Elegy

by Andrew Roberts

  As an exercise in putting the best face on the disaster, it was not bad, but VIII Corps was never again given responsibility for participating in a major or minor British offensive for the rest of the war, and was broken up in the summer of 1918.93 Hunter-Weston himself was not allowed to conduct another major attack for the duration, although he found time to get elected as Unionist MP for North Ayrshire only five months after the Somme.94

  *1 Some Protestant officers wore the sashes of the Orange order into battle.

  *2 A section of the Mill Road Cemetery has gravestones that lie flat because the ground below them is so honeycombed that they would not stand upright.

  *3 The Lonsdales’ official title was XI (Service) Battalion Border Regiment (Lonsdale).

  *4 There were another two brothers from Skelton, George and John Watt. Despite being shot through both thighs, George returned to fight with the Lonsdales. John Watt was killed at Passchendaele in November 1917.

  *5 Shell-holes could be enormous: at the Hunters Cemetery at Beaumont Hamel an entire cemetery of the 51st Division is incorporated into a single one.

  *6 The only Pals battalion to be called Chums.

  *7 Of that dozen, only Baumber and his comrade Sam Ward were able to answer roll-call that night.

  *8 LCpl. Pipe Garnet Wolseley Fyfe was Pipe Maj. Wilson’s uncle.

  *9 Today 98 men of the 2nd Battalion Gordon Highlanders are buried in a small circular cemetery on the side of the Péronne-Albert road.

  *10 He was later to die of wounds received at the battle of Poelcappelle in 1917.

  *11 The French Serre-Hébuterne Nécropole Nationale has several Algerians and Moroccans buried in it, noticeable from the domed headstones denoting Muslims instead of the Christian cross.

  *12 The very fact that he had time to contact Lady Haig on the first day of the Somme Offensive rather underlines Churchill’s criticism in his biography of the Duke of Marlborough of ‘our latter-day generals’ that ‘There are no physical disturbances: there is no danger: there is no hurry…There is nearly always leisure for a conference even in the gravest crisis.’

  SIX

  AFTERMATH

  By hedge and dyke the leaves / Flame to the clay / Fanned by the wing / Of Death. Yet Life achieves / From such decay / The buds of spring. / By air and sea and earth / To glorious death / Our loves we gave / Certain that Death is Birth / Love blossometh / Beyond the grave.1

  CAPT. CHARLES K. MCKERROW,

  ‘Flanders’, October 1915

  *

  ‘We worked for three days and three nights without rest. It was the bloodiest battle I ever saw.’2

  PTE. H. STREETS,

  58th Field Ambulance

  ‘The newfoundlanders had been wiped out at Hamel and the South Wales Borderers at Beaumont’, wrote John Harris in Covenant with Death. ‘The Durhams had been decimated at Ovillers and the Green Howards at Fricourt. Whole battalions, thousands on thousands on thousands of men, had been swept away in an unbelievable butchery in the first five or ten minutes after seven-thirty.’3 Almost half of the 120,000 men in the 143 battalions who had gone over the top on 1 July 1916 had become casualties, a truly staggering toll in warfare ancient or modern.4 Of the total of 57,471 casualties, 993 officers and 18,247 other ranks were killed, 1,337 officers and 34,156 other ranks were wounded, 96 officers and 2,056 other ranks were missing and 12 officers and 573 other ranks were prisoners of war.5 The total figures were therefore 35,494 wounded, 19,240 killed, 2,152 missing and 585 POWs.6

  No fewer than thirty-two battalions suffered more than five hundred casualties each, out of a typical full complement of around 1,050. The 10th West Yorkshires, which lost a staggering total of 710, headed this doleful list, followed by the 1st Newfoundland, which lost 684, the 4th Tyneside Scottish (629), 1st Tyneside Irish (620), 8th Yorks and Lancs (597), County Down Volunteers (595), Donegal and Fermanagh Volunteers (589) and 1/8th Royal Warwicks (588). Eighteen of the thirty-two lost twenty or more officers and none lost fewer than a dozen, out of a normal complement of thirty, making the pro rata officer casualty rate slightly higher than that for the other ranks. While one battalion of the thirty-two was from the empire (the Newfoundlanders), four came from the Territorial force and seven from the Regular army. No fewer than twenty of the battalions taking the greatest losses were from the New Army, the ‘Pals’ who had answered Lord Kitchener’s call.7

  Sometimes it can be hard to visualize such huge numbers. To get a sense of the extent of the slaughter, roughly the same number of Britons (and Newfoundlanders) were killed and wounded on the first day of the Somme as there are words in the main body of text in this book. It is impossible to accommodate this size of loss, however, though Lady Haig tried to in her memoirs. ‘The total casualties for the first three days’ fighting were about 40,000. Douglas was at first much concerned by the seemingly high figure, but he discovered that it included a great many lightly wounded cases which in other armies would not have been evacuated at all. Well over 4,000 prisoners were captured during the first phase of the attack.’8 (In fact the number of POWs was somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500.)9

  The number of soldiers of the BEF killed on 1 July 1916 was almost as great as the 21,000 who died in the three years of the Crimean War or the 21,000 who died in the three years of the Boer War. As an extreme example, the Charge of the Light Brigade—remembered as an iconic disaster for British arms—cost 110 dead, whereas the first day of the Somme killed 175 times that number. Around 3 per cent of Britain’s casualties for the First World War were suffered on that one day alone, although it was not the worst one-day loss of the war; on 22 August 1914 the French lost 27,000 killed in ‘the Battle of the Frontiers’ in Alsace-Lorraine.10

  NEWFOUNDLAND MEMORIAL

  The unveiling of the memorial—a proud caribou—to the Newfoundland dead at Beaumont Hamel, 7 June 1925.

  ‘It was pure bloody murder’, recalled Pte. P. Smith of the 1st Border Regiment of the first day on the Somme. ‘Douglas Haig should have been hung, drawn and quartered for what he did on the Somme. The cream of British manhood was shattered in less than six hours.’11 The pioneer battalions attached to each division, which had been intended to repair the captured German trenches, were set to work burying the dead. ‘For this disastrous loss of the finest manhood of the United Kingdom and Ireland there was only a small gain of ground to show,’ recorded the Official History,

  although certainly the greatest yet showed by the British Expeditionary Force: an advance into the enemy’s position some 3½ miles [5.6 km] wide and averaging a mile in depth… Of the magnificent successes achieved by the 30th, 18th, 36th (Ulster), 4th and 56th Divisions, none except those gained by the two first on the extreme right, next to the equally successful French, were permanent. The others were no more than isolated thrusts which, in the absence of support on either side, could not be maintained.12

  ‘The officers went through the same as the men,’ Pte. Thomas Grant of the 23rd Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers (Tyneside Scottish) wrote to his wife, ‘they knew no fear.’13 Of course they did indeed know fear, but they also knew that leadership meant not communicating it to their men. Nor was it only the more junior officers who were killed, the lieutenants, captains and majors; a total of forty-seven brigadiers and lieutenant-colonels were casualties leading from the front on that first day, the majority of them killed.14

  French casualties amounted to 7,000, German losses between 10,000 and 12,000.15 At the cemetery which houses the German dead from the whole offensive, the Deutscher Soldatenhof at Fricourt, there are 11,970 bodies buried in four large ossuaries, of which 6,477 are unknown. A total of 17,027 are buried there, including those soldiers killed in battles from July to November 1916.*1 The Royal British Legion and the local French communities lay wreaths there every year.

  THE PRIDE OF ULSTER

  A memorial to the Ulster dead in Sydenham, east Belfast, unveiled in 2010.

  The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing is a hugely imp
ressive 46-metre (150 ft) high brick and stone structure, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, that bears the names of over 72,000 soldiers of the United Kingdom and South Africa*2 who died on the Somme and who have no known grave. Many bodies had to be left on the battlefield, and those that were hastily buried in the front lines often lost their improvised markers when that sector came under renewed bombardment, so that ‘the ceaseless pounding of the artillery meant that many of the bodies simply vanished’.16 Others were blown to smithereens by the shelling, and so could not be identified.

  During the Somme Offensive, more newspapers than ever before published the full casualty lists, including provincial papers. They also published letters from the front that openly discussed the conditions in the trenches. One of the first—and certainly the best known—official war films, The Battle of the Somme, was released in August 1916 and played in over two thousand British cinemas. It was silent, in black-and-white, seventy-five minutes long, and some 20 million people watched it in the first six weeks after its release.17 It had been seen by over half the country by the time the battle ended in November.18 Some of its scenes had to be cut for reasons of national morale and the only action sequence in it was probably staged—including its most famous moment, in which a group of soldiers clamber out of a trench only for one of them to be shot and fall back into it—but at least it was honest about the high casualties.19 Scenes include the explosion of a mine, wounded soldiers returning to their lines, an artillery barrage and destroyed buildings, yet neither the film nor the casualty lists led to an outbreak of pacifism amongst the public, which, fortunately for Britain, was not to manifest itself until the war had been safely won. ‘In this picture the world will obtain some idea of what it costs in human suffering to put down the Devil’s dominion’, wrote one newspaper review.20 Its realism was commended by the Manchester Guardian and The Times. Frances Stevenson, secretary and mistress of David Lloyd George (then Minister of Munitions in prime minister Herbert Asquith’s cabinet), whose brother had died on the Western Front, wrote in her diary: ‘I have often tried to imagine myself what he went through, but now I know and I shall never forget.’21

  ‘THEIR NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE’

  One of the beautifully kept cemeteries along the Serre Road where many unknown British soldiers, who fell on 1 July, are buried.

  We tend to focus today on the ‘headline’ figure of the number killed on the first day of the Somme, but almost twice that number were wounded, many very seriously.*3 The medical services were of course prepared for large numbers of wounded over the course of the whole offensive, but not for anything like so many on its first day. In general, the doctors, surgeons, nurses, orderlies, ambulance drivers and stretcher-bearers who had arrived to serve the wounded of the First World War in 1914 were unprepared for what awaited them on the battlefields of the Western Front. Not only were the numbers of wounded higher than predicted, but also the types of wounds suffered were very different from what had been expected.22 The days of neat holes being made by rounded bullets were gone, to be replaced by horrific injuries caused by shrapnel and serrated shell fragments, and poison gas destroyed lungs.

  By the time of the Somme Offensive, after the tragedies of 1914 and 1915, Regimental Medical Officers (RMOs) had a much better idea of what to expect, but as the latest historian of the wounded of the First World War points out, ‘Carefully planned entraining and detraining routines went to pieces in the face of the sheer numbers of casualties at the railheads, and within a week of the Somme the whole system of transit simply broke down.’23 Nurse Morgan of the RAMC, for example, only realized the true extent of the problem when the No.3 Ambulance Train on which she lived and worked pulled into a base station to deliver its load and found 2,000 men from an earlier train still lying on stretchers on the platform, the sidings and in rooms in the station. There was no room to take her patients off the train, and would not be for hours until the previous train’s arrivals could be moved. Even though she did her best to calm her patients, ‘all around them they could hear the moaning of men in agony’.24 It was a scene that was being replayed behind the whole front, and got much worse later in the battle when temporary ambulance trains—ordinary trains pressed into service for the emergency but not properly kitted out for their new use and only intended for the lightly injured—had to be used to transport all types of wounded. Stretchers were laid end-to-end in the corridors, and were hung from every strap.

  Medical officers were appallingly overworked. Charles McKerrow had been an Ayrshire GP before volunteering as an RMO for the Northumberland Fusiliers, a regiment that lost 2,440 men killed and wounded in the first few hours of its attack on La Boisselle.*4 When McKerrow’s 10th Battalion went into action a week later and captured a German aid post, he took it over, complete with its German casualties and a German medical orderly who insisted on helping him. They treated 1,000 casualties as the piles of blood-stained bandages were trampled into the mud.25 ‘No one could have possibly equalled my stretcher-bearers,’ he wrote to his wife after working continually for ten days, living off coffee and soup but with virtually no sleep. ‘As one hard-bitten chap said to me, “they are doing Christ’s work”. It really is very fine to see these chaps passing through storms of shell to help their comrades. I am very proud of them and hope they will get some rewards apart from the normal ones of their conscience.’26 He later ensured that three of them were decorated.

  Not everyone was sad to be wounded, so long as it was the right type of wound. When considering how he survived the battle years later, Pte. Bert Payne of the 8th Manchesters said: ‘I suppose it was having the wound, a “Blighty”, to get away from the Somme. Everyone wanted a Blighty but it depended on what kind it would be, a good one or a bad one, and mine was a bad one.’27 After lying fully conscious in no man’s land for seven hours after being shot in the mouth by a machine gun bullet in the attack on Montauban, Payne and his comrade Bill Brock, who had lost a foot and used a rifle as a crutch, slowly and immensely painfully made their way back to the British lines. In a shell-hole on their way, Payne used Brock’s rifle to shoot a British soldier who had been ‘almost blown to pieces, but somehow [was] still alive. He was gasping for air, sobbing and calling out for someone called Annie.’ Payne later said he ‘could see at a glance that there was no hope for the man: he was bound to die after hours of lonely agony.’28 It is very likely that a lot more of these mercy killings took place in no man’s land than survivors cared to remember or admit, and they should be seen as rugged acts of charity.

  When Payne and Brock finally made it back to the British lines, which they found in chaos, there was a horse-drawn ambulance preparing to leave, full of wounded Germans. In an equally ruthless act of kindness for a comrade, Payne ‘tipped enough men off their stretchers to make space for his wounded friend, leaving them on the roadside calling for help’. He later found another ambulance cart for himself, and as it bumped along towards the medical station at Abbeville he ‘watched walking wounded and carts full of dead moving in one direction and reinforcements rushing’ towards Montauban.29

  On the second day of the offensive, 2 July, in the north of the battlefield around Gommecourt, Serre and Beaumont Hamel, a number of short and uncoordinated armistices were brokered as the Germans permitted the British to retrieve their wounded.30 This was nothing like the de facto Christmas Truce of 1914, but it was an indication perhaps that all civilized behaviour had not been entirely eradicated. ‘In many places,’ wrote an historian, ‘when they realized their own lives were no longer at risk, [the Germans] ceased firing, so that the more lightly wounded could make their way back as best they could do their own front line.’31

  Some of the badly wounded did not get back until 4 July, and many others not at all. Gerald Brennan, a young officer who captured ground at the end of July, noticed how soldiers wounded on 1 July had often ‘crawled into shell-holes, wrapped their waterproof sheets round them, taken out their bibles and died like that’.32


  Opposite Serre, where German snipers had been shooting at British wounded caught on the barbed wire, Harry Siepmann, an Old Rugbeian artillery officer fresh out of Oxford, saw an extraordinary sight from his forward observation post. Two men climbed out of the British trench, without a white flag, whereupon ‘a stretcher was passed to them, and they proceeded to carry it through no man’s land. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of eyes must have been upon them, and all firing of any sort ceased. Complete, uncanny silence descended like a pall, as the two men trudged steadily on and stopped beside a body lying on the ground. They lifted it onto a stretcher and plodded slowly back the way they had come. The silence remained unbroken until they were safe, and then the war resumed.’33 Some chivalry in war still existed, although in places where both sides went out to collect casualties simultaneously there was virtually no fraternization. Nonetheless, at Gommecourt the Germans raised a Red Cross flag early on 2 July for a one-hour truce in which their 2nd Reserve Guards Division did help British stretcher-bearers bring in the wounded.34