SOMME

by Lyn Macdonald

  Darby himself had had his own brush with Authority and, although it had been no more than a minor misdemeanour, typical of many a fed up Tommy, it had earned him eight days’ field punishment, which had seemed to him a trifle unfair, because it had only been meant as a joke. But the joke had a point. The particular chip on Fred’s shoulder was the sparsity of the rations and a shrewd suspicion that a large proportion of the food intended for troops in the line was being filched on the way up. The army biscuits which were all-too-often substituted for bread were nutritious enough once you got your teeth into them, but getting your teeth into them was the problem. They were as hard as cement. Varnished, buffed and polished, with a suitable cavity gouged from the centre, an army biscuit made a handsome and durable frame for a snapshot of wife or sweetheart. Soaked in water, and mixed with jam, or raisins if any were to be had, they made a reasonably palatable slop. Wrapped in a cloth and pounded with a mallet, they could be reduced to a state resembling ‘breadcrumbs’ which, mixed with mashed-up bully beef, resulted in a hash which was eatable if warmed up or – if there was fat available to fry them in, and a Tommy who had the patience to mould them – made into tasty rissoles. But the purpose for which they were palpably useless was the very purpose for which they were intended – to allay the pangs of hunger when nothing else was available. Fred Darby had sent one home to his wife, Freda. He wrote the message on one side: ‘Your King and Country need You, and this is how they feed you.’ On the other he wrote his wife’s name and address, affixed a stamp and posted it from a civilian Post Office behind the lines.

  It was the latter that caused the Army offence. There was no regulation which actually forbade defeatism in correspondence although, for obvious reasons, it was discouraged and could evoke a pointed rebuke from the censoring officer. But posting uncensored ‘correspondence’ – even an army biscuit – was a serious misdemeanour. Astonishingly, Freda had received the biscuit through the normal channels of the Post Office. Fred had received the backlash and, having taken his punishment, was not encouraged to repeat the experiment. He bore no grudge against the Army and the Army later demonstrated that it bore no grudge against Fred by awarding him the Distinguished Conduct Medal and wiping his ‘crime’ from its records. But, crouching together in their shell-hole under the bombardment, neither Fred nor Turrall could have guessed that Turrall, the enfant terrible, was about to earn even greater distinction.

  They went over at three o’clock in the morning. It was less than forty-eight hours since the first general attack had been launched on the Somme Front and it had been much against the will of the British Command that the troops had gone over then in broad daylight. After Saturday’s débâcle they were now doubly convinced that they had been right in disagreeing with the French who had pressed for a morning attack. It had been all very well for them to insist that their artillery observers needed daylight but it was glaringly obvious that the daylight had been on the side of the enemy. Now, with no interfering ally to thwart better judgement, the leading battalions rose from their shell-holes and surged forward through the concealing night to the trenches in front of la Boisselle. The 10th Worcesters were in the first wave.

  Eight hundred and ten men went in. Four hundred and forty-eight came out.

  But they had captured three lines of trenches and, although they had not succeeded in taking the whole village, by mid-day they had succeeded in winning enough ground to establish a line halfway through it and Tom Turrall had earned the Victoria Cross.1

  It had not been so much a fight as a mêlée. The ruined buildings concealed fortifications, dugouts and hidden strongpoints as apparently invincible as any on the front, but the Worcesters had fought with bayonet and bomb. They had gone on fighting when the Commanding Officer, the Second-in-Command and almost every other officer had been killed or wounded and there was no longer anyone to lead the fight. In the first light of dawn Lieutenant Jennings had gathered some remnants of the men about him and was doubtless thankful to recognize Turrall among the scattered troops who, willy-nilly, had been separated from their platoons. They had pressed on through and beyond the village and into a storm of machine-gun fire. When it ceased, none of the party was left but Turrall and, lying a few feet away from him, his leg shattered and useless, Lieutenant Jennings. Turrall had dragged him into a shell-hole. He had bandaged the broken leg, using his entrenching tool as a splint and one of his puttees as a bandage. He had single-handedly repulsed a bombing attack by a party of Germans creeping up at close range. He had survived a counter-attack, by lying as still and apparently lifeless as Lieutenant Jennings himself as the enemy swept past to try to retake the line. One German soldier had even stopped and prodded him with his bayonet, and still, with a monumental effort, Turrall contrived to appear oblivious. Throughout the day he lay with Jennings in the shell-hole at the further end of the village with the enemy in front and behind.

  At first light as the fight for la Boisselle was at its height and as Lieutenant Jennings had been gathering up his party and preparing for the dash forward, the small force of the 6th Wiltshires, their number swelled by men who had crept or tumbled into the crater during the night, were facing the German lines on the further rim of the crater, ‘standing to’ in case the enemy should rush it in a dawn attack. Nothing happened and the fearsome noise of the fighting in the village a quarter of a mile to their left reassured them that, for the moment, the Germans had their hands full. But their first sight of what lay beyond the crater, glimpsed cautiously in the grey half-light, haunted them through the sweltering day. Sweating in the heat, parched with thirst, pressed against the gas-soaked slopes of the crater, dizzied by the fumes of explosions, in the forefront of the clamour of the fight to the left of them they could hear quite distinctly a sound that came closer to home. It was the buzzing of a million flies hovering and settling on the still bodies of the dead, lying in countless numbers beyond the crater. The smell, in the summer heat, was almost overpowering but all Roy Bealing could think of through the endless day of burning heat, was that every dead soldier lying out in front must have a full water-bottle strapped to his body. Their own were long since empty. They could only hope that, when nightfall came, rations would come too. Meanwhile, they could only hold on.

  When the darkness deepened, Bealing scrambled over the rim of the crater and crawled in search of water among the ranks of the dead. The shelling had abated. In la Boisselle the fighting had died down. Both sides were glad to draw breath and draw strength for tomorrow. Flares lit the ground from time to time, but there was no fear that Bealing would be spotted. Creeping close to the ground among the huddled dead, he would simply be taken for one of them.

  Some few hundred yards away, beyond the captured line that ran through the centre of the village, Tom Turrall was creeping back with infinite caution and also with infinite difficulty. He was carrying his officer on his back and Lieutenant Jennings was in a bad way. He had been wounded twice before Turrall had dragged him into the shell-hole and he had been wounded twice more while he lay there. Now, with his left leg shattered, with wounds in his right thigh and knee and a bullet wound through his left arm, he could do little to help himself. Tom Turrall was not, in general, an admirer of officers, but he admired Lieutenant Jennings. He liked the way he had tackled the first dugout, bombing it himself and capturing it almost single-handed which, in Turrall’s opinion, was no mean feat. He had liked the way that he had led the men to the second line and kept on leading even after he was wounded and, when Jennings was beyond carrying on, he had astounded Turrall by his courage as he lay shattered in the shell-hole. Time after time he had fainted with pain and time after time he had roused and chatted in an almost social way and had even smoked a cigarette or two, allowing Turrall to light them but, with his one uninjured arm, waving away his efforts to place the cigarette between his lips. Turrall had liked that too, and he was determined to get Jennings back.

  Jennings was a dead weight. He was weak with loss of blood. He wa
s a taller man than Turrall and his one sound arm which Turrall had thrown around his own neck had little grip left in it. All that Turrall could do was to grasp it with one hand of his own, throw his other arm behind him around Jennings’ body, and half-carry, half-drag him through the gaps between the German outposts, across the battered ground, to the new British line. There had been little chance to consolidate, and the sentries were edgy, alert to any shadow that staggered from the darkness of the night beyond.

  ‘Halt! Hands Up!’ And then, as Turrall raised his hands as far as he could without letting Jennings go, came the heart-stopping snap of the rifle bolt, ‘That man behind you too! Quick!’ ‘For God’s sake! He’s wounded and I’m bringing him in!’ Turrall was just in time to stop the sentry firing and raising the alarm.

  Lieutenant Jennings survived long enough to be carried to the field dressing station. He survived the journey by ambulance to the casualty clearing station at Dernancourt. And he lived long enough to tell the story of what had happened and to recommend Tom Turrall for the Victoria Cross. He died of his wounds on the evening of 5 July. Some hours earlier, before Lieutenant Jennings had finally slipped into unconsciousness, they were able to tell him that the Germans had been pushed out of la Boisselle.1

  *

  The 19th Division was still in the line but now it was possible to bring out the Tynesiders of the 34th. The fragments of the battalions came out in pathetically small groups and were collected together in trenches on the Albert side of the Tara-Usna ridge. There was little shelter and, after a fine day, a chilly wind hinted at rain in the morning. They were very near the gun line but neither the roar of the night barrage, nor the absence of greatcoats and blankets disturbed them. Slumped where they had thrown themselves down, the Geordies slept the sleep of the dead.

  Next morning, for the first time in five days, they had a hot breakfast to sustain them on the six-mile march through the town of Albert to Millencourt four miles beyond. It was a long slog along the congested roads but there were many welcome rests while they waited at the roadside for a convoy of buses or lorries to pass. All were carrying troops whose clean and cheerful demeanour, in spite of an almost sleepless night of travelling, contrasted vividly with the appearance of the soldiers newly out of the line. Filthy, bedraggled, sunken-eyed with fatigue, they stood by the roadside and grinned and waved back as the cheering convoys passed. Tom Easton, for one, felt that, for the first time, he truly understood the meaning of the word ‘relief’.

  Chapter 10

  With the concentration of troops coming out of the line and whole brigades preparing to go in, the population of Millencourt which had amounted to a few hundreds before the war had expanded to that of a fair-sized town. There was no question that such billets as there were should be reserved for the exhausted ranks of the decimated battalions who, beyond anything else, needed rest. In the barns, stacked high with tiers of short wire-netting bunks, the weary men of the 34th Division lay asleep and replete too, for they had enjoyed a lavish meal. Some of the lads had managed to tuck away as many as four plates of stew and, for once, there had been enough bread to mop it up. With so few to be fed, there was plenty to go round.

  Arriving late in the afternoon from his meeting with the Divisional Commander, Brigadier Trevor Ternan was reluctant to rouse the sleeping officers, but it had to be done. A day or so before he had addressed the officers of his Brigade en masse in the village school-room. Now there was more than room enough for them all in his office at Brigade Headquarters. Eighty officers had gone into action with the four Battalions of the Tyneside Scottish Brigade. Ten now remained.

  In the Tyneside Irish, it was the same sorry tale. Mere drafts of reinforcements arriving in officerless battalions would be of little use. It had been decided, Ternan announced, that both Brigades should be transferred wholesale to the 37th Division to rest and recuperate, to regroup and retrain with new men in a quiet sector of the line. Meanwhile, two Brigades of the 37th Division would take their places in the 34th to continue the battle. Later, when they were up to strength again, he hoped that they would all return to the Home Division. But his listeners knew, as Ternan knew himself, that, whatever the future held, neither the Tyneside Scots nor the Tyneside Irish would ever be the same again.

  The change-over had taken place while the men were sleeping and the 112th Brigade was already resting on the slopes behind the village preparing to move off.

  A brisk half-hour’s stroll away in the environs of the insalubrious village of Bresle, the boys of the 13th Rifle Brigade had enjoyed a day of comparative rest and, in the course of it, had learned that they were now part of the 34th Division. After their night journey from Humbercourt they had been bivouacking all day in the open and they were not sorry to be stretching their legs and leaving to march nearer the line. Earlier in the afternoon, the Battalion had formed an open square on the hillside, Colonel Pretor-Pinney had addressed them, cautioned them – if caution were needed – to uphold the tradition of the ‘Golden Horseshoe’ symbol of the 37th Division, even though they had been abruptly transmogrified to the 34th, and wished them luck. A number of the boys felt, superstitiously, that it was an inauspicious moment in which to be deprived of the lucky horseshoe.1

  Now they were marching along the road, and they were singing. It was not exactly a marching song, nor one of the rousing airs which the popular mind had been led to believe by the War Correspondents made up the usual repertoire of cheery Tommies singing on the march. It was certainly not the Marseillaise – which one fulsome report had attributed to some anonymous battalion the week before. Although they were approaching the first anniversary of their arrival in France, the linguistic abilities of the Battalion did not extend quite so far as mastering the words of the Marseillaise, but there was nevertheless a distinctly international flavour about one tuneless dirge which was a favourite of theirs, if only because they had composed it themselves. In its genesis the melody had borne a faint resemblance to Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush but with the passage of time infinite variations had rendered it almost unrecognizable.

  We don’t want a girl from Givenchy-le-Noble,

  From Givenchy-le-Noble,

  From Givenchy-le-Noble,

  If you go for a walk she will get into trouble.

  So we don’t want a girl from Givenchy-le-Noble.

  We don’t want a girl from Izel-lez-Hameau,

  From Izel-lez-Hameau,

  From Izel-lez-Hameau,

  She may be all right, but we don’t care a damno,

  So we don’t want a girl from Izel-lez-Hameau.

  We don’t want a girl who comes from les Comptes,

  Who comes from les Comptes,

  Who comes from les Comptes,

  For they all eat onions, and their breath rather haunts,

  So we don’t want a girl who comes from les Comptes.

  As they marched easy a familiar discussion arose in B Company among the bards of No. 13 Platoon. They felt that they should bring the melodic itinerary up to date by adding a verse in honour of the delightful female inhabitants of Auxi. But inspiration eluded them. No one could come up with a better rhyme than ‘poxy’ and it seemed singularly inappropriate to the place where they had spent such a pleasant time.

  Sergeant Howard Rowlands, B Coy., 13th (S) Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  I can see us now – a long column of marching riflemen. We must have recaptured our high spirits of the night before because we’re singing again. It was a fair step and the gaps between the platoons got noticeably wider and wider. We marched past a field gun battery, halted for tea. We could have done with a cup ourselves, and we let them know it as we went by! Then we marched past them up a steep bit of road and, as we got to the top of the rise, there were long stretches of canvas fastened to plane trees along the roadside to hide the traffic on the road from enemy observation and, beyond the hill, we could see the town of Albert down in the valley.

  It was funny how the singing died away. Sh
ells were bursting away to the northeast and there in front of us was Albert, looking fairly intact, but with the battered cathedral tower standing out above it and the figure of the Virgin holding the Child leaning over the town in this sorrowful attitude. I can still picture that stark outline in my mind’s eye and it seemed to me then, as it always did afterwards when I looked back on it, that she seemed to be lamenting the folly of men.

  Even before the war, the golden Virgin, triumphantly holding the infant Child in her uplifted arms on the soaring heights of Albert’s Cathedral, had been a landmark. Now it was the very symbol of the war itself. Early in 1915, an unlucky shot from a German gun had struck the cathedral tower fair and square and the Virgin had fallen forward to lie precariously horizontal, face downwards above what had once been the market-place and was now the bustling centre-point of troop movements through Albert. It was an awesome sight.

  As the shellfire intensified and the cathedral itself became more and more battered and knocked about, the tower with its leaning Virgin remained intact. A superstition grew up among the French troops and it was adopted in their turn by the British when they came to the Somme. When the Virgin fell the war would end – and the Germans would have won! As the Virgin looked likely to fall at any time, an event which would be distinctly bad for morale, French Engineers were ordered to secure the statue with strong steel hawsers. So, there she hung, sorrowing or, according to the various imaginations of the troops, protecting or blessing them as they passed beneath.1

  It was astonishing that there could still be civilians in Albert a scant two miles behind the British front line. It was the ridge that saved it, for Albert lay cupped in a valley. It was not so much a town as an outsize village and, although some houses were tumbled and ruined and shells had taken a bite out of many others, there was still a remarkable air of normality about Albert although, since the bombardment had started, there were fewer inhabitants to be seen and those who had stayed there were keeping judiciously under cover. There were some villas still intact on the western outskirts and, in the main street by the cathedral, a number of houses which, if a soldier was not too fussy, could provide a reasonably draught-free billet for the night. The individual platoons of the 13 th Rifle Brigade were more or less left to fend for themselves, with the proviso that they must be on parade and in battle order in front of the cathedral at 7.30 next morning.