John Masefield’s Great War: Collected Works

by Philip Errington

  The line was double throughout. The front line was a deep, strong, well-wired, well-sited trench, containing many dugouts, and one concrete fortlet in the parapet to every fifty yards of front. The line ran at the top of a gentle slope, in some places hardly perceptible, so that the field of fire swept by it was large, without dead ground and without natural cover. The wire in front of the line was formidable, though not so thick and strong as the wire of the first-line system at the beginning of the battle. The second line of this second system lay about one hundred yards behind the front line. It, too, was wired, and the line was a good and well-sited trench, though without dugouts and concrete forts. Parts of this second system became very famous, later in the battle, under many different names. The ominous and bloody names of Zollern Redoubt, O.G. 1 and O.G. 2, were applied to parts of this second main line. They will be mentioned in their proper place.

  For two days after Mametz Wood was won there was no main attack, but much work was done in securing the captured ground, repelling enemy raids, and making ready for the assault on the second line. It was decided to attack this second line, wherever our troops fronted it, at a little before dawn on the morning of the 14th of July.

  The dangers of the attempt were plain from the lie of the ground. All of this second line was a strong position, even without the hidden defences which nothing but an attack could unmask. To the left, in the centre, and on the right, the ground favoured the defenders. The attackers had to advance uphill, under observation, to positions backed and flanked by great blind woods. The wood on the left (that of Bazentin-le-Petit), though visibly less full of scrub than Mametz Wood, was 1,000 yards broad, sloping gently uphill, like Mametz Wood, and quite likely to be as difficult to take. It was certain to be crossed with many trenches and to contain many hidden machine guns. The formation in the centre, where the wood of Bazentin-le-Grand sticks out on its knoll, offered a problem by itself. If the enemy could hold it, he could make it impossible for us to take the positions on its flanks. If the enemy lost it, yet managed to hold either flank, fire from that flank could make it untenable by us. Setting aside the difficulties of the position to be attacked, we had also to consider the difficulties of our own position, which made a curving, irregular bulge in the enemy front, big if compared with ground won in an ancient battle, but really so small that the centre, about the spur of Bazentin-le-Grand, was within field-gun range from both flanks and received fire from three sides at once.

  During the 13th, white leading tapes had been run out to the front as guiding marks to the attackers. At about midnight of the 13th – 14th, strong patrols went out to cover the advance. The battalions named for the attack formed up in the open behind these covering squads, and advanced across the open to their positions. There was no moon, and the night, though a summer night and not naturally very dark, was cloudy. All the ground over which the battalions advanced was under fire, and littered and obstructed with the mess of war. In the advance, the men had to cross trenches inclined at all angles to their line of march; they had to pass dugouts, gun emplacements, lines of wire, fallen trees, woodland, brushwood, and copses, and to keep touch, none the less, with the platoons to right and left. It was as difficult as a night march can be, though the distance to go was in all cases less than a mile (uphill). Even for so short a distance, an advance in line of battle by night, over ground so broken, would be a difficult feat in time of peace.

  Most soldiers (French and English) who saw the Somme fighting have agreed that this bringing up of the army to attack on the 14th of July was a feat of arms of which any nation might be proud.

  The artillery preparation for this attack was fiercer than anything which had gone before it. Longueval, already much battered, ceased to be a village, and Delville Wood took on the appearance of a wood in winter. It was soon to take on the appearance of a wood in hell. At a little after three, in the rather cloudy morning of the 14th, the fire heightened to the roll of an intense and terrible barrage, and at half-past three, in a grey light, “when there was just sufficient light to distinguish friend from foe at short ranges,” the artillery lifted and the men went over.

  The fight which followed was one of the hardest and most successful in which British troops have been engaged. On the left, our men broke over the line into the wood of Bazentin-le-Petit, which was defended much as the wood of Mametz had been. Our men stormed its trenches, cleared out the machine guns and heavy guns hidden in it, and had won right through it, and come out at the northern end with many prisoners and much material, by seven o’clock. In the centre, our men got into the wood of Bazentin-le-Grand, and into the village of that name beside it. They beat the enemy down the hill beyond, and chased him up the opposite slope, where, in a rush, which won the praise of a French General who watched it with admiration, saying that he had never seen such extreme bravery, they got into the village of Bazentin-le-Petit and made it ours.

  At this point our men were right up on the high ground of the plateau or plain, with High Wood, like a lonely island of trees, away to their right.

  Before the village was secure as a military position the enemy counter-attacked. The attack was beaten off at about noon, but it was repeated a little later with stronger forces and pushed home. This second attack was repulsed after a hard fight. It was followed by a most resolute and extended attack in which the enemy put in his reserves, with orders that the village was to be retaken and the position restored. This attack, falling heavily on our front from the Flers Road in the direction of the cemetery, drove us out of the village as far as the crossroads near the church. Here our supports came in, the village was retaken, and our men beat the enemy back, with heavy losses, to his trench.

  At the same time, as the enemy was much shaken from the last of his four defeats, an attempt was made upon High Wood. Cavalry which had been held in readiness, in case a chance should offer during the battle, were now sent forward on the flanks of some infantry to clear the standing corn which covered the field as far as High Wood. The wood itself, which, like all woods within the enemy system, was trenched round, and so netted with lines as to be a very powerful fortress, was shelled heavily. The cavalry (a squadron of lancers) cleared the corn, and the infantry assaulted the southern face of the wood, got into it, went through most of it, and took some prisoners there. The wood is a big plantation, say, 700 yards long by 500 across. The northern side tilts slightly downhill towards the long, bare, gentle slope which made the field of the autumn fighting. The southern side, which was the side attacked by our men on the 14th of July, is nearly flat. The trees are well-grown but not big timber, and the undergrowth at the time of the battle was thick. In the heart of the wood there were at least two permanent concrete emplacements for single heavy guns.

  Men who were in this afternoon attack on the wood have spoken of the exultation with which they went in. Firstly, they had beaten the enemy throughout the day, from post to post, and in every one of three big counter-attacks. Secondly, they had won clear from the strip of land poxed with the blastings of two years’ fighting. Those who went over that land later in the battle may find it difficult to believe, but on the 14th of July all the field in front of the wood bore harvest, and the wood was green. The coming into that undefiled country was a delight to the men. It is a fact that many of them cheered “for being among green things again.” Thirdly, the knowledge that cavalry were fighting side by side with them gave them great joy. They felt that it was a sign that the war of trenches was going to give way to a war of movement, and that perhaps they were on the eve of great events. They took all the wood except the northern point, which was flanked by the switch line to Flers on one side, and by the boundary trench or hedge of the wood on the other. The fighting was very bitter here and very deadly. Long afterwards the bones of an enemy machine gunner, lodged on the spike of a tree, showed what the fight had been.

  This taking of High Wood was the high-water mark and limit of the tide of conquest of the 14th of July. It brought us
, with a rush, right on to the top of the plateau and (in High Wood) almost to its northern edge, so that our men could see the great, gentle, beautiful valley, coloured with the harvest in all its sweep, and the distant ridge beyond, dark with woodland, and lined with red brick chimneys above, covering the prize of Bapaume. The left and centre of our attack had endured and achieved more than had been expected. On the right, towards Longueval, our success had been as notable.

  On the right our men attacked, roughly speaking, due north, keeping strong flanking parties to the east of their advance to check any attack from the enemy fortress of Guillemont. They rushed the long, straggling northern end of Trones Wood on the slope above them and set free that patrol of two companies of Kentish soldiers who had been fighting there all night surrounded by the enemy. A thrust was then made to the east, towards Guillemont, while the main attack went on, up the slope, to Longueval and the edge of Delville Wood. Our men got into Longueval, cleared the two straggling streets to the road-meet in the heart of the village, and there came against the defence which was to make the place a hot corner for some time to come.

  From the heart of the village, where the roads meet near the church, the ground slopes downhill towards Flers. The northern half of the village was built upon this sloping ground, which is a narrow, shallow valley, a quarter of a mile broad, at right angles with the village street. On both sides of the road there were plantations and orchards, not now to be distinguished from the main ruin of Delville Wood, but at the time of the fighting they were separate and fairly trim. The road through these plantations was lined with ruins, which the enemy defended ably. To the north of the shallow valley the ground rose up to the plateau crowned by High Wood. Most of this plateau was still strongly held by the enemy, who could see from it, fairly clearly, through the thinned wood, what was happening in the northern half of the village. The wood and the plantations masked the approach of troops coming to the relief of this part of the village, so that, what with a fairly well-observed artillery fire and a well-hidden line of support, the enemy had an advantage. By midday, the battle of Longueval had become a most bitter hand-to-hand struggle, in which our men gradually got the mastery. Most, or very nearly all, of this northern strip was in our hands by four o’clock, though two points just outside the village – one in the horn of Delville Wood, and one in an orchard on the hill to the west of it – still held out. All this area was soon to become the scene of some of the most terrible of the fighting of this war. Delville Wood was very soon to earn its name of Devil or Devil’s Wood. The enemy shelling concentrated on this area and became most terrible.

  The fighting here was not without compensation. One who was there remembered the taking of Longueval with pleasure, for in clearing out an enemy dugout he came upon a store of cigars. “Jolly good mild cigars; enough to give every man in the platoon a box, and so many that the Boche must have been giving cigars as an issue, at any rate, to the officers. We thought at first that they may have been poisoned and left behind as a booby trap, but we soon proved that.” Another, in the same attack, saw a young private come out of an enemy dugout with a bottle of brandy. He very rashly brandished this bottle, crying out, “See what I’ve got.” An old sergeant saw him, and said: “You’re too young to be drinking that poison. You hand that over to me”; so the sergeant had it. But a captain who had seen the matter said to the sergeant: “You’re too old to be drinking that poison. You hand that over to me.” So the captain took it and kept it. One little action of devotion may be quoted, for even though it deals with eating and drinking, it was yet another of those countless heroisms of the carriers which are so seldom noticed and rewarded, though they happen every day in all weathers and under all fires.

  A platoon had been fighting all day in the Longueval district, and had reached a strip of old enemy trench just outside Delville Wood. They tumbled into the trench and prepared to pass the night there. All were dog-tired, much shelling was going on, and all, though hungry, had given up all hope of food. At about ten that night, while they were getting what sleep they could in the devilish racket of the shelling, one of the officers was roused “by a little pale voice asking, ‘Is Captain – – – – – – – here ?’” It was the battalion mess-servant who had brought up dinner for the officers in a basket. He had picked his way in the dark from Montauban, carrying a heavy basket stuffed with good things, over two miles of road blazing with the enemy barrage. He had brought hot soup in a thermos flask, a tin of salmon, hot bully beef with two vegetables, and some cheese and bread, hot coffee and a bottle of port. When he had served this dinner and collected the dishes and bottles he carried the basket back by the same road, past the same dangers, to Montauban.

  This fight of the 14th of July gave us a large stretch of the enemy second line, brought us well on to his fortified plateau, and threatened the great, gently rolling expanse between Delville Wood and Bapaume. Our men had taken many prisoners and much war material. The enemy had lost heavily in killed and wounded, and had been badly shaken in the fighting round Bazentin, on a front of about a mile. When darkness came, our men were at work securing the new positions and linking them up with the line they had left just before dawn.

  The new line now ran roughly south to north, parallel with the Albert-Bapaume Road, from Contalmaison to beyond Bazentin-le-Petit. It made a bend at Bazentin, and ran north-easterly to High Wood, which was a salient. From High Wood it bent back, in a south-easterly line, to Longueval and Delville Wood. From Delville Wood it ran southerly, past Trones Wood, towards the Somme River. The attack had been a great success, and had given us more than all that we had aimed for.

  There were inconveniences in the new position. All our gains since the beginning of the battle made a salient, liable to be shelled from the front and from both flanks; but at High Wood we held a salient beyond a salient in a position of great importance to the enemy. It was therefore certain that High Wood would be made very difficult to hold. Further to the right, Delville Wood gave observation over so great a tract that the enemy could not afford to lose it; that, too, was certain to be fought for to the last ditch. Our troops attacking or defending Delville had strong enemy positions within half rifle-range on their right flanks and rear, and the only road of supply from Montauban could be shelled from two fronts. Worst of all, the weather was against us: it began to rain hard; the ground became a quagmire; the movement of troops and guns became difficult; and every hardship of war became harder and every difficulty worse. When the cloudy morning came and the fight raged up again, there was bad observation, and our aeroplanes could not detect the new enemy gun positions. With the dawn, attack and counter-attack began: our attacks against the strong points near Longueval, and on the right of our advance towards Ginchy; the counter-attacks against High Wood and against our hold on Delville Wood. During this second day of the fight, High Wood, the narrow salient, became untenable from shelling. The wounded were carried out of it and the position abandoned, though our line remained not far from it.

  At this stage of the battle it became imperative that our extreme right wing, which joined the French extreme left wing in the neighbourhood of Trones Wood, should win room for itself by a thrust to the east. It was necessary that the enemy should be pushed back from his position between Delville Wood and the Somme, so that the dangerous right angle in our line might be straightened out. Already an intense shellfire on the Montauban Road, which was the only line of supply to the troops in that angle, made our position difficult. It was plain that the enemy had now brought up his reserves of men and guns, and that the main agony of the Battle of the Somme, the struggle for the high ground of the chalk plateau, from the little town of Combles, where the dene-holes are, to the Schwaben Redoubt above the Ancre, was about to be fought. The weather, which was in the main against us throughout the battle, was against us now. The third week in July, 1916, when this struggle began, was wet; indeed the latter half of the year, while the fighting raged, was wetter than usual, and the last
quarter by far the wettest within the memory of man. The weather did not affect the result of the battle, but it delayed it by many weeks.

  The main need was to widen our position by winning more ground to the east. The enemy knew this as well as any soldier whose fate led him along the road by Bernafay Wood in those days. From the moment when our men cleared Trones and entered Delville Wood on the 14th of July, he concentrated a great artillery upon all that angle of the line and poured a continuous rain of shells on our hardly-won positions there. This increased daily for three days and nights, and on the 18th of July, after a very heavy shelling, a powerful enemy counter-attack came down on Delville Wood, and began that series of battles which killed every tree in the wood, and strewed every yard of it with the rags of human bodies. The attack drove us out of most of the wood and out of some of the village of Longueval beyond it, into a line of poor trench which no enemy could ever carry. At the same time, all the right angle of our line was shelled and shelled again, with barrages of all calibres, designed not only to stop our massing for an attack which might give us more room there, but to prepare attacks against us, and to destroy the advantages which had been won.

  Though under the fury of this attack the right of our advance was, for the moment, checked, our left (five miles away to the west) was widening the salient thrust by us. On Ovillers Hill, the underground garrison of the Ovillers fortress had surrendered, after a fine defence, and our men had pushed up the Ovillers Spur towards the head of Mash Valley. From the Ovillers Spur, looking eastward, over the broadish, gently shelving Mash Valley-head, they saw the first jutting-out of the parallel spur along which the Albert-Bapaume Road runs. At the jutting-out they saw the cemetery of Pozières, among a clump of cypress trees, and the straggling end of Pozières village, stretching among trees along a lane towards it. This was to be the next prize to be fought for. The attack which won Ovillers, cleared Ovillers Hill, and opened up Mash Valley, secured the western approaches to Pozières. On the same day (the 17th) the troops near the wood of Bazentin-le-Petit bombed out towards Pozières along the lines of trenches known as O.G. 1 and O.G. 2, secured a part of them, and wired them in against any counter-attack. This, though it did not secure the eastern approaches to Pozières, at least secured a part of them. At the same time the shelling from our guns concentrated upon Pozières, and on the long strip of copse or wood beside it.