by Wade Davis
On the afternoon of June 30, General Haig cut a fine figure, escorted by his Lancers—horses groomed, saddles and tack waxed to a perfect sheen—as he led them at a quick trot between the avenue of soaring plane trees that ran away from his château headquarters at Montreuil. With everything in place, there was no need to break his daily routine, and his afternoon constitutional was one of the highlights of his day. Riding a favorite horse with his polished staff at his side, not a button or buckle amiss, allowed him to maintain the illusion that the world was still a place of gentlemen and order, and that war as an exercise had not lost its luster or glory. In four years at the head of the largest army the British Empire had ever placed in the field, a force that would suffer 2,568,834 casualties in France and Belgium alone, Haig never once saw the front; nor did he visit the wounded. Long after the war Haig’s son attempted an explanation: “The suffering of his men during the Great War caused him great anguish. I believe that he felt that it was his duty to refrain from visiting the casualty clearing stations because these visits made him physically ill.”
On the eve of the Somme, Haig was convinced that Providence held the key to the battle and that God walked at his side. “I feel every step of the plan,” he confided to his wife, “has been taken with Divine help. The men are in splendid spirits … The wire has never been so well cut, nor the artillery preparation so thorough.” The morale after months of training and expectation was indeed high among the British troops. But the wire most assuredly had not been well cut. Indeed, for twenty-seven miles, the length of the immediate German front, it had hardly been cut at all.
In the final hour before the attack, over a quarter million shells fell on the German line. Then came silence—of a sort and only for an instant. A hollow, stunned moment, as if the ground itself had been given a reprieve. Time stood suspended. The British troops crowded at the base of the scaling ladders could hear the plaintive moaning of the wounded in what remained of the enemy trench, the buzzing of great swarms of flies, the high-pitched screaming of rats, even the sublime singing of birds, larks and mourning doves on this misty day, which the poet-warrior Siegfried Sassoon would later describe as “of the kind commonly called heavenly.” Ashen faces, watches synchronized, a tot of navy rum, a last letter to a loved one pegged to the trench with a knife, a muted prayer and a glance at a mate, a half smile certain to be one’s last. The smell in the trench was of fear, and of sweat, blood, vomit, excrement, cordite, and the putrescence of cadavers. At precisely 7:30 a.m. shrill, piercing whistles signaled the attack. Eighty-four battalions, 66,000 men jammed as a single throng in trenches along a fourteen-mile front, struggled to climb out onto the field of battle. At the same moment, from the depths of dugouts of a scale and complexity unknown and unimaginable to the British, the survivors of six German frontline divisions raced to the sunlight. In the minute it took them to reach the parapet, the battle was decided.
The Germans, of course, had known that the assault was coming. For weeks their agents in London had heard open talk of the Big Push. The buildup behind the Somme front, the construction of hundreds of miles of track and road and communication trenches, the accumulation of millions of shells, the increased traffic in the air and on land, the concentration of some two thousand guns and the tens of thousands of men of General Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army had been impossible to conceal. The bombardment heralded the assault, which the Germans knew would end precisely before the men went over the top. Haig always attacked at 7:30 in the morning following the cessation of a cannonade. Anything cleverer, such as suspending the guns just long enough to fool the Germans into reoccupying their trenches so that they might be killed in a final bombardment, was beyond the reach of his imagination. What’s more, Rawlinson’s message at 2:45 a.m. to the 34th Division had been picked up by the Germans. They knew the attack was on, and they knew the time to the minute.
What astonished them were the British tactics. Karl Blenk, a German machine gunner of the 169th Regiment, wrote; “When the English started advancing we were very worried; they looked as though they must overrun our trenches. We were very surprised to see them walking, we had never seen that before. I could see them everywhere; there were hundreds. The officers were in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. You didn’t have to aim. We just fired into them. If only they had run they would have overwhelmed us.”
Siegfried Sassoon was a witness to the advance, as the men went over the top, formed up, and then, shoulder to shoulder, burdened by in some cases a hundred pounds of gear, with bayonets fixed, leaned forward to walk into a storm of lead. At 7:45 he saw in a reserve trench men cheering their mates onward as if watching a football match. Two hours later, he wrote, “The birds seem bewildered; a lark begins to go up and then flies feebly along, thinking better of it. Others flutter above the trench with querulous cries, weak on the wing.” At 10:05, he noted, “I am staring at a sunlit picture of Hell, and still the breeze shakes the yellow weeds, and the poppies glow under Crawley Ridge where some shells fell a few minutes ago.” At 2:30 that afternoon: “I could see one man moving his arms up and down as he lay on his side; his face was a crimson patch.”
Of the battalions in the first wave, twenty were utterly destroyed in no-man’s-land. Within the first hour, perhaps the first minutes, there were more than 30,000 dead and wounded. By the end of the day, there was not a British soldier alive within the German wire. Not a village had been taken, nor a single major objective achieved. Machine guns cut the men down like scythes slicing through grass. Those few who reached the German front line were incinerated with flamethrowers, blown up by bombs, or riddled with bullets and left condemned to hang on the wire “like crows shot on a dyke,” until their flesh fell from their bones.
It was the biggest disaster in the history of British arms. The army lacked the “clerk power,” it was said, even to record the names of the dead, 19,240 altogether, which in time would fill 212 pages of a log. Of the wounded there were more than 35,000, a figure that would double by the end of the third day of a battle that would rage for four months. Regiments up and down the line suffered casualty rates of 75 percent. By the end of the morning of July 1, 1916, Kitchener’s New Army was no more. Its soldiers lay in rows, their tunics red with blood. “We were two years in the making,” wrote Private A. V. Pearson of the Leeds Pals, “and ten minutes in the destroying.”
BEHIND THE LINES at the casualty clearing stations, medical officers such as Howard Somervell and Arthur Wakefield waited for the deluge. July 1 was the only day of the war that Wakefield neglected his diary. Writing on July 2, he recalled the hours of anticipation: “We felt there was something in the air, everything seemed to be alive with an electrified undercurrent of excitement. We knew that only a few miles away men were killing and being killed in thousands and possibly the ultimate history of the war and the Empire was being decided, though we could hear and see nothing.”
The first trainloads of wounded arrived about 2:30 p.m., and kept coming until more than 2,000 wounded and dying men surrounded the medical marquees. “It was very hard to ignore their cries for help,” wrote a medical orderly, “but we had to concentrate on those who might live.”
“I was dressing as hard as I could go,” wrote Wakefield, “only stopping two or three minutes to gulp some food down … We never got through. They seemed an endless stream … New convoys came about 9:30 [p.m.] and I dressed them until 2:30, then, as more MOs and orderlies had arrived, we changed shifts. It was after 3 a.m. when I turned in. Called about 4 for a new crush and by 5:30 all was clear and I turned in again and slept till 10:30 a.m. Wind variable, light, warm, sunny. Very cold at night.”
At the 34th Casualty Clearing Station, at Vecquemont, Somervell had been told to expect no more than a thousand casualties on the first day of the battle. Instead, he and one other surgeon found themselves surrounded by a charnel ground of suff
ering, hundreds upon hundreds of limp figures bandaged in blood, boys and men, white, cold, and still:
Never in the whole war did we see such a terrible sight. Streams of motor ambulances a mile long waited to be unloaded … The wounded had to lie not merely in our tents and shelters and in the adjacent farm buildings, but the whole area of the camp, a field of five or six acres, was completely covered in stretchers placed side by side, each with its suffering or dying man on it. Orderlies went about giving drinks and food, and dressing wounds where possible. We surgeons were hard at it in the operating theatre, a good hut, holding four tables. Occasionally we made a brief look around to select from the thousands of patients those few fortunate ones whose lives or limbs we had time to save. It was a terrible business. Even now I am haunted by the touching look of the young, bright anxious eyes, as we passed along the rows of sufferers.
Hardly ever did any of them say a word, except to ask for water or relief from pain. I don’t remember any single man who even suggested that we should save him and not the fellow next to him. Silently beseeching they lay, as we rapidly surveyed them to see who was most worthwhile saving. Abdominal cases and others requiring long operations simply had to be left to die. Saving of life by amputation, which can be done in a few minutes, or saving of limbs by the wide opening of wounds, had to be thought of first. There, all around us, lying maimed and battered and dying, was the flower of Britain’s youth—a terrible sight if ever there was one.
Throughout the night, as the guns flashed and sheets of yellow light illuminated the glare, Somervell and his colleagues toiled, their arms and frocks drenched in the blood of the 12,000 wounded who reached the fields of Vecquemont that day. On the first day of the Somme, the Fourth Army alone suffered 32,000 men wounded. The total capacity of all medical facilities behind the front was only 9,500. And so the bodies arrived, some standing, some on stretchers, others in carts or perched on sheets of corrugated tin, carried by the lightly wounded. The injured and dying lay on the ground—like cordwood, as one soldier remembered—left to their fate, stifling their agony, open wounds untended, hoping that it would not rain.
FROM WAKEFIELD’S DIARY it appears that the full extent of the catastrophe took weeks to register. The London newspapers, which reached the front within a day, simply echoed official military bulletins, which had little connection to reality. “Sir Douglas Haig telephoned last night,” the Times noted on July 3, “to report that the general situation was favourable … Everything has gone well … effective progress, nay substantial progress … We got our first thrust well home, and there is every reason to be sanguine as to the result … Our troops have successfully carried out their missions, all counter-attacks have been repulsed and large numbers of prisoners taken.” Enhancing the tenor of the lie, the Observer stated, “The New Armies, fighting with a valour and fibre never surpassed by any people, have excelled our best hopes.”
The Daily Mail was one of many papers to personify the dead in florid language, as if mendacious rhetoric might resurrect their lives. “The very attitudes of the dead,” it claimed, “fallen eagerly forwards, have a look of expectant hope. You would say that they died with the light of expectant victory in their eyes.” On July 4 the Times declared the battle a complete success, noting that the wounded were “extraordinarily cheery and brave.” Most wounds were slight, the report noted, and the proportion of permanent disablements very small. Artillery fire had been highly effective, the account continued, though “there were places where individual bits of trench and stretches of the protecting barbed wire had miraculously escaped. Some of the latter caused our attacking infantry considerable losses.”
Evidence of these losses lay all around Arthur Wakefield at the 29th Casualty Clearing Station. Yet as he walked through the fields of wounded, deciding who might live and who was destined to die, not a boy or a man spoke with the lilt he knew so well. None wore blue puttees, unique to the Newfoundland Regiment, and not a single soldier’s cap bore its insignia, the head of a caribou wreathed in gold. It was as if the regiment had simply vanished.
Not until July 6, nearly a week after the battle began, did he first hear an eyewitness account of the fate of even one of his Newfoundlanders. In a heavy rain, wearing his mackintosh and gum boots, he had walked to Doullens, desperately seeking information. “The cinema show was on 6–8,” he wrote that night, “but I did not go. Lt. Baillie came in, told about Capt. Duff’s death and the cutting up of his Battalion. Duff was leading the charge, was wounded in the arm as soon as he got over the parapet but got up and went on. Was wounded again in the chest, but picked himself up and went on again. He reached the Boche trench with only a very few of his men. He had previously loaded himself with bombs, and with these bombs he killed 30 Huns, before his head was blown off by a shell. Wind SW, light, fair a.m., shower 5:30, then dull but fair.”
Two days later Wakefield encountered in his ward another friend from home, an officer named Summers, mute and catatonic with shell shock. He then treated two victims of gas gangrene, and recognized one as a lad named Gandiner, also from the regiment. “I had a long yarn with him and wrote a letter for him. Then went for a short walk and had a bath before mess. Wind N, light, fine, sunny and warm.” It was not until July 21, as evident in his diary, that Wakefield learned the full truth about what had happened to his beloved Newfoundland Regiment on the first day of the Somme. It was this story that broke his spirit and maddened him with a rage that would haunt him for the rest of his life. It led to his retreat after the war to the forests of Canada, his desperate yet forlorn efforts on Everest in 1922, and his agonized cries from the summit of Great Gable on the very day that George Mallory and Sandy Irvine walked to their doom on Everest. He had brought into the world each of the dead of Beaumont-Hamel.
ON THE MORNING of the Somme attack, the Newfoundland Regiment was attached to the British 29th Division, one of four divisions that made up VIII Corps, scheduled to assault the German lines on a three-mile front at the extreme northern end of the battlefield. Anchoring the center of the German defenses was a fortress at Beaumont-Hamel, which commanded the valley across which the British attack would be launched. No-man’s-land here varied in width from two hundred yards in the north to five hundred at the southern end of the assault, and all of it was open and bare, completely exposed. The battlefield, in fact, was in the shape of an amphitheater, with high ground flanking the fort on both sides. In these heights the Germans had had two years to build dugouts, establish bunkers, and position machine gun nests that dominated every inch of the field. Due to the lay of the land, the British fought partially blind, unable even to observe sections of the German front to ascertain the extent of the damage from the preliminary bombardment.
In the weeks before the battle, English sappers had tunneled to within thirty yards of the German front line. At 2:00 a.m. on July 1, these saps were unveiled as emplacements for Stokes mortars. The Royal Engineers had also planted forty thousand pounds of ammonal explosives directly beneath the German line at the crest of Hawthorn Redoubt, immediately opposite Beaumont village, which dominated the head of the valley. Rather than detonating this mine either well in advance or at the precise moment of attack, the British General Staff insisted on blowing it up at precisely 7:20 a.m., a timetable perfectly conceived to alert the Germans of the coming assault.
A German regimental account recorded: “The ground all round was white with the debris of chalk as if it had been snowing, and a gigantic crater, over fifty yards in diameter gaped like an open wound in the side of the hill. This explosion was a signal for the infantry attack, and everybody got ready and stood on the lower steps of the dugouts, rifles in hand, waiting for the bombardment to lift. In a few minutes the shelling ceased, and we rushed up the steps and out into the crater positions. Ahead of us wave after wave of British troops were crawling out of their trenches, and coming forward towards us at a walk, their bayonets glistening in the sun.”
The mine blast lifted dirt four t
housand feet in the air. The German guns responded. Sixty-six artillery batteries, undetected and undamaged, laid down a withering fire on the British infantry massed in the trenches, ready to attack. The lanes cut through the British wire for the assaulting troops were too few and too narrow. German machine guns ranged across each gap, butchering the men as they emerged from the trench, until the passage through the wire became so choked with their own dead that the following troops had to clamber over mounds of the corpses simply to reach no-man’s-land. Physical movement along the trench became impossible. Men writhing with wounds, whimpering and crying like children. Headless torsos, faces on fire, blood shooting out of helmets in three-foot streams, bodies cleft like the quartered carcasses in a butcher’s shop, splinters of steel in brains, shattered backbones and spinal cords worming and flapping about in the mud.
In the noise and chaos and horror of the battle, all communications collapsed. A false report of a glorious victory resulted in even more men being fed to the slaughter. At 9:15 a.m. the Newfoundland Regiment was ordered to advance. Its right flank hung in the air because the 1st Battalion, Essex Regiment, the next unit in line, had been delayed reaching the starting point by the sheer volume of dead. Shells landed on corpses, and flying fragments of flesh and bone blinded the living. Men enveloped in flames went mad and fought each other as they died. The soldiers of Wakefield’s beloved Newfoundland Regiment barely got out of their own trench, and when they did they floundered and died at their own parapet, their ranks swept by German machine gun fire. Those few who advanced slowed and faltered, burdened by their loads, leaning and bowing into the storm as if to limit their exposure to the lead. The British artillery barrage, timed to the second, had long since moved ahead and away from the immediate battlefield. Men dropped dead at every yard, and still the regiment pressed on. A few miraculously reached the German line only to be shot down in the mud or skewered on the wire, which was not cut. Indeed, the last thought of many of these brave men, breathless with exhaustion, blood-whipped and deranged with fear, was the horrid realization that the German line was utterly unscathed. Nothing had been damaged at all. The preliminary bombardment had missed. In fury they spun into the wire, tossing grenades, their screams baffled by the throaty gurgle men sound when hit in the brain.