Trudging along the road away from the battle-line towards Sailly, ‘Murder’ was a word which Sergeant Henry Coates was finding it difficult to dismiss from his mind and he surmised that the thoughts of the man who was plodding along in silence by his side were probably running along the same lines. He was taking the Brigadier home. From Philip Neame’s fine trench they had both had a grandstand view of the battle. The troops had gone over in fine style, behind a smokescreen so thick that they were through the battered German wire and into the front-line trenches almost before the Germans knew what was happening.
And that was the last they had seen of the advance, for the advance had melted away under the relentless German bombardment that had fallen all day on No Man’s Land. After the first euphoric hour when markers hoisted above the German trenches triumphantly confirmed that the first wave of troops had reached its first three objectives, they had seen nothing but the perpetual flicker of signal lamps. They had flashed all day long, signalling over and over again the same urgent message: SOS BOMBS. SOS BOMBS. SOS BOMBS.
Looking back on the long day at Brigade Headquarters, Coates could not bring himself to contemplate the number of parties they had ordered out into the maelstrom to try somehow to get bombs and ammunition to the troops, cut off in the German lines, battling to hold on to their hard-won gains. Eventually the Brigade Staff had stopped trying. It was very clear, as the day wore on, that no more troops had reached the other side. Even through the tossing sea of explosions, it was plain to see that the fighting was dying down. As dusk gathered in, the lessening flash of rifle fire, the intermittent sparking of a lone Lewis-gun, spoke all too eloquently of one last microscopic stand by a small band of survivors. Without ammunition, without help, without reinforcements, it was a miracle that they had lasted half so long.
As Coates stood in the trench peering at the last few futile streaks of fire, Philip Neame had appeared at his shoulder. ‘I think you’d better accompany the Brigadier back.’
Coates had followed Neame down the steps to the dugout. Brigadier Loch sat slumped, staring at the low roof and the hanging lamp that swung and shivered with every crash of the bombardment.
Sergeant Henry Coates, No. 510729, 14th (London Scottish) Btn., London Regiment
He was like a man in a dream. It was terrible to see him like that, because he was quite a chatty old boy, always talking about his little daughter, and friendly, though he could be severe sometimes. The Old Man was a daredevil. A real fighter. He wanted to be in strict control of all that was going on and that’s why we had this magnificent dugout with the short trench above it, away in advance of the Battalion HQs. It saved all our lives. If it hadn’t been for this deep dugout we’d all have been killed or buried alive. They were simply knocking hell out of us, nearly all day.
I’m sure the Old Man was shell-shocked. I know I was! He was broken. He made no objection to coming with me. He didn’t say a word. He just got up, very, very slowly and, in a break in the shelling, we went out. They’d shelled our own trenches so much that the line was absolutely broken, and the trenches were all knocked in and the chaps buried underneath. We were treading over dead bodies and all sorts of things going along. We just struggled back as best we could, past men going forward to try to get the wounded out of the trenches and out of No Man’s Land, and past people going up to reinforce the front line – what was left of it! There was hardly anyone there. The Brigadier just followed me and eventually we managed to get through on to the road to Sailly au Bois.
It took them several hours to cover the four miles to Sailly and the old Brigade Headquarters and all the way, neither of them spoke a word.
A sentry snapped to attention as they entered Brigade H Q. The Brigadier hardly returned his salute. The bombardment was still thundering behind them. In silence they went down the steep stair to the cellar and, huddling in opposite corners, still without speaking, they settled down to pass what was left of the night.
Two miles south of Gommecourt, travelling at snail’s pace along the congested road that would take them to the reserve trenches in the line in front of Serre, Reg Parker thanked God that he was with the Transport. Things had quietened down early on the Serre Front. By ten in the morning it had all been over. Two out of three of the men who had gone over the top had become casualties and lay dead or wounded on the gentle slope of ground between their trenches and the German lines. The Pals who had joined up in all the euphoria of the early weeks of the war, the lads from Leeds, from Bradford, from York, from Lancaster, from Sheffield, from Hull, had been slaughtered in the first short hour of the great battle. The last echoes of the cheers and the shouting, the last faint remembered notes of the brass bands that had sent them off from the towns and villages of the north, had died out in a whisper that morning in front of Serre.
Private Reg Parker, No. 744, 12th Btn., York & Lancaster Regiment (The Sheffield Pals)
It must have been two or three in the morning before we managed to get the transport and the rations up, though we’d been trying since early in the evening. We could see the fires as we went up. This little country village, this Serre, were a mass of fire that night. We had to take the stuff up to a place called Basin Wood and it was an exposed position, just about 600 yards behind our front line. And it was full of wounded. There were three doctors there, working flat out, and you could hear this groaning in the dark and see them lying round in the flash of the guns. They’d sent a party down to unload the rations but I’d got a water cart and you couldn’t just chuck the stuff and get away. You’d got to wait while they emptied it and poured it into petrol tins. You could see it had been a shambles.
I kept trying to find out about my brother. He’d only come to the Regiment a matter of days before the attack and he couldn’t have come at a worse time. I didn’t have time to wangle him on to the Transport. He was joined up with C Company, in the City Battalion, and he didn’t have time to pal up with any of them. So nobody knew him. I kept asking, but nobody knew what had happened to him. While they were unloading the water I saw our Sergeant-Major and I tried to speak to him but he’d have shot me! He was brandishing this revolver. Berserk! Didn’t know what he was doing. He was absolutely shell-shocked. They all were!
You weren’t supposed to stop there. You’d got to get out of it before dawn and I just managed to. I never did find out what happened to my brother. He must have been blown to smithereens.
Willie Parker was just one of some two thousand men who had fallen in front of Serre in the first hour of the attack.
Over the Redan Ridge in the Beaumont Hamel valley, blinking monstrously under the flashing sky, the white chalk crater of the mine on the Hawthorn Ridge glowered across at the British lines. It was many hours since the small force who had captured it and, for a time, held it, had been killed or pushed back. The Germans still held Beaumont Hamel; they were still in firm possession of their line. Save for the carpet of dead that lay in front of it, nothing had changed since morning. The long toil of the mining operations, the careful preparations, the high optimism, had all gone for nothing and been cancelled out by the single monstrous error that had silenced the guns across the whole Corps Front. Even now, at 8th Corps headquarters, Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston was fuming over it, and he was fuming because, in the course of a brief telephone conversation, the Commander-in-Chief had made it plain that he was displeased with the performance of the 8th Corps. Hours earlier, in a few snatched moments between conferences, between consultations and the hasty recasting of plans, Sir Douglas had confided his displeasure to his journal:
North of the Ancre, the 8th Corps1 (Hunter-Weston) said they began well, but, as the day progressed, their troops were forced back into the German front line, except two battalions which occupied Serre village, and were, it is said, cut off. I am inclined to believe from further reports, that very few of the 8th Corps left their trenches.1
They had ‘left their trenches’ all right, though not many had got as far as the trenches of
the enemy beyond. When the mine had gone up and the bombardment had ceased across the whole length of the 8th Corps Front, it was the last signal of confirmation the Germans had needed to warn them that the assault was under way. That had happened, not at Zero, but ten minutes before the troops were to go ‘over the top’. The Germans had ample time to rush up from shelters and dugouts, ample time to garrison their line, ample time to set up machine-guns, to man their hidden posts, to train the guns on the gaps in their own wire and also on the British wire, accurately sighted on the narrow lanes, through which the Tommies would have to pass into No Man’s Land. As for the troops already lying beyond the trenches, awaiting the signal to go forward to the assault, it took far less than ten minutes to alert the German artillery and to bring a hurricane of shells crashing down on to the land they would have to cross.
It was incredible that any had succeeded in crossing it at all, and those who did had long ago been cut off, with no hope of reinforcement, of relief, or even of rescue.
Between the remnants of the Pals and the remnants of the divisions flung back at Beaumont Hamel, but far ahead of both at Pendant Copse, Sergeant Harry Butler and a dozen men were still holding on to a tiny stretch of captured trench. They spent the hours of darkness salvaging the rifles of the dead and propping them around the trench in the hope that, when morning came, the glinting bayonets would lead the Germans to believe that fresh troops had come up in the night to reinforce them. For the moment they were safe. There was no shelling to worry about. After the first two hours, after the attack had first dwindled and then withered away, the German guns opposite the 8th Corps Front had been able to swing about and add the full strength of their support to the sectors on either side.
They were still firing now, some northwards to Gommecourt where the last of the survivors were trying to crawl back from the German line under cover of darkness. The rest of the guns, ranged behind Beaumont Hamel, had swung their muzzles towards the Thiepval Ridge and were firing over open sights at the Schwaben Redoubt where a handful of the Ulsters who had captured it were still holding on.
Later, when the shelling stopped in order to allow the encircling Germans to close in, they managed to struggle back to the shelter of Thiepval Wood through the tiny opening that remained.
Machine-gun fire from Thiepval village was still stuttering into the night.
On the shoulder of the ridge beyond it, the body of Eversmann was lying spreadeagled in front of the Leipzig Redoubt, where the Germans had counter-attacked and been pushed back in the afternoon. Major McFarlane of the 15 th Highland Light Infantry had taken A Company out to search for the wounded of the 17th Battalion. That morning, they had punched the Germans hard in the nose of the Leipzig Redoubt and were still, miraculously, holding on to the first two lines of the trenches they had captured. The rescue party stumbled across Eversmann’s body. There was no time to spare for the dead; in particular – and in the view of the Jocks, scouring among the carnage of the morning’s battle – there was no time to spare for a dead German. But there was always the chance that his pockets contained ‘souvenirs’. Later, crouched in a shell-hole in Authuille Wood, two Jocks of the 15th Highland Light Infantry were going over their haul in the first light of morning. The small notebook with its incomprehensible German script might have been tossed aside as useless, but Captain Hunter happened to come along. They handed it over with a jerk of the head. ‘We found it up yonder, sir.’ It was Eversmann’s diary. Hunter tactfully ignored the rest of their booty. The men had had a hard night. Between them they had brought in forty-two of the wounded.
Beyond the wood, across the dip of the Nab Valley, Ernest Deighton had not been quite so lucky for no rescue party had found him nor the four others who lay wounded beside him in the big shell-hole between the first German trench and the second.
Private Ernest Deighton, No. 25884, 8th Btn., King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, 8th Division
I thought I was a goner. I didn’t think I’d get back. I didn’t think I’d ever get back.
Lying out there that morning I were within twenty-five or thirty yards of the German front line, looking through this telescopic sight at the gap in their trench. I could have touched it. I had my finger on the trigger all the time, not moving, and I saw a few of them laid to rest. But it didn’t do our lads much good. As soon as they started across the machine-guns opened up. It seemed like hours before they got up near to me, but they kept on coming. I still dursn’t move. These bullets are flying all over the place. It were Maxims they were firing and they were shooting across each other, with this hissing noise as they went past. I dursn’t turn round, but I heard the noise behind me and I knew our fellows were coming. Some of them were getting hit and they were yelling and shouting, but they came on, and when the first wave got up to me I jumped up.
I were in the first row and the first one I saw were my chum, Clem Cunnington. I don’t think we’d gone twenty yards when he got hit straight through the breast. Machine-gun bullets. He went down. I went down. We got it in the same burst. I got it through the shoulder. I hardly noticed it, at the time, I were so wild when I saw that Clem were finished. We’d got orders: ‘Every man for himself and no prisoners!’ It suited me that, after I saw Clem lying there.1
I got up and picked up my rifle and got through the wire into their trench and straight in front there was this dugout – full of Jerries, and one big fellow was on the steps facing me. I had this Mills bomb. Couldn’t use my arm. I pulled the pin with my teeth and flung it down and I were shouting at them, I were that wild. ‘There you are! Bugger yourselves! Share that between you!’ Then I were off! It was hand to hand! I went round one traverse and there was one – face to face. I couldn’t fire one-handed, but I could use the bayonet. It was him or me – and I went first! Jab! Just like that. It were my job. And from there I went on. Oh, I were wild! Seeing Clem like that!
We were climbing out of the trench, making for the second line, and that’s where they got me again just as I were climbing out, through the fingers this time, on the same arm. I still managed to get on. I kept up with the lads nearly to the second line. Then I got another one. It went through my tin hat and down and straight through my foot. Well, that finished it!
After a bit, lying there, I saw two fellows drop into some shell-hole. I crawled after them and, of course, you couldn’t see much for the smoke but, next thing we did know, the Germans had taken back all their front line again. There were no more of our fellows about. So there we had to stop. When night came I were in a deuce of a state. I must have been fainting off and on, what with the loss of blood. You’d no idea of the passage of time. I didn’t know where I were. I only knew there were Germans in front and Germans behind and I had no idea which way were the British lines.
What with having nothing to eat and nothing to drink all day, my tongue was getting as big as two. I could hardly close my mouth. My water-bottle was gone. I couldn’t realize where I was. Lights going up all the time. All this noise. Them shelling from their side and us shelling from ours, and machine-gun in between. What worried me was getting caught in our own shellfire. I bothered more about that. Well, they dropped in front of me and they dropped behind me but they never put one into the shell-hole.
The long night flickered and thundered on. By mid-afternoon on the previous day, sickened by the terrible sights half-glimpsed through the smoke that rolled across the valley in the front of Ovillers and la Boisselle, Brigadier-General Ternan had dodged back through the shelling to his Brigade Headquarters in the lee of the Tara-Usna Ridge. If any news was to come back from the line, it would be brought – or telephoned, if there was a line intact – to Brigade HQ. The fate of the 8th Division, attacking at Ovillers, was obvious to them all. Few of them had even managed to cross the wide expanse of No Man’s Land to get within shooting distance of the village. As for his own Brigade, every single colonel of the Tyneside Scottish had died at the head of his battalion, and almost every other officer had peri
shed as they went forward to tackle the line at la Boisselle.1
Runner after runner had been sent across and had come back – if they came back at all – with no news. It was only now, in the deep dark, as some wounded fragments of the Tyneside Scottish were crawling painfully back from No Man’s Land that they realized, with terrible finality, that the 1st and the 4th Tyneside Scottish had been virtually annihilated. Later, when a telephone line was established, Major Acklom reported that he had gathered the remnants of the other two battalions and was holding out in a small length of the German line. Both his flanks were in the air. His men were exhausted. He urgently needed bombs and water. He recommended ‘an early relief by fresh troops’.
It was Tom Easton who had got the line going.
Private Tom Easton, No. 1000, 21st Btn., Northumberland Fusiliers (2nd Tyneside Scottish)
I was in this tunnel with Major Acklom – it was one of the tunnels the Engineers had dug when they laid the big mine. The mine went up all right. We saw it go from the third line. We’d been pulled back because of the explosion and, as a signaller, I was there with all the Battalion Headquarters people.
I could take you to the spot where we set out from. You had a dip coming from Bécourt Château to where the crater is. We were in the deep dip. You couldn’t see much when the mine went up, but the noise was terrible. The fallout was tremendous as well, but it fell short of us. Then we got orders to advance. My Colonel had gone sick and Major Heniker was in charge. He got killed by a shell even before we started. Major Neven was Second-in-Command – a big, noble-looking fellow. He got killed too. They all got killed. All the officers. I couldn’t do nothing but pray for my mother to protect us. As we went across I kept saying, ‘Mother, help me. Mother, help me’ – just as if I was praying to her. When we got to the wire, there was my Signal-Officer, Lieutenant McNeil Smith, lying dead. Then Major Acklom came along, and he took command. We didn’t have an officer left – and there were few enough of us!
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