Blood and Thunder

by Alexandra J Churchill

  At Fricourt with the West Yorkshire Regiment, James Knott fell less than a year after his brother. The German gunners had been knocked out prior to the attack but casualties were still horrific.3 The only part of the line that achieved anything approaching success was the southernmost sector of the British line. Here British troops achieved what they set out to and demolished the front German system, albeit in the face of much less artillery. They did not, however, make it to the second system of trenches.

  The cost of the opening day of the Somme campaign was horrendous. Over 19,000 men died and nearly 60,000 were put out of action on a single day. Of fifteen OEs known to have died on 1 July half were wiped out with no trace. It was the blackest day ever to befall the British Army. The bombardment had not lived up to expectations, no matter how loud and threatening it had seemed. The front was too long and the complexity and depth of the German objectives too deep to be swept aside.

  At the end of 1 July there was utter confusion across the British front. If the men commanding the battalions could not adequately assess the situation then Henry Rawlinson did not have a hope when he was relying on their information to plan the subsequent days of his offensive. Yet still, he would be required with Haig to decide what to do next to press the advance on.

  Notes

  1 Second Lieutenant Richard Willingdon Somers-Smith is buried at Bedford House Cemetery.

  2 Major Cedric Charles Dickens would not survive the campaign on the Somme. He was killed during preparations for another major assault near Ginchy on 9 September at the age of 27. His body was never recovered and he too is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial.

  3 The Knott family saw to it that their boys were buried together James’s body was labriously transferred north, resting as circumstances dictated in cemeteries and crypts along the way until he could be laid beside henry in Ypres Town Cemetery – an unusual occurrence for one killed on the Somme on 1 July.

  13

  ‘The Metal Is Gold and Tried in the Fire’

  So what next for the British Army? The sheer logistical effort of deploying the attack on the Somme, and political ramifications with France and Russia, meant that this front could never be abandoned. The offensive had been planned for months and was the allied offensive of 1916 aimed at winning the war.

  Gains had been made in the south, but Rawlinson was faced with utter failure in the north, which was the worst-case scenario in terms of moving forward. No full-scale advance could be made without first taking Thiepval and other important tactical features. So perhaps Rawlinson should even out the progress before he considered the full advance? In this instance they would eventually be able to make a larger assault on the German second-line system. Haig did not think so. He wanted to continue the gains already made in the south, pushing with the French who had success of their own on the other side of the River Somme on 1 July.

  Whilst men crawled about and bled to death in no-man’s-land, the British plan was laid. There would now be an attack in the southern part of the British sector to try to gain a favourable position for a main thrust on the second system of German trenches at the ridge running between Longueval and Bazentin-le-Petit. Additionally, there would be a diversionary attack at Thiepval as soon as 3 July.

  This diversion failed. Thus began a series of scrappy assaults in the centre of the British Somme front that would attempt to both keep the Germans on their toes and to gain local advantages ready for a larger assault. Control began to drain away from Rawlinson, who was losing his grip on the situation. Power was passing into the hands of his subordinates just as the weather took a turn for the worse on the Somme.

  More troops coming into the area meant more Old Etonians being fed on to the battlefield and amongst them was yet another who had made the transition from schoolboy to soldier in the midst of the war. Marc Anthony Patrick Noble had left school at 17 to do his bit. Born in 1897, Marc was tall, 6ft, with dark hair and dark eyes. At Eton he was not one of those who worshipped the playing fields. He was bright, with a vivid imagination and was passionate about his many interests, which included astronomy, English poetry, playing chess via correspondence with his brother Humphrey, history, music, painting, old books, shooting, farming and politics.

  In the nursery he and his sister Marjorie invented sagas ‘the length each of a thousand Arabian Nights’ or prepared lectures for their parents, properly presented (with a blackboard and a jug of water at hand) after dinner. One evening she spoke on Francois I and Marc on Napoleon. As they got older they began producing a newspaper for a favourite aunt called the En Avant, the motto of their Brunel relatives. Photography came hand in hand with this new venture and Marc was often out taking pictures of locations such as Windsor Castle and St George’s Chapel for their ‘historical home’ column.

  Marc held ‘an almost ascetic contempt’ for dancing or anything that devoted time to ‘playing about with girls.’ He was utterly satisfied with his own company. His sister remembered looking for him at their Broome Park home and finding him at the end of a lofty corridor whilst everybody else revelled downstairs. ‘The scents of a summer night drifted in through an open window.’ She found Marc with his telescope, ‘silhouetted against a great Northumbria sky of stars’.

  Eton, where he arrived in 1910, tried Marc’s patience on occasion. ‘One can never forget one is at school. No sooner has one settled down to read than that awful clock booms out that it is quarter past something, and all the illusion is spoiled.’ He was, however, fully invested in school life; like Cedric Dickens he was a cellist and as well as his personal interests he was a member of the Shakespeare, debating and essay societies. Marc spent his five Eton years in Samuel Lubbock’s house, a fabled abode of notable personages that would include Prince Henry, where the spread on the dinner table was enviously talked over by the boys in other houses.

  Marc was a thoughtful boy at the best of times and war had him pondering the grand scheme of things at school. ‘I was thinking this evening about my life,’ he wrote. ‘It is mysterious just to think of the future and what it holds in store for us … I have passed fifteen times the day I am going to die …’ Like William Winterton, Robin Blacker and Yvo Charteris, Marc was another of those who grew to consider their position at Eton untenable as 1915 dawned. By February he had convinced his housemaster that this was the case and was working on his father towards the idea of a commission in the artillery. It was the only choice as far as allegiance was concerned. Marc’s grandfather, Sir Andrew Noble, had spent a lifetime fighting with the artillery and in the pursuit of the advancement of gunnery. It seemed only fitting that in this war, so dominated by his craft, his grandson should follow in his footsteps.

  Sir Andrew Noble had joined the Royal Artillery in 1849 and within eleven years was Assistant Inspector of Artillery and a member of the Ordnance Select Committee. At about this time he was encouraged by Sir William Armstrong, the hydraulic engineer who produced guns for both the Army and the Navy, to take up a post in the private sector. More importantly he wanted him to take a job with him in Elswick where 60,000 people were employed at his burgeoning armaments factory. Sir Andrew’s career rocketed in this forward-thinking environment and he was pivotal in the advancement of every facet of gunnery, be it smokeless powder, a chronoscope for the measurement of tiny amounts of time, or fired gunpowder. By 1877 Armstrong and his team were finally able to begin wrenching antiquated muzzle loaded guns out of the government’s stubborn hands.

  There was further motivation behind Marc’s decision to join the Royal Field Artillery. He had begun to think that he would like to forge a post-war career at Elswick. At the beginning of 1915 he wrote from Eton to his father, who was a director at the factory, attempting to explain:

  I do hope, that in all this matter I have not caused you deep pain … I know that you would have preferred me to stay on at Eton, but … it is not as if I had rushed into it … and I should like to thank you especially for being so considerate about it all … After
all, the object of education is to teach us all to be men. I think Woolwich with its stern discipline, its hard work, will do me more good as a keen cadet than staying at Eton [as] a fellow who is looked on as not having done all he might, and feels it too.

  The family had always thought that if any grandson of Sir Andrew was to end up at Elswick it would be Marc’s elder brother Humphrey. Their uncle even thought that the career might be beneath a boy as bright as Marc, but now Marc himself was resolved and, more importantly, resolved not to do it in a He’s-a-Noble-so-there’s-a-berth-in-Elswick-for-him-manner. He wanted to enter the place after the war as a competent artillery officer in his own right. ‘I do not want to go into Elswick through being the grandson of the Chairman and the son of a Director.’

  Marc left Eton in April 1915 and proceeded straight to Woolwich, where he revelled in the outdoor lifestyle and in the scientific side of his artillery training, which engaged his quick mind. There was nothing that could be done to change his ambitions. ‘It seems a little sad that when the family has helped to create a thing like that, none of the rising generation should help to continue the work … Even if Grandpapa had founded a large business for making sausages or cheap braces … I think it would have been the duty of one of the grandsons to continue it.’ For now though, his career was a moot point. Elswick would go on, ‘unless the country is smashed up, in which case we won’t care about considering our own careers’, but for now the war was the priority.

  By the time Rawlinson’s troops launched their assault on the Somme on 1 July 1916 Marc’s grandfather had been dead for eight months, passing away on the very day that his grandson was commissioned into the artillery. Now a subaltern in the 121st Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery, which was attached to the 38th (Welsh) Division, Marc moved off that night from well behind the lines in the direction of the fighting. Arriving near Fricourt in the early hours of 7 July, they immediately began laying out lines of fire. Their target, behind Fricourt itself, was Mametz Wood.

  The wood, or what was left of it, had been designated as one of those necessary tactical objectives that would ease the burden of a future full-scale assault in the area and after July 1916 it was to become an unlikely location resonating through Welsh consciousness. The attack was due to be launched just a few hours after Marc and his guns arrived on the scene. Pushing from the ironically named ‘Happy Valley’ the Welsh Division was to advance towards Mametz Wood over a worryingly wide bit of open ground.

  Marc and his gunners began laying out a preliminary bombardment as soon as possible. It was hoped that they would be able to raise their barrage to create a shield of sorts for when the infantry went over the top. Unfortunately though, the infantry ran headlong into a veil of machine-gun fire and the attack faltered. Underinformed and disappointed, Haig threw his toys out of the pram and laid the blame with the Welsh troops, dismissing their commanding officer.

  The following day Marc’s battery continued pounding away at the north-west corner of Mametz Wood amidst rumours that the Germans were advancing towards Mametz itself. Another exhausting day followed and they fired on the wood throughout the night too until, on 10 July, the Welshmen were ordered to attack. The advance through a smoke screen at dawn was chaotic, but the troops this time managed to infiltrate the splintered, tangled remains of the wood. Marc’s battery rolled their guns forward until they were within range of enemy rifles among the trees and kept rapid fire up to try to support the advance. ‘I especially admired him,’ a senior officer wrote of Marc, ‘[in] his first taste of real war. He was evidently shaken by the unpleasant things that were happening, as was only natural, but he did his job most gallantly smiling all the time.’

  All through 11 July the battle raged as the Germans were pushed right to the edge of Mametz Wood. The scene was one of total destruction. In the confusion German and British shells, no doubt some of them Marc’s, crashed indiscriminately into the Welshmen. The following day the battered Welsh Division finally secured the wood at massive cost. Marc bombarded the German front line all day in conjunction with a battery of howitzers. The gain hardly justified the cost, for nearly half of the Welsh troops had vanished, been wounded or blasted out of existence. Meanwhile, Rawlinson was busy planning the continuation of the campaign on the Somme and, as he did so, yet more OEs were marching into the fray.

  Fathers in the Great War did not generally share the battlefield with their sons, but one Etonian exception saw William La Touche Congreve fighting in the southernmost sector of the British front on the Somme under his father’s command.

  Although he sent his son to Eton, General Sir Walter Norris Congreve VC had been educated at Harrow. After going up to Oxford he left early to go to Sandhurst, joined the Rifle Brigade and was awarded a Victoria Cross in the same action as Lord Roberts’ fallen son Freddy. After commanding a brigade on the Aisne in 1914, ‘Billy’s’ father was promoted to divisional commander before the influx of new units at the front gave him a corps: tens of thousands of men under his command by the end of 1915. Billy watched, full of pride and ‘almost reduced to tears’ as his father left his division to take up this exalted post with hundreds and hundreds of men cheering him on his way. ‘I think he really wept – if Lieutenant-Generals can weep.’

  As for Billy himself, all 6ft 5in of him, he had been born in Cheshire in 1891, Walter’s eldest son. He spent his early childhood in India and in Surrey and then went to Summer Fields in Oxford, where he was when he heard of his father’s Victoria Cross. An energetic little boy he was devoted to horse riding and could climb like a monkey. In 1904 Billy was sent to Eton and Hugh MacNaghten’s house. Not slow, he was however quite lazy and prone to teenage mood swings, although he was a good oar. Perhaps inevitably given his father’s occupation, he went to Sandhurst in 1909 and joined Walter’s regiment at Tipperary in 1911.

  Billy was not long with the Rifle Brigade on the Western Front, taking up his post as a divisional aide. It was a job that ground him down by making him feel that he was not contributing. He had picked up a Military Cross at Hooge and was then awarded the DSO for single handedly forcing the surrender of a substantial body of Germans, although he was modest about how it came about. ‘Imagine my surprise and horror when I saw a whole crowd of armed Boches … I stood there for a moment feeling a bit sort of shy, and then I levelled my revolver at the nearest Boche and shouted “hands up, all the lot of you!” A few went up at once, then a few more and then the lot; and I felt the proudest fellow in the world as I cursed them!’

  By the time the Battle of the Somme began Billy had changed position. Tired of being an aide, in December 1915 he was appointed brigade major in 76th Brigade which would fall under his father’s command that summer. Dick Durnford had summed the role up rather succinctly the year before. ‘Brigade Major is a plum job and they do not give it to fools. It is like being adjutant to a Brigadier, you do all his dirty work for him.’ Billy worked long and strenuous hours but loved it. ‘Of all the jobs … this … is the most dear to my heart,’ he said.’ ‘I am more or less my own master … there is unending work to do [and] there is heaps that’s definite to show for it.’

  Helping Billy along in his duties was his faithful, if trying, Scottish servant Cameron. Theirs was a love borne out of aggravating each other and they bickered like a married couple. Billy was in the bath one evening and Cameron thought it an opportune moment to tell him that all women were ‘terrible … creatures’. Billy gleefully suggested that he must be referring to Scottish women, whom he thought were ‘a poor type’. He got his intended reaction when Cameron raged at him and told him that a good Scottish woman might fix him and ‘his extravagant careless ways’. ‘This was a counter-attack,’ Billy recalled. ‘So I told him I was already married, but he didn’t believe me.’

  Sometimes Cameron found ways to get back at him. Once, he decorated Billy’s hut so that it looked partially like a tart’s boudoir, with looted carpet and furniture and prints of Sir John French and General Joffre on t
he walls. Given that looting was prohibited, Billy worried what would happen if the authorities caught sight of his net curtains or his chest of drawers. ‘However Cameron would probably rise to the occasion and produce receipts!’

  One of their plum arguments was about earwigs. Cameron was adamant that they were dangerous, ‘crawling into one’s brain and dying’. He claimed he knew of several cases. Billy informed him that he was a fool and a liar ‘but he waxed indignant and is as obstinate as a mule. Silly old ass … I say one thing and he contradicts me flat and I say, “Damn you Cameron, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” and he says, “Ah well, I know I am right.” He very seldom is. The Scotch are a wicked race … they and their earwigs!’

  Walter Congreve’s XIII Corps had been transferred to his old friend ‘Rawly’s’ Fourth Army in spring 1916 and it was to prove an added challenge as his sector comprised the point where the British lines joined with the French to the south. Added to this, asthma sometimes confined him to his sickbed and he was obliged to conduct proceedings whilst flat on his back. As a commander, Billy’s father was hands on and consequently popular. ‘Never content to command from the map,’ he was keen to get forward and see the men in the line for himself. He cared how they were living as well as fighting. Neither was he guilty of being a yes man or of ‘blind obedience’.

  Billy and his brigade were not present when his father enjoyed his comparative success on 1 July. In fact, as summer began Billy’s thoughts could not have been further from the war. He had gone home on leave and married the daughter of two actors, Pamela Maude, on 1 June. The Bishop of London, whose youngest son had been killed at Hooge with Billy Grenfell and Dick Durnford, presided over the service and they seized the opportunity for a brief honeymoon at Beaulieu. Within days Billy was on his way back to the front. By 1 July he had returned and was at St Omer with the rest of the brigade when they were ordered to entrain for the Somme to join his father.