Twelve Days on the Somme: A Memoir of the Trenches, 1916

by Sidney Rogerson

  Moreover, while we had been in Citadel Camp we had received drafts of over two hundred men to replace our losses, and it was therefore essential that these new arrivals should be fitted into their sections and platoons and given a chance to know, by sight at least, the N.C.O.'s and officers under whom they had to go into action. Many of them were North-umbrian miners, “Geordies,” whose outlandish Tyneside accents were barely intelligible to our own Yorkshiremen, which made some kind of “getting together” still more necessary.

  No one abhorred these forced activities more than Mac. To George Hall, drill of all kinds was almost second nature, but to Mac it was an utterly incomprehensible waste of time. While George cheerfully bellowed out commands and put his platoon energetically through arms drill or parade movements himself, Mac stood disconsolately, his cap well on the back of his head, his hand for ever stealing to his breeches pocket, watching the N.C.O.'s doing the actual work. Yet bored as he looked as he listened to Company Sergeant-Major Scott's gruff voice monotonously reiterating the bayonet drill, “Point ! Parry ! Short Point ! Parry right !” he had to smile when Scott waxed righteously indignant—“Long point ! Corporal Needham, put more thrust in it ! Point !”—then, disgustedly, “Corporal Needham, you couldn't stick a sausage !”

  But let us leave them at it—arms drill, bayonet fighting, platoon drill, bomb-cleaning, kit inspections. Useless work, perhaps. Who knows ? Follow me instead to Battalion Headquarters, but walk delicately. Pick your way between the tarpaulin shelters guyed to their screw pickets, and mind the strands of old Boche wire which loop redly out of the mud.

  A few weeks ago Battalion Headquarters was a length of German trench. To-day, by the simple expedient of roofing it over with corrugated iron and stopping one end with sandbags, it is a desirable habitation, furnished, it is true, only with a table—of sorts—and two or three wooden frames covered with rabbit-wire, which do duty as beds or chairs as necessity demands. Yet ramshackle as the place sounds, as a winter residence, to us dwellers in the tented field, it is as near luxury as our numbed imaginations can conceive. At the far end, huddled close to the stove coveted by my servant, sits the Colonel, wrapped in the camel's-hair lining of his trench coat, and if I mention him at some length here it is because the prevailing atmosphere of ordered comfort is largely a reflection of his personality.

  Colonel Jack was an “importation.” He had come to us from the Cameronians, but so completely had he identified himself with us and incidentally endeared himself to us that his alien origin had been completely and quickly forgotten. “A regular soldier of the best type” is the phrase which comes nearest to describing him, but it is inadequate. As punctilious on the parade-ground as he was regardless of his safety and unsparing of his energy in action, he had other and rarer qualities. Something of a martinet, and apt to be querulous on occasions, he was at the same time a real friend to his officers and, through them, to his men. In all ways he set us an example, but if asked to name his peculiar characteristic, I should say it was his determination, from which I never saw him relax, to keep up at all times and at all costs the proprieties of the old life of peace. “There's no need to live like a pig even though one is surrounded by filth, you know,” he would say, and he never did. No matter what the circumstances, he was always spick and span, and it was typical of him that before any big attack he would be careful to see that his boots and buttons were polished, explaining with a slow smile that one could “always die like a gentleman—clean and properly dressed.”

  Excuse the digression, and behold us all gathered to discuss details of the morrow's relief. MacLaren is there, the second-in-command, an officer on the reserve wrenched by the war from the comfortable home in Ontario which he will never see again. A Company is represented by Palmes, a militia captain, who has left a Rhodesian farm and is destined to die on the same day as MacLaren, nine months ahead; and by his senior subaltern, Arthur Skett, just joined from Sandhurst. I answer for B Company. Hawley, a senior captain of the regiment, plunged into this grim winter campaign after years of service in the steam-heat of West Africa, has C; and Sankey, a 2nd Lieutenant just promoted from the ranks of the Canadians, is temporarily in command of D Company. Matheson, another promoted Canadian, is acting adjutant.

  Preliminaries over, it is disclosed that the Colonel has decided to leave out of the trenches MacLaren and Palmes, whose company will be taken in by Skett. Two company sergeant-majors, including Scott, will also be left at transport lines. The Battalion will take over from the Devons company for company, A and B manning the front or outpost line with C and D in close support. The sector we are to take over lies between what remains of the villages of Lesboeufs and Le Transloy, at the very peak of the Somme salient. The positions occupied by the Devons are, the Colonel admits, “sketchy,” and the ground, which has only been won after stubborn local fighting, has been so pounded that, except for short lengths of German line, anything in the nature of a trench is non-existent. It is only possible, in fact, to reach the front line under cover of darkness or the early morning mist.

  “Company commanders,” the Colonel goes on, “will leave with me before dawn to-morrow so as to get an idea of the line before daylight. We'll start at 5.30 a.m. You fellows had better breakfast with me here at 5 a.m. sharp.”

  Details as to quartermasters' arrangements, hours of relief, rendezvous for guides, etc., are to be given in Battalion Orders, so after we have returned a negative to the Colonel's “Any questions ?” we retire to our respective commands to re-enact the scene on a smaller scale. Little fleas, indeed.

  To Mac fell the responsibility of leading B Company up to the trenches and, in spite of the desperately early start it entailed, I secretly welcomed the Colonel's decision. “He travels the fastest who travels alone,” and speed was safety, especially in crossing that valley to the left of Lesboeufs Wood marked on the maps “Heavily shelled area” !

  There being nothing better to do, I was in bed and asleep ridiculously early, though I found it no easier to rise with alacrity when called next morning at 4.30 a.m. Still half asleep, I struggled into the clothes I was to wear for three days. I put on trench boots, donned a heavy cardigan, decorated with woolly mascots, under my khaki jacket, and a leather jerkin above it. Over all I buckled on the various items of my “Christmas tree”—gas respirator, water bottle, revolver, and haversack—took a rolled-up ground-sheet instead of an overcoat, wound a knitted scarf round my neck and exchanged my cap for a “battle bowler.” With a “Chin-chin, see you later,” to Mac and George, I set off with my runner for Battalion Headquarters.

  A welcome aroma of coffee greeted me as I entered the dug-out where, in the warm light of the candles, I found the Colonel, Hawley, and Sankey already sitting down to breakfast. Skett arrived shortly after me and apologised for being late. He told me privately that he did not feel well. Certainly he did not look well, and seemed anxious and ill-at-ease. While the rest of us fell to heartily on Sergeant Brownlow's scrambled eggs and bacon and coffee, realising it would be our last decent meal for days, Skett ate practically nothing. We did not, I am afraid, view these symptoms very seriously at the time. It was no new thing for a youngster to be nervous when called on for the first time to take charge of a company in the front line. “Leave him alone and he'll be all right,” was Hawley's comment, which we accepted.

  Punctually to the hour we set out into the darkness, winding our way along crazy duck-board tracks, past holes in the ground where guttering candles and muffled voices told of human occupation, past dimly-seen gun positions and subterranean dressing-stations until, just as dawn was breaking, we reached the headquarters of the Devon Regiment in the sunken road to the left of Lesboeufs Wood.

  It needed the war to demonstrate the full truth of the saying that “joy cometh in the morning.” With the passing of darkness a load of danger seemed to be lifted, and even the poor shattered countryside appeared fresh and peaceful in the early morning glow. We were sharply reminded that this was bu
t an illusion, for as we stayed chatting cheerfully, Colonel Sunderland of the Devons came out and told us to get away quickly as the place was a death-trap, “taped” to an inch by enemy gunners.

  Each of us got a Devon guide and set off with all haste to reach the comparative safety of our respective destinations before the mist lifted and the early aeroplanes flew over as heralds of the day's shelling. The front line, our guide told us, lay over the low ridge which formed the skyline half a mile ahead, and had only been dug last night. “It's not easy to find in the darkness,” he went on in his soft West-country dialect. “In daylight it's all right. You follow this track till you come to a dead Boche. Here he be, zur !” pointing to a sprawling field-grey body wearing the uniform, I noticed, of the Minenwerfer Corps. “Then you have to look for a white tape—here, zur—and he leads you roight up to behind the old front line. But it's easy to go wrong at noight.”

  We crossed a low valley where the shell-ploughed ground was carpeted with dead, the khaki outnumbering the field-grey by three to one. There must have been two or three hundred bodies lying in an area of a few hundred yards around Dewdrop Trench—once a substantial German reserve line, but now a shambles of corpses, smashed dug-outs, twisted iron and wire. This was the position which C and D Companies were to take over, and whither Hawley and Sankey made their way with some misgivings.

  Skett and I walked on together until we reached the slope, when he veered off to the left and I to the right. The sun was now up and the protective mist had cleared, so that I was glad when I slithered into the shallow trench half-way up the ridge where B Company of the Devons had established their headquarters by the simple expedient of roofing in the trench with two stretchers—which might have kept off a little gentle rain but nothing more substantial ! Tea was being made for breakfast, and though I accepted an offer of refreshment which was very welcome, I turned away retching after the first gulp. It tasted vilely of petrol. For miles in the rear there was no water either fit or safe to drink, and all supplies had therefore to be carried up to the front in petrol tins, a system which was all right only so long as the tins had been burnt out to remove the fumes of the spirit. When they had not, as all too often happened, every mouthful of food and drink was nausea. It was only with the greatest difficulty that men could be restrained from using water from the shell-holes to make their tea or bully-stew, although this was expressly forbidden, as in addition to the danger of gas-poisoning, none knew what horror lay hidden under the turbid water. Having already breakfasted, albeit four hours earlier, I watched Hill, my opposite number of the Devons, eat his bread and “Maconochie,” after which, over a cigarette, he explained the situation to me.

  The two companies were both posted on the ridge which had been but newly captured, and though their fronts were touching, their flanks were both entirely in the air. The only approximation to a trench was the one in which we were sitting, already christened Autumn Trench, which was merely a narrow, unrevetted channel, without shelter, or fire-steps, and in which A Company also had its headquarters some 150 yards to the left. From this line a shallow trench, nowhere more than three feet deep, had been scooped out over the ridge, joining on the far side the real front line, which had only been established the night before by linking up shell-hole to shell-hole. This sketchy line had been made to gain a sight into the valley at the other side of the ridge, and had naturally been dug under cover of darkness, but daylight showed, so I was told, that the ground fell away so steeply in front of it that complete observation was still impossible.

  That was all Hill had to tell me about our own defence system, but admitted that the enemy was in little better straits. In fact, the Hun was not known to be holding any fixed line nearer than the Transloy-Bapaume road, some thousand yards away, though the area between that line and ours crawled with Germans who hung on in isolated bits of trench or in fortified shell-holes, the where-abouts of which were extremely difficult to detect.

  In short, the position was as obscure as it was precarious. The two companies were virtually isolated on their ridge without knowledge of the exact dispositions of the enemy in front, and behind them, no trench, just mile after mile of battered country under its pall of mud. “It's not a cheerful sort of place to hold,” my informant went on. “All the Boche has got to do is to pop a barrage down in the valley behind you and come over on both flanks, and you're marching off to Hunland before you know where you are !” (A comforting thought, I reflected, but no less than the truth. Isolated as we were, the enemy could bag the lot of us almost before our own Battalion Headquarters half a mile in rear were any the wiser.)

  “And now I think I've given you all the facts,” he ended, “except that you'll find the mud a bit trying in places. If I were you, I'd have a look round for myself while the Boche is behaving himself.”

  The front certainly was quiet, save for the occasional sharp whip-crack of an enemy sniper and the drone of aircraft high up in a sky which was very bright and blue for November. It had been strangely peaceful sitting, smoking, and chatting in the sun, but I had not gone twenty yards before I encountered the mud, mud which was unique even for the Somme. It was like walking through caramel. At every step the foot stuck fast, and was only wrenched out by a determined effort, bringing away with it several pounds of earth till legs ached in every muscle.

  No one could struggle through that mud for more than a few yards without rest. Terrible in its clinging consistency, it was the arbiter of destiny, the supreme enemy, paralysing and mocking English and German alike. Distances were measured not in yards but in mud.

  One of the war's greatest tragedies was that the High Command so seldom saw for themselves the state of the battle zone. What could the men at G.H.Q. who ordered the terrible attacks on the Somme know of the mud from their maps ? If they had known, they could never have brought themselves to believe that human flesh and blood could so nearly achieve the impossible, and often succeed in carrying out orders which should never have been issued.

  I had only to struggle some fifty yards before I came to the communication trench over the ridge, along which, crouching double or on all fours, we went for a further fifty yards before finding ourselves in the front line, christened by us, and thereafter known as Fall Trench. This I found to be better than I expected, already fairly deep and reasonably dry. I found that there was a detachment of brigade machine gunners there as a welcome addition to the trench garrison, and floundered along towards the left till I met Skett, with whom I compared notes and discussed a working programme for the night. We eventually agreed that we must at all costs deepen and consolidate Fall Trench, and run a couple of saps out from it, so as to command a full view of the valley in front. Secondly, to protect our flanks, Skett agreed to put a subaltern into an isolated post on his left, and I to make a T-head for a Lewis gun-post opening out on the right of the so-called communication trench to cover that flank. Leaving Skett, I returned by the way I had come to find that the round of a few hundred yards had taken over two hours of strenuous walking !

  The impression left on my mind was that we were as much at the mercy of the elements as of the enemy. Of the ordinary amenities of trench life there were none. The two stretchers at Company Headquarters formed the only roof in the sector. There was not even a hole into which men could crawl to be under shelter. They slept as they sat, huddled into themselves, in positions reminiscent of prehistoric burial. As cooking was out of the question, there was no apology for a cook-house. The one latrine yet made was a hole dug into the side of the support trench. In short, there was as much to be done to make the place habitable as defendable.

  The day passed slowly, with the sun doing its best to cheer the bruised landscape, won at the cost of so many thousands of lives, which we could see stretching away for miles behind us. Below in the valley ran Dewdrop Trench with its piles of dead. Beyond it the ground climbed slightly to where the remains of Lesboeufs Wood poked jagged, splintered fingers at the sky. Somewhere to the left was
Sailly Saillisel, and to the right Ginchy and Morval. What a view it was ! Yet, for all its spaciousness, there was nothing to see, just mile upon mile of emptiness, with never a house or a tree, a hedge or a spot of green to break the absolute monotony of tint and feature. Here and there, as if by magic, arose black spouts, marking the explosions of shells, and passing clouds cast purple shadows on the dun. Otherwise, all was drab and formless, as one imagines Earth must have been before the appearance of life.

  How I wished, as often during the war years, that I was painter enough to be able faithfully to record the scene on canvas, sparing nothing and missing nothing. I longed for this power, not with any idea of holding a mirror up to the futility of war, but to show the talkers, the preachers, and the shirkers at home what they were missing, and how little they could ever understand of our feelings, our hopes, or our fears. I realised only too clearly that those in England would never know what things were like, nor could descriptions, however eloquent, convey any true picture. Nature was strangely jealous of her scars, which she was quick to cover from all who were not actually present when they were inflicted.

  I had the same longing each time I came home on leave and saw Kent hop-fields or Hampshire meadows green and trim and quiet, but with this difference—I wanted to depict them, because in those sudden wonderful views from the windows of the railway carriage I was discovering the beauty and peace of England, whereas I wanted to show the void of war, to which I was habituated, to those who knew it not.