Away to their right, under the crest of the ridge, the vanguard of the 17th Highland Light Infantry was inching forward to lie close up to the belts of wire in front of the Wunderwerk. Somewhere beyond it, in these last moments of the bombardment, Freiwilliger Eversmann, waiting in battle order, was doubtless still wondering, ‘When will it end?’
Round the promontory of the Leipzig Redoubt, where the 70th Brigade was also waiting nearly in the shadow of the wire for the bombardment to lift, the line took an almost right-angled turn down into the Nab Valley. Ernest Deighton, of the 8th Battalion King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, was the first man out and he had been out since before dawn concealed in a shell-crater halfway across No Man’s Land. He had never felt so exposed nor so alone in his life. Deighton was a sniper and a marksman and, ever since it had been light enough to see, he had been training the telescopic sights of his rifle on a gap in the German wire, keeping his eyes peeled for any movement. The Jerries had been keeping their heads well down, and who could blame them, but he was pretty sure that he had bagged at least a couple and that there would be no trouble from that quarter when his comrades dashed across at Zero. The minutes dragged. He had no means of knowing the time – the chance glinting of a watch face might have given away his position – but, like Eversmann, he longed for the bombardment to stop, for the whistles to blow in the trenches behind him, to be on the move, to get going. As soon as the first line of troops reached him, he was to leap up and join them in the charge towards the German trenches.
A mile to the south, Brigadier-General Ternan was furious. Like General Loch at Gommecourt, he had gone to some trouble to make sure of having a good view of the attack and the Royal Engineers had constructed a fine observation post two hundred yards down on the forward slope of the Tara-Usna Ridge overlooking the Ovillers valley and with a fine view to the right over la Boisselle and the 34th Divisional Front. Here, with Brigadier-General Cameron, in command of the Tyneside Irish Brigade, he positioned himself just minutes before Zero, and he had just made the unpleasant discovery that, in spite of the elaborate preparations of the Engineers, it was impossible to see a thing.
The Brigadiers wished in particular to see the effect of the huge mines that were to explode on either side of the village of la Boisselle at Zero Hour. The infantry had already been pulled back to the reserve trenches to protect them from any untoward effects of the explosions and, as Ternan was unhappily aware, this meant that they would have a long way to go, and that they would be exposed to fire even before they started across No Man’s Land. Pushing along an assembly trench to their right, the two Brigadiers discovered that, by climbing on the fire step and looking over the parapet, they had a good, if unprotected, view of the valley. Fifty yards down the slope ahead, Ternan could see the first line of the Tyneside Scottish preparing to leave their trenches. At seven twenty-eight the mines went up – one to the left of la Boisselle, a huge one to the right of it and a mile beyond, on the Fricourt Salient, a clutch of smaller explosions. As the noise died away, in a brief spell of comparative silence while the guns lengthened their range, he could hear a strange whining noise from the trenches down the hill. It was the pipers tuning up as they made ready to play the Tyneside Scottish over the top.
The attack of the 18th Division in front of Montauban started with a bang. At the advanced Battalion Headquarters of the 10th Battalion, The Essex Regiment, the waiting officers cheered as the mines went up at Kasino Point. There were casualties from the fallout and, although it was in the second trench, a few far-flung chunks of debris even flew into their shack, but this was some compensation to Lieutenant Robert Chell who, newly promoted to Adjutant, had been rather disappointed that his place was at Battalion Headquarters rather than in the line with the men. But the men were surging ahead and the first prisoner arrived, incredibly, before the attack was five minutes under way. He was a pitiful specimen, unwashed, unshaven and, as Chell noticed delightedly as he telephoned the details of the prisoner’s regiment back to Brigade Headquarters, he was unfed as well by the looks of him and still shaking from his ordeal of seven days in the front line under the bombardment.
This was the first of many reports of good progress that Chell was to send back during the course of the day.
Eight minutes before Zero, where the 30th Division met the French at the end of the British line, Stokes mortar batteries had thundered a hurricane bombardment. Here where the Germans least expected an attack, it was so powerful and so effective that, when it stopped, there was absolute silence from the German lines. As the whistles blew and the troops left the trenches, they presented a sight that would have gladdened the hearts of the Staff who had pored so long and so hard over the battle plans. Extended in lines of companies, a hundred paces apart, they crossed the width of No Man’s Land in quick time with rifles slung – British Tommies on the left, French poilus on the right. At the point where the two lines met, Colonel Fairfax of the 17th Battalion, The King’s Liverpool Regiment, and Commandant Le Petit, in command of the 3rd Battalion of the 153rd Régiment d’Infanterie, found themselves together. Grinning, the French officer crooked his elbow invitingly. Colonel Fairfax took it and, pushing forward, they led the advance arm in arm.
By half-past seven all along the straggling miles of the front the ground mist was beginning to thin. As the first hundred thousand men went over the top, the sun was already shining strongly enough to feel warm on the napes of their necks and it blazed on through the long summer’s day.
Ordinarily, on the uplands of the Somme, just a week after midsummer, a balmy evening would have followed such a glorious day and turned imperceptibly into a warm cloudless night. But the night had fallen early, and it fell so thick with the dust and fumes of battle that you could almost touch it. It shook and quivered, blazed lurid yellow in the flash of the guns, swirling into black cloud shot with the flame of exploding shells, swelled into monstrous incandescence, as signal rockets soared through its turbulent mists. A hundred and fifty thousand men, living, or dead, lay out in the inferno.
Peering across at the furnace of Thiepval from the Artillery Observation Post, built four-square in solid concrete high on the Mesnil Ridge, anxious observers were still trying to make sense of the day’s events. Their eyes had been glued to the Thiepval Ridge since early morning, but, for all they had seen, for all they had been able to interpret the course of the long day’s battle, for all they had been able to make of the conflicting reports that had reached them, for all they we able to understand the significance of the signals and flares that lit the sky above the battle-line, they might have been blind and deaf. In spite of their best endeavours, they did not have the faintest idea of what was happening. But the sight of it awed the mind. The sound of it numbed the senses. And their only sickening certainty was that the position of the line had altered hardly at all since the troops had attacked from it in the morning.
*
But rumours of a breakthrough on the Somme had travelled fast and had been improved in the telling. Barely twenty miles to the north, in a sector of the trenchline between Wailly and Arras where the 6th Battalion, the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry was in the line, Lance-Corporal Len Lovell and Private Bill Clegg were suffering from the effects of the exaggerated good tidings. The joke had been conceived on the spur of the moment back at Brigade Headquarters in the euphoria of the first optimistic reports of success in the south and the Brigadier, who was never averse to ‘showing Jerry what was what’, had sent for a sign-writer from the Pioneer Battalion and set him to work right away. He was to find a trenchboard and embellish it with a suitable inscription. Almost before the paint was dry, it had been sent gleefully to the Headquarters of the 6th Battalion, the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry with explicit instructions.
Len Lovell was no stranger to No Man’s Land. It had become almost routine to him, and to Clegg as well, to strip off their insignia, to empty their pockets, to blacken their faces, to crawl through the wire and melt
into the night.
There was no possibility of dragging the heavy noticeboard. First Lovell, then Clegg had to carry it on his shoulders as they crawled, belly down, across No Man’s Land, feeling for obstacles in front, freezing in the intermittent glare of flares, inching on when they died down. It took them more than an hour to reach the German wire. Now they had to be doubly cautious, ears cocked for the slightest sound that might warn of an enemy patrol, wary of coming too close to the wire, lest a vibrating ‘ping’ should give them away, or the inadvertent movement of an arm catch one of them fast in its barbs.
Ten interminable minutes passed before the board was embedded into the earth. It took five more to prime the booby trap, designed to give any Germans who tried to remove it an exceedingly nasty surprise. Then came the slow crawl back to the lines, the ticklish business of finding safe passage through the wire, the hoarsely whispered password. Tonight it was ‘WITH’ – an everyday word, chosen for its ease of pronunciation by any native-born Britisher, yet containing, in one simple syllable, two complex sounds guaranteed to stump the foreign tongue of all but the most practised linguist.
Experience had shown that a surprisingly large number of Germans had some knowledge of English, so there was little doubt that Jerry would get the message – if not the joke – bright and early in the morning. The sign-writer had gone to some pains to make sure that it would be legible at a distance of thirty yards and, on its black-painted background, the white lettering stood out bold and clear:
10,000 MEN
AND
100’S OF GUNS
CAPTURED ON SOMME!
MORE TO FOLLOW
GOD SAVE THE KING!
A little way to the south, in the confusion of the thundering night, Intelligence Officers, trying to make sense of the day’s events on the Somme, would have given a great deal to have been put in possession of such precise information.
At Bouzincourt, where the hundred reinforcements of the 6th Battalion, The West Yorkshire Regiment had been anxiously waiting all day without news, dusk was falling before a message from Brigade Headquarters ordered them forward to join the Battalion. It was not hard to guess that there had been casualties and that the Colonel was among them, for Major Scott, his Second-in-Command, was instructed to go up with the reinforcements and to take charge. Even more disturbing was the fact that they were to rendezvous not, as they might have hoped, at Grandcourt, three miles beyond the start line, but at the start line itself in Thiepval Wood. Now they were trying to get there and, although two hours had gone by since they had set off, they had only managed to get as far as Aveluy Wood and here, it seemed, they were stuck. It was almost impossible, even in single file, to make headway through a struggling tide of stretcher-bearers streaming up the narrow tracks against the flow of ration parties and reinforcements pressing down them towards the line. The road to Lancashire Dump was nose-to-tail with limbers, and Lancashire Dump itself was a bottleneck, teeming with supply parties and ration parties and endless small bands of reinforcements pouring out from all over the wood on their way up to the line.
Leaving the track they had followed with difficulty through the trees, the West Yorkshires had to wait while a straggle of walking wounded passed, and some from their own regiment, recognizing them as they went through, called out to them, ‘It’s bloody murder over there, boys.’ A signpost at the edge of the wood was confidently marked THIEPVAL-BAPAUME-BERLIN. This time last night it had cheered the troops on their way to the line; now, waiting beside it for the last stragglers to catch up, Lieutenant Hornshaw found it less than reassuring.
A peremptory arrow pointed to the track. It led across the marshy valley to the bottom of the ridge, and to the single route to the trenches below Thiepval which was invisible from the enemy positions above. It took the West Yorks more than half an hour to shuffle across the mere half-mile to the opposite bank of the Ancre.
Sheltered by a steep bluff the track turned left, hugging the lower slopes of the ridge, passing through the ruins of Authuille and, beyond it, rising gently as it ran towards Thiepval Wood, a mile ahead. Pushing against an ever-swelling huddle of wounded, of messengers and runners clamouring urgently to pass, deafened by the din, wearing gas-masks for the last half-mile, held up in front, pushed forward from behind, the hundred men of the West Yorkshires struggled on as best they could through the rank, sour mist, towards the edge of the wood and the rendezvous at Paisley Dump.
The British Military had taken over Thiepval Wood as surely as they had taken over Aldershot. For the first year of the war, a tottering signpost, drunkenly askew, had kept up a pretence that it was ‘Proprieté privé. Entrée Interdite.’ But it had long ago given up the ghost. Now battered trenchboards nailed to the trees bore directions in uncompromising English: ‘To Johnson’s Post.’ ‘To Iniskilling Avenue.’ ‘To Hamilton Avenue, Campbell Avenue, Elgin Avenue,’ ‘To Belfast City.’ ‘To Paisley Dump.’
Here, at the foot of the ridge on the western edge of the wood, communication trenches splayed out towards the firing line six hundred yards above. Here, supplies were unloaded and ammunition dumped. Here was the meeting-place of every track from Authuille, every causeway across the marshes. Paisley Dump had regularly been chaotic. Tonight it was pandemonium.
The reliefs and reinforcements of two divisions were circling in a sheep-like throng, at a loss to know just where, in the holocaust above, their presence was so urgently required, and prevented even from getting up the communication trenches by the rabble of battleworn soldiers, relieved from the front line, trying to throng down. Some, at the limit of their strength, had given up the effort, and the assembly trenches, where they had waited for the attack, were overflowing with exhausted troops, lying literally in heaps, so drained by strain and fatigue that they could sleep in the midst of the inferno. The deafening sound of the battle above was blotted out by shells screaming closer still, exploding among the men packed into the clearing and exploding too among the still forms of the badly wounded as they lay along the edge of the wood waiting to be evacuated.
As they neared the wood, between the roar of explosions, behind the sickening gas-soaked mist, in the forefront of the noise that raged at them from every horizon, the small party of the West Yorkshires became aware of another sound. It was like nothing they had ever heard before. Later – and for the rest of his life – Lieutenant Hornshaw was to remember it as a sound that chilled the blood; a nerve-scraping noise like ‘enormous wet fingers screeching across an enormous pane of glass’. It was coming from the wounded, lying out in No Man’s Land. Some screaming, some muttering, some weeping with fear, some calling for help, shouting in delirium, groaning with pain, the sounds of their distress had synthesized into one unearthly wail.
As midnight passed and the night of the first day of July turned towards the dawn of the second, as the gunfire died down, it seemed to fill the air. All along the front, from the orchards of Gommecourt to the heights of Beaumont Hamel, from the shoulders of Thiepval to the valley beyond la Boisselle, it rose from the battlefield into the night like the keening of a thousand banshees.
Holding grimly to the remnants of their battered trenches, the battered remnants of the Army shivered as they listened.
Chapter 7
At Gommecourt, Arthur Agius was back where he had started at the beginning of the battle, at Battalion Headquarters at Hébuterne, but this time he was inside it, huddled in a corner with his face to the wall. Technically, Agius was a casualty, but his legs had not been able to support him through a long wait outside the aid post in a crowd of walking wounded, who seemed to him to be in more urgent need of attention than himself.
Captain Arthur Agius, 3rd Btn., Royal Fusiliers, City of London Regiment, 56th Division
I was shell-shocked, I suppose. At any rate, I wasn’t much use – inclined to cry, if anything. In fact, I couldn’t stop and, being rather young, I was somewhat ashamed of it. But it had been a total shambles. The first two companies had got across
and, about an hour after they started, I was told to take B Company across to support them. We had no idea that the whole attack was a diversion. We thought that we were going forward. We had maps and plans of Gommecourt – we knew from information we’d got from the local people exactly where every house was. But the trouble was that Gommecourt stuck out in the middle of the line and we didn’t attack it directly. We attacked on one side of the château park and the 46th Division were attacking on the other. We were supposed to encircle it and link up behind. But what we didn’t know was that the Germans had so manoeuvred and organized their line that this part which we weren’t to attack was really their strongpoint, and they simply had a clear field of fire on either side and nothing to bother about in front. And the shellfire was absolutely appalling. They were simply pouring shells down. We just couldn’t get across. We didn’t even get as far as the trench we’d dug – well, there was no trench left. It was all hammered to blazes. We got just about as far as our old front line and then it became quite impossible. The company in front of me said, ‘It’s no use. We can’t get over.’
We got orders to turn and try to make our way back to the village. One of my subalterns was newly out. Such a nice chap. He must have had money and we used to tease him a bit because his batman was the family butler! This young officer jumped out of the trench to try to organize the men, pass the word and get them moving to the communication trench, and he was promptly killed. Just disappeared in an explosion. The whole of the valley was being swept with machine-gun fire and hammered with shells. We got the men organized as best we could – those of us who were left. So many gone, and we’d never even got past our own front-line trench! And then we found we couldn’t get back. The trenches were indescribable! We were simply treading on the dead. Eventually my Sergeant and I got out on top – we were at the back of the Company. I heard a shell coming. I remember thinking, ‘Imagine! Just imagine hearing a single shell in the middle of all this din!’ It burst just above my head. The Sergeant was blown one way and I was blown the other. He was killed. I don’t know how I got back. I simply don’t know how I got back. It was murder.1
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