It was a soaking thaw after frost, and the roads, such roads as remained, were over ankle deep in mud, and our muddy army got up from the mud and went forward through it.
All the roads leading to the front were thronged by our army, battalion on battalion, division on division, guns and transport columns, camp kitchens, and artillery transport, going up in the mud after the enemy.
You could see them bringing the railway forward under fire, under heavy fire, along the Ancre Valley. They made the railway and the road side by side, with shells falling on them and the stink of gas blowing over them. And not a man died there, but died in exultation, knowing that over his death the army was passing to victory.
Today, as you know, the greatest battle of this war is being fought on that ground. And so far, as you know, our men have been hard-pressed and driven back.
It is not easy to stand here, while there, over the sea, those men are standing in the mud, waiting for death to come to them.
It is no light thing to face death in a modern battle, to have been living in the mud, on scanty food, with no rest, in all the terror and filth, among the blood, the rags of flesh, the half buried bodies half eaten with rats, the crashing and screaming of shells, all the confusion of a stunt, and the cries for stretcher-bearers. Only two things are any help in the battlefield, courage and the comrade beside you.
And I know that there is no man in the French and English armies today, standing-to in the mud waiting for death, who does not stand the steadier from the knowledge that this country stands behind him, and that the men of this country are in the line at his side.
We here are not helping in the fight; but we can help in the fight. We can build up behind those men a great wall of love and admiration and courage, so that they can feel it, and rest their backs against it when they are hard-pressed.
It is as well to face the facts of the battle. We have lost a tract of France, and our old graveyards of the Somme, our huts and water-pipes, some guns and dumps of stores and a great many men.
Fortune is like that in war. When Cortes had burnt his ships, and was marching into Mexico, his men growled that they had a hard time, with little food and no rest and bloody fighting. And Cortes told them that they didn’t come there to eat cakes of Utrera, but to take their luck as it came and their medicine as it tasted. We came into this war on those terms; so did you.
I’ve no news to tell you and no comfort to give you. The enemy had more aeroplanes than we had, and hid his preparations from us. He made a big concentration of men and guns, and when the weather favoured him he put them in, with skill and courage, against that part of the line where there are no good natural defensive positions. He took the 5th army by surprise and drove it back. As it fell back, it uncovered the right of the 3rd army, which held the good defensive positions. The 3rd army had to bend back in conformity, till the two armies together reached some sort of a line which could be held. Then the enemy switched his divisions north, and put in his attack on Ypres.
He was able to do this, because his lateral communications, behind his lines, are better than ours. People may ask, in some surprise, “Why are they better?” They are better because the enemy has at his disposal a great body of slave labour which we have not. He has the enslaved populations of Belgium, North France and Poland to work for him.
Then, in all this fighting, our armies have been outnumbered by the enemy. We have had concentrated against us not less than two millions of the enemy. People have asked, in some surprise, “How comes it, that you have been outnumbered?”
We have been outnumbered, presumably because the Allied High Command has judged, that this is not the time for the fighting of the decisive battle of this war, and that the line must be held with comparatively few troops so that the reserves for the decisive battle may be as large as possible.
We must be patient, and wait for the counter, trusting the goodness of our cause.
But in thinking of British manpower you must remember that though all the belligerent countries have to reckon with three big armies, we have to reckon with seven. All belligerent countries have to reckon with their army of the living, their army of the wounded, and their army of the dead. We have to reckon all these, and our armies of the dead and wounded would alone mount up to nearly 2½ millions of men. But we have also to maintain four armies which the other belligerent countries do not have to have.
First, an army of defence, against invasion. This is a small army consisting mainly of elderly men and of lads in training. We have to maintain it; it may be necessary; and “it is better to be sure than sorry.”
Then we have armies abroad in distant parts of this war, the army in Italy, the army in Salonika, and the big garrisons in India and Egypt which feed the armies in Mesopotamia and in Palestine. All of these armies and garrisons melt away continually in the fire of war, and everywhere on the roads to those armies, are the reinforcements and the drafts swallowing up more and yet more men.
In Gibraltar, and Malta and Alexandria and Port Said, you will see, every day, some ship filled with our men going out to death in those far fields, and you will see the men standing on the deck and cheering, as the ship draws away and leaves home and sweetness and pleasant life behind, for ever.
Then, besides these, we have the army of the sick. The great epidemical scourges of ancient armies have been nearly eliminated from this war; but we have been forced to maintain armies in distant outposts of this war, in Gallipoli, in Salonika, and in Mesopotamia where the men have suffered much from tropical diseases, dysentery and malarial fever. We have some hundreds of thousands of men who have been weakened by these complaints; not wrecked by them, but so weakened that they cannot stand the life in the trenches.
And besides all those armies, we have a vast army of the very flower of our race, both men and women. It may consist of four or five millions of men and women who work in treble shifts, day and night, as they have worked for the last three years, making the things of war, not only for ourselves but for our Allies. Our Allies are not manufacturing people. Russia made few things, France’s coal and steel are in the hands of the enemy, Italy makes few things. We have had to supply these people not only with equipment of all kinds, guns, clothing and shells, but with ships and coal. Not less than half a million men have done nothing in England since the war began but get and ship coal for the Allies. They have sent not less than 60 million tons of coal to the Allies since the war began.
Then a part of that army builds ships, and ever more ships, and yet never enough ships for the needs of this great war and for the supply of our friends.
The enemy spreads abroad lies concerning us. I am not going to answer them. Lies do not last long.
There is no need to lie about a people. Still less is there any need to lay claim to this or that glory. No nation is so bad that it has not something very good in it; and none so glorious that it has not some taint of self.
And I’m not here to sing my country’s praises. No one will do that. Patriotism, as I see it, is not a fine drawing of the sword, behind some winged and glittering Victory. It is nothing at all of all that. It is a very sad thing and a very deep thing and a very stern thing.
St. George did not go out against the dragon like that divine calm youth in Carpaccio’s picture, nor like that divine calm man in Donatello’s statue. He went out, I think, after some taste of defeat, knowing that it was going to be bad, and that the dragon would breathe fire and that very likely his spear would break and that he wouldn’t see his children again and people would call him a fool. He went out, I think, as the battalions of our men went out, a little trembling and a little sick and not knowing much about it, except that it had to be done, and then stood up to the dragon in the mud of that far land, and waited for him to come on.
I know what England was, before the war. She was a nation which had outgrown her machine, a nation which had forgotten her soul, a nation which had destroyed Jerusalem among her dark Satanic mills.
Don’t think that this was due to this or that man, to Kitchener, or to another, or to another. It was due to something kindling and alive in the nation’s soul.
When I first went to the Somme, it was on the day we took Martinpuich and Flers. And on my way up, I passed a battalion going in. They were being played up by the band, to the tune of “It’s a long, long trail awinding to the land of my dreams.” It wasn’t a long trail, nor a winding trail to most of those men, but only a few miles of a quite straight road to le Sars, where I found their graves afterwards.
That tune is perhaps the favourite tune of the army today. The army knows that it is a long, long trail, and a winding one, to the land of our dreams.
And if in this war it has seemed, that we have done little, if it has seemed, that we retreated at Mons, and only just held at Ypres, and withdrew from Gallipoli, and stood still at Salonika, and were driven back at St. Quentin and are hard-pressed on the Ridge, I think you somehow feel, that with it all, no matter how long the trail is, nor how winding, nor how bitter nor how bloody, we’ll stick it, as long as we’ve a light to go by, even if we’re not so clever as some, nor so attractive.
And what is the land of our dreams? We must think of that.
In the Bible there is the story of King David, who was a very generous and very bloody yet very noble man. And David, besieging a city in the summer, was faint from thirst, and he said, “I wish I had some of the water from that pool by the city gate.” And three men heard him and they took bottles and broke through the enemy pickets and filled their bottles and brought the water to David. But David would not drink water brought to him at such risk. He said, it would be like drinking blood; so he poured it out to his God.
The men of those armies in the mud are bringing us water at the risk of their lives, the living water of peace, that peace which I think will be the peace that passes all understanding, peace to have our lives again and do our work again and be with our loves again. But if we go back to the world of before the war, that peace won’t serve us, it will be a drinking of the blood of all those millions of young men.
I said some time ago, that the only things which matter in war are courage and the love of your comrades. When this war ends, we shall need all our courage and all our comrades, in that re-making of the world, which will follow this destruction. And I hope that when that time comes, you will not think of us again, as cold, or contemptuous, or oppressive, but as a race of men who went down to the death for a friend in trouble, as St. George did, on this day, so many centuries ago.
And in the light of that adventure I hope that we may stand together to remake this broken world, a little nearer to the heart’s desire.
[source: The War and the Future, New York: Macmillan, 1918]
Introduction to Edward G.D. Liveing, Attack
An Infantry Subaltern’s Impressions of July 1st, 1916
The attack on the fortified village of Gommecourt, which Mr. Liveing describes in these pages with such power and colour, was a part of the first great Allied attack on July 1, 1916, which began the Battle of the Somme. That battle, so far as it concerns our own troops, may be divided into two sectors: one, to the south of the Ancre River, a sector of advance, the other, to the north of the Ancre River, a containing sector, in which no advance was possible. Gommecourt itself, which made a slight but important salient in the enemy line in the containing sector, was the most northern point attacked in that first day’s fighting.
Though the Gommecourt position is not impressive to look at, most of our soldiers are agreed that it was one of the very strongest points in the enemy’s fortified line on the Western Front. French and Russian officers, who have seen it since the enemy left it, have described it as “terrible” and as “the very devil.” There can be no doubt that it was all that they say.
The country in that part is high-lying chalk downland, something like the downland of Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, though generally barer of trees, and less bold in its valleys. Before the war it was cultivated, hedgeless land, under corn and sugar-beet. The chalk is usually well-covered, as in Buckinghamshire, with a fat clay. As the French social tendency is all to the community, there are few lonely farms in that countryside as there would be with us. The inhabitants live in many compact villages, each with a church, a market-place, a watering-place for stock, and sometimes a château and park. Most of the villages are built of red brick, and the churches are of stone, not (as in the chalk counties with us) of dressed flint. Nearly all the villages are planted about with orchards; some have copses of timber trees. In general, from any distance, the villages stand out upon the downland as clumps of woodland. Nearly everywhere near the battlefield a clump of orchard, with an occasional dark fir in it, is the mark of some small village. In time of peace the Picardy farming community numbered some two or three hundred souls. Gommecourt and Hébuterne were of the larger kind of village.
A traveller coming towards Gommecourt as Mr. Liveing came to it, from the west, sees nothing of the Gommecourt position till he reaches Hébuterne. It is hidden from him by the tilt of the high-lying chalk plateau, and by the woodland and orchards round Hébuterne village. Passing through this village, which is now deserted, save for a few cats, one comes to a fringe of orchard, now deep in grass, and of exquisite beauty. From the hedge of this fringe of orchard one sees the Gommecourt position straight in front, with the Gommecourt salient curving round on slightly rising ground, so as to enclose the left flank.
At first sight the position is not remarkable. One sees, to the left, a slight rise or swelling in the chalk, covered thickly with the remains and stumps of noble trees, now mostly killed by shellfire. This swelling, which is covered with the remains of Gommecourt Park, is the salient of the enemy position. The enemy trenches here jut out into a narrow pointing finger to enclose and defend this slight rise.
Further to the right, this rise becomes a low, gentle heave in the chalk, which stretches away to the south for some miles, becoming lower and gentler in its slope as it proceeds. The battered woodland which covers its higher end contains the few stumps and heaps of brick that were once Gommecourt village. The lower end is without trees or buildings.
This slight wooded rise and low, gentle heave in the chalk make up the position of Gommecourt. It is nothing but a gentle rise above a gentle valley. From a mile or two to the south of Gommecourt, this valley appearance becomes more marked. If one looks northward from this point the English lines seem to follow a slight rise parallel with the other. The valley between the two heaves of chalk make the No Man’s Land or space between the enemy trenches and our own. The salient shuts in the end of the valley and enfilades it.
The position has changed little since the attack of July 1. Then, as now, Gommecourt was in ruins, and the trees of the wood were mostly killed. Then, as now, the position looked terrible, even though its slopes were gentle and its beauty not quite destroyed, even after two years of war.
The position is immensely strong in itself, with a perfect glacis and field of fire. Every invention of modern defensive war helped to make it stronger. In front of it was the usual system of barbed wire, stretched on iron supports, over a width of fifty yards. Behind the wire was the system of the First Enemy Main Line, from which many communication trenches ran to the central fortress of the salient, known as the Kern Redoubt, and to the Support or Guard Line. This First Main Line, even now, after countless bombardments and nine months of neglect, is a great and deep trench of immense strength. It is from twelve to fifteen feet deep, very strongly revetted with timberings and stout wicker-work. At intervals it is strengthened with small forts or sentry-boxes of concrete, built into the par
apet. Great and deep dugouts lie below it, and though many of these have now been destroyed, the shafts of most of them can still be seen. At the mouths of some of these shafts one may still see giant-legged periscopes by which men sheltered in the dugout shafts could watch for the coming of an attack. When the attack began and the barrage lifted, these watchers called up the bombers and machine gunners from their underground barracks, and had them in action within a few seconds.
Though the wire was formidable and the trench immense, the real defences of the position were artillery and machine guns. The machine guns were the chief danger. One machine gun with ample ammunition has concentrated in itself the defensive power of a battalion. The enemy had not less than a dozen machine guns in and in front of the Kern Redoubt. Some of these were cunningly hidden in pits, tunnels and shelters in (or even outside) the obstacle of the wire at the salient, so that they could enfilade the No Man’s Land, or shoot an attacking party in the back after it had passed. The sites of these machine gun nests were well-hidden from all observation, and were frequently changed. Besides the machine guns outside and in the front line, there were others, mounted in the trees and in the higher ground above the front line, in such position that they, too, could play upon the No Man’s Land and the English front line. The artillery concentrated behind Gommecourt was of all calibres. It was a greater concentration than the enemy could then usually afford to defend one sector, but the number of guns in it is not known. On July 1 it developed a more intense artillery fire upon Hébuterne, and the English line outside it, than upon any part of the English attack throughout the battlefield.
In the attack of July 1, Gommecourt was assaulted simultaneously from the north (from the direction of Fonquevillers) and from the south (from the direction of Hébuterne). Mr. Liveing took part in the southern assault, and must have “gone in” near the Hébuterne-Bucquoy Road. The tactical intention of these simultaneous attacks from north and south was to “pinch off” and secure the salient. The attack to the north, though gallantly pushed, was unsuccessful. The attack to the south got across the first-line trench and into the enemy position past Gommecourt Cemetery almost to the Kern Redoubt. What it faced in getting so far may be read in Mr. Liveing’s account. Before our men left the trenches outside Hébuterne they were in a heavy barrage, and the open valley of the No Man’s Land hissed, as Mr. Liveing says, like an engine, with machine gun bullets. Nevertheless, our men reached the third line of enemy trenches and began to secure the ground which they had captured.
John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works Page 35