‘The English came walking, as though they were going to the theatre or as though they were on a parade ground,’ recalled Uffz. Paul Scheytt of the 109th Reserve Infantry Regiment. ‘We felt they were mad.’38 Another recalled: ‘We were very surprised to see them walking, we had never seen that before… They went down in their hundreds. You didn’t have to aim, we just fired into them.’ Musketier Karl Blenk of the 169th Regiment remembered changing the barrel of his machine gun five times, after firing 5,000 rounds each time. If the machine-gunner had an accurate ranging sight on the opposing trench, many of the men were killed even as they reached the top of the ladders. ‘The German machine gun fire was terrible,’ said Pte. W. Carter of the 1st Bradford Pals. ‘Our Colonel was hit after only a few steps along the trench.’39 Nor was it only machine gun and rifle fire that the Germans laid down: ‘A whizzbang caught my platoon sergeant in the throat and his head disappeared’, recalled Pte. J. Devennie of the Derry Volunteers.40 It was carnage within moments, all along the British line. ‘Five minutes after the attack started,’ said Pte. J. F. Pout of the 55th Field Ambulance, ‘if the British public could have seen the wounded struggling to get out of the line, the war would have possibly been stopped by public opinion.’41
TAKING HOME THE SPOILS
German soldiers return to their trenches with captured Allied Lewis guns on their shoulders.
Henry Williamson, who was later to write the celebrated nature story Tarka the Otter, recalled the feeling when the German machine guns opened up on the 8th Division attacking Ovillers: ‘A steam-harsh noise filled the air. [I] knew what that was: machine gun bullets, each faster than sound, with its hiss and its air crack arriving almost simultaneously, many scores of thousands of bullets in the air together at the same time and coming from all directions.’42 When men were hit, he wrote, ‘Some seem to pause, with bowed heads, and sink carefully to their knees, and roll slowly over, and lie still. Others roll and roll, and scream and grip my legs in utmost fear, and I have to struggle to break away, while the dust and earth on my tunic changes from grey to red… who could have imagined that the “Big Push” was going to be like this?’43 Yet in every single brigade and battalion, the men marched on. The 94th Brigade of 31st Division, for example, ‘advanced in line after line, as if on parade’, as its commanding officer Brig. H. C. Rees recalled, ‘and not a man shirked going through the extremely heavy barrage, or facing the machine gun and rifle fire that finally wiped them out… hardly a man of ours got to the German front line.’44 Where the wire had been cut the men were funnelled together, ‘and it was there those patterned criss-cross streams of bullets caught us.’45
The German 180th Regiment in the Ovillers sector, facing the onslaught of the 8th Division, lost 78 killed and 108 wounded in the preliminary bombardment and its front defences were damaged, as were those of the 110th Regiment. Nonetheless the survivors knew how vital it was to reach the parapet. A soldier from that unit was later to write an account of this whose clarity and immediacy justifies extensive quotation:
The intense bombardment was realized by all to be the prelude to an infantry assault sooner or later. The men in the dugouts therefore waited ready, belts full of hand grenades around them, gripping their rifles and waiting for the bombardment to lift from the front defence zone onto the rear defences. It was of vital importance not to lose a second in taking up position in the open to meet the British infantry which would advance immediately behind the artillery barrage. Looking towards the British trenches through the long trench periscopes held up out of the dugout entrances there could be seen a mass of steel helmets above the parapet showing that the storm troops were ready for an assault. At 7.30 a.m. the hurricane of shells ceased as suddenly as it had begun. Our men at once clambered up the steep shafts leading from the dugouts to daylight and ran singly or in groups to the nearest shell craters. The machine guns were pulled out of the dugouts and hurriedly placed in position, their crews dragging the heavy ammunition boxes up the steps and out to the guns. A rough firing line was thus rapidly established. As soon as the men were in position a series of extended lines of infantry were seen moving forward from the British trenches. The first line appeared to continue without end to right and left. It was followed quickly by a second line, then a third and fourth. They came on at a steady easy pace as if expecting to find nothing alive in our front trenches. Some appeared to be carrying kodaks [cameras] to perpetuate the memory of their triumphal march across the German defences.*13 The front line, preceded by a thin line of skirmishers and bombers, was now half way across no man’s land. ‘Get ready!’ was now passed across our front from crater to crater, and heads appeared over the crater edge as final positions were taken for the best view, and machine guns mounted firmly in place. A few moments later, when the leading British line was within a hundred yards, the rattle of machine gun and rifle fire broke out along the whole line of shell-holes. Some fired kneeling so as to get a better target over the broken ground, whilst others, in their excitement, stood up regardless of their own safety, to fire into the crowd of men in front of them. Red rockets flew up into the blue sky as a signal to the artillery, and immediately afterwards a mass of shell from the German batteries tore through the air and burst among the advancing lines. Whole sections seemed to fall and the rear formations, moving in closer order, quickly scattered. The advance rapidly crumbled under this hail of shell and bullets. All along the line men could be seen throwing up their arms and collapsing never to move again… The British soldier, however, has no lack of courage, and once his hand is set to the plough he is not easily turned from his purpose. The extended lines, though badly shaken and with many gaps, now came on all the faster. Instead of a leisurely walk they covered the ground in short rushes at the double. Within a few minutes the leading troops had advanced to within a stone’s throw of our front trench, and whilst some of us continued to fire at point-blank range, others threw hand grenades among them. The British bombers answered back, whilst the infantry rushed forward with fixed bayonets. The noise of battle became indescribable. The shouting of orders and the shrill cheers as the British charged forward could be heard above the violent and intense fusillade of machine guns and rifles and bursting bombs, and above the deep thunderings of the artillery and shell explosions. With all this were mingled the moans and groans of the wounded, the cries for help and the last screams of death. Again and again the extended lines of British infantry broke against the German defence like waves against a cliff, only to be beaten back. It was an amazing spectacle of unexampled gallantry, courage and bulldog determination on both sides.46
The 180th Regiment lost only 83 men killed, 184 wounded and 13 missing that whole day, most of them in the preliminary bombardment rather than the infantry assault.
The distances the men had to go across no man’s land varied widely from sector to sector, and also within sectors. At the Glory Hole*14 at La Boisselle, the two front lines were closer than anywhere else in the whole Western Front, a matter of only 100 feet (30 m), so there was constant mining and counter-mining. Professional coal miners from Cornwall, Wales, Yorkshire, Northumberland, Nottinghamshire and Durham did vital work underground. The Norwich Engineers in 34th Division cleared much of the wire the night before the attack. In some places covered by the 29th Division, for example, opposite the Sunken Road and Hawthorn crater, no man’s land was only 200 to 250 yards (183 to 229 m) wide, whereas there were places nearby where it was twice or even thrice that.47 The 16th Middlesex had to cover 400 yards (366 m), and the right flank of the 2nd South Wales Borderers 700 (640 m). To march even 200 yards (183 m) at walking pace would take four minutes, in which time a single German machine gun could fire well over fifteen hundred rounds, and have time to reload several times.
Yet a deliberate decision had been taken by the High Command not to dig trenches much closer to the enemy than 200 yards (183 m), as the senior operational planner on the staff of 29th Division, Lt.-Col. C. G. Fuller, told the official war histo
rians after the war: ‘About a month before the attack, the whole question had been discussed by the Commander-in-Chief (Haig), Chief of the General Staff (Major-General Sir Launcelot Kiggell), Fourth Army (Rawlinson), VIII Corps (Hunter-Weston) and 29th Division (De Lisle) commanders in conference and they had come to the conclusion that it was undesirable to dig trenches closer to the Germans as it would make them realise that we intended to attack.’48 Yet the Germans knew perfectly well that an attack was about to take place at the end of the seven-day bombardment, which Haig and the other senior officers present must have suspected.
‘No man in his right mind would have done what we were doing’, recalled LCpl. J. Cousins, of the 7th Bedfords.49 ‘To us they had to be killed. Kill or be killed. You are not normal.’50 The reason that people continued moving forward rather than succumbing to the temptation (and natural human reaction) of flinging themselves onto the ground immediately was that they wanted to do right by the units on either side of them, whose successes they were told were central to victory. No one wanted to be in the unit that compromised the breakthrough. ‘There were no signs of cowardice, or “low morale” as we call it more kindly, in those early days of the struggle’, wrote the journalist Philip Gibbs. As for the Germans, ‘They fought with a desperate courage, holding on to positions in rearguard actions when our guns were slashing them, and when our men were getting near to them making us pay a heavy price for every little copse or gully or section of trench, and above all serving their machine guns at La Boisselle, Ovillers, above Fricourt, round Contalmaison, and at all points of their gradual retreat, with a splendid obstinacy until they were killed or captured.’51
GERMAN HEAVY ARTILLERY
German gunners loading a 24cm long-range gun on the Somme.
It was untrue that there were no signs of cowardice at all, or ‘lack of moral fibre’ as it came to be called (and still later, more humanely, post-traumatic stress disorder). When one of Siegfried Sassoon’s brother officers could not move himself out of the dugout, ‘We left Jenkins*15 crouching in a corner, where he remained for most of the day. His haggard blinking face haunts my memory. He was an example of the paralyzing effect which such an experience could produce on a nervous system sensitive to noise.’ Although at the time Sassoon felt no sympathy for him, by 1930, once he had the chance to reflect on the effects of trauma, he did.*16 Although British colonels did have the legal ‘sanction’ of summary execution to prevent unit collapse through panic during battle, none of them had to resort to such drastic measures at any time on the Somme, where overall the courage shown was exemplary. As Winston Churchill put it in his history of the First World War, The World Crisis, ‘If two or ten lives were required by their Commanders to kill one German, no word of complaint ever rose from the fighting troops. No attack, however forlorn, however fatal, found them without ardour… Martyrs not less than soldiers, they fulfilled the high purpose of duty with which they were imbued. The battlefields of the Somme were the graveyards of Kitchener’s Army.’52
Only 634 Victoria Crosses were awarded during the First World War, one for every 14,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers mobilized, which a recent historian states was ‘a parsimonious rate of distribution compared to the relative largesse of the nineteenth century’.53*17 The nine men who won the Victoria Cross (VC) for their actions on the Somme on 1 July 1916 were Capt. E. N. F. Bell of the 9th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, Lt. Geoffrey Cather, adjutant of the 9th Royal Irish Fusiliers, Capt. John Green of the Royal Army Medical Corps, Maj. Stewart Loudon-Shand of the 10th Yorkshires (Green Howards), Pte. W. F. McFadzean of the 14th Royal Irish Rifles, Rifleman Robert Quigg of the 12th Royal Irish Rifles, Drummer Walter Ritchie of the 2nd Seaforth Highlanders, Cpl. G. Sanders of the 1/7th West Yorkshires and Sgt. James Turnbull of the 17th Highland Light Infantry. Of these nine, three survived the war, three are buried in military cemeteries at Foncquevillers, Bécordel-Bécourt and Authuille, and three have no known graves.54 Illustrating how extraordinary heroism was not confined to any specific army rank, the nine comprise two privates, a drummer, a corporal, a sergeant, a lieutenant, two captains and a major. In all, fifty-one VCs were awarded during the Somme battle; twenty to junior officers, twelve to NCOs and nineteen to privates, one-third of them posthumous.55
CAPTAIN ERIC BELL VC
An artist’s impression of the courage shown by Captain Eric Bell, which won him the Victoria Cross, one of nine awarded on the first day of the Somme.
Lt. Cather won his VC at Beaumont Hamel when he was the only surviving officer of his battalion. Between 7 p.m. and midnight on 1 July, he went out onto no man’s land with other volunteers to recover three wounded men. The next morning he rescued a fourth man and delivered water to others, while under constant machine gun and intermittent artillery fire. He died later that morning, and won a posthumous VC, even though back in December 1914 Haig had ruled out the award of VCs merely for saving the wounded. The reason Cather was honoured, according to a recent book on the internal politics of the award, was that—as well as showing ‘the most conspicuous bravery’, as his citation put it—‘In the days that followed the start of the Battle of the Somme, Haig needed all the “good” publicity that could be mustered; in the absence of obvious battlefield victory, dead heroes were the best means of garnering the sympathy of a critical press and a variously bewildered and appalled general public.’56 Because so much heroism was shown in the first months of the war, the Military Cross (MC) had been invented in December 1914, partly as a way of keeping the VC rare and difficult to obtain. In the course of the war, more than 37,000 MCs were awarded, almost three thousand of them with bars (that is, a second award). In April 1916 the Military Medal (MM) was founded for other ranks.
Another of the VCs from the first day of the offensive was awarded to the twenty-one-year-old Pte. Billy McFadzean, who had shown ‘most conspicuous bravery’ in a closely packed trench at Thiepval Wood. A specialist bomber, he was ordered to unpack grenades while under heavy German shelling, but he dropped the box and two grenades fell on the ground with their pins knocked out. McFadzean threw himself onto them, dying instantly but saving everyone else in the trench except one man who lost a leg. ‘He well knew his danger,’ read the citation in the London Gazette, ‘but without a moment’s hesitation he gave his life for his comrades.’57 (The War Office paid for the railway ticket for McFadzean’s father to go from Belfast to London to receive the VC from King George V at Buckingham Palace, but he was made to travel third class.)
‘When I got near the German trenches I could see some of them coming out with their hands up,’ recalled LCpl. W. Sanders of the 10th Essex Regiment, ‘but, when they saw how many of us had been hit, they changed their minds and ran back again.’58 In those places where the British did capture enemy positions, they found that the Germans had many more communication trenches, so their efforts to extend right and left were limited by the sheer size of the German entrenching system.59 By 8.30 a.m. just under half of the 66,000 British soldiers who had attacked in 84 battalions were casualties, at the rate since Zero Hour of 500 a minute, or more than eight per second.60 By noon, 100,000 men and 129 battalions had been committed to the battle, but by 3 p.m. so few gains had been made that the cavalry was ordered to stand down, as they would not be needed to exploit breakthroughs in the line.61 Until that point, the cavalrymen had been standing close to their fully-laden mounts waiting for the order to advance.
Instead, stretcher-bearers were sent out to try to bring in the wounded, many of whom were fired on by the Germans. Max Plowman started the war as a member of the Territorial Army Field Ambulance Corps in 1914, though he later became a commissioned officer (and, before the war’s end, a conscientious objector). He recalled one of the stretcher-bearers on 1 July called Side, who that day ‘carried stretchers under fire continuously for twenty-four hours. Anyone who knows the weight of a loaded stretcher and remembers the heat, the condition of the ground, and what the firing was like upon that day, will agree w
ith me that the Victoria Cross would have expressed rather less than Side’s deserts.’62 However all Side received was a promotion to corporal.
Once they were back in the British trenches, the wounded survivors were not out of trouble. Sgt.-Maj. Ernest Shephard of the 1st Dorsets wrote in his diary that it was ‘A lovely day, intensely hot’. Born in Lyme Regis in 1892, the son of a photographer who was to lose two of his three sons in the war, Shephard had enlisted in the part-time Special Reserve in 1909 but joined the Dorset Regiment later that year and was a sergeant by 1914. His diary entry continues:
Lots of casualties in my trench. The enemy are enfilading us with heavy shell, dropping straight on us. A complete trench mortar battery of men killed by one shell, scores of dead and badly wounded in trench, now 1 p.m. Every move we make brings intense fire, as trenches so badly battered the enemy can see all our movements. Lot of wounded in front we got in, several were hit again and killed in trench. We put as many wounded as possible in best spots in trench and I sent a lot down [i.e. down the line to casualty clearing stations or advanced dressing stations], but I had so many of my own men killed and wounded that after a time I could not do this. Sent urgent messages to Brigade asking for RAMC bearers to be sent to evacuate wounded but none came although Brigade said they had been dispatched. Meanwhile the enemy deliberately shelled the wounded between the trenches with shrapnel, thus killing, or wounding again, most of them.63
Elegy Page 10
