Elegy
Page 18
The sacrifice of 1 July 1916 had at last been justified.
*1 Hunter-Weston was totally wrong about the Germans having a more powerful artillery, it was simply much better concentrated. In fact VII and VIII Corps hugely out-gunned the Germans.
*2 After the war he criticized various army and corps commanders as well.
CONCLUSION
‘One’s revulsion to the ghastly horrors of war was submerged in the belief that this war was to end all wars and Utopia would arise. What an illusion!’1
CPL. J.H.TANSLEY,
9th Yorkshire and Lancashire Regiment
*
‘As I was one of the lucky ones; I still say I am glad I was there.’2
LCPL. C.F.T. TOWNSEND,
12th Middlesex Regiment
It has been calculated that it would take three and a half days for the 888,246 British and Commonwealth troops who died in the First World War to march past the Cenotaph in Whitehall, London, even at four men abreast. Although the size of the losses in the entire 141-day Battle of the Somme were horrific on both sides, it was the Germans—with a much lower overall population than the Allies—who could least afford them. In terms of sheer attrition, therefore, the Allies ‘won’ the battle, even if the British suffered on the first day of the offensive what has rightly been described as ‘the greatest tragedy of their military history’.3 In the broadest sense, therefore, Capt. von Hentig of the German Guard Reserve Division was right when he said that ‘The Somme was the muddy grave of the German field army.’4
In his (admittedly very self-serving) War Memoirs, David Lloyd George nonetheless described the First Battle of the Somme as ‘this bull-headed fight’ of ‘horrible and futile carnage’ and one of ‘the most gigantic, tenacious, grim and futile fights ever waged in the history of war’.5 His friend and erstwhile colleague Winston Churchill agreed. ‘You know my views about the offensive so well that I do not need to set them out on paper’, he wrote on 15 July 1916 to his brother Jack, who was on the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps staff, contrasting Haig’s supposed stupidity with the men’s courage. ‘The marvellous devotion and heroism of the troops exceeds all that history records or fancy has dreamed’, he wrote.6 However much the revisionist and now post-revisionist battle has been fought over Haig’s reputation, history has certainly agreed with Churchill about the troops’ heroism.
‘He does not appear to have had any original ideas’, Churchill wrote elsewhere of Haig.
No one can discern a spark of that mysterious, visionary, often sinister genius which has enabled the great captains of history to dominate the material factors, save slaughter, and confront their foe with the triumph of novel apparitions. He was, we are told, quite friendly to the tanks, but the manoeuvre of making them would have never have occurred to him… Here he stood at the head of an army corps, then of an army, and finally of a group of mighty armies. Hurl them on and keep slogging at it in the best possible way—that was war.7
Yet when Churchill himself tried to employ his own mysterious, visionary genius to break the charnel-house slaughter on the Western Front, it had led to the Dardanelles disaster.
Unlike the Dardanelles, there was no public inquiry into the carnage of 1 July 1916, indeed within six months Haig’s chief of staff, Launcelot Kiggell, had been promoted to lieutenant-general and awarded a knighthood ‘for distinguished services in the field’. Yet being chief of staff is a thankless task—the commander tends to get the credit for victory while the chief of staff gets the blame for defeat—and Kiggell was sacked by Lloyd George in 1918. Nor should there have been an inquiry—any more than there ought to have been over the Dardanelles either—because the British High Command did not callously send men to their deaths; there were logical and rational reasons for the assumptions they made, many of them based on the dreadful experience of the Battles of Loos and Neuve Chapelle. They were doing their best, but many of their assumptions were plainly wrong. The Official History of the Great War put ‘the prime causes of the general failure’ down to ‘the strength and depth of the German position and its stout defence’, adding that there was ‘little hope of a decisive success until the morale of the German army was broken’, which was not to happen until 1918.8
The other reasons for the failure given by the Official History—which was certainly no whitewashing text—were many and various, and deserve reiteration: ‘No attempt was made to select for attack a part of the enemy front which had weak features: indeed the Somme sector might be said to be the strongest part. The date chosen was due to the condition of affairs at Verdun, not to the state of the preparations on the Somme… the late hour, and that in broad daylight, had been fixed and insisted upon by General Foch… and General Fayolle.’9 Yet the primary reason for the failure to break through—that the artillery had far too many targets—was not highlighted.
‘Was it a futile bloodbath dreamed up by criminally incompetent donkeys,’ asked the historian Nigel Jones on the ninetieth anniversary of the battle, ‘or a necessary battle of attrition that decisively weakened the German enemy and saved Britain’s embattled French ally from collapse, albeit at the cost of so many lions?’10 It certainly did save France from disaster at Verdun, which was a necessary prerequisite for ultimate victory, in a war that did have to be won. For the First World War was not futile; it was fought against a German Reich and its Austro-Hungarian ally that sought to dominate the European continent, and there was no quick or easy way to win a war against the two empires except with massive loss of life. It could not be done cheaply, any more than it could be won cheaply against the Third Reich a quarter of a century later, when the Russians lost 27 million killed, nearly half of them military.
Slaughter on the Somme was tragically unavoidable. The Allies were forced to try to liberate Belgium and northern France from the Germans in a war that could not have been fought in any other way than a series of attritional battles on a continental scale. That is the dreadful, inexorable truth, as is the fact that the British army needed to adopt far better tactics, and part of that steep learning curve had to evolve through trial and costly error. Nonetheless, Haig and Rawlinson had clearly adopted a hopelessly optimistic and unimaginative battleplan; which one of them was ultimately responsible for it is of interest to military historians but hardly anyone else.
The extension of the bombardment for two extra days because of the rain reduced the stockpile for the final shelling, though it is doubtful that it could have been much more intense than it was. Yet despite the 1,627,824 shells fired, the front was so wide and deep that they simply were not enough, so that ‘many strongpoints and machine gun posts were never touched’.11 Not enough gas shells were fired, only a ‘negligible quantity’ by 75-mm gun batteries that had to be lent to the British by the French.12 It was a revolting weapon, but once used by the Germans it was only proper to respond in kind. Far more gas shells needed to be fired at the German front-line dugouts in the hour-long bombardment just prior to the assault. The huge proportion of shells that failed to explode or went off too early would indeed have made a fitting subject for a public inquiry.
Despite actions such as the first day on the Somme and similar bloodbaths (the Battle of Arras saw greater average losses per day than the Battle of the Somme), overall Britain lost proportionately far fewer men killed in the First World War—6.7 per cent of males aged between fourteen and forty-nine—than Germany and Austria at 10 per cent and France at 12.5 per cent.13 Although the death toll was twice as high in France—the war was fought largely on French soil, and not at all on German—the proportion of servicemen killed in action (one in eight in the British army to one in six in the French) was not so wildly different.14
‘The British’, writes the historian David Reynolds, ‘need to remember that the 1st of July 1916 was very unusual in a war that lasted 1,516 days.’15 Of course if it had not been unusual the war could not have lasted so long, but it had a profound impact on the grand strategy of the Second World War, leavi
ng what a recent historian has correctly called ‘a raw psychological wound’ on British strategists such as Winston Churchill and FM Sir Alan Brooke.16 During the Second World War, Churchill and Brooke put off the return to the Continent for four years after the retreat to Dunkirk, preferring to fight in North Africa and Italy than risking a direct assault on France and Germany, in order to avoid a return to the kind of trench warfare seen on the Western Front in the Great War. For all the harsh fighting seen by the British army between 1939 and 1945, none of its men went through anything like the first day of the Somme, even on D-Day.
On campaign in France, a friend of Cpl. James Parr of the 1st/ 16th London Regiment (Queen’s Westminster Rifles) asked him why they took the risks they did. Because, he said, ‘We could live and love and work somewhere in the world whether Germany or England won. What’s the use of it all?’ Parr answered him: ‘I think we gain the one thing that every man has wanted from his boyhood up—opportunity. Opportunity to show what he is made of. Opportunity to show himself what he’s made of, to show that he can be a hero…What do we gain? We stand to gain everything and to lose—only our lives.’17 Parr was killed in action at Gommecourt on the first day of the Somme Offensive, and is buried there alongside 170 of his comrades. He did indeed show himself that he could be a hero, but his death also forced the British army to learn how to win the First World War.
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Appendix: The Order of Battle
Select Bibliography
Notes to the text
Index
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
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About Andrew Roberts
Also by Andrew Roberts
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It has been the misfortune of Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax, to be remembered not for his very considerable achievements as a senior Conservative politician and diplomat, but as an architect of the policy of appeasement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
A church-going, fox-hunting aristocrat, nicknamed ‘Holy Fox’ by Churchill for his political guile, Halifax’s career in public life spanned the period from the end of the First to the conclusion of the Second World War. As Viceroy of India (1926–31), his deal with Gandhi ended the Civil Disobedience campaign before it could force the British to quit. His meeting with Hitler in 1937 was a milestone in appeasement, yet just days before the 1938 Munich conference, Halifax repudiated the policy and demanded the ‘destruction of Nazism’. By May 1940, it was he, rather than Winston Churchill, who was the choice for Britain’s war leader.
Andrew Roberts has drawn on remarkable private documents to present Lord Halifax as an enigmatic, influential and much-maligned politician – above all, as a man whose self-knowledge, moral decency and patriotism led him to put the needs of his country before the glittering prize of the highest political office.
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ONE
BIRTH, BOYHOOD, BEREAVEMENT
Edward Wood was born on 16 April 1881 in Devon, a fact which many years later he inadvertently vouchsafed to King George VI on a train journey there. He soon regretted it when the King, displaying all his heavy Hanoverian drollness, pointed to every shack and cow-shed along the way, asking, ‘Is that where you were born, Edward?’, until the butt of his constantly reiterated joke found it hard to continue his courtly laughter.
The Woods of Hickleton were a fortunate family. For centuries they had been respectable York merchants, providing justices of the peace, aldermen and the occasional distinguished soldier or sailor. They were worthy but not of national eminence. Just before the start of the Industrial Revolution, they were wealthy enough to buy an estate near Doncaster and to settle as moderately landed squires. Some short time later, they discovered themselves to be sitting on several hundred acres of Britain’s deepest and finest coal seam, the great Barnsley field. It was seventy yards deep in places and all of the highest quality. This left them wealthy enough to do whatever they pleased.
Charles Wood, born in 1800, went into politics. He married the daughter of Earl Grey, the Whig Prime Minister, and rose to become Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State for India. His Whiggery was a tough creed, combining a belief in minimal reform at home and pugnacious optimism abroad. He was awarded a viscountcy in 1866 and was one of those ministers considered close enough to Queen Victoria to be awarded the task of attempting to bring her out of her seclusion years after the death of Prince Albert.
The first Viscount Halifax displayed a number of characteristics that were to reappear in his grandson. He was never a party-minded politician. He contracted a sparkling marriage to the daughter of an earl, which, once his son and grandson had followed suit, gave the family more social standing than their 218th in the precedence of peerage might otherwise imply. He devoted a large part of his life to reform in India, especially in the field of education, holding office there both before and after the Mutiny. Finally, his friendship with the Queen started a tradition of confidentiality and intimacy with the Royal Family that was to prove invaluable to his grandson seventy years later.
In Charles, the second Viscount Halifax, there existed a curious paradox between unquestioning faith in God, which dominated every hour of his ninety-four years, and a fascination for other-worldly phenomena. He was also one of Victorian England’s most splendid eccentrics. He saw himself as the last of the Cavaliers, sported a Vandyke beard and devoted his life to contesting the ‘singularly deserted battlefields’ of theology.1 For half a century the senior lay figure on the ‘High’ side of the Anglican Church, he had been at Oxford during the second phase of the Oxford Movement. His love of ritual, extreme partisan High Anglicanism and all but Catholic beliefs set him at loggerheads with most of his Church for much of his life. He was never happier than when indulging in theological – and preferably also legal – controversy. His Presidency of the English Church Union from 1866 to 1920 saw him champion the High Anglican wing of the Church of England in ecclesiastical disputes virtually incomprehensible today even to aficionados of the genre. He threw himself into the most obscure (and expensive) legal battles over the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874 to the point that he had to resign as Groom to the Prince of Wales’s Bedchamber for advocating the breaking of the law.
He passed on to his son Edward acceptance of Transubstantiation and all the standard Catholic doctrines, barring Papal Infallibility and the Immaculate Conception. When in London, he and Edward worshipped at St Mary’s, Bourne Street, the Church of England’s ‘highest’ and most baroque church. If there was a criticism of Edward Wood’s religion as imparted to him by his father it was, as his friend Fr Ted Talbot wrote in 1949, that ‘In a sense his religion, admirable in its loyalty and diligence, has not one feels had to encounter the sharp north-east wind of deep questioning.’2 Nevertheless, there was a strong sense of realism in the High Anglicanism of both father and son which was to come out in the latter’s politics.
Realism was distinctly lacking in much of the rest of the second Viscount’s life. His strange streak of mysticism and eccentricity led him to edit an excellent book of ghost stories, to be utterly feudal in his politics, to have priest-holes and secret passages built into his house, and to keep yaks, emus and kangaroos in the park at Hickleton. In September 1870, only a year married and father of a six-week-old baby, he went over to France to help fight disease amongst prisoners captured in the Franco-Prussian War. In response to his letters about pulling Zouave corpses out of water butts, his mother felt that he ‘had no right to leave Agnes for the shells, smallpox and cholera of another country’s war’.3 Lady Agnes, Edward’s mother, was a kind, loving and long-suffering soul, who gave him the stability
it was not in his father’s power to bestow. The second Viscount did, however, impart to him a deep affection for the East Riding of Yorkshire, which was to dominate his son’s view of the world throughout his life.
Edward was born without a left hand. He does not seem to have been adversely affected by this at all, though it may have added to a tendency to be slightly sensitive. He was certainly highly successful at putting it into the background. He had a false hand in the form of a clenched fist with a thumb on a spring, which he became so adept at manipulating that when out hunting he had no trouble in opening a gate while holding his reins and horn. Many years later, when crossing the Atlantic in a battleship, his Private Secretary, Charles Peake, ‘could not but admire the beautiful judgement and economy of movement with which he went up a vertical ladder using only his right hand without haste or hesitation’.4 He was also born with a slight lisp, which, far from conveying the sense of weakness it sometimes can, made his sonorous voice more interesting to listen to.
Far more than any of this, Edward’s character was moulded by a series of tragedies which befell his family between his fifth and tenth birthdays. His three elder brothers died, each within two years of one another and each of classic Victorian child-killing diseases. Henry died of lung congestion in 1886 aged seven, Francis of the same in 1888 aged fifteen, and Charles of pleurisy after a long illness in 1890 at the age of twenty. Those last two years, 1888 to 1890, saw the deaths of a bewildering succession of family and friends, leaving the second Viscount with only Edward on whom to concentrate his boundless ambitions and devotion. From being the sixth of six, and very much physically the runt of the litter, the nine year old was catapulted into being the sole focus of his father’s almost fanatical love.