Cpl. Sidney Appleyard recalled how according to one report that his unit received, ‘Gommecourt Wood had been knocked to the ground and the Germans had evacuated the whole position’.8 But it was yet another over-optimistic report, a rumour. ‘Line after line advanced and disappeared in the clouds of smoke, and on several occasions one could see batches of men disappear as a shell exploded in their midst’, he later wrote. ‘On we went and it seemed marvellous how the pieces missed us, for the air appeared to be alive with missiles. At last after advancing about thirty yards (27.4 m) I was struck in the thigh by a bullet, the force of which knocked me over. The only thing to do was to crawl back, and this I did… Knowing that a good number had been hit, I decided to crawl out on top again and give any assistance that might be required. My efforts were useless for the only man left out there had been shot through the head and killed instantly.’9 He crawled to an ambulance station at Sailly, from where he was sent to Le Tréport hospital, from which he wrote the next day: ‘The doctors and nurses are very kind to us all and it is worth getting wounded. The weather is glorious and it is a treat to get away from the booming of the guns.’10 He was proud of what they had achieved: ‘The London Territorials were outnumbered and beaten, but by no means disgraced, for under such conditions we did remarkably well in taking the first two lines, and if we had been in the position to get reserves up we should certainly have reached our objective.’11
Despite taking their first objectives in places where the wire had been well cut, the men of the 56th Division were forced back into their own trenches by the end of the day. The Official History was damning of Haig for ordering a major attack at Gommecourt at all. ‘The VII Corps before Gommecourt, having played its part in the preparatory period by attracting an extra enemy division,’ Edmonds wrote, ‘the assault… at that spot should have been countermanded by GHQ order.’12 It further pointed out that ‘Any chance of surprise which existed on the front between Fricourt and Gommecourt was lost by the enemy overhearing at La Boisselle a British telephone message and the firing of the mine at Hawthorn Ridge ten minutes before zero.’13
At Gommecourt Wood New Cemetery lies LCpl. Daniel George McMillan, twenty-three years old, from the 14th Battalion London Regiment (London Scottish). He was the son of Alexander and Margaret McMillan of East London, South Africa, who chose this inscription for his gravestone: ‘He died for King and Country and the freedom of the world.’ Nearby lies Pte. G. H. Saltinstall, aged nineteen, of the North Staffordshire Regiment, son of a widowed mother from Burton-on-Trent, who chose the words: ‘Death divides but memory clings.’ In Gommecourt British Cemetery No. 2 is buried Cpl. Leonard Edward Rowe, twenty years old, from the 2nd Battalion London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers). He came from Clapham and was, his headstone records, ‘A mere boy but a great sportsman’. A Star of David is on a grave believed to be that of 2nd Lt. J. Josephs, aged nineteen, from the 12th Battalion London Regiment (The Rangers), the son of David and Sabine Josephs of Willesden Lane, London.
To the south of the 56th Division was the 48th Division, which did not attack at all on 1 July. Once the Germans realized that they need not expect an attack in the sector north of Serre, they turned their guns there onto the 56th Division and Maj.-Gen. Robert Wanless O’Gowan’s 31st Division to the south. The latter was made up of Pals battalions from northern English industrial towns such as Accrington, Bradford, Leeds, Barnsley and Halifax. They were supposed to capture Serre and then protect the 4th Army from a counter-attack from the north. Attacking uphill from copses named after the four evangelists, they marched into a storm of 74,000 rounds of machine gun and rifle rounds, gaining little ground at huge expense.14 Just off the Serre Road a single machine-gunner (named Kaiser) virtually destroyed the entire battalion of 11th East Lancashires (Accrington Pals).
The attack from Mark Copse of the 11th Battalion East Lancashire Regiment also failed within a few minutes. At 7.33 a.m. the 1st Barnsley Pals got up, dressed their line, walked forward the 300 yards (274 m) to the enemy line and were annihilated. The Accrington Pals suffered 585 casualties, the Sheffield Pals 512, the 1st Barnsley Pals 286 and the 2nd Barnsley Pals 275. By 7.50 a.m., after only seventeen minutes, the attack had completely failed. The Durham Light Infantry reached Pendant Copse 1¼ miles (2 km) in, and some Accrington Pals and Sheffield City Battalion reached Serre itself, but they could not hold the position. In all, the division lost over 3,600 men. ‘I felt sick at the sight of this carnage and remember weeping’, recalled LCpl. H. Bury of the Accrington Pals.15 Of the Sheffield City Pals’ battalion, the novelist John Harris in Covenant with Death wrote memorable words that describe many of the battalions of Kitchener’s New Army on that summer day: ‘Two years in the making. Ten minutes in the destroying. That was our history.’16 It was said that no house in Accrington was left unaffected when the news of the Pals battalion’s fate reached the town.17
In the Railway Hollow Cemetery, Pte. J. H. Mawdsley, of the East Lancashire Regiment has a gravestone that says, in the words of his wife Hetty from Clayton-le-Moors, Accrington, ‘I have fought a good fight. Kept the faith. Finished the course.’ In Serre Road No.1 Cemetery Horace Iles of the 16th Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment is buried; he was the son of Elizabeth Iles of Spenceley Street, Leeds. His sister Florrie had written to him begging him to come home as he had lied about his age when volunteering and was only fourteen years old. The letter was returned with the words ‘Killed in Action’ stamped on it. In the Railway Hollow Cemetery, Pte. Archie Brammer, who died at twenty-two in the 12th Battalion Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment (Sheffield City Battalion) has a headstone whose words were chosen by his parents, Mr W. H. and Mrs A. Brammer of Walkley, Sheffield: ‘To live in hearts of those we love is not to die.’
To the right of the 31st Division was the Hon. Sir William Lambton’s Regular 4th Division, whose objective was to capture the Quadrilateral Redoubt. This they managed to achieve but nothing more, because of what was happening on both their flanks. Under attack by German units from both Serre and Beaumont Hamel, they were forced to abandon the Quadrilateral the next morning, with total losses of 4,700.18 Requests for renewed bombardments were hard to make as telephone lines were often cut by the barrage, and runners were often too late to make a difference. Generals could no longer control their men once they were in no man’s land, or even stay in touch with them effectively. Those units that took the initiative and ran at the German trenches, such as the 1st Rifle Brigade, had far more of a chance of achieving their objectives.19
Just outside Serre Road Cemetery No. 2 is a memorial to Valentine Braithwaite, son of Sir Walter Braithwaite, who had been awarded one of the earliest MCs of the Battle of Mons and then served at Gallipoli. He had returned to France with the Somerset Light Infantry of the 4th Division and was killed on 1 July along with his colonel, his adjutant and four other officers. His body was not found. ‘God buried him and no man knoweth his sepulcher’, wrote his family on a simple cross.
To the south of the 4th Division was the 29th Division, whose plan was to advance from what is known as ‘the Sunken Road’ through the German positions for 2½ miles (4 km).20 The 86th and 87th Brigades planned to capture the German front-line trenches in front of Beaumont Hamel at 7.30 a.m. and then at 8.30 a.m. the 88th Brigade, which included the Newfoundland Regiment, would move through them to attack the second line of German defences. Of this attack, Maj. James Ball of the Battery of the Royal Horse Artillery later wrote: ‘To expect infantry to walk across 800 hundred yards [732 m] with full equipment, carrying… duckboards in the face of a fully armed enemy was to invite the massacre that actually occurred.’21
Unfortunately, the guns of the divisional artillery, which ought to have been bringing fire down on the German front trenches once it was clear that the attacks in the north had failed, were following the rigid timetable set out in the schedule, whereby they moved their fire forward by 100 yards (91 m) every two minutes. This meant that when the 29th Division was stopped in its tracks in
no man’s land in front of the Y Ravine at Beaumont Hamel, the barrage that should have been supporting it was instead shelling the opposite side of the valley, with no means of calling it back. ‘Seldom have the evils of an inflexible, predetermined schedule of artillery fire been so tragically demonstrated’, wrote the historian of the Newfoundland Regiment.22 Communications between infantry, observers and artillery were still rudimentary, and so exact a science as moving a barrage forward in coordination with infantry movement was still impossible in mid-1916. Instead, timetables were used which worked for the artillery but were lethal for the infantry if they were held up, as they were so often by machine gun fire on 1 July.
‘WE NEED FEAR NOTHING’
Newfoundland soldiers waiting in the St John’s Road support trench on July 1, 1916.
In the Beaumont Hamel British Cemetery lies Pte. W. S. Lonsdale of the Lancashire Fusiliers. He was nineteen and from Salford, and his parents inscribed his tombstone: ‘Our Loss, his eternal gain.’ Close to him is Pte. F. A.W. Tagg, aged nineteen, a soldier of the Middlesex Regiment from Ealing: ‘His memory is as dear today as in the hour he passed away.’ Nearby is Pte. Frank Halliwell of the Lancashire Fusiliers, who was from Chorley and twenty years old when he died. ‘He answered his country’s call’, wrote his family.
To the south of the 29th Division was the 36th (Ulster) Division, which managed, partly because they ran at the German trenches rather than walking, to break into the Schwaben Redoubt under the cover of smoke shells fired by trench mortars, having also crawled out into no man’s land before Zero Hour. As early as 7.15 a.m., under cover of extraordinarily heavy fire—which the Germans described as the worst in the sector and which featured Stokes mortars and some 9-in. mortars firing 200 lb bombs lent by the French—the leading battalions of the 109th and 108th Brigades crept forward to within a hundred yards of the German front trenches. Recent battlefield archaeology shows that they dug into no man’s land before the attack and therefore were so close to the enemy that they won the all-important race to the parapet. When the buglers in the front trench signaled ‘Advance’, the Official History records, ‘the scene with the mist clearing off and the morning sun glistening on the long rows of bayonets was brilliant and striking’.23 Back then, the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne was celebrated on 1 July under the Old Style calendar, rather than on the 12th as it is today, and the Protestants among the Ulstermen believed the anniversary was a good augury.*1
SCHWABEN REDOUBT
British artillery bombarding the formidable German defence system at the Schwaben Redoubt, 1 July 1916.
On the right, the 109th Brigade managed to reach the German front trenches and to capture them with relatively few casualties, largely because the wire had been cut by artillery and trench mortar fire. It was on approaching the reserve trench 500 yards (457 m) beyond that the German machine guns doomed the advance, especially once the guns at Thiepval no longer had to be directed against the smashed 32nd Division. The 9th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers took heavy losses, though by 8 a.m. they had entered the front face of the Schwaben Redoubt. Over four hundred prisoners were taken, to be escorted back to British lines at the rate of sixteen per guard. ‘So anxious were they to reach shelter’, stated one eyewitness, ‘that many ran back towards the British lines, outpacing their escorts.’24
When the Ulstermen broke into the redoubt they found a huge rabbit warren complex*2 of tunnels, shelters, cavernous ammunition stores and dugouts built over the previous eighteen months, but they had to withdraw from it later that day when it became clear that the divisions on either side of them had not made their objectives and a massive counter-attack was on its way. The further the Ulstermen got the more exposed they became to counter-attack, especially once a heavy barrage cut them off from reinforcements. During the night and the next morning they therefore had to give up the positions they had fought so hard to gain. They won four VCs that day, and some units are thought to have penetrated up to 2 miles (3.2 km), but they lost 5,104 men, over one-third of the division.25
‘The morning of July 1st broke very fine’, wrote W. J. Grant of D Battery, 154th Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery in his diary,
on a day which was to prove a red letter day for the division. As soon as day broke the infantry went over, with the 32nd Division on one side and the 29th Division on the other. Our infantry got away in fine style taking the enemy’s first three lines in very quick time, it was in this line they were supposed to rest for half an hour, while the artillery shelled the fourth and fifth lines, but being carried away by the excitement they pushed on and took the 4th and 5th lines, in spite of the officers’ pleading to them to rest. On getting into the front line they had Thiepval at their mercy, but it was discovered that neither of the 32nd or the 29th Divisions had got to the enemy’s first line, which of course left our division in a very sharp salient which was impossible to hold. We were being enfiladed from both flanks besides a murderous fire from the front. There was nothing to do but to draw back, which was very disheartening, seeing that the division had had 5,000 casualties in two hours getting there, but there was nothing else for it. By this time the battery had fired just on 4,000 rounds in just over a day.26
At noon a gun in Grant’s battery took a direct hit from a German shell, ‘severely wounding all four men. The gunpit caught fire, then fell in, burning and burying the gun.’ Grant then watched the wounded from the 36th Division’s attack returning:
It was a terrible sight to see the wounded coming down in hundreds, the most serious in any convenience that was handy, in General Service wagons, motor-lorries, ambulances, or anything they could get. Those that could possibly crawl at all had to get from the trenches to the dressing station, which was about three miles (4.8km), as best they could… About 3 o’clock about 500 prisoners came down and looked pleased to be out of it. Night closed with the division cut to pieces, but still holding on to the enemy’s second line.27
Grant survived through to demobilization in March 1919, but Rifleman W. Dunbar, nineteen, of the Royal Irish Rifles, from Downpatrick Street in Belfast, did not. He died of his wounds on 2 July and his grave is inscribed ‘Peace perfect peace with loved ones far away’.
ROYAL IRISH RIFLES (OVERLEAF)
Soldiers resting in a communication trench during the opening hours of battle on 1 July.
To the south of the 36th Division was the 32nd, which was supposed to take the Thiepval plateau high ground, a strong German position that would not fall for another twelve weeks. The division assembled on the lower slopes of the Thiepval spur from Authuille Wood to Thiepval Wood, where the assembly trenches had only been dug in the hard chalk a few days before, and the men had had to carry up supplies too, leaving them, in the words of one of them, ‘dog-tired’.28 The two front brigades, the 97th and 99th, had to attack the whole spur from the Liepzig Salient to Thiepval village, and then, it was hoped, advance further. The southern face of the salient was to be left alone and taken from behind once the other attacks had succeeded. It was a New Army battalion, the 17th Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Commercials) of the 97th Brigade, which left their trenches at 7.23 a.m. and crawled to within 35 yards (32 m) of the German lines won the race to the parapet and took the Leipzig Redoubt, the only gain of the day for the 32nd Division.29 Brig. J. B. Jardine of the 97th had learnt the tactic in the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War where he had been a liaison officer with the Japanese, another example of a senior officer who was much more lion than donkey.
‘The defenders were taken prisoner before they could emerge from their dugouts in the chalk quarry’, recorded Edmonds.30 Yet it was when the 97th Brigade tried to go beyond that, moving onto the trenches known as ‘Hindenburg Strasse’, across an open slope, that machine guns forced them to stop. From his observation post, Jardine ordered Lt.-Col. A. S. Cotton of the 161st Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery, which was supporting 97th Brigade, to switch part of his fire to the German defences at the rear of the Leipzig Redoubt,
even though this was contrary to GHQ’s orders. This allowed the Highlanders to withdraw successfully. ‘It is the 32nd Division at its best’, wrote an onlooker, Percy Crozier of the 36th Division:
I see rows upon rows of British soldiers lying dead, dying or wounded, in no man’s land. Here and there I see an officer urging on his followers. Occasionally I can see the hands thrown up and then a body flops to the ground. The bursting shells and smoke make visibility poor… Again I look southward from a different angle and perceive heaped up masses of British corpses suspended on the German wire in front of the Thiepval stronghold, while live men rush forward in orderly procession to swell the weight of numbers in the spider’s web.31
The Lonsdale Battalion, part of 97th Brigade, moved to Crucifix Corner near Authuille Wood prior to the attack, in which their task was to assault the Leipzig Salient and capture the German advance HQ at Mouquet Ferme.*3 The men mainly hailed from Cumberland and Westmoreland. Their commanding officer, Lt.-Col. Percy Machell, was under no illusions about how hazardous it was going to be to carry out the complicated order to leave the wood at 8 a.m. and go northwards until they reached the rear of the right company of the HLI and then swing due east, all under what he rightly suspected would be heavy machine gun fire not just from the opposing German trenches but also enfilading fire from machine gun nests that doglegged to the right. ‘If it goes badly,’ he wrote in his final instructions, ‘I shall come up and see it through.’32
Elegy Page 12
