by John Garth
EIGHT
A bitter winnowing
The first of July 1916 dawned with a light mist but with all the signs of a glorious summer’s day. Hope ran high. Behind the front line, a great cavalry stood like something out of the old picture books, ready to ride through the breach the infantry would make. The army poised to fight had grown hugely since its losses at Loos last year. Three times larger than any army Britain had ever fielded, this was Kitchener’s army, brought there by optimism and enthusiasm. New arrivals at Warloy, where Tolkien slept, were startled awake by the astonishing crash of artillery – ‘drum-fire’, they called it – as the guns in the east launched into their morning cannonade. It went on for over an hour, towards the end somehow redoubling in fury. A Royal Flying Corps observer high above the Somme front said it was ‘as if Wotan, in some paroxysm of rage, were using the hollow world as a drum and under his beat the crust of it was shaking’.
A thousand yards from the German line, Rob Gilson and his battalion spent the night in and around the small château in trench-riddled Bécourt Wood, where his captain friend had been hit by shell-burst two weeks previously. Even here, despite the unrelenting British bombardment, war seemed remote. Cuckoos called, nightingales sang, dogs barked at the guns; wild and garden flowers grew in profusion. A light rain pattered through the leaves for soldiers to catch in their hats to drink. ‘Jerry’ could scarcely have survived the merciless week-long bombardment and tomorrow would be a walkover. At breakfast in the yard, spirits rose further still with the help of a dose of treacly army rum in the soldiers’ tea. Rob’s batman, Bradnam, packed his master’s things and at five Gilson marched his platoon out of the wood along the trenches. Dressed not as an officer but as one of the men, so he would not be instantly shot down, Gilson, like everyone else, carried sixty-six pounds of gear. The Cambridgeshires arrayed themselves in trenches to the rear of another unit, from Grimsby. Gilson’s platoon, composed largely of men from the Isle of Ely, was in his battalion’s fourth and final ‘wave’.
At 7.20 a.m., ten minutes to ‘zero hour’, every gun in the artillery accelerated to its maximum rate of fire in a hurricane bombardment. The air was brown with the chalk dust of disrupted fields and red with the pulverized brick of village and farmstead. Then, with two minutes to go, the ground reeled. Lieutenant Gilson and his men had been warned to expect this; they had been kept back to protect them from concussion. Across No Man’s Land, and a little to Gilson’s left, the earth erupted thousands of feet into the smoky blue air as twenty-four tons of explosive ammonal (ammonium nitrate mixed with aluminium) were detonated under the enemy trenches where they formed a strongly protected salient. Clods of soil and chunks of chalk rained down, as big as wheelbarrows.
For the first time in a week all the guns stopped. In No Man’s Land, long ranks of men rose from where they had been crouching on the ground. The skirl of bagpipes started up nearby. The British artillery lengthened its aim so the infantry could safely enter the German front line. Then it resumed its bombardment. The shriek and roar pressed in from all around.
Gilson waited for the Cambridgeshires’ third wave to leave. He checked his watch and, at two and a half minutes after zero hour, blew his whistle and waved his platoon forward some four hundred yards up to the front line.
Something was amiss. Now the space above his trench was alive with bullets, and shells the size of two-gallon oildrums sailed through the air, spinning with a sinister wouf, wouf, wouf. Nervous men, astonished that the pulverized enemy was firing back, looked at each other; but they were ashamed to show their fear. Gilson spread the soldiers of his ‘dear, stupid, agricultural platoon’ along a hundred-yard stretch of trench, checked his watch, and waved them up the ladders.
The German trench mortar shells, or ‘sausages’, now somersaulting overhead had given their name to Sausage Valley, the shallow depression up which Rob Gilson and the Cambridgeshires were supposed to advance. Away to the left, beyond the rise on which stood the smashed enemy-held village of La Boisselle, it was paralleled by a further depression, Mash Valley. Beyond that, another entrenched spur ran out from the German-held high ground, and then there was the long dell containing Blighty Wood, so called because of the numbers of wounded who regularly left there bound for home. Here G. B. Smith and the Salford Pals were due to head across No Man’s Land, two miles along the line to Gilson’s left. Crammed into the trenches between the two TCBSites were eighteen whole battalions: men in their thousands from Tyneside and Devon, from Yorkshire, Scotland, Nottingham, and elsewhere. In the knotted trenches and the press of bodies, amid the killing cloud of artillery and the secrecy and confusion of the assault, those two miles might have been a million.
The Cambridgeshires were in extremis. Within an hour and a half, Rob Gilson’s platoon was supposed to advance nearly two miles up Sausage Valley to an enemy strongpoint; in the plan, it had their regimental name on it: Suffolk Redoubt. The strongpoint lay just beyond a wood on the skyline, but as Gilson hauled himself out of the trench it is doubtful that he could see beyond the curtain of British shell explosions behind the German front line. That curtain – the barrage – would move in stages just in front of the advancing soldiers. It was in the plans. The bodies already strewn on the sweep of wasteland in front, up to the white lip of the newly blasted crater, were not. Nor was the machine-gun fire cutting the air from La Boisselle. The artillery had failed to destroy or drive out the German defenders there.
Rob Gilson had half-predicted the problem. ‘I am astonished by the small material damage which a single shell, say a 4.2”, does,’ he had written home. ‘If it explodes in the open it makes quite a shallow and small hole and throws the earth about a bit…But it does not look as if it had a radius of much more than 2 yards and one may burst just in front of, or even on, the parapet…without doing the smallest damage…On the other hand if a shell happens to explode right in a trench the damage it does to men is worse than I imagined.’
As soon as the barrage lifted from their front line, the Germans rushed from the dugouts in which they had crouched fearfully all week and took to their guns. No Man’s Land was up to six hundred yards wide here, but soldiers from the foremost three waves of Cambridgeshires had begun to fall within the first hundred. They went down ‘just like corn in front of the farmer’s reaper’, one of Gilson’s men remembered. Bullets spun men around and dropped them in strangely awkward postures; it felt like being hit by half a house. The enemy’s shells dealt with those the bullets missed. But the advance went on, somehow: men with heads bowed as if walking into a gale. By the time Gilson led his platoon out, the machine-gunners had found their range and were working with improved efficiency.
Rob Gilson had described No Man’s Land as ‘the most absolute barrier that can be constructed between men’. The details of what happened inside it seem almost an indeterminable mystery. Yet a captain friend, injured by a bullet ten minutes in, said he watched Gilson leading his soldiers forward ‘perfectly calmly and confidently’. For Rob’s batman Bradnam, time and distance stretched out: as he remembered it, Gilson was still moving forward at about nine o’clock and had advanced several hundred yards (which would have taken him beyond the German front line) when Bradnam himself was hit and cried out; but the orders were cruelly clear: nothing must stop the advance. Then Gilson’s beloved old Major Morton was knocked out of action. His company was leaderless, and the Major passed on a message to Gilson in the middle of No Man’s Land to take over. He did so, and was moving forward again, as if on parade, when he and his sergeant-major, Brooks, were killed by a shellburst. A soldier crawling back told the injured Bradnam that his lieutenant was dead. Another said later that he found Gilson back in the front trench, as if he had been dragged or had dragged himself all the way back there; but there was no sign of life.
Far away, Rob Gilson’s father, the Headmaster, was preparing to officiate at the King Edward’s annual Sports Day. Rob’s sister Molly was going to serve tea to the schoolboys’ paren
ts. His stepmother Donna, who usually handed out prizes, was giving it a miss this year and was going to ‘revel in a quiet and lovely afternoon’ at home instead.
‘I hope I may never find myself in command of the company when we are in the trenches,’ Gilson had once said. Such responsibility did not sit easily on him, but in his final minutes he had to lead the men he loved, and who loved him in return, into virtual annihilation. Many times he had told his fellow officers that he would rather die ‘in a big affair and not by a shell or chance bullet in the trenches’. But he was a gentle aesthete in the midst of absolute horror. His friend Andrew Wright, a fellow officer in the Cambridgeshires, told Gilson’s father: ‘It was the final but not the first triumph of determination over his sensitive nature – He alone is brave who goes to face everything with a full knowledge of [his own] cowardice.’
Gilson did not live to see the full scale of the disaster that day. More than five hundred of the Cambridgeshires were wounded or killed. Of the sixteen officers the battalion had fielded, Gilson and three others died, two more were never found, and only one, Wright, emerged unhurt. No Man’s Land was dotted everywhere with bodies. A dozen of the Cambridgeshires made it across to the edge of one of the enemy redoubts but were caught in the blast of a flamethrower and died horribly. Others made it behind the German lines but were hopelessly cut off. Later in the day the German machine gunners strafed No Man’s Land methodically, in zigzags, to finish off the wounded and stranded volunteers of Kitchener’s armies.
On Sunday 2 July 1916, Tolkien attended Mass in front of a portable altar in a field at Warloy. The battalion’s padre, Mervyn Evers, was a Church of England man, chirpy but averse to Roman Catholics. The brigade’s Catholics, such as Tolkien, were ministered to by the chaplain with the Royal Irish Rifles. The British were rumoured to have taken the entire German frontline system, but no official news had come. All through Saturday the main road had carried an endless procession of troops and laden trucks heading for the front. There was also traffic in the other direction, including a few German prisoners, but it seemed that everything with wheels was being used to bring wounded men in to the temporary hospital at Warloy. The exodus continued unabated on Sunday, the second day of the battle. It was often tranquil apart from the humming of aeroplanes (two fought an inconclusive dogfight above the village), but every now and then the distant artillery would burst into deafening fusilades. In the afternoon the first official word came on progress so far: said to be ‘rather obscure’.
Through these days Tolkien and the Lancashire Fusiliers were held in a state of battle-readiness. A rumour arose that they were going into trenches near the German-held hamlet of Thiepval, but when the brigade left Warloy on Monday 3 July it was for Bouzincourt, a village three miles behind the front. In the dusk, as they set out, an exhausted Highland Division straggled past, broken by battle, its unshaven and mud-plastered men clutching each other for support.
Three miles was not far enough. Just before dawn, as Tolkien lay in a hut, a German field gun bombarded Bouzincourt. He was now on the Western Front, and it was his first time under fire. The tiny French farming village was not hit – fortunately, for soldiers filled its every house, cellar, barn, and orchard. When a thunderstorm broke out, the men of Tolkien’s battalion were drenched where they lay out in a field. It rained still harder throughout the next day, 4 July, which was spent largely cooped up because no one was allowed out from under the shelter of the village’s trees for fear of enemy observation. But a ridge nearby offered a grandstand view of the battle line, on the hillside eastward across the wooded valley of the River Ancre, where shells could be seen bursting among the German trenches. The sky was no friendlier. At the front, Tolkien said, ‘German captive-balloons…hung swollen and menacing on many a horizon.’ Men were arriving in their hundreds to have wounds dressed, but some were horribly mutilated. Rob Gilson’s division had lost most heavily of all on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, but along the British front there had been 57,000 casualties: out of the 100,000 who entered No Man’s Land, 20,000 had been killed and twice as many wounded. On the second day there were 30,000 more casualties.
In between training and instruction, Tolkien’s battalion provided working parties to dig graves in the suddenly expanding cemetery. Units from his division had taken over the line from Gilson’s last night; but what had become of him, and where was G. B. Smith? Tolkien looked over their letters: Smith’s prayer that they might all survive ‘the fiery trial’; Gilson’s terse hints about his own harrowing ordeal; and Smith’s 25 June warning about correspondence, ‘You must expect none in the future.’
On Wednesday afternoon, 5 July, orders came at last: the four battalions of Tolkien’s brigade were needed to help another division that had suffered heavily in fighting at La Boisselle. That village had at last been taken, but fresh troops were needed to push further into enemy territory. They set out under Lieutenant-Colonel Bird at lunchtime on 6 July, but all ranks not required for combat were left behind. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers’ signal officer, W. H. Reynolds, went to run communications at their trench headquarters, but Tolkien did not go with him. Instead he stayed put at Bouzincourt, along with the signal office running communications for the whole 25th Division. So he was still there when G. B. Smith arrived on 6 July.
Smith had received his orders for the Big Push a week after his return from his May leave in England, and on the eve of Tolkien’s crossing. Since then, he had hardly been out of the trenches. On the day Tolkien left Étaples, Smith’s men had set out from Warloy for their battle station, singing. Orders were that they would wait until after the initial assault before emerging to consolidate the British gains, taking their picks and shovels so they could dig in. But after twenty-four hours crammed into sodden dugouts in the wood west of the Ancre, they had been told the attack was off and had retired to billets to wait.
The night before the rescheduled attack they moved into dugouts further forward, near a pontoon bridge across the rivermeads at Authuille, for four hours’ fitful sleep, and were up at five o’clock. At six the bombardment began again, deafening in its intensity, shaking the ground. They crossed the bridge just after ‘zero hour’. Now they struck uphill, passing brigades of artillerymen stripped to the waist as they slaved to feed the huge guns, and reached the trenches that ran into the southern edge of Blighty Wood.
Several hundred yards beyond the small, much-battered wood, up a steady slope, was the British front line, a stretch known as Boggart Hole Clough. On the far side of No Man’s Land, where Smith had patrolled it one night in May, was the heavily fortified Leipzig Salient, at the toe of Thiepval Ridge. By now it should have been overrun and left far behind by the advance. The Salford Pals would simply walk across the open country from the wood and climb down into the Salient with their picks and shovels. Later they would move on nearly two more miles to refortify another conquered enemy strongpoint.
But no sooner was Smith under the trees than walking wounded and stretcher cases began to stream past. Further in, the wood was full of corpses. Now the battalion in front started to bunch up, and the labourers and businessmen of Salford, and the Oxford University men, paused. Their eyes streamed from tear gas; their ears were filled with the ping of bullets and the crack of falling branches. Smith, now the battalion intelligence officer, attempted to take in the situation from a trench at the far edge of the wood. Across the blasted desolation through which the British communication trenches ran up to Boggart Hole Clough, enemy machine guns were rattling away from the high ground to the east.
The idea of an orderly march forward was rejected at last but, three hours into the battle, the Pals’ advance resumed. The first company was sent out of the wood in rushes, but platoon by platoon they withered into the ground. The next group went out under a smokescreen, dashing from shellhole to shellhole, but no news came back out of the chaos. Orders came down to advance along the crowded trenches instead. This was done by men including Smith’s old pl
atoon, collierymen mostly, but they sent word back that their front line was choked with the dead and the wounded, and was impassable. Furthermore, the German artillery had now turned its attention on Boggart Hole Clough. The Pals were ordered back to the confines of Blighty Wood, which came under a rain of shells for the rest of the day.
Remarkably, a few Salford Pals had already defied the odds to reach Leipzig Salient, parts of which were by now in British hands. There they were trapped all day with pockets of men from other battalions, desperately fighting off German troops with bombs and bayonets. They could not be pulled back until night fell, when the survivors of Smith’s battalion withdrew from Salient and wood. Heading back the way they had come that morning, they found the whole area now littered with discarded guns, grenades, and ammunition. Everywhere, men sat brokenly, or lay silent in the darkness. After a second day under shellfire in the trenches around Authuille, Smith’s platoon and others were sent back to man Boggart Hole Clough for a further twenty-four hours under intermittent but intense bombardment.
Only half the battalion had returned to its village billets in the small hours of 4 July. G. B. Smith was fortunate that he no longer commanded a platoon: four of the Pals’ officers had been killed and seven wounded. Thirty-six of the ‘ordinary’ soldiers were dead or missing and more than two hundred and thirty had suffered wounds. Most had fallen on the first morning before they even reached their own front line.
For Tolkien, the relief of seeing his friend safe and sound on Thursday 6 July was overwhelming. GBS arrived alone ahead of the Salford Pals, who followed early the next morning. These were fraught days. The divisional signal office at Bouzincourt was hit by shells on Friday night and its cabling wrecked. Meanwhile, Smith, recovering from his sixty-hour ordeal under fire, was involved in the hasty reorganization of his depleted battalion into just two companies; but between their chores in this garrisoned Picardy village smelling of death, the two Oxford TCBSites spent as much time together as they could. Waiting for news of Rob Gilson, they talked about the war, strolled in an unspoilt field of poppies, or took shelter, on Friday, from the heavy rain that fell all day; and in true TCBSian fashion they discussed poetry and the future. But on Saturday the Salford Pals left for the trenches due east across the Ancre, where they were going to back up the continuing British assault on Ovillers, the German strongpoint overlooking the valleys of Sausage and Mash and Blighty Wood. After seeing his old friend once more, Smith departed.