SOMME

by Lyn Macdonald

  Sergeant Jack Cross, No. 4842, C Coy., 13th (S) Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  We had to break into the houses to get the lads under cover, but that was all right as long as the sergeants did it, so all the C Company NCOs got in one place and the company officers were next door. We thought that they were fattening us up for the kill, so to speak, because we actually got issued gammon rashers for supper. We had to cook them ourselves, of course, but nobody minded that. Well, I’d noticed that the garden next door had a fine crop of potatoes in it, just ready. So Fred Crease and myself, we slipped over the garden wall, took our bayonets and dug up these potatoes. They were lovely. We boiled them, fried the gammon rashers and had gammon and new potatoes that night for hot dinner. We hadn’t had such a feed since Christmas.

  The fact that the Sergeants of C Company dined so royally was probably because Jack himself had seen to it that the cooks always got a share of the warm garments so lovingly knitted by his fellow servants in Eaton Square. No one enquired too closely where the gammon rashers came from, but the C Company Sergeants did notice that the same appetizing smell drifted from the C Company Officers’ billet next door. The officers had not had the good fortune to enjoy the delicious accompaniment of new potatoes, although they had been brazenly filched by the Sergeants from the garden behind their own billet, and had to be content with beans.

  The rest of the Battalion supped, that evening, on beans and bully beef. Bob Thompson was mixing it into a tasty mush in his mess tin and warming it over his personal, carefully guarded primus stove, when Major Sir Foster Cunliffe popped his head into the Corporals’ billet.

  ‘Lost your saucepan, Thompson?’ They exchanged grins.

  ‘Yes, sir. And no custard either!’

  It was an old joke, dating back to the previous autumn when the Battalion had been occupying the line that ran through the orchards at Hannescamps. The trees above the communication trenches were heavy with apples, and it had given the signallers of D Company an idea, for they were partial to stewed apples and custard. There was no ‘custard’, of course; there was no milk to make it with; there was no sugar to sweeten it. There were apples in plenty, actually falling in showers into the trench when a shell happened to explode within fifty yards of them, but there was no saucepan to cook them in. It was Sid Whiting who supplied the deficiency.

  Rifleman Sid Whiting, MM, No. S/4229, D Coy., 13th (S) Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  We could get Quaker Oats – so I suppose the custard was porridge, really speaking – and bags of apples, but this question of a utensil really bothered us. One day, when we were out of the line, I was sitting in the barn at Bienvillers, when I saw ‘Madame’ bring out a saucepan of food for the dog. As soon as she turned her back, quick as a flash before the dog could get at it, I nipped over, emptied the food on the ground and ‘won’ the saucepan.

  Next time up the line I was cooking our usual supper of stewed apples and porridge when our Company Commander, who was then Captain Sir Foster Cunliffe, came into the dugout and remarked how good it smelt. Well, I naturally asked if he would like some, and he said he would. He asked me how we came by the stuff. So I told him the whole story – including the story of the saucepan. We all thought it was a great joke, and the Captain really enjoyed his supper! But he never let us forget it after that! He said, ‘Well, I’ve attended banquets and eaten off gold plate, but I don’t think I’ve ever before eaten food cooked in a dog’s saucepan.’ Well, as we used to say, ‘C’est la guerre.’

  And ‘C’est la guerre’ the boys were saying, as they put their shoulders to the door of a locked-up estaminet in the main street of Albert. Major Sir Foster Cunliffe, now Second-in-Command of the Battalion, was fortunately well out of the way, or had turned a judicious blind eye. And any officers in the vicinity later turned a deaf ear to the merrymaking when, pleasantly replete with free beer, Horace Smith and some other stalwarts of B Company dragged the piano from the estaminet into the street for a sing-song. Breaking into private property had not over-worried them. If the place had not been locked up when the civilians had hastily evacuated, they would never have dreamed of helping themselves. They had been perfectly willing to buy the beer and, for once, they had money to pay for it. ‘C’est la guerre.’

  Sergeant Jack Cross, No. 4842, C Coy., 13th (S) Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  Well, what the lads were a bit annoyed about was that we all got paid out that day. They could have done with the money a couple of days before when we were up at Humbercourt. You never knew for sure when you were going to get paid except if you were going into action. They always paid us out then because it was a chance to get rid of this money, so that the Quartermaster-Sergeant wouldn’t lose it all in a fight. He’d see you got it first. There was a chap in my platoon called Wright and he used to run a Crown and Anchor board so he said, knowing that the lads had got money, ‘I’ll get the old board out, Sergeant Strictly illegal, of course, and as a Sergeant I shouldn’t have had anything to do with it, but I said, ‘All right, Arthur, you do what you like. Get the board out and I’ll give you a start.’ Well, all the lads gathered round and Arthur started on the job and I was putting my bits and pieces down and I was winning! I just kept putting my money down on the right spots. I’ve never won so much money in my life on a Crown and Anchor board. Four pounds ten shillings I picked up that afternoon - near enough a month’s pay for a sergeant. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll stick it now and hold on to the money. So, off I went. After a bit, when it got dark and they had to pack up, Arthur came along and found us in this billet and said, ‘Sergeant, can you tell me where there’s a Field Post Office?’ I went out in the street and there was a Military Policeman coming along so I said, ‘Say, chum, can you tell us where there’s a Military Field Post Office? He said, ‘See that flag fluttering over there? That’s it.’ ‘Right,’ said Arthur. ‘I’m going over there to get rid of this money. I’m not going up the line for somebody to pick my pockets when I get a bullet So he sent the money home in postal orders – and it was a tidy sum too!

  It rained that night. It was the last straw for Joe Hoyles and the twenty others of his platoon who had not been fortunate enough to find a billet under cover. Wrapped in waterproof groundsheets they passed an uncomfortable night lying on the broken pavement round the church. They had not required to visit the Field Post Office to send their money home. In a sense, Arthur Wright had done it for them and the few francs that had passed briefly through their hands an hour or so earlier were already on their way to swell Arthur’s savings at home. Between them they had lost every bean.

  It was just as well that Colonel Pretor-Pinney had not been in the vicinity while the Crown and Anchor game was going on. He was a stickler for discipline.

  But Colonel Pretor-Pinney was otherwise engaged, for Major-General Ingouville-Williams, the Commander of the 34th Division, and in spite of his exalted rank disrespectfully known to the troops as ‘Inky Bill’, had summoned the Brigadiers of his two newly acquired Brigades and the Commanding Officers of their eight Battalions to a meeting. It started at eleven o’clock. The General apologized for the lateness of the hour. As they were already on their way into the line, this was the only opportunity there would be to make mutual acquaintance and to discuss the plans that were to be put into effect tomorrow.

  The particular plan for tomorrow was the renewal of the attack on the village of Ovillers, across the valley from la Boisselle, which, in spite of the terrible cost, had resisted all efforts to take it. Strictly speaking, it was not the affair of the 34th Division, because the assault was to be carried out by the right flank of General Gough’s newly formed Fifth Army, but it was important that they should know of it because they were to be attached to the 19th Division still holding the adjacent sector and their own fortunes and progress would depend on the result. Unless Ovillers fell, it would be extremely difficult to exploit the gains at la Boisselle and to push on beyond it. Meanwhile, they would move up in support and, when the 19th Division was reliev
ed, take over the front line and push ahead.

  The night was heavy with cloud and heavy with noise, for the iron-rimmed wheels of the transport limbers clattered non-stop over the broken pavé, making the most of the hours of darkness to get the supplies up the line, and behind the town the guns were roaring out a bombardment as fierce as any since the first day of the assault. Through the long damp hours between nightfall and dawn the men lay waiting for the morning. They knew that something was up and that, soon enough, they would find out what it was.

  What was ‘up’ was that the Germans were answering back. Behind his line for the last few days the enemy had been engaged in very much the same reorganization as the British behind theirs. After the first onslaught the German Army, which had put up such a rugged resistance to the British efforts to break their line, was exhausted and depleted by heavy casualties, and Royal Flying Corps observers were bringing back reports of long lines of ambulances, of troop movements and trains of supply wagons as units were reshuffled in and out of the line. Both sides had fought almost literally to the death and there was hardly a British or a German soldier coming thankfully out of the front line who did not feel a positive admiration for his opponent. It was impossible for the Germans not to admire ‘Tommy’ pitting his strength and his will against the steel and concrete of strongholds armoured and designed to be impregnable; it was impossible for the British not to admire ‘Fritz’, who had fought so valiantly in their defence.

  The Germans had been chivalrous. The morning after the Big Push in many places where the attack had utterly failed and there was no fight left in the troops, unofficial truces had lasted for hours and the few troops who were left were allowed to move freely in front of their trenches to rescue as many of the wounded as they could in the time allowed. In front of Beaumont Hamel, a young soldier of the Worcesters who had crawled out concealed by the morning mist to search for a wounded friend and had, miraculously, found him, was seen by the Germans just a few feet from their wire when the mist suddenly cleared. There was a clatter of rifle bolts but, as both soldiers looked up, appalled, a sharp order was given and a German officer sprang on to the parapet of the enemy trench. He shouted across, in astonishingly perfect English, ‘You must not stop there with that man. If you want to come in, come along. Otherwise you must go back to your own trenches.’ And he added, as the boy hesitated, ‘We will look after your comrade.’

  ‘I’ll go back to my own trenches, sir.’ He didn’t dare stand upright, and it seemed a long crawl through the shell-holes and the bodies, down a slope, across dead ground and up again to the British wire. But the Germans had not fired a shot at his retreating back. Nor did they fire at the line of British soldiers in their forward trench who, incautiously poking their heads above the parapet, anxiously watched his approach.

  Now, days later, some thousands of dead still lay there and the weak waves and shouts of the wounded had long ago been stilled. Even in sectors where bitter fighting had pushed the line forward, the terrible detritus of the first day’s battle lay blackened and decomposing in the open. Awaiting the 13th Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, on their arrival at la Boisselle, was the task of burying them. Someone had to do it.

  Now that the Germans, like the British, had replaced their battle-weary front-line forces with fresh troops they had thrown them straight into the battle – not, like their exhausted predecessors, to defend their line but to wrest it back in the places where the British had bitten into it, and to stand fast. They had attacked at dead of night. They threw themselves against the tiny lodgement in their front line north of Thiepval and proceeded to throw the British out of it in short order. They had attacked beyond Thiepval, at the other end of the ridge, battering into the bloody nose of the Leipzig Redoubt and fought and bombed all through the night before their survivors were beaten back. And the Germans had been beaten back even beyond the trench from which they had started. Two companies of the 3rd Worcesters had pulled it off. They had succeeded at last in capturing the whole of the German front line in the Leipzig Salient, and they held it and continued to hold it though the Germans blasted a desperate bombardment back at them.

  The Germans had also attacked at Ovillers, streaming out of the village and setting up machine-guns in No Man’s Land an hour before the British troops were due to launch an attack themselves. But, by ten o’clock in the morning, by the time the 13 th Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, had marched out of Albert up the long straight road to the Tara-Usna Ridge, which overlooked the valleys of Ovillers and la Boisselle, Ovillers had been taken. Or, rather it could have been taken, if there had been survivors enough to hold it. The cost of thwarting the German attack, of pursuing them back to the village, of subduing the nest of strongholds which had repulsed successive waves as a cliff-face repulses the sea, had been too high. Fourteen hundred men of the three Battalions had been killed or wounded. They took the first three lines of trenches but, by the time they had done so, there were not enough of them to hold the enemy. All that could be done, until reinforcements arrived, was to retire from the first line, consolidate the two behind it and hang on. But it was a start. And it was more than a start. It was a victory.

  From their position in lowlying Ovillers, had they dared to raise their heads and look to their right, the victors could have seen, two kilometres ahead of them, at the top of the long shallow valley that ran through the gently rising ground, the thick belts of wire that protected the village of Pozières, lying beyond them astride the Albert–Bapaume road. Like Ovillers, Pozières was a fortress.

  With the Army now pushing towards it from two separate directions, it seemed to Sir Douglas Haig that Pozières was the next logical objective. He had just discussed the matter with General Rawlinson when the news arrived that the capture of Ovillers was not complete and that the troops had merely gained a foothold in the village. No casualty figures were yet available, but it appeared, from all accounts, that the gain, though small, had been costly. More men must be brought in. Experienced men. Good fighters.

  The Commander-in-Chief accordingly issued his orders. He instructed General Gough to complete the capture of Ovillers with such troops as remained at his disposal, and he ordered the Anzac Corps in the Second Army to send two Australian Divisions south to the Somme. For the moment he would hold them in reserve. Later, when the way was open, he would push them in to attack Pozières.

  In his conversation with General Rawlinson, the name of the Anzacs and the name ‘Pozières’ were linked for the first time. As long as battles were remembered, they would never again be separated.

  In meadowland near Millencourt, flanked on either side by Major-General Ingouville-Williams and by the Corps Commander, Sir William Pulteney, Brigadier Trevor Ternan surveyed the ranks of his Tyneside Scottish Brigade. After a morning of roll calls the totals returned by each battalion had almost beggared belief, but they were amply confirmed by this afternoon’s parade. The whole Brigade, drawn up in open square formation, barely occupied the space of a single battalion. The Generals warmly congratulated the men. Sir William Pulteney dwelt at length on the tactical importance of the part they had played. Their achievement might only be measured in yards, but they had broken the German line. General Ingouville-Williams dwelt on their splendid gallantry. He bade them goodbye and Godspeed. He hoped that they would soon rejoin his command. Trevor Ternan, as sadly conscious of the absence of familiar faces as any man in the ranks, called for three cheers. A voice yelled out with statutory bravado, ‘Are we downhearted?’ The men obliged with a stentorian ‘NO!’ No one yelled it louder than Tom Easton. For the last six days he had been sick with worry about his brother Joe. This morning, in the decimated ranks of his battalion, he had found him. By some miracle he was whole – and alive!

  At ten o’clock that evening, in pouring rain, the 13th Rifle Brigade left the reserve trenches on the Tara-Usna Ridge for the line at la Boisselle. It was less than a mile ahead, but the shelling was heavy and they lost thirteen men, killed or wound
ed on the way. Early the next morning, just after stand to, Walter Monckton and Joe Hoyles were brewing tea in the trench when the Colonel came along, accompanied by a Staff Officer. They both rose hastily to their feet as the two officers stopped beside them. The trench ran to the left of the big crater and now, since la Boisselle had fallen, it was a good distance behind the front line. It was exactly a week, almost to the minute, since the 34th Division had gone over the top, and most of them lay there still, with the bodies of the men who had followed them.

  Climbing on to the firestep, the Staff Captain cautiously raised his head above the parapet and looked across. ‘Good God!’ he exclaimed. ‘I didn’t know we were using Colonial troops!’ Pretor-Pinney made no reply. Hoyles and Monckton exchanged grim looks. ‘Dear God,’ muttered Monckton, when the Colonel and the visitor had moved away to a safe distance, ‘has the bastard never seen a dead man before?’ It was a rhetorical question. Lying out in the burning sun, soaked by the frequent showers of a week’s changeable weather, the bodies of the dead soldiers had been turned black by the elements.