by Peter Hart
Lieutenant Edgar Lord, 15th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, 96th Brigade, 32nd Division
News began to trickle back from Thiepval where Lieutenant Lord’s battalion was going over the top in the ill-fated attack as part of 32nd Division. The first indications were not promising and the news went downhill from then on.
Two wounded men of our battalion came down the road on a wagon. They told us of several casualties due to an intense bombardment of our trenches before the attack started and hazarded the belief that half of our battalion was hors de combat before they went over the top. We did not believe this report to be very reliable, but every few minutes more of our wounded men passed and all told the same story, adding that the Huns seemed to have a machine gun in every trench, that the wire was uncut and he seemed to have the sector extremely heavily manned. It was like following a cricket match on a tape machine, except that the news was desultory and not consecutive, sometimes even contradictory, but one thing was certain—that the fellows one knew so intimately had probably been entirely wiped out.137
Lieutenant Edgar Lord, 15th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, 96th Brigade, 32nd Division
Lieutenant Lord was particularly keen to get news of his friend Lieutenant Ivan Doncaster and the bad news merely stoked the fires of his concern. By the end of the day there was incontrovertible proof of the sheer scale of the losses suffered by his battalion.
The scene on the road called Northumberland Avenue leading to Bouzincourt defies my powers of description to do it justice. A broiling hot day, without a breath of wind, and down the dusty road came hundreds of men with wounds of every description. A few of the worst cases came on the ambulances, which were in small supply, but carts, wagons, lorries, limbers, water tanks and any vehicles which could give a lift were crammed to the utmost. The walking cases were choked with dust, staggering along between the limbers, sometimes helping each other forming human crutches, most of them wearing blood stained bandages and many in improvised splints. The agony on their faces told a weary tale of experiences well-nigh beyond recounting, as all had only just escaped the longest journey of all. I helped as I could by buying chocolates, biscuits and giving draughts of water from my bottle, but all along the road men laid down for the last time, being wounded worse than they knew.138
Lieutenant Edgar Lord, 15th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, 96th Brigade, 32nd Division
Of his friend Ivan Doncaster there was still no sign. For men like Lieutenant Lord it all seemed frankly incredible. How could this have happened? What had gone wrong?
CHAPTER FIVE
The Morning After
THE COST HAD BEEN horrendous. In one short day the British Army suffered a massive 57,470 casualties of which a staggering 19,240 were dead. This was the worst disaster ever to have befallen the British Army in its entire history. The county regimental system of the British further exaggerated the impact of the casualties. Battalions drawn from a single city area, or a provincial town were slaughtered and whole communities were thrown into mourning.
There were sheets and sheets in the paper of dead and wounded with photographs where they could get them of the men. Of course everybody rushed to the paper every day to see if there was anyone they knew. When we got to know of anybody at the school, the headmaster announced them if they had been old boys. I was brought out of class to be told that my cousin had been killed. There were numerous services in churches. It was a very, very sad time—practically everybody was in mourning. People were in deep black, the men if they couldn’t wear black wore black armbands as a mark of respect. The city was really shrouded in gloom. They were very, very sad and nothing seemed to matter any more.1
Miss Llewellyn, Sheffield Schoolchild
Friends who had worked together, enlisted together and trained together had on far too many occasions also died together. This was of no comfort to their grieving families as they faced a future without their children. Then there were the teeming wounded. Some would be restored to full health, but many more would face the consequences of their injuries carrying their scars and gross disfigurements for the rest of their days. And what kind of a destiny could lie ahead for those who had so far survived unscathed and were still serving at the front in a war that could wreak havoc like this?
The British had failed because they still did not grasp the sheer effort that it took to capture modern fortifications defended by well trained and courageous troops. The much vaunted British bombardment had simply not lived up to its star billing. Although, from the limited perspective of the British front line and observation posts, the bombardment had looked awe-inspiring, what was being seen was merely a one-dimensional viewpoint. Millions of shells had been fired but the total length of the front stretched for nearly 20 miles, while the depth that had to be covered reached back up to 3 miles. The end result was a brutally simple and deadly reality—the number of shells falling along each yard of the successive lines of German trenches was far less than Rawlinson had managed to achieve with his concentrated bombardment of the mere 2,000 yards of front assaulted at Neuve Chapelle. Yet this was not a skimpy, single front line that the British were assaulting, as had been the case in far off March 1915. This was a carefully planned series of deeply dug and revetted trench lines, with interlocking fields of fire, seamed together by communication trenches and switch lines all served by numerous reinforced deep dugouts. When the troops eventually penetrated the original German front line in the days that followed, many of them were stunned by the stark contrast with the basic British trenches they had long grown accustomed to.
This trench was dug about 15 feet deep and duckboarded. We must have gone through a mile of this, which was just wonderful; each fire bay had a ladder to it, also a deep dugout quite near; and after all our bombardment the trench was little damaged. If it had not been for a big mine we put up, we should surely never have been able to penetrate this system. We then selected a dugout for company headquarters; the best thing in dugouts I have ever seen. It had two entrances being about 40 feet deep, extending underground about 30 yards. The inside room was fitted up with glass doored cupboards, these contained detonators and mining implements. A large stove was fitted, also a periscope looking over the old British line. In an anteroom at one end was an engine for working the electric light of the trench system. At the opposite end was a tunnel large enough to place about 100 men.2
Lieutenant Lionel Ferguson, 13th Battalion, Cheshire Regiment, 74th Brigade, 25th Division
As they explored such dugouts it rendered the events of 1 July rather more explicable. And there were more strings to the German bow: the numerous fortress redoubts and villages had brought the art of defensive military engineering to a new peak. The British shells, whose sound and fury had so much impressed before the attack, were simply not falling in sufficient concentrations to smash this kind of reinforced and layered defence works. Two other factors further weakened the effect of the British bombardment. The British gunners were new to their trade and inevitably the accuracy of their fire was not what it might have been with more training and battle experience. In addition the quality of the British shells had been severely compromised by the intensive efforts of the munitions industry to rapidly speed up their production. Many simply did not explode. All this further diluted the anticipated effects of the bombardment.
If the German dugouts survived unscathed or only lightly damaged then so inevitably did the German garrisons. At the crucial moment the soldiers would file out: shaken, nervous, shell-shocked perhaps; haunted by the privations and crunching detonations they had endured for the previous week—but in the end they still proved capable of firing their machine guns and rifles when it came to the moment of truth. This was made substantially easier for them by the absence of any credible creeping barrage. The British generals cannot be blamed for this—the concept was new and only just being developed. Nevertheless, it was sadly ironic that just as the British troops went over the top into No Man’s Land, the
British barrage moved smartly off the German front line and began to feel its way back towards the German support lines. As for the German artillery batteries, not all had been properly located and the counter-battery efforts had been too weak to have any credible effect along much of the northern and central sectors assaulted. Of course some German guns were put out of action, but not enough, and time after time the surviving gun teams took their revenge by liberally plastering the British front trenches and No Man’s Land with shells.
In the face of this the British infantry tactics were far too simplistic to offer any hope of progress in the face of the withering German artillery and machine-gun fire. Their commanders had generally restricted them to a plodding, slow march in long lines to attack in successive waves with each adding to the weight of the push until an objective was finally secured. But what if the waves were slaughtered before they could exert any meaningful pressure on the German line? Then each successive wave was simply marching forward to their deaths. Perhaps more effort could have been made to ‘rush’ across No Man’s Land, using small squads of lightly equipped troops to try and seize the entrance of the German dugouts before the Germans themselves could emerge from their warrens. But such tactical sophistications had been explicitly ruled out as it was feared the raw, young troops simply did not have the training to cope with such complexities. In the final analysis the real problem was the British disease—hubristic optimism based on over-confidence. They assumed that everything would be all right; that the German defences would be comprehensively flattened; that the German troops would not have the guts to stand up to such an ordeal; that the German artillery would be dealt with. British pluck would, after all, overcome any obstacle—wouldn’t it?
Where the success came in the southern sector around Mametz and Montauban, it came because the British and French artillery had managed to break down the resistance of the German artillery and comprehensively demolish the German front line. It also obviously helped if the British front line was close to the German front line—in other words that the gap to be crossed before the Germans emerged from whatever remained of their dugouts was reduced to the point that the British could win the race. It was once again confirmed that artillery was the key to success on the Western Front. Yet to attack on a wide front made the sheer quantities of guns, howitzers and shells needed almost incalculable. Along most of the 20-mile front the British had got nowhere near the phenomenal concentration and domination required to give themselves a chance—so they failed. In the southern sector they had achieved artillery domination—so they succeeded. Such a mechanistic interpretation does much to undermine the old lie of the superiority of pluck or élan or the offensive spirit—however one chooses to put it this belief was exposed as nothing more than an invitation to an early grave.
In the aftermath of such a disaster the sheer weight of human death and suffering was overwhelming. As men moved forward across the battlefields they were appalled at the signs of slaughter that surrounded them.
We literally couldn’t walk along the trenches without unfortunately treading on dead bodies: German and British. The stench and the flies on those hot summer days were simply appalling. That was one of my most miserable memories of the Somme. It was pathetic really. I remember particularly a sergeant. He was lying on the ground, dead, and he had his hand on his open bible. I knew it was a Douai bible and from that I knew he was a Catholic. I took his address from that bible, the shrapnel pouring over our heads, it didn’t matter. I closed his eyes and closed the bible, put that in my pocket and then we crawled back. I sent that bible to his widow. But we had not to mind—eventually one just got over it, thought nothing of it. Dead bodies all over the place, we couldn’t help it—we were alive and that’s what mattered. And being alive we jolly well had to get on with it and that’s exactly what we did.3
Second Lieutenant Montague Cleeve, 36th Siege Artillery Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery
Over the next few days one of the absolute priorities was to try to help those who still clung to life but were too far gone to make their own way back. They lay where they had fallen, unable to move and suffering untold agonies of thirst and hunger with only the pain of their wounds to distract them. Where the attack had made some progress this was relatively easy; but where the failure had been all-embracing it meant trying to get the wounded back from No Man’s Land. In front of Gommecourt, once the dust of the fighting had settled, the Germans made an unusually generous gesture to their defeated opponents. In a sense its very magnanimity underlined the completeness of the defeat suffered the previous day by the British.
A figure was observed standing up in the German trenches making friendly signals, which turned out to be an appeal for a truce. Eventually this was agreed to and both sides went out to collect their wounded. The Germans were very particular who went out, and fired at and wounded some men who started out still carrying rifles. Both sides then proceeded to collect their wounded. There were many Germans who had been taken prisoners and sent back, but got wounded or killed crossing No Man’s Land. The Higher Command had been rung up and asked to suspend all artillery fire, but unfortunately after a short cessation, whether through necessity or ignorance of the situation, the guns started firing again. The Germans thereupon intimated that they would give our men ten minutes to get back, when the truce would come to an end. Owing to this it was feared that many who might have been saved were missed.4
Captain Reginald Lindsey-Renton, 1/9th Battalion (Queen Victoria’s Rifles), London Regiment, 169th Brigade, 56th Division
Men were scattered all about the battlefield, many had hidden themselves fearing the Germans, and as their strength ebbed away it was a matter of luck whether they would be found in time by British soldiers.
Breakfast time came and as chaps of 8 Platoon were eating they heard a movement in a small dugout nearby. When they looked they found a young Irish soldier terribly injured, for his stomach had been ripped right down the middle and all his intestines were lying on top of his body. Our doctor was fetched and he couldn’t do much, this was a case for the surgeons. The doctor said that if he could soon be got to hospital for treatment he stood a good chance of recovering from the terrible injuries. Volunteers were soon available for the chaps had forgotten about breakfast now. When a stretcher was brought he was laid tenderly on it and carried so carefully by fellows who tried their best to get him to the rear and hospital.5
Signaller Sidney Kemp, 6th Battalion, Royal West Kent Regiment, 37th Brigade, 12th Division
Even the unwounded presented a harrowing sight by the time they finally emerged from their ordeal in the line. The first surprise to men left out of the line was how few there were left. Sergeant Stewart Jordan was sent up to a crossroads to guide back the London Scottish as they came out of the line from Gommecourt.
I heard marching feet and after a bit in the dark I could see that they were wearing kilts and guessed that that was our regiment. When I could distinguish them I noticed about 120 men I suppose and the adjutant was leading them. So I said to him, ‘Which company is this please?’ ‘Company!’ he said, ‘This is the regiment!’ About 800 men went over and about 100 came back.6
Sergeant Stewart Jordan, 1/14th Battalion (London Scottish), London Regiment, 168th Brigade, 56th Division
Exposure to the realities of war in the twentieth century could wreak havoc with the appearance of men who they had seen march forward with such high hopes of military glory just a couple of days before.
What a sight this small band presented when we met them: weary, haggard and drawn faces, bodies exhausted and legs that almost could not carry their burden, but their thoughts were too tragic for words. All had lost many friends on that awful day and as I marched along with them, trying to cheer them on, I felt like a warder escorting a condemned prisoner. The band joined us, and as it played ‘Keep the home fires burning till the boys come home’, I nearly wept with impotence and sadness. For the first time I fully appreciated t
he horrors of war, the futility and madness of it all.7
Lieutenant Edgar Lord, 15th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, 96th Brigade, 32nd Division
Lieutenant Lord was increasingly concerned to trace the whereabouts of his friend, Lieutenant Ivan Doncaster, who was nowhere to be seen. After making enquiries the truth became apparent beyond reasonable doubt. Some of his men thought they had seen him hit in the wrist just 12 yards short of the German wire. He had then been reported hit a second time, this time in the head, while sitting in a shell hole trying to bind up his original wound. It seemed clear that he was dead. Lieutenant Lord was stunned but duty still called. And what a duty it was, as he and the other men left out of battle were repeatedly sent forward to scour the battlefield.
A skeleton company was sent into the reserve trenches at Ovillers. Our work was to salvage as much equipment as we could: packs, rifles, bayonets, groundsheets, Lewis guns, ammunition, Very pistols, revolvers and suchlike were transported to a central dump to be sorted. Corpses lay everywhere and the stench from the decaying bodies was very unpleasant. A blackened hand protruding from the ground was gruesome to say the least. One night I was detailed with a dozen men to bury some of the dead near our new front line. As some of them had been doing this the day before, they were feeling sick and groggy, so I ordered them to dig holes in the ground and make wooden crosses, whilst I went with a Lewis gunner to handle the corpses. It was a ghastly job in the dark, feeling for their identity discs and effects, as most of them were bloated, having been killed some days earlier. We rolled them into adjacent shell holes covering them with earth and placing a cross at the head bearing their names. One man whom we handled had lost both feet and the hand wearing his identity disc had been so badly smashed that the disc was mixed with the putrefying flesh. After a vain attempt to recover it, we interred him as ‘unknown’.8