We climbed into the German front line. There were any amount of dead and wounded there, ours and theirs. We built a barrier in this line for our own defence on the la Boisselle side – the Germans were still in the trench on the other side of it. They’d had a great shock when the mine went up, but they’d found their feet.
We were in this sap and we’d got the telephone lines in and, late in the night, I managed to get through to my Battalion Headquarters at Bécourt Château. The dugout was full of wounded. My Sergeant, Bob Wear, was there, badly wounded. The blood was draining out of him. When it got quieter, after dark, I said to Major Acklom, ‘Sir, could I and one or two of the other men try to get this man across to our own front line?’ It was only fifty yards away, because we were at the bit where the lines had been closest. Major Acklom studied a bit and then he said, ‘Yes, you can go, providing you promise to return.’ I said, ‘You can have that promise now!’ I got these two or three lads and we got a groundsheet. We couldn’t carry him. We trailed him on the sheet. One or two shells were coming over. We laid him down to take a bit of a rest and he said, ‘I don’t know what the hell you’re bothering about me for. I’m half bloody dead anyway. You’re just risking your own bloody lives.’ ‘Well,’ we said, ‘we’re going to bother.’ We trailed him across to our own front line. We had to watch what we were walking on. We were absolutely trampling on the wounded. You couldn’t help it. It’s bad enough when you’re getting bloody wounded, but it’s bloody murder when they’re trampling on you as well. Oh, they were crying out! I can hear them now. But there wasn’t a thing we could do about it. Just get back to the sap, and hang on. Bob Wear died later.
Gunner Frank Spencer, No. 1113, C. Bty., 152nd Brigade, Royal Field Artillery (his diary)
Still more wounded coming past the guns, day and night. Two of our signallers and an officer who had gone through with the infantry charge return to us. The officer was slightly wounded and the two signallers suffering from severe shock, as they had been buried. Also one of the telephonists was missing and another badly wounded. The duty of this little party had been to run out a telephone wire to keep us in touch with the advancing infantry – but they met with disaster and failed. They say that many of our poor wounded were shot by the enemy while trying to crawl back to the cover of our own trenches. But, on the other hand, a German doctor and his staff was nicely captured whilst tending our own wounded. As nightfall approaches, our infantry are still fighting for la Boisselle, so we are still firing heavily through the night. La Boisselle is now alternately reported in our hands and then in the enemy’s. The dogged courage and high fighting qualities of the enemy machine-gunners who had weathered our rain of shells and then breasted and checked the waves of our determined infantry is worthy of admiration. The suggestions one hears that the Germans have not fought well, is no compliment to our own gallant troops.
Beyond the loop of the Fricourt Salient still, as it had been that morning, in German hands, and some four miles to the south-east, the officers of the 10th Battalion, The Essex Regiment, were settling down to enjoy a late dinner in the deep German dugout which some of their Battalion had had the pleasure of helping to capture earlier in the day. It was an extremely convivial occasion and, strictly speaking, there were rather more officers present than there had any right to be. But so many officers had drifted up from the transport lines where the cadre of the Battalion had been left behind when the rest went into action, and they were so anxious to savour the delights of victory, so keen to sightsee in the captured German line, that Colonel Scott did not have the heart to send them packing.
The dugout in ‘Mine Alley’ near Montauban was the best part of a mile from their jumping-off point of that morning. Their progress had been swift, their casualties had been comparatively few and now their satisfaction was enormous. The 18th Division had well and truly broken the German line on the Somme and, even now, on the other side of Montauban, the troops were probing even further forward. There was no doubt that Jerry was considerably shaken, for only one gun was firing in a desultory fashion from, they guessed, the direction of Delville Wood. It didn’t worry them much. They had captured innumerable prisoners, run over a score of gun positions and, once in possession of their new domain, the 10th Essex had even had time to toss out a load of rubbish in the form of the spare uniforms, stores and personal belongings of the previous occupants. They had burned them in a celebratory bonfire. But they had taken care not to dispose of interesting souvenirs or useful commodities. Almost every man in the Battalion, from the Colonel to the cooks, would be able to march out of the line festooned with the coveted German helmets as well as lesser trophies.
Tonight they were having a wonderful time. There was only bully beef to eat, supplemented by cheese and some watery soup, but there was a copious supply of very acceptable German chocolate and, for the officers, excellent German sparkling water to dilute their whisky. General Higginson had enjoyed a generous tot when he had come in person to congratulate them. Now, several hours after his departure, the officers of the 10th Essex, together with those signallers and servants who were lucky enough to be attached to Battalion H Q in its luxurious new abode, were still delightedly smoking good German cigars, celebrating their victory, and looking forward to pressing on tomorrow. It was a whoopee of an evening.
Only the Adjutant, Captain Robert Chell, with his ear clamped to the telephone, doing his best, in the rowdy atmosphere, heavy with cigar-smoke, to comply with the demands of Brigade for precise information, had half an inkling that, elsewhere, things had not gone quite as well as had been expected.
All along the front, of the hundred and fifty thousand men who had gone over the top that morning, more than fifty-seven thousand had been killed or wounded. By a prophetic irony of fate, when the Central War Charities Committee had allocated particular dates in 1916 to particular fund-raising bodies, the first week of July had been designated ‘Women’s Tribute Week’.
Chapter 8
For the people at home, the parents, the wives, the sweethearts, even the children, of the boys who had mostly gone into battle for the first time, the Big Push would be the story of the year. The Correspondents had watched it from a rise on the Amiens road a mile or so behind Albert.
Spangled with waving poppies and wayward clumps of mustard flowers on its verges, the road ran from Albert through the summer fields of Picardy to the town of Amiens, fifteen miles to the south-west – near enough to the battlefield to hear the constant rumble of gunfire in its streets and to see, from a top floor window, the glowing sky lit by the battle below. But Amiens was another world. With the influx of refugees and of French and British military, the number of residents had almost doubled since the war and they were further augmented by an ever-changing floating population, predominantly masculine and predominantly khaki-clad, drifting in holiday mood through its streets in search of civilian delights. Even after two years of war Amiens still had plenty to offer.
After a spell in the squalor of the trenchline, when a man had perhaps not removed his clothes for a fortnight, when his daily ration of water for washing and shaving had been easily contained in a half-pint mug, and whose head, for most of the time, had been clamped into a steel helmet, the pleasure of a visit to a barber was indescribable. The barber’s shop in Rue des Trois Cailloux offered a whole range of sybaritic pleasures – a shampoo, a hair-cut, a shave, hot towels and, greatest luxury of all, a friction d’eau de quinine rubbed in until the scalp tingled and glowed. Next door at the parfumier you could buy Eau de Cologne to mask the unpleasant odour that clung to every uniform and person, buy French scent as a lavish present for your girl, or, against the happy day when it would be your turn for a bath, soap that bore no relation at all to the abrasive yellow slabs provided by the Army.
There was the bookshop where Madame Carpentier and her daughter, smiling on purchasers and browsers alike, did a brisk trade in indelible pencils and writing pads and an even brisker trade in copies of the saucy Vi
e Parisienne, whose cut-out pictures enlivened the décor of almost every dugout on the Western Front. They also sold postcards galore and occasionally a book. There were smart cafés, mostly frequented by young officers, and bars in the side streets where drinks were half the price. There was an interesting museum and, although the glorious stonework of the Gothic cathedral had long since disappeared behind a pyramid of sandbags, it was still worth a visit.
Best of all, to palates numbed and wearied by army rations, there were restaurants – la Cathédrale, which specialized in good home cooking, the more expensive Godebert, presided over by the delicious Marguerite and, in a sleazy side street with the curious name of Rue du Corps Nu sans Tête, Josephine’s oyster restaurant, cheap, cheerful and none too clean, was run by a virago of a patronne who clattered and banged about with the speed of a whirlwind and whom the Tommies had consequently nicknamed ‘Hurricane Jane’. A few doors away an establishment which proclaimed itself in white-washed letters across the window to be an ‘Officers Dining Room’ was much patronized by junior subalterns.
By tacit consent the excellent restaurant of the Hotel du Rhin in the Rue Amiral Courbet was avoided by all but officers of the rank of major and above. There were far too many staff officers about, and staff officers, moreover, whose red-hatted grandeur was further enhanced by the green armbands of the Intelligence Service. They lived and worked across the road in a mansion owned by Madame de la Rochefoucauld but, despite the comfort of their aristocratic billet, despite the pleasant proximity of the Hotel du Rhin and its excellent cellar, despite the civilized surroundings of Amiens, they were not enjoying themselves. They were nursemaids, or so they would have described themselves, to a group of British War Correspondents – or so they would have described themselves. To the Army they were ‘writer chappies’ and the Army, and in particular its Commander-in-Chief, thought them an infernal nuisance.
Always a professional soldier who regarded soldiering as a professional affair, impatient of what he saw as ‘interference’ by the uninformed (a category in which he included most civilians and all politicians), Haig had accepted the presence of journalists at the front with distaste and reluctance. Since the beginning of the war the military authorities had put every obstacle in the way of those who wished to report it but, by the time Haig had taken over command of the Army six months earlier, the presence of the journalists was already a fait accompli. But his attitude towards them was far from helpful.
Official Communiqués were telegraphed from GHQ each evening and, in the opinion of GHQ, they contained all the facts which newspaper readers required to know. Any embellishment by non-military observers might, when published, give useful information to the enemy. More colourful stories were, after all, only ‘written for Mary Ann in the kitchen’. Haig had been injudicious enough to say as much to the faces of some of the most distinguished representatives of Fleet Street when they had called on him at GHQ, and had caused deep offence. Faced with the patronizing smile and formidable presence of this ‘tall, handsome man who could not see why we wanted more facilities to record the progress of the war’, only Philip Gibbs of the Daily Telegraph had the courage to speak up. He told the Commander-in-Chief, and in no uncertain terms, that he ‘could not conduct his war in secret, as though the people at home, whose sons and husbands were fighting and dying, had no concern in the matter. The spirit of the fighting men, and the driving power behind the armies, depended upon the support of the whole people and their continuing loyalties’.
The Commander-in-Chief was not a man whose opinions were easily swayed, but Gibbs had given him food for thought and, at least on the face of it, his attitude had changed. The Correspondents were given uniforms, the use of the upper storey of the splendid billet in Amiens, and the ‘services’ of a group of trusted Intelligence Officers as censors-on-the-spot, who were installed on the floor below. Their brief was to escort the Correspondents on their forays to the front, censor their despatches as they wrote them and, so that they might be despatched with all speed, no less a personage than a King’s Messenger would carry them daily to London. The Correspondents were also led to believe that there was no part of the front they might not visit, that the Army had been instructed to this effect and that they might write whatever they liked, on the understanding that they might not mention place names other than in the most general of geographical terms, nor the names of individuals or units ever at all. As a final accolade, they too would have the right to wear the green armbands of the Intelligence Service.
It was a brilliant move. From now on, the War Correspondents, attired in the King’s uniform, were, to all intents and purposes, Officers of the Army, conscious of their debt to it and conscious too of their duty to keep up morale and to reinforce that ‘continuing loyalty’ of people at home. It was natural that they should wish to prove themselves worthy of the Army’s trust. Their facilities included the right to ‘talk to anyone’, and they travelled far and wide, doing just that, each accompanied by his Army Watchdog, viewing the battles from convenient vantage points and often taking considerable risks to get closer.
It was human nature that, in the light of their previous difficulties with the Staff, the ease of their new situation should float like a rosy gauze between the Correspondents and their observations. It was also human nature that senior officers who condescended to speak to them confined themselves to sanguine observations on what was apparent to anyone who took the trouble to read Official Communiqués, that field officers confined themselves to platitudes and that other ranks, invited by an officer of senior (if unrecognizable) rank to confide his impressions of the war, inevitably responded with such anodyne observations as would appeal equally to the sentimental heart of ‘Mary Ann in the kitchen’ and the patriotic fervour of her master at the breakfast table. It was human nature, but it was not journalism. If any breath of criticism ever escaped the lips of the War Correspondents none was detectable in the dutiful columns of print that breathed victory and hope to the ‘people at home’.
In Madame de la Rochefoucauld’s house in Amiens, the lights had burned into the small hours of the morning of 2 July as half a dozen typewriters clattered out a story which each Correspondent fervently hoped would convey the drama and flavour of his excitement better than any other. Robinson of The Times, having exhausted his repertoire of adjectives in eyewitness descriptions of some scores of previous bombardments during his two years in France, was now faced with the difficulty of describing one that outstripped them all. In an attempt to convey the number of shells which burst every minute he resorted, in desperation, to a technique which had all the elements of a parlour game.
… counting was hopeless. Fixing my eyes on one spot I tried to wink them as fast as the lightnings flickered, and the shells beat me badly. I then tried chattering my teeth, and I think that in that way I approximately held my own. Testing it afterwards in the light, where I could see a watch face, I found that I could click my teeth some five or six times in a second. You can try it for yourself and, clicking your own teeth, will get some idea of the rate at which shells were bursting on a single spot…
But there was no hint of ‘chattering teeth’ in the well-oiled lyricism inspired by the sight of the Tommies marching to battle.
Long before they came close one heard the steady roar of their feet – tramp-tramp! Tramp-tramp! And always as they passed they whistled softly in unison. Some whistled Tipperary, some Come back my Bonnie, to me, and some, best of all in the place and surroundings, La Marseillaise. As we came back along that road, far behind the front, we saw more companies, more battalions. On the tree-shaded road it was too dark to see them, save only as vague dark masses against the light background of the highway. One felt their presence and heard more than one saw them; always the steady tramp-tramp, tramp-tramp as they shouldered by; and they were always whistling. Now and again a laugh broke out at some unheard joke, a completely careless laugh, as of a holidaymaker…
The Correspondents had
only been able to snatch an hour or two of sleep when the morning Communiqué arrived from GHQ. Now, as the censors breakfasted at this unseemly early hour on a Sunday morning, restoring themselves for their duty of scrutinizing the despatches as they were ripped hot from the typewriters, the Correspondents were at it again, stiffening their skeleton impressions with a backbone of positive fact.
… North of the Ancre our principal success was the capture of the hamlet of Serre, which is regarded as an important tactical point; but by the close of the day the Germans had counter-attacked so violently that progress appears to have been partial… Everything has gone well. Our troops have successfully carried out their missions. All counter-attacks have been repulsed and large numbers of prisoners have been taken… The enemy apparently still hold Gommecourt, though our troops are on both sides of that village On either side of the valley of the Ancre the situation is unchanged… Our troops were making effective progress near la Boisselle… The general situation may be regarded as favourable… Thanks to the very complete and effective artillery preparation, thanks also to the dash of our infantry, our losses have been very slight… The first impression of the opening of our offensive is that our leaders in the field have amply profited by the experience of the last two years and that they are directing a methodical and well planned advance… There are already indications that close touch must have been kept throughout, and that the attacking forces were well under control…
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