The experts, the 18-pounder battery commanders, were quite good at cutting wire, but it did need very careful laying because guns were rather inaccurate things in those days. They had what was called a ‘hundred per cent zone’. That meant that, if you fired a hundred rounds from one gun, at, say, a range of three thousand yards and you then measured up very carefully the area in which all the shells had fallen, you would then call that the hundred per cent zone. But, although most of the hundred rounds – all laid in the same way, remember – would be more or less gathered in the middle, quite a few odd ones would have exploded out towards the extremities of the zone. So, it wasn’t easy to go on plugging one gun into the same hole every time, however accurately you laid it. With the inaccuracies of ammunition and fuzes and even the guns themselves, you would get unavoidable errors.
It was quite literally a case of a hit or a miss. In the cloudy moonless nights before the assault, raiding parties, crawling in black-faced cohorts across to the German lines, brought back mixed reports. They had found the German trenches empty and the wire ‘well cut’. They had found the wire impassable and the trenches heavily manned. They had found the trenches empty (except for an unfortunate sentry dragged back as a prisoner) but had heard the muffled singing of Germans in their dugouts. But the small bag of prisoners sent back for interrogation were cowed and visibly shaken by the unremitting nervous strain of the bombardment and, like Eversmann, sheltering in a deep dugout from the explosions rocking Thiepval Ridge, willing it to end.
Freiwilliger Eversmann, 143rd German Regiment of Infantry
It is night. Shall I live till morning? Haven’t we had enough of this frightful horror? Five days and five nights now this hell concert has lasted. One’s head is like a madman’s; the tongue sticks to the roof of the mouth. Almost nothing to eat and nothing to drink. No sleep. All contact with the outer world cut off. No sign of life from home nor can we send any news to our loved ones. What anxiety they must feel about us. How long is this going to last?
The answer was, ‘not long’. Already the British troops were moving up to the assembly trenches. A few unfortunates, the first to move into position for the attack that should have been launched forty-eight hours before, had already been in them for two chilly and rainy days. There was no question of taking all of them back, for, in the country immediately behind the lines, every tent, every hut, every barn and every house in every village was crammed full of men who had marched up from the rear behind them. Now the weather had cleared. It was a fine night with the promise of a fine day ahead.
Greatcoats had been handed in, tied in bundles of four and, with two hundred thousand packs and three thousand or so officers’ valises, were stacked in farm outbuildings all up and down the line. At last-minute parades, brigadiers had bawled through megaphones in cheering tones of encouragement. Commanding officers and adjutants, armed with the printed Summaries of Intelligence sent forward from Headquarters for the purpose, read extracts aloud to their battalions. Based, perhaps selectively, on captured documents, on the interrogation of prisoners, the reports of raiding parties and observations of the result of the bombardment, they pointed without exception to the demoralization of the enemy, to the destruction of his defences, to his lack of fighting spirit, to the casualties he had suffered in the punishing shellfire. Listening to these words, as the shells roared and crashed in the distance, neither the officers nor the men found them difficult to believe.
In the early dusk of the previous evening Major-General Rycroft had gone forward to have a look for himself at the Thiepval Ridge where his 32nd Division was going to attack. Standing at the edge of Aveluy Wood he had no need of binoculars. The ground under his feet quivered with the vibration of the guns and for five days they had been trained on the Thiepval Ridge. Like the tall church and every other building in the village, the château had all but disappeared under a heap of tumbled brick and rubble, half-glimpsed through clouds of yellow smoke that enveloped the ruins with every salvo. Away to the right, the face of the hill was pockmarked with craters. On the skyline above, the clutter of wire and trenches, the forward lines of the great redoubts, seemed to totter behind a curtain of flying chalk. ‘My God!’ the General had to shout to make himself heard, although the Commanders of his three Brigades were only inches away. ‘All we’ll find in Thiepval, when we go across, is the caretaker and his dog!’
The Brigadiers, pleased with the aptness of the General’s summing-up, had passed it on to the infantry in their reassuring goodbye messages. They all sincerely believed that it was true.
Now the troops were on their way, each man wearing on his shoulder a flash in the identifying colour of his Division. In a spectrum of bright colours they fluttered from two hundred thousand shoulders and on their backs, catching the last rays of the dying sun, were two hundred thousand triangles of tin. Shining in the sun tomorrow morning, they were intended to reveal to distant observers the progress of the infantry’s advance. It was the last tiny detail of a million details of the painstaking planning that would direct their destiny.
Even the assembling of such a mass of men had been planned with such care that there was hardly a hold-up or a hitch. Coloured lamps, glowing discreetly at ground level, guided the battalions along their designated tracks to arrive at Divisional Assembly Areas within minutes of the appointed time and with time in hand for a little rest. Although the order had been ‘March Easy’, it had been hard going; ‘Battle Order’ meant that every man was weighed down with more than sixty pounds of equipment and, now, at forward divisional dumps, they were dishing out still more spades, pickaxes, and even, to some benighted Tommies in the second wave, rolls of barbed-wire. Cursing at the weight of it all, the infantry could hardly be blamed for failing to appreciate that this burden of extraneous equipment was intended for its protection. After much mulling and weighing of advantage against disadvantage, the Staff had decided that its novice warriors would stand a better chance if they were able to consolidate captured trenches with all speed, rather than run the risk of a counter-attack while they waited for Pioneer Battalions to come up behind them.
Hunched under their assorted burdens, the infantry moved up to the line. Their excitement was mingled with nervousness, but at least the waiting was over. At long last they would have a chance of having ‘a proper go’ at the Hun. Despite the bellicose array of weapons dangling about their persons, many Tommies had thoughtfully provided themselves with knuckle-dusters, lengths of chain and even vicious knives as their personal contribution to the armoury of battle. Most had never yet seen a German face to face, but, as if anticipating some street corner brawl, they intended to be ready when they did. The fact was that, in spite of the long months of careful rehearsal, of lectures and training, of preparation and of orders, in the untried ranks of Kitchener’s Army there was hardly an officer or a man who appreciated the difference between a raid and a general attack.
Part 2
The Big Push
‘Old soldiers never die; they simply fide a-why!’
That’s what they used to sing along the roads last spring;
That’s what they used to say before the push began;
That’s where they are today, knocked over to a man.
SIEGFRIED SASSOON
Chapter 6
Morning crept over the Somme spreading a gentle haze that promised a fine day ahead.
The last hour of waiting was the worst.
At 6.35 the guns, which had been firing incessantly all night, roared out in the crescendo of the final bombardment. The shells were too high to be seen but they came screaming so thick and so fast over the front-line trenches that the men packed into them, with only the sky for a view, looked up in spite of themselves, as if expecting to see some thrilling visible sight, like the hail of arrows singing through the air at Agincourt.
In the trenches on either side of Gommecourt, the British troops hardly noticed the stepping up of their own bombardment because the Germans, convinced t
hat the main brunt of the attack would take place here, were returning shot for shot. They were pounding the advanced trench, dug with such bravado well out in No Man’s Land, where the first wave of the 56th Division infantry were waiting to go. They were hammering the old front line where the second wave were ready to follow them. Shells were crashing among the support trenches and raining down on Hébuterne where the reserve troops awaited the order to move forward. Captain Agius was there with B Company, ready to go across with bombs and ammunition and to establish contact with the leading companies of the 3rd Londons as soon as they were ensconced in the enemy’s front line. In the open street outside the cottage that served as Battalion Headquarters there was no shelter from the bombardment. Brigade Headquarters was even further ahead, for Brigadier-General Loch was a man who liked to see for himself what was going on. The Brigade Orderly Sergeant, Harry Coates, in ordinary circumstances rather admired his fire-eating Brigadier, but now with shells exploding all around the fine observation trench which was Brigade Headquarters for the battle he was not quite so sure. Brigade-Major Philip Neame, originally a Royal Engineer, was a fire-eater of equal calibre to General Loch, and had proved it a year earlier at Neuve Chapelle by winning the Victoria Cross. He had designed the trench, had supervised its construction and, last night, they had moved into it, they had moved into it. Luckily, Neame’s design had included a good dugout a dozen feet underground and they were sheltering there now. The Brigadier, Neame himself, Coates, and a clutch of runners, orderlies, telephonists and signallers, who were already hunched over their instruments testing the lines as the orderlies dished out the first of the dozen strong cups of tea that each man would drink in the course of the day ahead. The walls were vibrating with every explosion and the Brigadier was looking worried.
Across the two-mile stretch of land that separated the 56th Division from the left flank of the main attack, the two battalions of the 48th Division who were manning the trenches were having an equally bad time. They, at least, were not going ‘over the top’ although, to make it look as if they were, they had opened conspicuous lanes through the wire in front of their trenches and made the same visible feint ‘preparations’ as the Third Army on their left. But all they were required to do was to launch a smokescreen to hang like a curtain across the two miles between Gommecourt and Serre and thus to blind and confuse the Germans and their guns. They knew already that they would fail. The wind, which should have carried the smoke forward, had turned and now a gentle breeze blew towards the British from the direction of the German lines.
At Serre the Pals were in position. Waiting in the support trenches with the men of his Vickers machine-gun team, Sergeant Jimmy Myers checked the gun and its components for the umpteenth time and thought for the umpteenth time that, even broken into its component parts and with five men to carry the gun and its thousands of rounds of ammunition, it would be quite a job to hump the gun when they went over with the Bradford Pals. Still, that was more than an hour away. They had practised it all a thousand times – dismantling the gun, slinging the pieces on top of the trench while they clambered out, keeping up with the infantry and, when they reached their advanced position, re-assembling the gun with lightning speed and coming into action. They had got it down to a fine art and, after the final rehearsals, the only observation made by Lieutenant Burrows had been a nod of quiet satisfaction. There was no need to worry about the trek across the width of No Man’s Land. As the rehearsals had shown, by nine o’clock when they went over troops of the first wave would already be far ahead and the German outpost line, now staring down at them from the low crest of the hill, would long ago have been rendered harmless.
In the first wave, Willie Parker in the Sheffield Pals was probably the only man who had not rehearsed the battle. He had only been with the Battalion for two weeks. Since he had joined up with his young brother Reg on the very day the Battalion had started recruiting, his belated arrival was due, in his own view, to unreasoning wilfulness on the part of Authority. First they had trained him as a soldier and then, at the end of six months, had plucked him out of the ranks and sent him back to his proper trade as a skilled engineer. No one from Lord Kitchener downwards could have convinced Willie that the year he had spent making munitions at Armstrong-Whitworth’s was more valuable to the war effort than his presence in the khaki ranks of the Sheffield Pals, armed with a rifle that he barely knew how to use. He had badgered the Army, he had petitioned the Lord Mayor, he had made such a nuisance of himself by pestering the factory manager that Armstrong-Whitworth’s had given in and released him. The Army had taken Willie back into the fold and he had considered it the greatest piece of luck that a draft of men was on the point of leaving to join the Battalion in France in time for the Big Push. Waiting now in the front-line trench, clad in new khaki, taking pleasure in the unfamiliar weight of rifle and tin hat, Willie would not have changed places with the King himself.
Already they were placing the scaling ladders against the wall of the trench. At twenty-past seven the Sheffields would climb them and crawl out to lie in readiness in front of their own wire. At seven-thirty, when the whistles blew, they would be the first men across.
Over the Redan Ridge, ever since dawn, machine-gun teams to the left of Beaumont Hamel had been looking across at the German line through a tangle of grass and weeds. It was the closest view they had ever had, because they were now well out in No Man’s Land on the very edge of the low plateau they called the White City. The British front line ran across it within forty feet of its furthest edge and, in the weeks before the battle, they had driven forward a series of shallow tunnels to within a foot or two of the sunken road in No Man’s Land beyond. Just before dawn, they had broken down the last thin barriers of soil in its bank and camouflaged the openings with a thin curtain of tangled vegetation to hide the gun-crews from the prying eyes of any over-zealous observer who might raise his head in the thick of the bombardment. They lay so close – no more than a hundred yards away - that they could almost see the individual barbs of the wire entanglements that stretched across the field, guarding the rising ground where the German trenches furrowed through shattered orchards. The wire looked uncomfortably intact, but there were gaps here and there. Marking them with their eye, the men mentally plotted the rush that would carry them across the ground as they dashed out ahead of the infantry to put paid to any opposition and pave the way ahead. Meanwhile, they were waiting for the word of command to move back along the tunnel, dragging the guns to a safe distance, so that they would not be damaged nor the men concussed when the great mine exploded under the redoubt on the Hawthorn Ridge. That would be the signal to crawl forward again ready for the jump-off ten minutes later.
At twenty minutes past seven, the mine went up in a sheet of flame and a thunderous fountain of debris that leapt a hundred feet into the air. As it fell back to the earth and the last rumblings of the explosion died away, looking across from his observation position behind the White City, Dudley Lissenburg could see quite clearly on the ridge across the valley a small force of two hundred men rush forward and disappear into the cloud of black smoke on their way to capture the crater.
In the stunning aftermath of the explosion, despite the sound of the bombardment on the heights of Thiepval to the right, and a distant mutter of gunfire far, far away to the left, a strange silence seemed to fall. In the moments before the German machine-guns started up, it seemed to Lissenburg uncanny. Across the Redan Ridge the Pals of the 31st Division, crawling out to wait in front of the wire for the signal to go for Serre, remarked on it too. The bombardment which more than two miles away had had to cease to allow two companies of troops to attack four hundred yards of the enemy’s defences on the Hawthorn Ridge, had, by some error of judgement or misinterpretation of orders, stopped along the four-mile length of the 8th Corps Front. For the next ten minutes, not a single shot would be fired.
In their jumping-off trench at the edge of Thiepval Wood, waiting to move uphill
across the slope to tackle the formidable line that lay in front of the Schwaben Redoubt, the Ulstermen of the 36th Division heard the explosion quite clearly through the roar of their own bombardment, and saw the tip of the cone of debris it threw into the sky. They were at a pitch of excitement. It was the 1st July and, according to the old calendar, it was the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne. To the Ulstermen it was the best of all possible omens and they were raring to go.
A little way behind them, where the 109th Brigade were in readiness to follow up the first-line troops as they left their trenches, Colonel Ricardo stood on the parapet of the assembly trench cheering his men on as they went through the two centre exits on either side. He wanted to wish them luck, but he needed a megaphone to make himself heard. ‘They got going without delay; no fuss, no shouting, no running, everything solid and thorough – just like the men themselves. Here and there a boy would wave his hand to me as I shouted “Good Luck” to them through my megaphone. And all had a cheery face. Most were carrying loads. Fancy advancing against heavy fire with a big roll of barbed wire on your shoulder!’
Away to the right, at the top of the hill, the ruins of Thiepval village were shuddering under the final tornado of the bombardment. The piles of dusty rubble seemed to hold as little threat as the bleached bones of a long-dead tiger. Not a man among the hundred-strong company waiting to clamber from the trenches across the tumbled terracing of the old château gardens and on to the shattered village beyond, had the slightest doubt that their job would be a piece of cake.
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