First day of the Somme

by Andrew Macdonald

  Leutnant-der-Reserve Emil Geiger, RIR121, was thinking much the same as he led a counterattack group into Heidenkopf that afternoon. ‘I seemed to be invincible on this day.’201 All around him men were killed — an NCO shot in the heart, two just-arrived reinforcements shot through the head, along with plenty of others killed or wounded in the fighting. ‘We ran into English machine-gun fire at a distance of a few metres. Two of my men were almost torn to pieces. I was, strange as it may sound, unscathed.’ Geiger continued: ‘We attacked the enemy concentrically using our grenades and they had to withdraw from traverse to traverse. We had very heavy losses.’202 Here and there the resistance firmed, and Geiger’s group had to consolidate their gains. ‘We were forced to put a barricade between us and the enemy, sandbags on top of our dead friends and enemies.’ That night the trenches were back in German hands. Geiger was ‘quite exhausted by the excitement of the day, apathetic and [cradling a] half dislocated arm through the many throwings of hand grenades.’ Earlier that afternoon, a parched Leutnant-der-Reserve Friedrich Conzelmann, RIR121, guzzled greedily at his water bottle: ‘The sun shone so beautifully over the slaughter of 1 July. The heat beating down on us was such that we nearly died of thirst.’203

  German soldiers returning to Heidenkopf described it as a charnelhouse. One said British and German dead lay heaped up in piles of five or six, all horribly mutilated by hand-grenade blasts.204 Another said about 150 German soldiers lay dead in the trenches — witnesses said their bodies ranged from severely mangled to badly charred — and at least three times as many British.205 The scene of carnage around RIR121’s positions spilled into no-man’s-land where about 1800 British soldiers lay.206 ‘The lines of English dead,’ wrote one German eyewitness, ‘are like tide-marks, like flotsam washed up on the sand.’207

  Eighth Corps’ bloody destruction north of the River Ancre was guaranteed before a single man stepped into no-man’s-land. The sevenday bombardment’s failure was compounded by the botched timings of the Hawthorn Mine blast and initial barrage lift. German defenders had up to 10 minutes’ warning to meet an attack from their battered but defensible network of trenches, redoubts and fortified villages, with help from multiple operational artillery batteries. Unsurprisingly, numerous British battalions were destroyed behind and around their own front line, as well as in no-man’s-land. This was exactly as Soden had planned. The mechanical nature of the attack — despite efforts to stop it in places — only added to the slaughter. Fourth Division’s Heidenkopf epic was destined to fail, as was the 29th Division’s toehold at the Hawthorn Ridge crater. The few men of 31st Division who made it to Serre proved to be red herrings who enticed profligate Hunter-Weston towards ill-considered salvage operations even after he had admitted any hope of success was lost. By contrast, in a division-wide context, Soden’s regiments, defensive line and counterattack scheme north of the Ancre had performed as he expected. From an early hour, as we shall see in the next chapter, he was able to rely on his men on the spot to organise the defence and counterattacks, and focus his attentions, reserves and artillery on erasing X Corps’ very troubling break-in at Schwaben Redoubt, near Thiepval. In short, Hunter-Weston’s pre-battle blunders had handed Soden the tactical advantage and victory over VIII Corps. The tactical ramifications of this quickly extended south of the meandering waterway and affected the outcome of the neighbouring X Corps’ operation.

  A SWATHE OF lumpy ground and a ditch half filled with rotting leaves in what is today known as Sheffield Memorial Park, near Serre, are all that remain of the front-line trench from which 94th Brigade set out. Few got far beyond this defile, which edges a stand of trees that in 1916 was known severally as Mark, Luke and John Copses. Nowadays the park holds a handful of stone memorials and ageing plaques. In December 2014 it is muddy and cold, and several of the memorials are draped with British north-country football tat and made-in-China wreathes with fading poppies. It was somewhere near here that war poet Sergeant John ‘Will’ Streets, 12th York & Lancasters, was wounded then killed while trying to rescue a wounded soldier. Some of his verses were probably roughed out in these trenches, as he explained: ‘They were inspired while I was in the trenches, where I have been so busy that I have had little time to polish them. I have tried to picture some thoughts that pass through a man’s brain when he dies. I may not see the end of the poems, but hope to live to do so.’208 The 31-year-old is thought to be buried in Euston Road Military Cemetery, which back in the day probably was not all that different from another soldiers’ plot that Streets saw not long before his death:

  When war shall cease this lonely, unknown spot,

  Of many a pilgrimage will be the end,

  And flowers will bloom in this now barren plot,

  And fame upon it through the years descend,

  But many a heart upon each simple cross,

  Will hang the grief, the memory of its loss.

  FROM HIS POSITION on the outskirts of Serre, Unteroffizier Otto Lais, IR169, saw successive lines of 31st Division’s infantry advancing into a swarm of bullets from multiple chattering machine guns. Belt after belt of gleaming Spandau ammunition clattered through Lais’s weapon; its water coolant boiled and piping-hot barrels were repeatedly changed. The gun’s steam overflow pipe broke loose: ‘With a great hiss, a jet of steam goes up, providing a superb target for the enemy. It is the greatest good fortune that they have the sun in their eyes. . . . We fire on endlessly.’209 Soon the water ran out. Lais’s mates urinated in the coolant container as an alternative. Ammunition stoppages were cleared. He saw British soldiers go to ground, hiding behind the dead and wounded. ‘Many hang, mortally wounded, whimpering in the remains of the barbed wire.’210 All told, his gun loosed off about 18,000 rounds, and another nearby about 20,000: ‘That is the hard, unrelenting tempo of the morning of 1st July 1916.’211 Lais continued: ‘Skin hangs in ribbons from the fingers of the burnt hands of the gunners and gun commanders! Constant pressure by their left thumbs on the triggers has turned them into swollen, shapeless lumps of flesh. Their hands rest, as though cramped, on the vibrating weapons.’212 Using those same hands, Lais, the killer, later became an artist known for his brush and charcoal celebrations of women and sexuality.

  ‘Impressions came back later, in flashes, very clear, like photos,’ said Private Alfred Damon, 16th Middlesex. ‘But then? No, nothing.’213 He remembered that soldiers of 29th Division advanced with tin triangles fixed to their haversacks, which meant British observers could see them more clearly from a distance. Now he could see those ‘tin triangles glittering in the sun’ on the backs of the numerous dead.214 Soon enough, Damon’s platoon hopped the bags, and after about 100 yards a bullet thudded into his shoulder.215 The former public schoolboy did not like swearing, said he had had a pious upbringing.216 With bullets and shrapnel flying those values did not seem to matter so much. ‘I let go with a stream of filthy language; words that would have made a Cockney Eastender blush. I suppose I must have heard all those words and retained them in my subconscious mind.’217 He crawled back to the British trenches and then to a dressing station where he met a blood-covered friend whose scalp had been creased by a bullet: ‘The only thing he told me about it was that the impact was so great that he thought he was dead. I remember being surprised that a person’s thoughts can travel at such speed between the impact of the bullet and unconsciousness.’218

  Damon was quite likely one of the soldiers in Lieutenant Malins’ film of the attack across the Beaumont Hamel–Auchonvillers road. At the time a somewhat detached Malins was watching shells burst, listening to the swelling machine-gun fire and worrying whether his camera’s lens was clean:219 ‘I looked upon all that followed from the purely pictorial point of view, and even felt annoyed if a shell burst outside the range of my camera. Why couldn’t Bosche put the shell a little nearer? It would make a better picture. And so my thoughts ran on.’220 This was Malins at his most high-handed. Soon enough a chunk of German shrapnel cleaved his tripod leg, which
Malins fixed. A few hundred yards away through the viewfinder he saw shellfire doing the same thing to men, except that they were not quite so easily repaired and returned to action.

  ‘This certainly provided me with what would be called a traumatic experience,’ wrote Private William Slater, 18th West Yorkshires, of advancing from a trench 500 yards behind the British front line opposite Serre.221 He saw men hit by machine-gun bullets fall in a ‘curious manner,’ and sheltered in a shell crater with others, most likely still behind British lines. As explosive shells blew and shrapnel whirred, he pondered his own mortality:

  What would it be like to be obliterated like an insect under someone’s foot? Would there be a sudden blackness like the switching off of a light, and if so would it continue forever, and in that case how should I know that I was dead? Although I was not unduly afraid of being killed outright, I certainly shrank from the possibility of being grievously wounded and left there to die in agony.222

  Leutnant-der-Reserve Adolf Beck’s memories were mostly of soldiers dying horrible deaths. The RIR121 officer saw British soldiers cut down by machine guns ‘as if by mowing machines,’ and by the explosion of ‘diabolical’ shells that penetrated the soft ground before detonating.223 One explosion sent bodies flying in all directions. One of the victims, a tall Scot, came down on an iron stake and ‘was spitted straight under his lower jaw. Thereafter I was faced with the gruesome sight of a death’s head staring at me.’224 Beck soon found that his observation post, near Heidenkopf, was behind enemy lines. A British soldier called out ‘Germans?’ into the darkness of its entrance — as if he was ever going to get an answer — and tossed two hand grenades down the stair well. ‘They exploded wrecking the timber and doing my hearing no good.’225 At dusk, Beck slipped past some British outposts until he linked up with other soldiers of RIR121. Soon enough Heidenkopf was retaken and Beck found himself among an exhausted group of German soldiers: ‘Sitting amongst comrades from the other companies, tired out and emotionally drained, were the remnants of my 3rd Company — thirty men and five Unteroffiziers. They slumped there, dog tired and spent. It had all been too much!’226

  Private Francis ‘Mayo’ Lind of Little Bay, Newfoundland, was not so lucky. The nickname ‘Mayo’ came after he complained about a shortage of tobacco of that brand at the front,227 in one letter among a bunch of his published in a Newfoundland newspaper. The community rallied; the boys at the front were inundated with tobacco.228 In 1916 it was a patriotic act — not so now — and made Lind something of a Newfoundland celebrity. On 29 June he promised to send ‘a very interesting letter’ soon.229 But, just before 9 a.m. on 1 July, Lind’s promise was about all used up. He was killed in what is now Newfoundland Memorial Park, probably by machine-gun fire. Someone saw him ‘doubled up as though he had been hit in the stomach.’230 The affable 37-year-old with pale blue eyes and a boyish turn of phrase was gone. Newfoundland had lost its most famous war scribe. Years later, Lind’s body and that of another Newfoundlander were found and buried together at Y Ravine Cemetery in the memorial park. Lind’s cryptic epitaph on the shared headstone: ‘How closely bravery and modesty are entwined.’

  THREE DAYS AFTER the battle, Hunter-Weston penned a farrago of fiction and fact for his soldiers.231 It was rich with the adjectives of heroism and the word ‘failure’ was conspicuous for its absence; it was not something he would publicly admit to. Instead he wrote of the ‘splendid courage, determination and discipline’ of his divisions and of the glorious dead who had ‘preceded us across the Great Divide.’ The next part of his message was mostly a lie: ‘By your splendid attack you held these enemy forces here in the North and so enabled our friends in the South, both British and French, to achieve the brilliant success they have.’ The British and French had certainly made gains well south of the Albert–Bapaume road, but Hunter-Weston was very obviously seeking to divert attention away from the tragedy that had befallen his corps. He knew full well that VIII Corps’ job was never to provide any kind of diversionary attack for the areas where gains had been made, but rather to provide flank support for Fourth Army’s main thrust around the Albert–Bapaume road.232 In brief, his message was a paean to the virtues of duty and gallantry, and was designed to dress his failure as something it never was, a success.

  Hunter-Weston’s semi-literate letters to his wife reveal much of the man behind the façade. ‘Our attack, though carried out with wonderful gallantry, discipline & determination failed to get home, & though we inflicted heavy losses on the enemy, our losses also were severe, & we are still in our old positions.’233 Privately, he could admit his corps’ failure, but he was incapable of accepting responsibility for having set the tactical parameters of battle in favour of the enemy. He was disappointed that his corps’ ‘splendid preparations, excellent discipline & magnificent courage in attack, have not had the result we all hoped for.’234 In Hunter-Weston’s mind it was better to veil the big picture of catastrophe with the adjectiverich language of heroism, propped up with the crackpot eugenics of his message to the troops: ‘It was a magnificent display of disciplined courage worthy of the best traditions of the British race.’235 If casualties held no importance to Hunter-Weston in victory, he attached some higher moral value to them in defeat; in this logician’s mind, anything could figure as anything else.

  Eighth Corps’ casualties ran to at least 14,592: by far the most of any army corps on 1 July. This included 4860 dead, 8839 wounded, 512 missing, 128 prisoners of war and 253 unspecified.236 Losses among the opposing German regiments totalled about 1194, including 421 dead, 701 wounded and at least 70 missing. For every German casualty opposite VIII Corps, there were about 12.2 British, this skewed ratio revealing the true extent of Hunter-Weston’s defeat.

  BRIGADIER-GENERAL WALTER Ludlow hiked over Heidenkopf in March 1918 looking for his son’s corpse. Captain Stratford Ludlow, 1/8th Royal Warwicks, was last seen deep in the German lines, shouting encouragement to his men and puffing on a cigarette. The 22-year-old Solihull officer’s body was finally found in the 1930s and buried at Serre Road Cemetery No. 2. In 1918, his father found the slopes there covered with thick, brown grass and the occasional head of wild broccoli. Old trenches were collapsing, and scattered about were corroding bombs, bayonets, helmets and rifles. He saw not a living soul, but spied plenty of bones and nameless graves marked by crude wooden crosses already falling into disrepair:

  I sat on the edge of a shell hole opposite to the German position in No Man’s Land, and wondered how it was possible that any troops in the world could attack such a position in broad daylight on a lovely July morning. There was not sufficient cover for a mouse except that which was afforded by shell holes in moving forward to the attack.237

  Stand at the foot of Serre Road Cemetery No. 2 when a bitterly cold December gale belts across the amphitheatre and it is easy to see what he meant. There is nowhere to hide.

  CHAPTER 6

  Loitering without Intent

  X Corps, squandered opportunities and failure at Thiepval

  ‘Every now and then another straggler came in and we got talking about those who had been hit. Many of us broke down and started howling.’1

  — Lance-Corporal James Henderson, 14th Royal Irish Rifles

  LIEUTENANT-GENERAL SIR Thomas Morland was a man of paradoxical empathies and simple views. As the rag-tag remnants of an infantry battalion attached to his X Corps withdrew from the Somme in July 1916, one soldier spied him on horseback: ‘I had a lump in my throat as I saw him there with tears in his eyes.’2 And, yet, seven days after his corps was martyred on the dog-legged battlefield around Thiepval, with more than 3000 of its dead rotting in the summer sun, Morland was having his likeness immortalised: ‘I have now got the plaister [sic] cast of my head and the bronze me is in the process of construction.’3 Clearly, in commissioning such a work, Morland had expected a different outcome to the 1 July battle for his corps. Perhaps that was because he saw few shades of grey when it came to the art of attack
. ‘The Bosches have had a good hammering and we shall go on punching them, I hope for a long time yet,’ he wrote the following week.4 Here was Morland in a nutshell: by turns intimate and callous, and quite guileless when it came to managing a battle.

  Morland wore a monocle and smoked fat cigars. He liked horseriding and polo and fox hunting. ‘To the end of his days he was a true type of the old Army,’ stated his 1925 obituary.5 He was well liked by his staff, old-fashioned in his opinions and methods, and ‘hardly left much impress on the men whom he commanded.’6 His career had been built on obscure West African spats, but by 1916 his health and mental vigour had declined. As his obituary said, ‘the virile personality of the tropical campaigns was becoming hard to recognize under the almost nonchalant habits of mind, which Morland [had] assumed when the Great War came to a close.’7 What were these nonchalant habits of mind? General Sir Douglas Haig wrote in May 1917 that he thought the 50-year-old descendant of William the Conqueror lacked knowledge and confidence in the summer of 1916;8 he might as well have said that Morland was not up to the job.