by John Harris
It wasn’t a rout or a retreat, and our losses didn’t include prisoners. The sixty thousand we lost on July 1st were almost all dead or wounded, and they nearly all fell in the first few minutes, for an unrealistic plan that, in the light of later years, never had a chance of succeeding. It took seven days for the last of the wounded and the stragglers to come in, but even then there weren’t enough of us left to re-form the battalion and it just ceased to exist. They offered most of the survivors commissions and drafted us to other battalions, assuming, I suppose, that we’d learned something about war after July 1st.
More and more men came up and the guns never stopped firing. The skeletons of the dead lay in rows, huddled in the hollows and heaped against the wire until the Germans retreated the following spring. All through the autumn, the fighting went on and it never seemed to be anybody’s concern to bury them. The generals were always too busy with new plans, never losing heart as they looked for fresh places to butt their heads against.
Never for a moment, night or day, until the end of the year, in rain, frost, sleet or sun, did the artillery cease to thunder or the machine gun bullets stop along the broken trenches and in the ruined fields and villages, with their scattered graves marked by rusting helmets, wooden crosses or bayoneted rifles.
They say we smashed the old German Army there on the Somme, but we smashed something else too. The faith we’d had found its grave there in the knuckly hills and valleys round the Ancre. The men who followed us into the long arc of wretchedness until 1918 grew younger and older all the time as conscription caught up with them, none of them half the men they were on July 1st. Never again was the spirit or the quality so high. After the Somme, the French sneered at the British, and the British at the French, and the Australians and Americans at both. Last sons were called up and the conscripts went forward like driven sheep. I never heard them singing again as I heard them that summer of 1916.
There was never an enquiry into the Somme. Nobody seemed to mind that all the fine prophecies of the generals were wrong. After Gallipoli, many people got the sack, many of them people who’d had no share of the blame. But after the Somme, it went on just as it had gone on before.
God knows who had to answer for Serre and Gommecourt, but I noticed nobody seemed to get the push.
I never fancied going back, in spite of the ‘Tours of the Battlefields’ that they organised in the ’twenties. I felt I’d left a bit of me behind, there in front of Serre. Everything that seemed to belong to my youth was there.
I met the few who were left from time to time, growing a little older every year: Oakley, blind and helpless and unable to the end of his life to do much for himself; Barraclough, limping and one-legged; Appleby; Murray, as mad-headed as ever and never changing; Tom Creak; and Henny Cuthbert, his face twisted by a scar that never seemed to grow less livid.
I’d probably never have gone back, except that years later I chanced to pass through Amiens by car on the way to Calais and was persuaded at last to pay a visit.
At the Hotel Centrale-Anzac near the Place Gambetta, I found an Australian who’d fought at Villers-Bretonneux near the river and had finally married a Belgian girl he’d met. He’d never been home and when he was asked he’d show people the way around. He lent me a map with all the regiments marked on it and all the cemeteries. Fricourt, Mametz, Contalmaison, Serre, Hamel, Thiepval. The words come out of the lines and patches of colour on the old linen-backed paper as if all other names were trivial by comparison.
The little graveyards lie by the roadside all the way from Gommecourt to Maricourt and beyond, British and French and German, one after the other, in neat little plots full of shrubs and flowers that are curiously not saddening because they’re so quiet and the Somme these days doesn’t see much traffic. The trees have grown again round Serre and Gommecourt, and Delville Wood’s come up again and the copses are back once more round Beaumont Hamel and Thiepval, full of ghosts and the hint of those old nostalgic songs. The Golden Virgin on the top of the Basilica in Albert is holding her Child up to the sky again and the place looks as dull as it must have done before.
The countryside hasn’t altered much. The water-carts and the flies still hang round the water-taps in Bos and Rippy, and the women are still the same sturdy shrewd peasant stock who lead those great plodding Percherons because they still haven’t got around to using tractors much. The white chalk dust still lays over the grass verges and among the moonpennies and poppies along the Serre Road, and the smell’s still the smell of horse dung and burning vegetation. There are the same lush hedgerows and nettles in the deep damp fields down by the Ancre, and the same big double row of poplars stands on either side of the road just outside Aveluy, backed up by buttercups and dandelions and clover and the long, long grass among the pollards and willows.
I drove up the Serre Road and found the City Battalion memorial. You can see from the position of the little cemeteries the route we took and how far we got.
I stood on the green slope of a field where a row of Picard men and women were hoeing and realised it must have been somewhere near that tangled front trench of the Germans that we reached. Somewhere here, I thought, must have been where Bold fell, and even across the years I could still see him sitting there, unafraid, his eyes undismayed, as he waited for death to come to him. Somewhere near here, I kept thinking, was where we found Locky, and somewhere near here the shell-hole where I crouched with Catchpole, and the spot where I stayed all day in the sunshine with the bodies of Eph and the Mandys.
Down in that little hollow just behind the crest where the machine guns caught us, I found a small cemetery and saw all their names again on the neat headstones – Colonel Pine and his brother, Ashton, Blackett, Mason, the Mandersons and Eph Lott, and Hardacre and Locky and Arnold Holroyd. Some of them, like Spring and Tim Williams and Dicehart and Welch and Catchpole, were missing and I suppose they lay in those little plots that were marked simply An Unknown British Soldier. They wore their names instead on that red brick and stone monstrosity, like a cross between Waterloo Bridge and the Albert Memorial, that they erected on Thiepval Ridge, the memorial to the seventy-four thousand who fell on the Somme and have no known grave. It was there I found that fine, quiet, brave man’s, Patrick Bold’s.
As I stood and looked along the rows of silent graves, I found that memory was being kind as usual. I could only remember the laughter and the singing, and the immense pride we had in ourselves, and things like Ashton’s sad face and gentle courage, and the colonel with his stammer and his eye-patch, giving me three stripes I didn’t want; and Catchpole, and that service he held at Blackmires that had brought us round when we’d been in the depths of despair; and Mason’s gaiety, and Locky’s dry, never-failing humour; and Eph’s riotous raucousness; and the harsh, unswerving honour of Bold.
The memory was poignant, a memory of trial and sacrifice, but somehow one of great beauty, a memory of the agonies and rejoicings of hearts caught by a sense of sacrifice. Nothing that they’d done, neither extravagance nor meanness nor selfishness, nothing could touch that frail immortal glory.
Including those like Tim Williams and the adjutant who’d sneaked up to join the battalion, seven hundred and ninety-five men from the battalion went into action that hot July morning and, out of them, seventy-eight – two sergeants among them and not a single officer – finally found their way unwounded to the orchard at Bos. Seven hundred and seventeen we lost in those three or four hours between seven-thirty and midday when the field finally emptied of human life, and of these most vanished from the earth in the first ten minutes of the battle.
That was what we joined up for. That was why we endured that bleak winter at Blackmires and the heat of Egypt, why we ate that awful food they served us and went through all those exercises again and again and again until we hated them, why we sang and sang and still went on singing, why the bands played and we cheered on the slightest excuse, why we endured and kept faith and never lost our first impassi
oned belief in victory, why we went on until the clamour of battle obscured the sky and destroyed the thousands of separate existences in a mere matter of minutes. Two years in the making. Ten minutes in the destroying. That was our history.
Historical Note
Although a work of fiction, John Harris’s book could just as easily be factual, relating the story of a recruit into the Sheffield City Battalion – the ‘Sheffield Pals’ – and reaching its climax with the 1st July attack on Serre.
In common with other industrial towns in the north of England, Sheffield was quick to form its own ‘Pals’ battalion in the early weeks of the First World War. On 1st July 1916, the Sheffield City Battalion fought alongside the Accrington Pals in the heroic but hopeless attempt to capture the heavily fortified village of Serre. In the memorable words of John Harris: ‘Two years in the making. Ten minutes in the destroying. That was our history.’
The Making
Within a month of Britain’s declaration of war against Germany on 4th August 1914, the Duke of Norfolk and Sir George Franklin presented themselves at the War Office to propose the formation of a Sheffield battalion recruited from both university and commercial men. The proposal was readily accepted and on 10th September enlistment began at the Corn Exchange for the Sheffield City Battalion, the 12th (Service) Battalion York & Lancaster Regiment.
The heady atmosphere of the time was caught in placards reading TO BERLIN – VIA CORN EXCHANGE. It took little time for the battalion to reach its full complement, with between 900 and 1000 men being recruited in just two days. The recruits came from all walks of life; in History of the 12th (Service) Battalion, York & Lancaster Regiment (1920), Richard Sparling recalled there being ‘£500-a-year business men, stockbrokers, engineers, chemists, metallurgical experts, university and public school men, medical students, journalists, schoolmasters, craftsmen, shop assistants, secretaries, and all sorts of clerks’.
The battalion’s early instructions in drill took place at Bramhall Lane, the famous home of Sheffield United Cricket and Football Club. Other grounds had to be found before long, as the Club’s directors took exception to the loss of grass! On Saturday 5th December – a miserably cold and wet day – the battalion of 1,131 officers and men left Sheffield for Redmires Camp, a windswept camping ground a few miles west of the city. The battalion trained at Redmires for just over five months, a period which saw it placed in the 94th Brigade (31st Division) alongside the 13th and 14th York & Lancasters (1st and 2nd Barnsley Pals) and the 11th East Lancashires (Accrington Pals).
Preparation for active service continued throughout 1915 with spells at Penkridge Bank Camp near Rugeley, Ripon – where training in small arms fire began in earnest – and Hurdcott Camp near Salisbury. On 28 September, Lt. Col. J. A. Crosthwaite, formerly of the Durham Light Infantry, assumed command. On 20 December 1915, the battalion embarked on HMT Nestor at Devonport for Alexandria.
The 31st Division had been assigned to Egypt to defend the Suez Canal against the threat of an attack by the Turkish Army. In the event, the threat of attack soon evaporated and the 31st was reassigned to take part in the planned summer offensive on the Somme. On 10th March 1916, the Sheffield battalion embarked on HMT Briton at Port Said for the five-day voyage to the French port of Marseilles. Eighteen days after arriving in France, the battalion took over a stretch of the front line opposite the fortified hilltop village of Serre.
The Destroying
The weeks preceding the offensive were by no means quiet. The battalion suffered its first fatal casualty as soon as 4th April when Pte. Alexander McKenzie was killed by a rifle grenade. On the night of 15/16 May, fifteen were killed and forty-five wounded as the Germans mounted a trench raid under cover of an artillery bombardment of such an intensity that in places the front line was practically levelled. Meanwhile, preparations for the offensive continued and by early June the battalions of 94th Brigade were practising the attack on Serre. The Sheffield City Battalion would have the dubious honour of being at the extreme left of the fifteen-mile British offensive front that stretched south from Serre to Maricourt.
On Saturday 24th June, the British artillery opened a bombardment that over a five-day period was intended to destroy the German defenses completely. Each night the battalion sent out raiding and wire-examining parties; ominously, the German wire was found to be incompletely cut. On 28th June, word was received that the attack would be postponed for two days because of the poor weather. The new time for the start of the offensive was 7.30am on Saturday 1st July.
The day before the offensive began badly with the news that Lt-Col. Crosthwaite was seriously ill, necessitating his hurried replacement by Major Plackett. At 3.45am on 1st July, the battalion was in position in the assembly trenches, finding them already in an atrocious condition from German shellfire. Patrols from the 4th and 7th Companies of the 169th (8th Baden) Infantry Regiment defending Serre noted the build-up. With the appearance of daylight at 4.05am, German artillery began to shell the British front line.
At 7.20am the first wave of the battalion moved a hundred yards into No Man’s Land and lay flat on the ground as the brigade mortar battery and divisional artillery placed a final hurricane bombardment over the German front line. A few minutes later – with the British front line coming under an intense counter-barrage – the second wave took up position thirty yards behind the first.
At 7.30am the bombardment lifted from the German front line. All four waves rose, took a moment to align themselves, then advanced steadily towards the German lines into a devastating hail of machine gun bullets and shellfire. An ineffective smoke screen exposed the battalion to machine gun fire from the left as well as from ahead. The third and fourth waves, caught on the opposite side of the valley, were reduced to half strength before even reaching No Man’s Land. On the left of the battalion front, long stretches of barbed wire had been left uncut. Men brought to a halt in front of the inpenetrable entanglements were reduced to firing vainly through the wire to the German lines beyond. Only on the right of the attack were a few men somehow able to force their way into the German trenches. Some found themselves alone and managed to return to the British lines. Others were never heard of again.
Within minutes it was as if the battalion had been wiped off the face of the earth. Cpl. Signaller Outram recalled that as far as the eye could see, the last two men left standing on the battlefield were himself and another signaller, A. Brammer. They signalled to each other. Outram turned his head for a moment, and when he looked back Brammer had gone.
On the right of the Sheffield City Battalion, the Accrington Pals made greater inroads into the German trenches but were unable to hold on to the hard-won gains. The battle for Serre was lost.
The Aftermath
The remnants of the battalion were taken out of the line in the evening of 3rd July, having lost 513 officers and men killed, wounded or missing; a further seventy-five were slightly wounded.
Throughout the long months of the Battle of the Somme, Serre remained uncaptured, falling into British hands only after the German withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in February 1917.
Although the battalion was gradually returned to strength, the ‘Pals’ character was unrecoverable. During the harsh winter months of 1916-17, an almost unbelievable 887 officers and men of the battalion were evacuated to hospital. For two spells in May 1917 at Arras, the battalion defended the vital Windmill spur in the Gavrelle sector, suffering 143 casualties, before playing a successful part in the attack at Oppy-Gavrelle on 28th June. The battalion was again to suffer in German gas attacks at Vimy Ridge in August and September 1917. Finally, in the early weeks of 1918, the weakened battalion was forced to disband.
After the war, Sheffield placed a memorial in the village of Serre to the men of the City Battalion who had fallen in the attack of 1st July 1916. In 1936, the Sheffield Memorial Park was opened on the site of the British lines below Serre. Sheffield had served the memory of its boys well.
Andrew Ja
ckson is the author of Accrington’s Pals: The Full Story (Pen & Sword, 2013).