British and imperial success was not matched by the French to the south. They attacked with four corps but failed to make a significant advance. And although the British and imperial forces had done well, they had nowhere achieved all their objectives. The Official History concluded that the German Army ‘had been dealt a severe blow’ and had suffered ‘heavy casualties’, but that on the Fourth Army front ‘the results fell far short of the desired achievement’ and there was ‘no question of a break-through’.35
Ten days later, the infantry in Rawlinson’s army were ordered over the top once again. This time the intense artillery barrage proved a success and the German positions under assault were weaker than those attacked earlier in the month. Morval and Lesboeufs were captured on 25 September; Combles on 26 September. That same day, Gough’s army attacked further north and achieved some notable successes. General Ivor Maxse’s 18th (Eastern) Division at last took Thiepval, the focus of so much bloodshed on 1 July. Two days later, the same division seized the Schwaben Redoubt, which had been temporarily occupied by the Ulstermen on the first day of the Somme battle. Unfortunately the momentum could not be maintained and during October little new ground was taken, although German counter-attacks were repelled with heavy losses.
The pressure on the German lines was intense and had been continuous for several weeks. A diary captured by the New Zealanders on 27 September contained the following incomplete final entry: ‘No relief. Feeling of hopelessness, apathetic, everyone sleeps under heaviest fire – due to exhaustion. No rations, no drink. The whole day heavy fire on the left. We got heavy and HE shells. Everything all the same to us. The best thing would be for the British to come. No one worries about us; our relief said to be cancelled. If one wants sleep aeroplanes will not let us rest. In the present conditions, one no longer thinks. Iron rations, bread, biscuit, all eaten …’36
By now the rains of autumn had arrived in earnest. Vast areas of the fighting front became seas of mud, rendering movement of supplies, ammunition, guns and tanks almost impossible. The New Zealanders found twenty horses were needed to haul a single artillery piece. The men in the trenches had to cope with increasingly appalling conditions, sinking up to their knees into several feet of wet, slimy mud. Exhausted stretcher bearers struggled to bring in the wounded. When an Australian brigadier was wounded it took four bearers ten hours to carry him even to the advanced dressing station.
But despite this, the Allies had learned lessons from the weeks of continuous fighting. The artillery had now mastered the art of the creeping barrage, moving the line of shell fire forward in proper coordination with the infantry, who might be only fifty yards behind. During October such tactics almost always proved successful. But slowly the number of assaults were reduced in the face of the weather. In early November, the French scaled their operations right back. There was, however, one last blow Haig wanted to strike.
Allied commanders were due to meet at the French headquarters at Chantilly in mid-November. Haig wanted the British to be able to announce a success at this summit. So Gough’s Fifth Army launched a final offensive in the north along the Ancre river, a tributary of the Somme. The attack was directed against many of the objectives that had been assaulted unsuccessfully on 1 July. Little fighting had taken place in the area since then, so the ground was less heavily cratered than elsewhere, and it was less far to bring supplies. The 51st (Highland) Division finally succeeded in capturing Beaumont-Hamel on 13 November, while the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division, a mixture of marines and conventional army recruits, took Beaucourt. However, Serre, the little village further north, proved impossible to capture. These actions, later described as the Battle of the Ancre Heights, cost Fifth Army 23,274 men killed, wounded and missing, although German losses were estimated to be even greater.37
On the night of 17 November, the first snow of winter fell along the Somme front. In the final assault, which took place on the following morning, the rested and re-formed 11th Borders made their return to front-line combat. With new officers in command and the battalion augmented by hundreds of new recruits, the Lonsdales lined up once again with the other battalions of the 97th Brigade alongside whom they had fought at the beginning of July. They assembled overnight and in dreadful conditions went over the top again, with heavy sleet driving at them all the while. The battalion war diary proudly recorded that they ‘advanced in perfect order to attack. The spirit of the men being a fine sight to see in spite of the intense cold in which they had to lie and wait.’38 They stormed a German line called Frankfort Trench, just south of Grandcourt, no more than three miles from where Colonel Machell and the battalion had been cut down on the first day of the battle. The 11th Borders seized the trench but after a protracted struggle had to withdraw. This was the furthest point reached by British troops on this section of the front.
Ironically, with the capture of Beaumont-Hamel and the return of the 11th Borders, the Battle of the Somme in the north ended where it had begun. Further south, however, where the assault had been more successful from day one, the Allies had advanced about seven miles into enemy territory. The weather finally brought close of play to a battle that had lasted for four and a half months. But the weather had not brought an end to Haig’s resolution to keep up pressure on the enemy. He was determined to sustain the war of attrition. The commander-in-chief sent orders to Rawlinson at Fourth Army and Gough commanding Fifth Army to ‘continue offensive operations to a limited extent as far as resources and weather permitted’.39 He wanted to harass the enemy throughout the winter by every means possible.
The popular view of the Battle of the Somme is that it was a ghastly failure and a futile tragedy. For half a century the prevailing view was one of disastrous losses, incompetent generals, brave soldiers struggling in appalling conditions and the failure to effectively utilise new technology like that of the tank. Winston Churchill summed up this view in his grand history of the war, The World Crisis, when he described British troops as ‘Martyrs not less than soldiers’. He went on: ‘They fulfilled the high purpose of duty with which they were imbued. The battlefields of the Somme were the graveyards of Kitchener’s Army. The flower of that generous manhood which quitted peaceful civilian life in every kind of workaday occupation, which came at the call of Britain … was shorn away for ever in 1916.’40
More recently a different view has emerged, one that emphasises the importance of the battle for the British army in learning the tactics that would be needed to win the war two years later. Those arguing this view make the case that while casualties were always going to be high in an industrial war of attrition, the Somme was a battle that had to be fought somewhere at some time. The British armies had displayed courage and moral determination in fighting on. While it is difficult to class the Somme as a ‘victory’, it was certainly not in military terms a defeat.41 This argument concludes that the real loser on the Somme was the German army, which suffered somewhere between half a million and 600,000 casualties, including many of its best trained and most experienced NCOs and junior officers.42 Captain von Hentig of the Guards Reserve Division described the Somme as ‘the muddy grave of the German army’. Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria concluded that ‘What remained of the old first-class peace-trained German infantry had been expended on the battlefield.’43 And certainly the authorities in Berlin reached the view that the war could not be won on the Western Front and so made a decision to resort to unrestricted U-boat warfare in the Atlantic to try to starve the Allies into submission. This strategy resulted in the entry of America into the war and began the process that led to the ultimate defeat of the German army on the battlefield in November 1918. In this sense, it can certainly be said that the Somme was a pivotal battle in the war.
The Australian divisions that had fought so intently at Pozières in August were brought back into the battle in November. With them came Charles Bean, who trudged up from Albert, visited Delville Wood and Longueval, took another look at what was left of Pozières and
finally reached the Australian trenches. Here the liquid mud came up to his knees and every step required a gigantic physical effort. On 5 November, the Anzac Corps launched an assault near Guedecourt. The line was pushed forward a few yards here and there but fighting had become almost impossible. Bean later claimed these were the worst conditions ever faced by Australian troops in the First World War.44
It was in August, while sheltering in a dugout in Pozières as the shells whistled down, that Bean had reflected how words were not enough to pay tribute to the sacrifices he was witnessing. He decided to collect as many photographs and as much cinema film as he could recording the work of the Australian Imperial Forces. He also started to gather letters, diaries, maps and war records relating to the Australian troops, along with what he increasingly saw as the ‘sacred relics’ of Australian sacrifice and heroism.45 Coming up with the idea of a ‘Museum of War Relics’, he pitched it to General Sir William Birdwood, commander of the Anzac Corps, who enthusiastically recommended it to the Australian government back home. The result of Bean’s reflections was the establishment of the Australian War Memorial, which would eventually be built as an archive and museum in that nation’s capital, Canberra. Similar concerns and interests in Britain led the War Cabinet in March 1917 to establish what would become the Imperial War Museum in London.46 These museums and many others would still be making records available and providing a memorial to the ‘war to end all wars’ one hundred years later.
But even as the Battle of the Somme came to its muddy end in the snow and sleet of winter, the military reaction to the epidemic of shell shock was still playing itself out. Some unlucky victims of war trauma were accused of cowardice or desertion and found they had to face another, even more brutal, military response.
9
Rough Justice
Charles Samuel Myers grappled for some time with trying to understand what was happening to men’s minds in the course of nervous breakdowns brought on by the trauma of war. As he struggled with the military authorities to make them realise that shell shock was first, not a sign of weakness, and second, could be treated and cured, he also opposed the view that shell shock victims were mostly shirkers seeking to get out of their military duties, to desert. Even though Myers had been admitted into the military hierarchy as Consulting Psychologist after the start of the Somme offensive in 1916 he still felt like an outsider in the army establishment. He summed up the attitude he had to contend with when he wrote that ‘from a military standpoint, a deserter was either “insane” and destined for the “mad house” or responsible and should be shot.’1 The nervous diseases brought on by the war made this simple distinction far more complex and difficult to manage. But it did mean that the military would always see mental illness in relationship to the whole issue of discipline and the systems created to enforce it.
The purpose of military law was to ensure that discipline was maintained and orders were obeyed under the often extreme pressures of the battlefield. And of course picking out men and punishing them was intended to set an example for all the other members of a unit – pour encourager les autres, as the French aptly put it. Military law derives its legitimacy from the British Army Act, renewed annually as part of the process of approving the costs of the army in Parliament. Army Field Regulations established different ways of trying offenders, all of which had set procedures that the prosecutors were required to follow. Relatively simple matters of indiscipline could be handled by a man’s commanding officer, usually a company commander, a captain, or a more senior officer. These would include acts of drunkenness, refusing to obey an order, using obscene language to an NCO and minor theft. The officer would collect evidence and had authority to issue a range of punishments, including stopping a man’s pay for up to twenty-eight days, fining him up to ten shillings or detaining him in the guard house for a short period of time. As a young subaltern, Robert Graves remembered spending several hours every day adjudicating on these minor offences when his battalion were training in England.2
More serious crimes were subject to fixed Field Punishments. Field Punishment No. 1 involved tying a man to an object, sometimes a post but more often a wheel on which the culprit was spreadeagled, a practice known by the men as ‘crucifixion’. This could continue for two hours a day, for up to twenty-one days – although never on more than three consecutive days. Carried out in a public place, usually near the entrance to a man’s barracks or camp, it was a barbaric way of treating a convicted soldier, dating back to the days when soldiers were regarded as ‘scum’ who needed brutal treatment to keep them in line. During the course of the First World War, most came to see this type of punishment as totally distasteful in a citizen army made up initially of volunteers and later of conscripts.
For more serious misdemeanours on the battlefield there were various levels of military tribunals, or courts martial. The Regimental Court Martial dealt with minor offences of negligence, absence without leave or more serious acts of drunk and disorderly behaviour. It could impose custodial sentences of up to forty-two days. Next up the ladder was the District Court Martial, which could issue punishments to NCOs that included demoting them to a lower grade or sending them ‘back to the ranks’. For serious offences it could impose a custodial sentence of up to two years.
At the top of the military legal hierarchy were the General Courts Martial and the Field General Courts Martial. The General Court Martial was the highest form of military court but it was rarely called in wartime. A judge advocate presided over it, supported by up to thirteen officers. The Field General Court Martial was easier to use, requiring only three officers to act as judges, the most junior of whom had to be at least a captain. It was this form of court that was usually set up in France or in other theatres of war, relatively near to the front where an offence had occurred. The two senior courts martial had the power to impose the death penalty for a series of crimes that included desertion, sleeping at post on duty, cowardice, disobedience and murder. For a death sentence to be passed all three officers had to reach a unanimous decision.
There was no appeal, in the usual sense, to the decision of a court martial. The guilty verdict, however, was passed up the chain of command, sometimes with a recommendation for mercy, and a man’s brigadier, divisional and corps commander could add comments. In practice these senior officers rarely knew the men individually, so any comments they made usually related to the general level of morale in the battalion of the man found guilty. Finally, the verdict with any recommendations reached the desk of the commander-in-chief – in France until December 1915 this was Sir John French, Sir Douglas Haig replacing him thereafter. The commander-in-chief had then to make a decision as to whether the death sentence should be applied or leniency shown; in the latter case the man would usually have his sentence commuted to one of penal servitude, often with hard labour. French and his successor Haig literally had the power of life and death over condemned men.
During the war years, British military courts sentenced 3,342 individuals to death. The vast majority of these sentences, about 90 per cent, were commuted. But 438 people were executed. These figures include nearly one hundred civilians who were sentenced during periods of martial law, such as ninety-three Irishmen convicted of rebellion after the Easter Rising of April 1916, and various individuals convicted of spying and espionage under the Defence of the Realm Act in Britain. The total number of soldiers in the British and imperial armies who were executed amounted to 343, out of 3,077 sentenced to death.3 Most of them were shot by firing squad, usually at dawn. The firing squads were sometimes made up of men from the same battalion as the convicted man, although during the war it was decided this was not the best way to conduct an execution and firing squads were appointed from other units. Executions were not carried out in public, but it was required under Field Regulations that the battalion of a man sentenced to death should be called on parade and news of the execution read out to the whole unit – pour encourager les autres, again.
>
The system appears today to be horribly brutal, although of course capital punishment applied in the criminal courts of Britain as well at the time. For instance, 106 soldiers were convicted of murder, which was subject to a mandatory death sentence in both civilian and military courts. The real problem with military courts martial was that the officer-judges could be very inconsistent in their judgements. For instance, prior to every trial the accused soldier could be offered the assistance of an officer to act as ‘the Prisoner’s Friend’. This was often his platoon commander, who effectively acted as the defending counsel of the accused, although rarely did these officers have any legal training. But at the beginning of the war it was not a requirement for the accused to accept assistance. In several cases, men chose to defend themselves. Others, from the evidence, were clearly overwhelmed by the situation. An ill-educated, working-class soldier faced with his senior officers, individuals whom he was trained to think of as his ‘superiors’, acting as both prosecutors and judges, could find the whole process utterly intimidating. Courts martial would also look very badly on an accused soldier who had any previous convictions on his record. Furthermore, a hostile remark or damning comment from a witness or from the man’s commanding officer could often sway the verdict.
Breakdown Page 23