Elegy

by Andrew Roberts

  At 3 p.m., once the Manchesters had gone through a sap and made an assault on the Leipzig Redoubt, brigade sent Shephard a message saying the 1st Dorsets—who now numbered a mere fifty-three men from B and C companies—would be relieved by the 15th Highland Light Infantry (HLI) as soon as possible. ‘Meanwhile we were to hold tight. We needed to; literally we were blown from place to place. Men very badly shaken. As far as possible we cleared trenches of debris and dead. These we piled in heaps, enemy shells pitching on them made matters worse.’ With the wounded ‘suffering agonies’, Shephard collected water bottles from the dead for them, before renewed shelling hit at 8 p.m. ‘I had miraculous escapes’, he wrote.64 The HLI arrived to relieve him, but not until midnight.*18 Shephard was commissioned in November and killed two months later commanding a company of the Dorsets.

  Behind the lines, estimates of the battle continued to be over-optimistic. ‘During the day hundreds of German prisoners and our own wounded were passing through our lines,’ recorded Gwilym Ewart Davies of the Royal Artillery:

  We have advanced much further than we expected to… Our wounded soldiers returning from the trenches were in excellent spirits. They were saying that as long as they had done what they were asked to do they didn’t care about their wounds. They were, of course, no doubt glad that they were returning to England or ‘Blighty’ as they call it. Several of our chaps had souvenirs from the German prisoners, such as postcards, etc., but as I was on gun I was unable to get any… Our battery was firing about every three minutes… Without any exaggeration the roads were like the streets of London, so very busy were they.65

  We are fortunate to be able to view the German experience of the Somme through the eyes of one of the greatest German novelists of the twentieth century, Ernst Jünger, who volunteered on the opening day of the war in August 1914 and served throughout the conflict, becoming the country’s youngest winner of its highest valour award, the Pour le Mérite. A lieutenant in the Rifle Regiment of Prince Albrecht of Prussia (the 73rd Hanoverian Regiment), his autobiography Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel), first published in 1920, is one of the great books of the war, whatever one might think of his subsequent ultra-conservative/quasi-Fascist politics. Jünger was based with his regiment at Douchy-lès-Ayette to the north of what was to become the Somme battlefield, and spent much of his time there and in the front line at nearby Monchy-au-Bois. A few excerpts from his trench diary from October 1915 show how dangerous and uncomfortable it was long before the Allied offensive there the following summer:

  7 OCTOBER: In the morning, the sentry on our left flank was shot through both cheekbones. The blood spurted out of him in thick gouts. And, to cap it all, when Lieutenant von Ewald, visiting our sector to take pictures of Sap ‘N’ barely fifty yards (46 m) away, turned to climb down from the outlook, a bullet shattered the back of his skull and he died on the spot. Large fragments of skull were left littering the sentry platform.

  19 OCTOBER: The middle platoon’s section of trench was attacked with 6-in. shells. One man was hurled against a post by the blast so hard that he sustained serious internal injuries, and a splinter of wood punctured the arteries of his arm… That night, two men were wounded while unspooling wire.

  30 OCTOBER: Following a torrential downpour in the night, all the traverses came down and formed a grey sludgy porridge with the rain, turning the trench into a deep swamp. Our only consolation was that the British were just as badly off as we were, because we could see them baling out for all they were worth. Since our position has a little more elevation than theirs, we even managed to pump our excess their way… The crumpled trenches exposed a line of bodies left there from the previous autumn’s fighting.66

  Jünger wrote of how they blew the heads off pheasants—which with Teutonic humour they nicknamed ‘cookpot volunteers’ —caught rats with steel traps and then finished them off with clubs, and went out and collected unexploded shells, ‘little ones and big ones, some weighing a hundredweight or more, all in plentiful supply’, which underlines British complaints about the quality of the British ordnance.67

  ‘Throughout the war,’ he wrote, ‘it was always my endeavour to view my opponent without animus, and to form an opinion of him as a man on the basis of the courage he showed. I would always try to seek him out in combat and kill him, and I expected nothing else from him. But never did I entertain mean thoughts of him. When prisoners fell into my hands later on, I felt responsible for their safety and would always do everything in my power for them.’68

  Although a great deal has been written about the Christmas Truce of 1914, where Tommy and Fritz fraternized, exchanged cigarettes and played football in no man’s land, Jünger makes it clear that there was no repeat of this the following year. ‘We sang hymns,’ he recalled, ‘to which the British responded with machine gun fire. On Christmas Day we lost one man to a ricochet in the head. Immediately afterwards, the British attempted a friendly gesture by hauling a Christmas tree up on their traverse, but our angry troops quickly shot it down again, to which Tommy replied with rifle grenades. It was all in all a less than merry Christmas.’69

  By early March, Jünger reported, they had seen the worst of the mud and as the weather dried, the trench solidified. Time was spent in digging deep, thirty-one-step dugouts in the chalk and clay, linked by underground passages so that they could cross ‘from right to left of our frontage in safety and comfort’. His favourite project was a 60-yard (55 m) underground passage linking his dugout with the company commander’s, ‘with other dormitories and munitions depots off to either side’. It was far better than anything the British had at that time, and as Jünger pointed out, ‘All this was to come in handy in the fighting to come’.70 For they were under no illusions as to what was coming; on 16 June their general warned them in a speech that a large-scale offensive was to be expected soon. Four days later, Jünger was ordered to eavesdrop on the British line to find out if they were mining underneath his own trenches, and he left a vivid account of what such an expedition in no man’s land felt like: ‘These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression’, he wrote:

  Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass is an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of your hand grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsman, and the terror of the quarry.71

  In the fortnight leading up to 1 July 1916 there were so many mortar attacks that Jünger recalled always walking along the trenches ‘one eye aloft, and the other on the entrance of the nearest deep dugout… Occasionally my ears were utterly deafened by a single fiendish crashing burst of flame. Then incessant hissing gave me the sense of hundreds of pound weights rushing down at incredible speed, one after the other. Or a dud shell landed with a short, heavy ground-shaking thump. Shrapnel burst by the dozen, like dainty crackers, shook loose their little balls in a dense cloud, and the empty casings rasped after they were gone. Each time the shells landed anywhere close, the earth flew up and down, and metal shards drove themselves into it.’72 He had used his gas mask case to carry his sandwiches in before he saw some men who had been gassed, ‘pressing their hands against their sides and groaning and retching while their eyes watered… a few of them went on to die over the next several days, in terrible agony.’ Thereafter he used it for his gasmask only, and he took it with him wherever he went.

  Jünger was stationed behind the lines on 1 July, and his regiment only lost forty men in the engagement which ‘left plenty of dead on our wires’. Burying the coffins, ‘with their names written in pencil on the unplaned planks’, the minister began with the words: ‘Gibraltar, that is your motto, and why not, for have you not stood firm lik
e the rock in the sea surge!’*19 For all that burying his comrades had been ‘a sorry task’, Jünger and the survivors felt perfectly able to celebrate that night ‘the success of the engagement with several well-earned bottles’.73 As well they might, for the British army had suffered the worst one-day losses in its history, and for terribly few territorial gains, most of which were short lived.

  *1 His corpse was never identified; his name is engraved on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing.

  *2 Another phrase for it was ‘to hop the bags’, as in hop over the sandbags that lined the top of the trenches.

  *3 It is quite clear from the rest of Higson’s memoir – which he based on his war diary – that there was no irony intended here.

  *4 The sloped bolt action of the Lee-Enfield gave it a superior firing rate to the French and German rifles.

  *5 For some reason called a ‘tin hat’. Most of the men wore their chin-strap behind since it had been noticed that steel helmets struck by flying pieces of shell had a habit of spinning sharply upwards, giving a violent jerk to the chin confined in a chin-strap.

  *6 Which was required to include shaving gear and a spare pair of socks. The men had to be clean-shaven (except for officers, who tended to wear moustaches) so the gas masks fitted.

  *7 There is no truth to the rumour that the Ulster Division was given double rations of rum.

  *8 Or ‘Blighty’ as Great Britain was universally nicknamed.

  *9 When a mine had been exploded near Fricourt back on 26 March, Maj. Probert recorded: ‘At 6.20 a.m. one of our mines went up. I watched from the top of the hill. The noise made by the Germans who had been buried was heard all night. Flames from the explosion lasted in some cases twenty seconds.’20

  *10 Which often had wire screens over the faces to prevent them from being smashed.

  *11 When Maj. Probert attended the Old Etonian dinner in the Hotel Godbert in Amiens on 4 June, there were 168 officers of the 4th Army present. They sang the school song, ‘Carmen Etonense’.

  *12 Some German machine-gunners handcuffed themselves to their guns in sheer bravado – one was taken prisoner, another was killed.

  *13 Almost certainly these were gas mask boxes, not cameras.

  *14 The ironic name given by the Tommies to a very dangerous ‘hot spot’; known as Ilôt in French and Granatof – ‘Grenade Alley’ – in German.

  *15 Not his real name.

  *16 If Jenkins had been a private rather than an officer, he would almost certainly have been court-martialled, with a very high chance of being given the death penalty, but there was only an 11 per cent chance of this being carried out.

  *17 The total includes one for the American Unknown Soldier interred at Arlington.

  *18 When he knew his position was helpless, he ordered the supporting company to fall back in order not to be overwhelmed themselves, an action the military historian Richard Holmes has described as characteristically professional.

  *19 Jünger’s Hanoverian regiment dated back to the days of King George III and they loyally served their (Anglo-German) Elector by defending Gibraltar against the Spanish and French through the great siege of 1779-83. In the First World War this regiment wore the name ‘Gibraltar’ embroidered on the cuffs of their jackets, which was rather confusing for Tommies when they captured them.

  FIVE

  THE FIRST OF JULY

  ‘It was about this time that my feeling of confidence was replaced by an acceptance of the fact that I had been sent here to die.’1

  PTE. J. CROSSLEY,

  15th Durham Light Infantry

  ‘The attack is to go in tomorrow morning at 7.30,’ Gen. Sir Douglas Haig had written to his wife on 30 June 1916, ‘I feel that everything possible for us to do to achieve success has been done. But whether or not we are successful lies in the Power above. But I do feel that in my plans I have been helped by a Power that is not my own. So I am easy in my mind and ready to do my best whatever happens tomorrow.’2 Yet everything possible had certainly not been done to achieve success, and from the north to the south of the battlefield, the fortunes of the Allied divisions on 1 July 1916 varied greatly as they attacked the nine fortified towns, thirteen redoubts and their connecting trench lines. Generally speaking, their fortunes improved the further south they launched their assault. In the most northerly sector, at Gommecourt, the 46th and 56th Divisions’ sacrificial diversion was an unmitigated disaster. The 31st, 4th and 29th Divisions suffered badly at Serre and Beaumont Hamel. To their south, the 32nd and 36th Divisions were thrown back at Thiepval, although some short-term gains were made. At the central axis of the attack, the 8th and 34th Divisions also made little or no progress against Ovillers and La Boisselle. Further south still, the 21st and 7th Divisions had some partial success around Fricourt and captured Mametz, though at a very high price in blood, while the 18th and 30th Divisions took their objectives around and including Montauban. Below Montauban, on both banks of the Somme itself, the French army was very successful, taking all its objectives.

  In the northern sector, two divisions of VII Corps of the 3rd Army, commanded by Lt.-Gen. Sir Thomas D’Oyly ‘Snowball’ Snow, attacked Gommecourt, hoping to eliminate a German bulge (or ‘salient’) in the line but also to create a diversion that would draw German reserves away from the real place at which Haig intended to break through, which was further south between Thiepval and Pozières. The wood and village of Gommecourt were part of the Kern Redoubt, an immensely strong defensive position with 360-degree views of the land around it, so it should probably not have been attacked at all, and certainly not in such huge numbers considering it was only ever intended as a diversion.

  The north of Gommecourt was assaulted by the 18,000-strong 46th (North Midland) Division, which had been created out of the part-time soldiers of the Territorial forces from Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire and had landed in France in March 1915 under the command of Maj.-Gen. the Hon. E. J. Stuart-Wortley, who had previously served in South Africa. In the Battle of Loos it had lost 3,500 men attempting unsuccessfully to capture the Hohenzollern Redoubt, partly due to bad cooperation between the divisional artillery and infantry.

  They trained for the attack on Gommecourt with trenches dug to resemble the German lines, but in the ten days before 1 July the division was fully occupied holding the front-line trenches, and was shelled regularly. For the fortnight prior to the attack, recalled Cpl. E.J. Lawson of the 1/7th Sherwood Foresters, ‘we rarely had a stitch of dry clothing’. On being told the attack was about to take place, he wrote, ‘We felt a great sense of relief although in anything but a fit state to undertake so mammoth a task.’3

  Haig directed that the German trench in front of the 46th Division should not be shelled, but only the support and reserve trenches, as he wanted the front trench to be kept intact for use by the division once it was captured.4 To make matters worse, when they went over the top the men found the barbed wire largely intact, and the smoke barrage that had been laid down to confuse the Germans had hidden the few places where there were gaps in the wire. The first German trench was just in front of the wood, 300 yards (274 m) from the British lines. A few dozen men got through the small gaps in the wire but were killed in the attempt, while the vast majority were cut down in the field between Gommecourt Wood and what is today the Gommecourt Wood New Cemetery.

  German artillery as well as machine guns destroyed the 5th and 6th Battalions of the North Staffordshires and the 5th and 6th Battalions of the South Staffordshires, which is why a large number of the North and South Staffordshire graves in the cemetery are not identified by name. Once the 46th Division’s advance collapsed, the Germans concentrated on repelling the 56th Division to the south of Gommecourt, and by 9.30 a.m. it was back in its own trenches having taken a mammoth 4,300 casualties, against 2,455 for the 46th. Although Stuart-Wortley had suffered the fewest losses of any of the British generals, he was relieved of his command two days later. (Haig had long r
ubbed up badly against him, and was quick to agree to Lt.-Gen. Sir Thomas D’Oyly Snow’s request that he be sacked immediately.)

  Haig managed to add grave insult to the injury already caused by then blackening the name of the 46th in his war diary, writing: ‘The Gommecourt attack was also progressing well. 46th Division had [the] northern corner of Gommecourt Wood… But eventually [the] right brigade of 46th Division did not press on.’5 This is totally unfair, as the large numbers of dead from the 137th Brigade in the Gommecourt Wood New Cemetery silently attest. They had pressed on as far as their losses could possibly allow. Cpl. Lawson was hit even before getting out of the trench. ‘Just as we were signalled’, he recalled, ‘a shrapnel shell burst a few feet over the top of the trench, and I received a shrapnel bullet in the back.’ It probably saved his life. Although the divisional artillery commander later claimed to have cut the wire ‘along the whole front for a distance of 1,500 yards (1,372 m)’, he was wrong. ‘I advanced with the first wave and got as far as the wire,’ recalled Sgt. H. Fitzgerald of the 1/6th North Staffordshires, ‘which was very thick and not cut. We couldn’t get through.’ Whereupon the enemy had opened up with machine gun fire.6

  A BIRD’S EYE VIEW

  An aerial photograph of the south end of Gommecourt village and park, showing the destruction caused by the fighting, October 1916.

  Attacking Gommecourt from the south was Maj.-Gen. C.P. A. Hull’s 56th (London) Division, which included the Rangers, London Scottish and London Rifle Brigade. The Londoners found the wire cut in several places and overran the first two lines of trenches but were held up at the third, as well as at Nameless Farm. The division then came under heavy German artillery attack out in the open, which prevented reinforcements reaching them across no man’s land. When the Germans began their counter-attack, therefore, the Londoners could not defend their gains. For all that a bombing section of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles got behind Gommecourt, it proved impossible for the 56th to join up with the 46th. Although the attack on Gommecourt had been purely diversionary, it was of course impossible for the General Staff to tell that to the divisions concerned, so support battalions were sent into the fray and were also destroyed. ‘Guns of all calibres pounded their system of trenches till it looked for all the world like nothing more than a ploughed field’, wrote an officer of the 56th Division.7