Elegy

by Andrew Roberts

  There was thus a collective assumption, especially in VIII Corps, that the preliminary bombardment, and especially its final sixty-five minutes, would destroy and demoralize the Germans in their forward positions, yet intelligence contradicting that theory was gleaned throughout the previous week by trench raiders who found uncut wire, or were vigorously repulsed, which should have given planners pause for thought. ‘Critical evaluation of the intelligence gathered over the previous seven days’, one historian states, ‘seems to have been non-existent.’32 Here was group-think at its most pernicious.

  It was not until 1917 and 1918 that aerial photography and signals intelligence provided much help to Charteris and his successors in trying to work out the whereabouts of German theatre reserves. The agent network in Belgium did not provide anything useful until 1917 either, and the situation was not helped by a turf war between GHQ’s Intelligence operation and the Secret Intelligence Service.33 The Allies had no moles in the German High Command or the senior reaches of government and had access to nothing like the Ultra decrypts that led to such brilliant results in the Second World War. Charteris was perhaps doing his best in very difficult circumstances, but if he was often flying blind it seems he did not confess his relative ignorance to his commander-in-chief. Few Intelligence chiefs ever do.

  The surprising thing is that the general paucity of information induced such over-confidence in Charteris. In February 1917 he was still warning audiences, for example, not to believe that the enemy was in good shape, whereas in fact the German army really was a formidable machine almost up to the moment when it cracked in the summer of 1918. Charteris must not be used as a scapegoat for all the High Command’s errors, however; every commander needs to be aware of the limitations of Intelligence. Besides, as the government insider Lord Esher told Haig’s private secretary, Philip Sassoon, Charteris ‘had no more real influence with Haig than his chauffeur’.34

  By April 1916, British Intelligence had recognized that the Germans had improved their front-line defences on the Somme, having long perfected their first and second lines and now starting on a third. Yet 4th Army planners did not know about the completion of the third line until the preliminary bombardment began.35 They did know, and had since January, that the Germans were building significantly deeper dugouts and that the openings to these were placed at the front wall of the trenches rather than the back, making them harder for the artillery to hit.36

  GERMAN UNDERGROUND DUGOUT

  German trenches on the Somme tended to be considerably more comfortable—and better furnished—than Allied ones.

  If Haig took the Intelligence material he received too much at face value, the soldiers in the field tended not to, believing that it was often false and occasionally absurdly esoteric. The corps Intelligence summary was nicknamed ‘Comic Cuts’, after a droll Victorian magazine, and the poet and writer 2nd Lt. Siegfried Sassoon, attached to the 1st Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, part of 22nd Brigade of the 7th Division, recalled how on 27 June 1916 the Intelligence summary reported that a large number of enemy batteries had been silenced by British batteries (which he could tell they had not been) and that ‘The anonymous humourist who compiled “Comic Cuts” was able to announce that the Russians had captured a redoubt and some heavy guns at Czartovijsk, which, he explained, was 44 miles (71 km) north-east of Luck.’37

  By early April, British Intelligence knew that the Germans had four divisions in reserve behind their 6th Army, and by the end of May that this had increased to at least five because of British preparations at the Somme. After the Russians launched the Brusilov Offensive on 4 June and it became clear two weeks later how successful this attack had been, British Intelligence re-assessed the situation, based on agents’ reports in Belgium about German troop movements eastwards. On 16 June Haig wrote in his diary that there was ‘no doubt’ that the enemy was taking troops away from his front and sending them to Russia, hence the reappearance of cavalry in his tactical thinking.38 German records show that that there were ten divisions in the German reserve still on the Western Front on 1 July, of which six were facing the British sector and were in perfectly reasonable morale, while British Intelligence believed there were only three, of low morale.39 Charteris wrote to his wife on 30 June, the day before the attack, ‘We are fighting primarily to kill Germans and against their plans, [to] gain some valuable positions and generally prepare for the big offensive that must come sooner or later and if not this year then next.’40 When he published his book At GHQ,41 he altered the wording to read ‘fighting primarily to wear down the German Armies and the German nation… and generally to prepare for the great decisive offensive’.42 The veterans of the Somme were not told that all the bloodletting had been for such limited objectives as ‘to prepare for the great decisive offensive’; many of them believed this was to be the actual great offensive.

  Although the precise date of the ‘Big Push’ was not known outside the General Staff until just beforehand, nor its exact location, it was known in every pub in Britain that there was going to be a major offensive that summer. ‘Everyone at home seemed to know that the long-planned offensive was due to “kick off” at the end of June’, Sassoon later wrote in his Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). Sassoon won a Military Cross later in the battle, but by the time he wrote his memoirs he had become viscerally opposed to the war. (‘The safest thing to be said’, Sassoon wrote of medal-winners, ‘is that nobody knew how much a decoration was worth except the man who received it.’*3)

  Sassoon’s memoirs are superb at recreating life in the trenches before and during the ‘Big Push’. He recalled ‘knocking my pipe out against one of the wooden props which held up the cramped little den, and staring irritably at my mud-encumbered boots, for I was always trying to keep squalor at bay, and the discomfort of feeling dirty and tickly all over was almost as bad as a bombardment.’43 He suffered from ‘trench mouth’ (acute necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis), whose symptoms were painful bleeding gums, and wrote of how ‘Trench life was an existence saturated by the external senses; and although our actions were domineered by military discipline, our animal instincts were always uppermost.’ As for his men, ‘I could never understand how they managed to keep as cheery as they did through such drudgery and discomfort, with nothing to look forward to but going over the top or being moved up to Flanders again.’44 Although officers on leave were warned not to speak about it and there was no mention of it in the newspapers, even Sassoon’s Aunt Evelyn, who lived in Kensington, London ‘was aware of the impending onslaught… No one had any idea what the Big Push would be like, except that it would be much bigger than anything which had happened before.’45 Sassoon and a friend, Captain Huxtable, ‘decided, between us, that the Push would finish the war by Christmas’.

  On the way up to the front just before the assault, Sassoon noted how as a staff officer was coming in the other direction, ‘Larks were rejoicing aloft, and the usual symbolic scarlet poppies lolled over the sides of the communication trench; but he squeezed past us without so much as a nod, for the afternoon was too noisy to be idyllic, in spite of the larks and poppies which were so popular with war-correspondents.’ Sassoon asked his brother officer, Julian Dadd, ‘I suppose those brass-hats do know a hell of a lot about it, don’t they, Julian,’ only to receive the reply that they had not done so at Loos, but ‘They’ve got to learn their job as they go along, like the rest of us.’46

  The Germans also knew perfectly well what was about to happen. The Württemberger 26th Reserve Division in the north of the sector had heard the din of supplies being delivered night after night, and their patrols had discovered saps—underground trenches dug directly towards enemy lines—within 90 yards (82 m) of their positions. The Germans also spotted preparations for the offensive through aerial reconnaissance as early as 7 April.47 They also noticed that the RFC was flying more reconnoitering sorties than hitherto. German Intelligence had learnt from London newspapers—which exercised an only haphazard se
lf-censorship—that a meeting of owners and workers at munition factories had been told by a cabinet minister on 2 June that the Whitsun bank holiday weekend of 9 to 12 June would be postponed until the end of July.48 Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, commander of the 6th Army, regarded this as ‘the surest proof that there will be a great British offensive in a few weeks.’49

  WATCHING

  A German soldier perched facing a trench mirror as he sits in a reconnoitering post.

  That same day, 2 June, Gen. Fritz von Below, commanding the German 2nd Army, asked for reinforcements to disrupt the Allied plans with a pre-emptive attack on the Ancre, although he did not get any because of the Brusilov Offensive in the east.50 On 19 June Prince Rupprecht reported to his private diary that a large-scale attack on the 2nd Army was clearly imminent and on the 26th he named 1 July as the day he thought, from intelligence received by the German military attaché in Madrid, that the attack would take place. He started issuing uplifting Orders of the Day, saying that the English stood foremost in the way of peace and that a victory would speedily end the war.

  The forty-seven-year-old commander of the German 6th Army on the Somme, Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria was a wholly admirable character and perhaps the only royal commander of the entire war who fully deserved his command. A truly professional soldier who had interrupted his military career to study at the universities of Munich and Berlin, he was also widely travelled in the Middle and Far East. A serious student of military history, he proved a most competent battlefield commander. In the latter stages of the war he was an opponent of Ludendorff’s ‘scorched earth’ policies and a proponent of peace in late 1917 once he could see the struggle was undoubtedly lost; during the Third Reich he became an avowed anti-Nazi, telling his cousin King George V in 1934 that Hitler (who loathed him) was insane. He went into exile in Florence once the Second World War had broken out. Prince Rupprecht had commanded the Bavarian I Army Corps since 1906, becoming a full general in 1913. On the outbreak of the First World War he was given command of the German 6th Army, with which he checked Gen. Noël de Castelnau’s 2nd Army at the Battle of Lorraine in August 1914, although some in the army unfairly blamed him for not having achieved the much needed breakthrough on the Marne.51 In giving Rupprecht command of the Northern Army Group forces on 28 August 1916, Ludendorff chose more than just a safe pair of hands, and on 17 December Rupprecht’s Order of the Day stated: ‘The greatest battle of the war, perhaps the greatest of all time, has been won.’52 Rupprecht was promoted to field marshal soon after the first day of the Somme Offensive, yet by the time of the great Spring Offensive of 1918, he was thoroughly disillusioned about Germany’s chances of victory. ‘Ludendorff is a man of absolute determination,’ he said of the architect of the gigantic Operation Michael, ‘but determination alone is not enough, if it is not combined with clear-headed intelligence.’53

  When the British attack came, the Germans were ready and waiting.

  *1 ‘No man’s land’ comes from early fourteenth-century English, meaning land, usually barren, over which nobody has established legal ownership.

  *2 As an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge in the 1980s, I was taught never to state that anything is ever inevitable in history, as it cannot be. That is of course true, except in the case of German counter-attack.

  *3 He also said that the front-line infantry wanted to distinguish between their decorations and the General Staff’s, and ‘rightly insisted that medal ribbons earned at Base should be a different colour’.

  THREE

  PREPARATIONS

  ‘The artillery bombardment which preceded the advance was in magnitude and terribleness beyond the previous experience of Mankind.’1

  CAPT. G.H.F. NICHOLS,

  The 18th Division in the Great War

  *

  ‘Too many of the bravest and best perished, seeking to compensate by valour for lack of experience and the shortage of munitions, to the hazard of the final victory and the detriment of the future of the nation.’2

  Preface to EDMONDS,

  History of the Great War: Military Operations France and Belgium 1916

  Cpl. Sidney appleyard was born in may 1894 in Shoe Lane in the city of London, the son of a publisher and the second of three brothers. A quantity surveyor before volunteering on the outbreak of war aged twenty, he was initially rejected as unfit by the navy because his chest measurement was too small. In November 1915 the pressing need for volunteers meant that he managed to join the Territorial 9th London Regiment (Queen Victoria’s Rifles), with which he commenced training in Hyde Park without a uniform and carrying a dummy rifle.3 He certainly considered himself totally unqualified to fight when he and his battalion was shipped over to Flanders in May 1915.

  ‘On the very long route marches we had to sing to keep our spirits up,’ he recorded in his diary, ‘and our platoon poet, Bill Bright, kept us going with some of his verse, such as:

  I’m a bomber, I’m a bomber

  Wearing a grenade,

  The Army’s got me where it wants,

  I’m very much afraid.

  When decent jobs are going

  I never get a chance,

  Which shows what bloody fools we were

  To volunteer for France.4

  As well as long route marches, Appleyard recalled how ‘We had continuous practice throwing live bombs and had demonstrations of liquid fire which the Germans were now using. This was a very terrible and frightening affair but if one kept low in the trench it was quite harmless.’5

  Sidney Appleyard’s diary reminds us how ludicrously overconfident the High Command was when it came to the damage that the artillery would wreak on the German lines before the attack. ‘We were informed by all officers from the Colonel downwards’, he wrote,

  that after our tremendous artillery bombardment there would be very few Germans left to show fight, and they all fully expected us to carry the lines with very little resistance. Everybody was quite convinced by this time that this attack was really coming off, and was not going to fall through as similar affairs had in the past. So we all decided to make the most of our few days which remained and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. The distant rumble of artillery was distinctly heard during these days, and we heard very fine reports of the damage caused by our shells.6 *1

  It was taken for granted throughout the General Staff that the artillery bombardment preliminary to the offensive would destroy the enemy’s trenches, smash in his dugouts, cut through his barbed wire and prevent him replacing it, knock out machine gun emplacements and observation posts, and make life in the communication trenches, batteries, billets and support roads behind the lines completely intolerable. As Brig. Edmonds, the official historian of the battle for the Committee of Imperial Defence, was to put it:

  It was not expected that there would be effective gunfire or that his reserves would be able to come up… But in every attack thus far, the Germans had produced some surprise, and at the Somme it was to be deep mined dugouts, with sometimes two storeys below ground,*2 sheltering machine guns and their crews from harm during the bombardment. The garrisons of the first position remained below ground, close packed, uncomfortable, short of food, depressed, but still alive and ready on their officers’ orders, when the barrage lifted, to issue forth with morale unbroken; if there were neither parapets nor trenches, then to man with machine guns and rifles any shell-hole that came handy.7

  This was what happened throughout the northern and central sector, with catastrophic results for the British assault.

  In preparation for the ‘Big Push’, Gen. Sir Douglas Haig turned the entire Somme sector into a massive military encampment and supply dump. By 1 July 1916 the BEF numbered 660,000 effectives, increased from 450,000 at the start of the year.8 Haig needed 400,000 men for the offensive as well as 100,000 horses, both as cavalry and to carry equipment. Horses were vital to the war effort for bringing up stores and supplies; 8 million served in the British army in the F
irst World War, of which 1 million died. The offensive required an enormous logistical operation, such as the laying of 7,000 miles (11,265 km) of signal cables buried 7 feet (2.1 m) deep, so that German shelling could not sever it. Road and rail transportation had to be built from scratch or improved and extended. (The troops resented the navvies who built the railway tracks but went nowhere near the front line and earned more than the infantryman’s shilling—5p—a day.)

  Fuel, food and water, arms and ammunition of all kinds—the British army fired an average of a million shells a week throughout the battle—medical supplies, postal services, trench and dugout construction, equine forage: these were just the bare basic requirements for maintaining an army in the field, let alone preparing it for easily the greatest offensive operation in the history of the British army.9 In the final few weeks before the ‘Big Push’, airfields were prepared for the RFC, leave was cancelled, field gun ammunition was taken well forward and buried deep underground, the men were ordered to do constant bayonet practice, and graves were dug (though in the event nothing like enough). New helmets were issued, flat basins of khaki-painted manganese steel that were said to be capable of deflecting shrapnel, but which unlike the German helmets failed to protect the ears. Pigeons were issued to send messages back from captured trenches; imitation snipers’ heads were set up to draw German fire; roads were screened with camouflage netting to hide them from enemy air reconnaissance.