As it grew close to zero hour, 7:30 A.M. on July 1, 1916, ten enormous mines were detonated deep underneath the German trenches. Near the village of La Boisselle, the crater from one that contained 30 tons of high explosives remains, a stark, gaping indentation in the surrounding French farmland; even partly filled in by a century of erosion, it is still 55 feet deep and 220 feet across.
Alfred Milner could hear the low thunder of the bombardment at his country house near the Kent coast, and when the barrage reached its crescendo, 224,221 shells in the last 65 minutes, the rumble could be heard as far away as Hampstead Heath in London. More shells were fired by the British this week than they had used in the first 12 months of the war; some gunners bled from the ears after five days of nonstop firing. At a forest near Gommecourt, entire trees were uprooted and tossed in the air by the shelling and the forest itself was set on fire. Soldiers of the 1st Somerset Light Infantry sat on the parapet of their trench cheering at the tremendous explosions. Officers issued a strong ration of rum to the men about to head into no man's land. Captain W. P. Nevill of the 8th East Surrey Battalion gave each of his four platoons a soccer ball and promised a prize to whichever one first managed to kick the ball to the German trench. One platoon painted on its ball:
THE GREAT EUROPEAN CUP
THE FINAL
EAST SURREYS V. BAVARIANS
14. GOD, GOD, WHERE'S THE REST OF THE BOYS?
PREPARATIONS FOR THE Somme offensive were already at high pitch when the first group of British conscientious objectors forcibly transported to France were taken to an army camp parade ground with other soldiers and given the order "Right turn! Quick march!" The other troops marched off; the 17 remained in place, unmoving. The army fined them five days' pay, something that amused them, since on principle they were already refusing to accept any military pay. There was little else to laugh about. Periodically they were summoned to hear announcements of men sentenced to death for desertion or disobedience. And, of course, they knew that in Ireland the Easter Rising leaders had just been shot by army firing squads. At times, they could hear the rumble of artillery from the front.
They refused to do any work. Angry sergeants punished them by administering what was known as Field Punishment Number One, which meant being trussed to a fixed object like a gun carriage wheel or prison fence for two hours at a time, arms spread-eagled in crucifixion position. "We were placed with our faces to the barbed wire of the inner fence," recalled one CO, Cornelius Barritt. "...I found myself drawn so closely to the fence that when I wished to turn my head I had to do so very cautiously to avoid my face being torn by the barbs. To make matters less comfortable, it came on to rain and the cold wind blew straight across the top of the hill." But the men's spirits held, for when officers weren't looking, ordinary soldiers showed them unexpected kindness. One gave his dinner to CO Alfred Evans, and when his superiors were gone for the evening, a sergeant of the Irish Guards spent his own money buying cake, fruit, and chocolate for the whole group at the post canteen. Evidently worried that the men's pacifism might influence the troops, the army moved them off base, to a fish market on the docks of Boulogne that had been turned into a punishment barracks. There, they were locked in group cells with no sustenance but water and four biscuits a day.
The men in one cell could talk to those in other cells only through knotholes in the wooden walls. As best they could, the entire group—which included a schoolteacher, a watchmaker, a student missionary, several clerks, and a Catholic from a trade union family—held debates: on Marxism, Tolstoyan pacifism, and the merits of the invented international language Esperanto. The Quakers among them held a Quaker meeting. For some, religious conviction had put them behind bars; for others, a belief in socialism; for many, both. The songs they sang included both Christian hymns—
Trusting Him while life shall last,
Trusting Him till earth be past
—and the famous labor song "The Red Flag":
The people's flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts' blood dyed its every fold.
"Rats were not infrequent visitors," remembered Barritt. "They would sit on the edge of a fire bucket to drink the water and occasionally run up one's back during a meal.... There were now eleven of us in the one cell.... We could just lie six a side with our feet almost touching; but it was a problem to find room for the bucket placed in the cell for 'sanitary' purposes. The cells measured 11 feet 9 inches by 11 feet 3 inches."
Unable to comprehend so many people acting according to conscience, the military at first decided that Barritt and three other COs were the ringleaders responsible for the larger group's disobedience. They were court-martialed and found guilty. None of them knew whether the messages they had smuggled out had reached England—or would have any effect. On June 15, 1916, just two weeks before the Somme offensive was scheduled to start, the four "ringleaders" were taken to a nearby army camp for sentencing.
"I cast many a glance in the direction of the white cliffs of Dover," recalled one, "for this might be our last opportunity." They were brought to a large parade ground, and several hundred soldiers were assembled on three sides as witnesses. A command rang out for silence. "As I stepped forward I caught a glimpse of my paper as it was handed to the Adjutant. Printed at the top in large red letters, and doubly underlined, was the word 'Death.'"
As each man stepped forward, the adjutant read out his name and serial number and the charge, and intoned, "Sentenced to death by being shot." There was a pause. "Confirmed by General Sir Douglas Haig." Then a longer pause. "And commuted to ten years' penal servitude."
In the days that followed, while trains and truck convoys all around them sped last-minute supplies to the front for the great offensive, a total of 34 British COs in army camps in France were told that they had received the death sentence, commuted to ten years' imprisonment; some 15 others were given lesser sentences. None of them knew of the visit Bertrand Russell and others from the No-Conscription Fellowship had paid Asquith, but it was crucial in saving their lives, for immediately afterward the prime minister had sent a secret order to Haig that no CO was to be shot. Two weeks after the first sentences, the COs were returned to England and sent to civilian prisons—as would happen with all COs refusing alternative service from then on. Jeering bystanders threw eggs and tomatoes at them when they landed at Southampton. But the men knew that they had stuck to their beliefs even when threatened with death. "As I stood listening to the sentences of the rest of our party," one CO said later of that day on the parade ground, "the feeling of joy and triumph surged up within me, and I felt proud to have the privilege of ... testifying to a truth which the world as yet had not grasped, but which it would one day treasure as a most precious inheritance."
Throughout the British Isles, millions of people waited tensely for news of the great attack. "The hospital received orders to clear out all convalescents and prepare for a great rush of wounded," remembered the writer Vera Brittain, working as a nurse's aide in London. "We knew that already a tremendous bombardment had begun, for we could feel the vibration of the guns.... Hour after hour, as the convalescents departed, we added to the long rows of waiting beds, so sinister in their white, expectant emptiness."
Haig waited anxiously in his forward headquarters at the Château de Beauquesne, ten miles from the battlefield. As dawn came on July 1, a Royal Flying Corps observer found himself looking down on a fog-bank that covered part of the front, on which "one could see ripples ... from the terrific bombardment that was taking place below. It looked like a large lake of mist, with thousands of stones being thrown into it." Then, after five days of nonstop explosions, the British barrage abruptly ceased, and silence settled over the battlefield.
When whistles blew at 7:30 A.M., the successive waves of troops began their planned 100-yards-a-minute advance. Each man moved slowly under more than 60 pounds of supp
lies—200 bullets, grenades, shovel, two days' food and water, and more. But when those soldiers actually clambered up the trench ladders and over the parapet, they discovered something appalling. The multiple belts of barbed wire in front of the German trenches and the well-fortified machine-gun emplacements dotted among them were largely intact.
Officers looking through binocular periscopes had already suspected as much, and a handful of German deserters who made it through the barrage to the British lines reported the same. Plans for any attack, however, have tremendous momentum; rare is the commander willing to recognize that something is catastrophically awry. To call off an offensive requires bravery, for the general who does so risks being thought a coward. Haig was not such a man. The whistles blew, men cheered, Captain Nevill's company of East Surreys kicked off its four soccer balls. The soldiers hoped against hope to stay alive—and sometimes for something more: troops of the 1st Newfoundland Regiment knew that a prominent young society woman back home had promised to marry the first man in the regiment to win a Victoria Cross.
The bombardment, it turned out, had been impressive mainly for its tremendous noise. More than one out of four British shells were duds that buried themselves in the earth, exploding, if at all, only when struck by some unlucky French farmer's harrow years or decades later. Two-thirds of the shells fired were shrapnel, virtually useless in destroying machine-gun emplacements built of concrete, steel, or stone appropriated from nearby houses. Nor could shrapnel shells, which scattered light steel balls, destroy the dense thickets of German barbed wire unless they burst at just the right height above the ground. But their fuses were wildly unreliable, and often they exploded only after they had plummeted into the earth, destroying little and embedding so much metal in the ground that soldiers trying to navigate through darkness or smoke sometimes found their compasses had ceased to work.
The remaining British shells were high-explosive ones, which could indeed destroy a German machine-gun post, but only if it was hit with pinpoint accuracy. When guns were firing from several miles away, this was almost impossible. The many photographs from the Western Front of geysers of earth lifted skyward by a shellburst are usually evidence that the shell rammed itself into muddy ground and spent its energy pointlessly blowing dirt into the air. German machine-gun teams were waiting out the bombardment as much as 40 feet below the surface in their dugouts, supplied with electricity, water, and ventilation. For them, being underground for nearly a week, largely sleepless and at times in gas masks, had been grossly unpleasant but seldom fatal. In one of the few places where British troops did reach the German front line on July i, they found the electric light in a dugout still on. And when, after tens of thousands of British deaths, more of the German front-line trench had finally been captured, a soldier reported, "I did not come across a single dugout which had been broken into from the roof by our artillery fire."
Unaccountably, an underground mine exploded beneath the German lines ten minutes before zero hour, a clear signal that the attack was soon to begin. Then, like a final warning, the remaining mines went off at 7:28 A.M., followed by a two-minute wait to allow the debris—blown thousands of feet into the air—to fall back to earth before British troops climbed out of their trenches to advance. Those two minutes gave German machine-gunners time to run up the ladders and stairways from their dugouts and man their fortified posts, of which there were roughly a thousand on the sector of the line under attack. Ominously, during the two minutes, the British could hear bugles summoning the gunners to their positions.
Even before the British left their trenches, some machine guns had begun firing, streams of German bullets knocking bits of dirt and grass into the air as they grazed the tops of the British parapets, a horrifying warning that the five-day artillery barrage had been for naught. Elsewhere the Germans held their fire as the British moved forward. With some exceptions, the attacking units had been ordered to walk, not run. "They came on at a steady easy pace as if expecting to find nothing alive in our front trenches," recalled a German soldier facing them. "...When the leading British line was within 100 yards, the rattle of [German] machine guns and rifle fire broke out from along the whole line.... Red rockets sped up into the blue sky as a signal to the artillery, and immediately afterwards a mass of shells from the German batteries in [the] rear tore through the air and burst among the advancing lines." The Germans, like the British, had plenty of artillery pieces; these were under camouflage netting and had not been used during the weeks leading up to the attack, so as not to reveal their positions to British aircraft. Now they fired their deadly shrapnel shells, whose effects the Germans could see: "All along the line men could be seen throwing their arms into the air and collapsing never to move again. Badly wounded rolled about in their agony ... with ... cries for help and the last screams of death."
The Germans were just as much prisoners of traditional ideas of military glory as their opponents, and this account of the first day's slaughter, like so many British descriptions, ends by noting not the suicidal nature of the attack, but the soldiers' bravery. "It was an amazing spectacle of unexampled gallantry, courage and bull-dog determination on both sides."
Plans for the orderly march forward in line abreast were quickly abandoned as men separated into small groups and sought the shelter of hillocks and shell holes. But there was no question of the hard-hit British troops' turning back, for each battalion had men designated as "battle police," herding any stragglers forward. "When we got to the German wire I was absolutely amazed to see it intact, after what we had been told," remembered one British private. "The colonel and I took cover behind a small bank but after a bit the colonel raised himself on his hands and knees to see better. Immediately he was hit on the forehead by a single bullet." Because artillery had destroyed so little barbed wire, British soldiers had to bunch up to get through the few gaps they could find—making the battlefield even more of a shooting gallery. Many soldiers died when their clothing, especially the loose kilts of the Scotsmen, caught on the wire and pinned them in positions exposed to fire. "Only three out of our company got past there," recalled a private of the 4th Tyneside Scottish Battalion. "There was my lieutenant, a sergeant and myself. The rest seemed to have been hit in no-man's-land.... The officer said, 'God, God, where's the rest of the boys?"'
The vaunted "creeping barrage," which was supposed to force German machine-gunners and snipers to keep their heads down, accomplished little. It crept forward according to the prearranged timetable—and then continued to creep off uselessly into the far distance long after British troops who were supposed to be following it had been pinned down by the tangles of uncut wire. The troops had no way to tell their artillery in the rear to change the plan. The cavalry waited behind the British lines, but in vain. Those who survived in no man's land sometimes waited until after dark to crawl back to their own trenches, but even then the continual traversing of German machine-gun fire sent up showers of sparks as bullets hit the British barbed wire.
Of the 120,000 British troops who went into battle on July 1, 1916, more than 57,000 were dead or wounded before the day was over—nearly two casualties for every yard of the front. Nineteen thousand were killed, most of them within the attack's first disastrous hour, and some 2,000 more who were badly wounded would die in hospitals later. There were an estimated 8,000 German casualties. As usual, the toll was heaviest among the officers, three-quarters of whom were killed or wounded. These included many who had attended the Old Etonian dinner a few weeks before: more than 30 Etonians lost their lives on July 1. Captain Nevill of the East Surreys, who had distributed the soccer balls, was fatally shot through the head in the first few minutes of combat.
The 1st Newfoundland Regiment, awaiting its Victoria Cross winner and the young woman who had promised herself as his reward, was virtually wiped out. The regiment's 752 men climbed out of their trenches to advance toward the skeletal ruins of an apple orchard covered by German machine-gun fire; by the day's end 684
were dead, wounded, or missing, including every officer. The German troops the Newfoundlanders attacked did not suffer a single casualty. Only in the far south of the attack area, on three miles of front, did the British advance a significant distance—roughly one mile. It was the bloodiest 24 hours any army suffered in this war.
Attacking soldiers had been ordered not to tend injured comrades but to leave them for stretcher bearers who would follow. The dead and wounded, however, included hundreds of stretcher bearers themselves, and there were nowhere near enough men to carry the critically injured to first-aid posts in time. Stretchers ran out; some wounded were carried off two to a stretcher or on sheets of corrugated iron whose edges ravaged the bearers' fingers. Many wounded who lived through the first day never made it off the battlefield. For weeks afterward their fellow soldiers came upon them in shell holes, where they had crawled for shelter, taken out their Bibles, and wrapped themselves in their waterproof ground sheets to die, in pain and alone.
In other ways, too, the terrible day took its toll after the fact. One battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel E.T.F. Sandys, having seen more than 500 of his men killed or wounded during that day, shot himself in a London hotel room two months later, after writing to a fellow officer, "I have never had a moment's peace since July 1st."
To End All Wars Page 25