures the effects on his family of the battle, in which his father and father-in-law fought in the Sheffield City Battalion without injury, his brother-in-law and an uncle were gassed, two other uncles lost their legs and a fourth was killed. Harris records vividly the down-to-earth flavour of the average soldier’s outlook on the war, interpreting the high-flown rhetoric of politicians, clergymen and newspapers: ‘Entente Cordiale? “Our lot” to everybody else. Noble Allies? “Froggies” was good enough for most of us. Prussian militarists? “Kaiser Bill” to the troops.’42 It was a citizen army that fought on the Somme: over half of the 120,000 infantrymen who attacked on the first day were volunteers. Almost half of the divisions—eight of the seventeen—were made up of four Regular Army and four Territorial divisions. Although conscription had been introduced in January 1916, those men were still in training and so were not present on the Somme.

  Between August 1914 and December 1915, some 2,466,719 men enlisted in what became known as Kitchener’s New Army,*7 comprising 43 per cent of the 5.7 million men who served during the war. It was the second-largest volunteer force in history, after the Indian army of 1939–45.43 Many of them joined up in response to appeals for manpower made by Earl Kitchener, the most famous of which was of course the recruitment poster featuring his face and pointing finger. ‘There wasn’t even any point in drawing whiskers on it’, John Harris wrote of that poster, ‘because it already had a better set than anybody could have added on with a pencil. There was something about it that made it personal enough for a man to look over his shoulder, “YOUR KING AND COUNTRY NEED YOU”, it seemed to say, not HIM. Nor him. Not the clerk on his way home, arguing about the price of plums over the barrow by the arches. Not the miner in the flat cap round the corner with his face in a pint pot. YOU. And you felt a little prouder for having answered.’44

  The immediate response had swamped the War Office’s capacity to equip the New Army, so early training was undertaken in the volunteers’ own clothes and shoes before proper uniforms were ready. The men were enthusiastic and sang sentimental, unmilitary songs on the march such as ‘Tipperary’, ‘Lo
ng Long Trail’, ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ and ‘If You Were the Only Girl in the World’. Only later on did they sing the sardonic, almost anti-war song ‘We’re Here Because We’re Here’, to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’. Yet although it became fashionable to argue that these men were mere sheep led to the slaughter who did not really know what they were fighting for, that is untrue. They might not have made much of the reasons for their service, in the way that soldiers rarely do, but they well knew that they were fighting to save Civilization in general and the British empire in particular from Prussian militarist tyranny. Many of the letters the soldiers wrote home, and the inscriptions some parents chose for their sons’ headstones, spoke of the necessity of the sacrifice in order to keep Britain and Europe free.

  The first battalions of Kitchener’s New Army were assembled in the autumn of 1914 and deployed by the end of 1915. The idea for having what came to be called ‘Pals’ battalions has been ascribed to Gen. Sir Henry ‘Rawly’ Rawlinson, who wanted soldiers to be recruited into battalions together from people in the same trades, and from the same backgrounds, social clubs, places of work, church groups and so on, because it was thought that friendship and community of interest would be good for regimental cohesiveness and pride. So the 10th Battalion Royal Fusiliers was the ‘Stockbrokers’ Battalion’, for example, the 8th Battalion London Regiment was the ‘Post Office Rifles’, the 15th Battalion London Regiment was the ‘Civil Service Rifles’, and there were also ‘Football’, ‘Sportsmen’ and ‘Public Works’ battalions. The names of these locally recruited ‘Pals’ battalions such as London Scottish, London Irish, Tyneside Scottish and Tyneside Irish reflected proud ethnic backgrounds. Units such as the ‘Public Schools Battalion’, ‘Artists’ Rifles’, ‘North Eastern Railway Pioneers’, ‘Grimsby Chums’ (The 10th Lincolns), ‘Belfast Young Citizens’ (14th Royal Irish Rifles), ‘Leeds Pals’ (15th West Yorkshires) and so on also promoted strong regimental morale. Yet they were not the complete greenhorns of popular myth; they had generally been training for nine months in Britain and a further nine to twelve in France or Flanders learning the particular complexities of the Western Front before they ever set foot in a forward trench. Most units had lived in the trenches and conducted trench raids and suffered casualties before 1 July 1916.

  GENERAL SIR HENRY RAWLINSON

  Sir Henry ‘Rawly’ Rawlinson, commander of the BEF’s 4th Army at the Somme, pictured here on the steps of his headquarters at Querrieu Chateau, July 1916.

  Morale was generally extremely high. Entirely typical is this account from Pte. Arthur Edwin Wrench of the 5th Battalion Seaforth Highlanders in the 51st (Highland) Division, who kept a diary from 1915 till 1919. In a preface written in Glasgow in 1921, he recalled how on his journey through France to the front:

  We stopped at several stations on the way where parties of ladies fed us with sandwiches, cakes and tea. Then as we started on our way, wet eyes, sad faces and waving handkerchiefs receded from us as we raised our battle-cry enthusiastically ‘Are we downhearted? No!’ Their tears were none of our business, for this adventure was far too thrilling and exciting, and I do believe now that each one of us, like every other soldier going to war for the first time, fondly imagined that this draft was on its way to deal the final and decisive blow, and achieve the last triumph. What a delusion… Yet through it all one’s optimism emerged supreme and this was the thing that kept our spirits alive and the souls burning within us as we tried to keep our faith with those at home who trusted in us and upon whose promises we also relied.45

  The BEF was divided into five armies, each of which was made up of between two and four corps. Each corps was commanded by a lieutenant-general and consisted of a number of infantry divisions, and could number up to 120,000 men. Each infantry division, commanded by a major-general, consisted of three infantry brigades and included up to 12,000 infantry as well as 2,000 Royal Engineers and pioneers, 3,500 artillerymen, 750 medical as well as supply staff, and could thus number 20,000 at full strength. At the time of the Battle of the Somme, an infantry brigade was composed of four infantry battalions, each with its engineer, signals, mortar, machine gun and ambulance units. Although each battalion, commanded by a lieutenant-colonel, was supposed to number around 1,100 men, very often after illness, wounds, leave and other factors diminished the unit, they could often actually field only around two-thirds of that number. Battalions had four companies of around 200 men commanded by a major or captain, which were divided into four platoons each commanded by a lieutenant, and these consisted of four sections commanded by a sergeant.46

  The BEF’s order of battle on the Somme on 1 July comprised two armies (the 3rd and 4th), six corps (III, VIII, X, XIII, XV and VII), and seventeen infantry divisions comprising fifty-one brigades. Every division had a pioneer battalion of fully trained infantrymen who were also specialists in digging trenches, laying out barbed wire and all the other back-breaking labouring duties associated with trench warfare. As a general rule, the 1st and 2nd battalions of a regiment comprised its Regulars, the 3rd and 4th its Territorials, and the 5th onwards its Kitchener New Army volunteers. Those conscripted after January 1916 went into its service battalions.

  THE GENERALS

  General Officers of World War I (1922) by John Singer Sargent. Fifth from left: Henry Rawlinson; tenth from left: Henry Wilson; ninth, eighth and seventh from right: Douglas Haig, John French and William Robertson.

  The British army had expanded in the two years since the war broke out from 247,000 Regulars and 246,000 Territorials to 1.25 million men.47 This meant that the officers who commanded corps of tens of thousands of men in 1916 were the same men who had only two years earlier been brigadiers commanding a fraction of that number. As the British army before 1914 was more of a colonial police force than a continental war-fighting force, their officers had little experience of corps and none of armies and there was very little opportunity to exercise field command above battalion or brigade level.48 In 1914 there were fewer than 13,000 officers in the British army, but by 1918 there were 13,000 Staff officers, and over 25,000 officers in the Royal Regiment of Artillery alone.49

  Considering how little experience the senior officers had, it would be unsurprising if they had been cautious, uninspiring and lacking in much optimism or confidence about how to win the war. Yet although Haig’s High Command has indeed been accused of having limited vision, when it came to the plan of attack for 1 July 1916, the biggest problem was not the narrowness of its vision but its dangerous ambition.

  *1 On occasion he was over-enthusiastic and expected too much of first-generation technology; he once fell for a charlatan who claimed to have invented a death-ray.

  *2 Writing in his diary in August 1916—without giving any evidence—Haig stated that ‘Winston’s head is gone from taking drugs’.11

  *3 Named after the Russian commander in the south-western sector, Gen. Alexei Brusilov.

  *4 The trench lines are easily discernible from the air today as white lines in the fields.

  *5 Elsewhere in the war, the British Army’s phonetics turned Ypres into ‘Wipers’, Ploegsteert into ‘Plug Street’ and Étaples into ‘Eetaps’.

  *6 The term sniper dated from the eighteenth century, and referred to the accuracy needed for shooting snipe.

  *7 Or, colloquially, ‘Kitchener’s Mob’.

  TWO

  TACTICS

  ‘My strongest recollection: all those grand looking cavalrymen, ready mounted to follow the breakthrough. What a hope!’1

  PTE. E.T. RADBAND,

  5th West Yorkshire Regiment

  *

  ‘I made up my mind that, if ever I got out of it alive, there wasn’t enough gold in the Bank of England to get me back again.’2

  LCPL. J.A. HENDERSON,

  Belfast Young Citizens’ Battalion

  Until the advent of the tank on the battlefield ten weeks after the opening of the Somme Offensive, there was no alternative in attack to sending men int
o no man’s land*1 and trying to seize the enemy’s front trench and kill or capture everyone in it. Yet at the Battle of Loos and in many other previous engagements of the war, this had proved prohibitively costly, and for one primary reason: the machine gun. In 1916 the German army’s three independent machine gun companies were amalgamated into Maschinengewehr-Scarfschützen-Abteilungen. Each new division had no fewer than seventy-two heavy machine guns, increasing to 350 by 1918.

  Although the concept of a multi-firing gun was almost as old as that of the musket itself, it took until the nineteenth century for a strong enough metal to be smelted that could withstand the pressure of sustained repeated firing, and for manufacturing processes to become capable of creating the necessary fractional tolerances for each part of such a complex weapon. In 1862 an inventor from North Carolina, Richard Gatling, produced a crank-operated gun capable of firing 200 rounds per minute. In 1888 Hiram Maxim, an inventor from Maine who settled in England, perfected a machine gun that continued to fire until the finger was taken off the trigger. Never in the field of human conflict could so many be killed so quickly by so few. The Maxim gun that wrought such havoc amongst the British infantry on 1 July 1916 was a water-cooled, belt-fed 7.92 mm calibre weapon that weighed 57.3 lbs (26 kg) and could fire 500 rounds per minute at a 900 yard (823 m) per second muzzle velocity. Its optimum range was 2,000 yards (1,829 m) but it was still reasonably accurate at twice that distance. It could fit 250 rounds on each of the belts that fed the gun, and a new belt could be fitted in a matter of seconds. The French nicknamed it ‘the lawnmower’ or ‘coffee-grinder’, the English ‘the Devil’s paintbrush’.