First day of the Somme

by Andrew Macdonald

  Darmstadt-born Hahn had already established a bleak picture of events across the 28th’s positions south of Fricourt Spur. Telephone lines between front-line battalions and the 58-year-old’s headquarters were severed.144 By about 8 a.m., reports from observers well behind the front line left Hahn in no doubt as to the developing danger.145 He set to strengthening his second intermediate position, up to 3000 yards behind the front line, with elements of IR23, ancillary divisional troops and machine-gun teams. Around this time RIR109 and RIR111 requested urgent reinforcements via signal lamp.146 Hahn’s rejoinder: ‘Persevere, reinforcements are approaching.’147 Another influx of reports before 9.30 a.m. told Hahn that Fricourt Spur was all but lost, that Mametz was under concerted attack and that further east Montauban had probably already fallen.148 Hahn was by now well aware that the Fricourt–Mametz salient was under threat on both flanks, and that the British were making steady gains.149 It was a crucial moment. Hahn now decided against attempting to retake the lost ground:150 he was more concerned by significant British gains closer to Montauban. It was a concession that ran against orders and reduced RIR109 and RIR111 to ground-holding formations, but it did buy time to bolster the 28th’s line further back.

  The significance of Hahn’s decision should not be overlooked. It meant he had conceded not only that Fricourt and Mametz would be lost, but also that he no longer had the resources on hand to defend them properly, or reclaim them after they inevitably fell. It was a judgement call that flew in the face of a dictate from General-der-Infanterie Erich von Falkenhayn, Chief of General Staff, Supreme Army Command, that not an inch of territory should be ceded, even if doing so would result in better-placed defensive positions.151 Although Hahn would escape without penalty, he was almost certainly rebuked, as Second Army’s chief of staff, Generalmajor Paul Grünert, was sacked for sanctioning such tactical moves elsewhere.152 Hahn’s decision likely reflected his annoyance with the salient’s poor-quality defensive positions and his division’s increasingly tenuous footing there. It also amounted to a tacit criticism of the armywide emphasis on front-loaded defensive schemes, and further suggested that he already believed the British offensive would become one of attrition.

  Soldiers on the battlefield saw no such shades of grey, as an embittered Feldwebel Eiser, the NCO in RFAR29, later revealed: ‘We were deeply disappointed: why had we been abandoned with no reinforcements or relief? Was that our reward for what we had given up and sacrificed?’153

  HORNE HAD AN optimistic summary of events by 11 a.m.,154 and no idea of Hahn’s tactical thinking. He knew 7th and 21st Divisions were approaching their first objectives, but had no knowledge of 50th Brigade’s failure.155 The first two elements of Horne’s plan were incomplete: it was too early to assault Fricourt head-on. Fifteen minutes later, believing III and XIII Corps’ infantry were progressing on his flanks, Horne decided to renew his attack by ordering 91st Brigade’s first objective, Dantzig Alley (North) on the spur east of and overlooking Mametz, and the unimaginatively named Fritz Trench just beyond, to be captured. An earlier attempt by 91st Brigade to seize these objectives at 10.30 a.m., after 30 minutes’ shellfire, had failed to produce results.156 At 11.15 a.m., Horne, aware XIII Corps had now taken the nearby Pommiers Redoubt and Beetle Alley to the east, ordered a fresh attempt to force Dantzig Alley (North) and Fritz Trench. An hour later, the 7th’s commander, Major-General Herbert Watts, said somewhat bullishly that he wanted to ‘push straight through’ to his objectives.157 A further 30 minutes’ bombardment was ordered at 12.25 p.m., on the same objectives as previously and at the request of Brigadier-General John Minshull-Ford, the 91st’s commander, to break up a German counterattack that was forming. The infantry would follow the bombardment, which was to lift at about 12.55 p.m. Earlier, at 11.45 a.m., Horne told 21st Division to advance its left flank on Fricourt Spur and keep in touch with III Corps.158 At midday, Horne’s focus was very much on developing the 7th’s and 21st’s gains, retaining contact with neighbouring corps and continuing to build a platform from which Fricourt could be enveloped and then taken.

  The 91st’s attack east of Mametz went in as planned. The bombardment broke down some, but by no means all, resistance. One advanced section of German field guns fired over open sights until their crews were killed.159 The remaining companies of 2nd Queen’s took Dantzig Alley (North) soon after 1 p.m., thereafter bombing their way westward down its traverses and reaching the outskirts of Mametz.160 About 45 minutes later they linked up with 1st South Staffords and the remaining three companies of 21st Manchesters, which had worked their way into the ruined village’s southeast corner around the same time.161 The 91st had finally captured a sizeable chunk of its first objective, but its second, a few hundred yards beyond, remained outstanding and its left flank was vulnerable to local counterattack as the 20th Brigade had yet to come up alongside. Seventh Division was still a long way from forming a defensive flank facing Willow Stream valley.

  At least 25 minutes before the 91st’s attack began, an impatient Horne was already betting on a positive outcome. By 12.30 p.m. he was even more convinced that III and XIII Corps were advancing on his flanks, with their reports suggesting German resistance was collapsing.162 Apparently German artillery was ‘running away’ in III Corps’ sector, while the enemy was in ‘full retreat’ in XIII Corps area.163 In III Corps’ case this information would turn out to be almost entirely incorrect; not so for XIII Corps.164 At the time, both pieces of news were what an optimistic Horne wanted to hear. He resolved to force an outcome to the battle by launching more of 50th Brigade directly at Fricourt, hoping to capitalise on what he believed was widespread crumbling resistance. Orders went out at 12.50 p.m. The attack would begin at 2.30 p.m. It would be preceded by a half-hour artillery bombardment that jerked back 500 yards at Zero, and 15 minutes later a further 250 yards, at which point it would remain for one-and-a-half hours. Horne was enacting the final phase of his attack scheme, the capture of Fricourt, despite the fact that neither of its two preconditions had been met. In his mind, this was a measured risk founded on positive battlefield reports;165 in reality it was a flutter based on incorrect or overly optimistic information.

  Mid-afternoon, Horne, now aware of the 91st’s gains, revealed he expected the 50th’s attack on Fricourt to produce results:

  Up to now, 2.30 p.m., the attack generally has been very successful. I am a bit backward still as the two villages in front of me have proved very difficult. Villages are always a difficult problem as the houses and cellars give cover for machine guns &c. I hope however that before long now we shall be able to get on better & make a good job of it.166

  The problem was that nothing had changed at Fricourt. German machine-gunners were still there, still dug in amid the ruins with ample stores of ammunition to hand and very much motivated to continue the fight.

  Horne’s flutter around the mouth of Willow Stream valley produced a predictable sacrifice on the altar of Fricourt. Attempts to have the attack called off by the 50th’s commander, Glasgow, fell on deaf ears at divisional and corps headquarters.167 So it was that the remaining three 7th Yorkshires companies were destroyed by ‘murderous’ machine-gun and rifle fire.168 In three minutes and 50 yards these companies ran up 176 casualties, or about one a second.169 At 2.33 p.m., two companies of 7th East Yorkshires,* attacking on the same stretch of ground as 10th West Yorkshires that morning, were shot down within yards of their own parapet, losing 155 men. Further operations by the 50th were stopped.170 German accounts acknowledge that Horne was attempting to force what he perceived as a favourable position, and recorded bluntly that these British afternoon attacks were simply ‘smashed with heavy losses.’171 As the swathe of still-warm Yorkshire corpses proved, machine-gunners still lurking in Fricourt’s ruins and possibly opening in long-range enfilade from the western slopes of Hill 110 to the southeast made the village impervious to direct assault at this time.

  ‘Three hundred yards away I saw the enemy’s trenches bristling wi
th bayonets and lined with steel helmets,’ said Lieutenant-Colonel Ronald Fife, 7th Yorkshires, of the German trenches in front of Fricourt:172 ‘The deafening cracking of the enemy’s machine guns and rifles, which began the moment that the first wave of men crossed the parapet, showed clearly what was happening. . . . It was evident that the assault was under enfilade from both flanks and that it would be a miracle if it succeeded against such a storm of bullets.’173 Nobody made it as far as the barbed wire outside the British front line, said Private Alfred Askew, 7th Yorkshires: ‘We were mown down like ninepins.’ Two bullets caught his left arm and his nickel razor case stopped a third: ‘What a nice souvenir.’174 Later that night, Brigadier-General Robert Fell, commanding 51st Brigade, went to Meaulte, where he found Glasgow ‘quite broken down by his losses — Pilcher [the 17th (Northern) Division’s commander] and I talked with him till after midnight.’175

  IT IS THE height of summer. The track down to Fricourt New Military Cemetery is lined with six-foot-tall corn, which rustles in a gentle, balmy breeze. It feels like you are walking along an open-topped corridor, which opens out onto a small cemetery clearing, also surrounded by cornstalks and close to the still-visible mine craters of the Tambour area west of Fricourt. Here rest 210 soldiers, most of them in mass graves, which is why so many headstones carry multiple names from the 7th East Yorkshires and 10th West Yorkshires. Among their epitaphs: 23-year-old Lieutenant William Keighley, ‘Love, laughter, life’; 29-yearold Lieutenant Alfred Ratcliffe, ‘A very dearly loved son and brother’; and 16-year-old Private Albert Barker, ‘Beyond Recall. . . . So dear’. Before the war, Keighley, 10th West Yorkshires, was a teacher. Barker, 7th East Yorkshires, was a schoolboy. Ratcliffe, also 10th West Yorkshires, was a barrister, and yet another would-be poet and Cambridge University chum of Brooke. Then, there is another headstone that forces you to stop and think:

  Six Privates of the Great War

  West Yorkshire Regiment

  In death, six men bereft of names — stripped of the one constant in their young lives: identity itself.

  WHILE THE 2.30 P.M. direct attacks on Fricourt were a disaster, a more successful sequel by 7th Division was afoot on Hill 110 and at Mametz, foreshadowed by a 30-minute bombardment. The Russian Sap on Hill 110’s west-facing camber just south of Fricourt — known as L25, with twin Vickers-gun emplacements at its head, near the Germanheld Aeroplane Trench — was opened along its length at 2.30 p.m. The machine-gun officer failed to turn up and his sergeant had no orders; the Vickers emplacements at the saphead, which had been opened at 7.30 a.m., went unused. Lieutenant Sansom, the tunnelling officer, was there: ‘We waited anxiously until 2.30 p.m. expecting to go and we opened up the sap. Enemy had MG [machine gun] on it at once and half men getting out were dropped.’176

  On 7th Division’s left flank, just south of Willow Stream, Brigadier-General Julian Steele’s 22nd Brigade went in. Twentieth Manchesters,* followed by half of 1st Royal Welsh Fusiliers,* crossed over on an extended three-company front. Private Pat Burke, 20th Manchesters, watched his battalion commander Lieutenant-Colonel Harold Lewis, who was later killed, wave his men forward with the words ‘Isn’t it wonderful.’177 The battalion’s two left companies in the vicinity of the L25, the Russian Sap, were raked by Fricourt’s machine-gunners as they reached the sunken road leading from the ruined village up to Hill 110.178 They were soon caught in a bitter bomb fight for the group of trenches known as the Rectangle, just behind the German front line.179 Support waves lost heavily.

  War poet Siegfried Sassoon, 1st Royal Welsh Fusiliers, watched the ‘sun flashes on bayonets, and the tiny figures advance steadily and disappear behind the mounds of trench debris.’180 At about 9.30 a.m., he nipped off for a shave and returned: ‘Fricourt was half-hidden by clouds of drifting smoke — brown, blue, pinkish, and grey; shrapnel bursting in small blue white puffs, with tiny flashes.’181 Larks appeared bewildered, flitting along with querulous cries and weak on the wing, reluctant to rise into the iron sky. Around midday Second-Lieutenant Sassoon ate his last orange in contemplation: ‘I am looking at a sunlit picture of Hell. And still the breeze shakes the yellow charlock, and the poppies glow below Crawley ridge.’182 It was 2.30 p.m. and the 20th Manchesters were advancing: ‘Many walked across with sloped arms. About twenty-five casualties on the left (from a machine-gun in Fricourt). I could see one man moving his left arm up and down as he lay on his side: his head was a crimson patch. The others lay still. Then the swarm of ants disappeared over the hill.’183 Private Stephen Smith, 20th Manchesters, was one of Sassoon’s ‘ants.’ The 39-year-old Mancunian cloth beetler was killed. He left behind a wife, Sarah, and two children aged seven and five. He has no known grave and is today named on the Thiepval Memorial.

  The German collapse at Mametz now came on swiftly as 7th Division renewed its attack mid-afternoon. Ninety-first Brigade’s 2nd Queen’s and elements of 21st Manchesters had, between 3 p.m. and 6.30 p.m., moved beyond Dantzig Alley (North) and cleared their Fritz Trench objective after a hard fight under ‘covering fire from Lewis guns and rifles.’184 They linked up with XIII Corps to the east. To the west, they remained in contact with 1st South Staffords and more elements of 21st Manchesters, which had expanded their footing in the village’s southeastern ruins by this time, and now forged ahead to reach their Bunny Alley objective about 7.40 p.m. Captured machine guns ‘were turned on the then retreating enemy.’185 In 20th Brigade’s patch, at 3.30 p.m. after 30-minutes’ shellfire, two companies from reserve battalion 2nd Royal Warwicks,* tracing the Gordons’ path that morning, and several companies of 8th Devons, following 9th Devons’ footsteps, were sent forward to break the impasse southwest of Mametz. Before they reached their start line several hundred German soldiers in and around Mametz and The Shrine surrendered, more fleeing towards Fricourt Wood. Eighth Devons, 2nd Gordons and 2nd Royal Warwicks now pushed beyond Hidden Wood, Dantzig Alley (South) and Mametz to reach their Bunny Alley and Orchard Trench objectives soon after 4 p.m. Bombing parties worked through Mametz to ‘tackle each house in turn, and very soon they were clear of all but dead Germans.’186 Around Hidden Wood, 2nd Borders advanced and made contact with 22nd Brigade just west of Bois Français about 5 p.m. By dusk the 7th had taken most of its first two objectives and held a 2000-yard defensive flank facing Willow Stream, isolating Fricourt and its wood from the south.

  It was during this fighting that The Shrine fell to a cobbled-together group of Devonshire bombers who worked around its flanks via shell holes and half-collapsed trenches before silencing its machine guns: ‘A vast pile of empty cartridges around them told their tale hardly less plainly than the lines of dead and wounded lying out in No Man’s Land near Mansel Copse.’187

  At least three 7th Division officers believed failing German resistance around Mametz should be exploited. At about 6 p.m., Lieutenant-Colonel William Norman, 21st Manchesters, began preparing Mametz to withstand counterattack, later walking out to Bunny Alley, which overlooked Willow Stream valley: ‘I was at once strongly convinced that the enemy had abandoned the neighbourhood.’188 Norman asked brigade headquarters for reinforcements to exploit the gains. He received a company of 2nd Royal Irish Regiment,* which he thought insufficient for the job.189 Major Guy Drake-Brockman, a staff officer, remembered a ‘feeling at H.Q. 7 Div. that a great opportunity was being let slip’ that evening:190 ‘Certain localities outside the final objective could have been captured with very small loss, which subsequently were very costly to take.’191 Whatever the case, there was no further attempt to take Fricourt that evening and XV Corps’ focus shifted to consolidating its gains.

  Private Frank Cloudsdale, 21st Manchesters, found the German trenches full of dead and wounded. ‘The Battalion was now split up and the position became confused. . . . As the day wore on we began to dig in and tried to form a line in order to get cover. When darkness came we were still bogged down.’192 Fifty-fourth and 95th Field Companies, Royal Engineers (RE), went forward overland at about 4.30 p.m., follo
wed later by 1/3rd Durham Field Company and pioneer battalion 24th Manchesters, and wired the whole new front line, built four strongpoints, duckboarded tracks and repaired roads.193 Private Wicks’ group of 2nd Queen’s was led by a sergeant, all the officers being dead or wounded: ‘It was rather confused because so many regiments had been cut up and battalions decimated and they were wandering about spare. . . . So we had to dig in there in front of Mametz and wait for reinforcements.’194 Second-Lieutenant Arthur Walsh, 24th Manchesters,† and his pioneers spent the night filling shell holes, dragging coils of barbed wire and ‘very cautiously’ clearing unexploded shells:195 ‘Stretcher bearers moved the corpses and tended any wounded still alive but not [yet] brought in. I was as usual apprehensive, but it was a quiet night on this patch, as though tired out by the preceding inferno.’196

  Hours earlier, the first batches of stumbling, dishevelled German prisoners had begun filing through Minden Post, roughly 1000 yards behind the old British front line and near Carnoy. Cinematographer John McDowell, attached to 7th Division, filmed their bewildered march into captivity. The route was thronged with curious British soldiers; some played to the camera, others were less inclined. The seriously injured were carried supine on stretchers with a prisoner at each corner. Walking wounded hobbled back, their fatigued, pain-creased faces often nonplussed by the cameraman’s presence. The next day McDowell went forward to film the captured ground, which was a corpse-littered wilderness of gravel and shell holes. He rolled off some footage of British and German dead. A Manchester soldier and dog, the battalion’s mascot, lay side by side and made for an interesting shot. McDowell must have filmed late in the afternoon, as his reel shows many of the fly-blown dead already stiff with rigor mortis as burial parties set to work.