SOMME

by Lyn Macdonald

  There was no means of signalling to the men who were already fighting in the German trenches. No flags could be waved without signing the death warrant of the man who waved them. Nobody, in any event, would be looking back for such a signal. No whistle, no bugle, no shout or warning could possibly be heard. Nothing could be done but to send more runners forward, to get word to the boys and to tell those who were still fighting to get out and come back.

  Corporal Bob Thompson, Lewis-gunner, No. 2756, D Coy., 13th (S) Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  There weren’t over-many of us there in the third German trench. I’d lost my Lewis-gunner somewhere or other, and I was on my own for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour and then I picked up another Lewis-gunner. We all knew that, once you occupy a trench, you have to set up a post to consolidate it and defend it in case the Jerry attacks again. Well, we were looking round for a place to plant our gun over the Jerries’ side of the trench and, walking round it, I found a Jerry who was wounded sitting on the ground. As we walked up to him very carefully, with a bayonet at the ready to stab him if he started being naughty, he looked up and he said, ‘Water, Tommy, water.’

  He was badly wounded. What could you do but give him water? So, I slung my rifle and told the other chap to keep watch, and I took my bottle and gave him a drop of water. And then, when he’d drunk it, in a very strange manner – he hadn’t got a steel helmet, they had little round hats – he took his little blue hat off and he handed it to me and, in good English, he said, ‘Lucky souvenir, you, Tommy.’ And he died. Just died, there and then. I was glad I’d given him the water. I stuck the hat in my pocket and forgot all about it. We’d found a place and started setting the Lewis-gun up when Sergeant Holford came running across along the trench beneath us and he shouted, ‘The thing’s cancelled! We’ve got to make our way back.’

  Corporal Joe Hoyles, MM, No. 3237, 13th (S) Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  Every officer was wounded or killed. We only had one officer left, Captain Reviere, and he shouted across to me, ‘Corporal, gather some men together and capture that machine-gun post that’s doing the damage.’ We went up this German communication trench and we found this machine-gun. There were only about six of us left in the section and I went ahead and, when I saw the Boche there round the corner, I said, ‘Right, lads! Get rid of your bombs!’ And over went the bombs! We killed those poor chaps. We captured one prisoner alive. I sent him back, and, just with that, we had the order to retire. It was about ten o’clock by then. Just getting dusk – and after all that massacre, after we’d taken the trenches, we had to retire.

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

  How these bullets were whistling! I can still hear them! Now and again a shrapnel shell would burst in the air and these bits of shrapnel showered down, hitting the mud and going flop, flap, flip over the mud. Laney went down. Then he got up and off he went again, and I was going on with him when, suddenly, I got hit and it lifted me up in the air and dropped me flat on my face, just like you see in cowboy films. It knocked me out. I fell down flat on the grass and I stuck my head forward and tipped my steel helmet to the front. I thought, I’ll hold that on there, and then I won’t get one through the napper.’ Suddenly, the firing ceased and the machine-guns stopped spluttering just for a moment. I hopped up, doubled back and dived into this shell-hole. I knew I’d just passed one, and as I dived into it my leg came up in the air and I felt a sting in the calf of the leg and I’d got a bullet there as well.

  I turned myself round, and faced the enemy and got my head down into the shell-hole and somehow I wiggled my entrenching tool out of the back of my belt and I scratched a hole so I could get deeper down and get the side high between me and the bullets and they still kept singing round the top of this earth around me. After a while, everything went quiet, so I thought, ‘This is it, Jack. Now you make your way back to that dressing station – if you can!’ And I started crawling back.

  Rifleman George Murrell, 13th (S) Btn., The Rifle Brigade

  I lay there for a long time. For a while I could hear the Lewis-gun firing in front of me, but the Number One couldn’t have had more than one drum of ammunition, because I knew all the rest of the section had been wounded and they’d been carrying the spare drums. When it stopped, I didn’t know what had happened. I thought maybe it had only run out of ammunition because the Jerries’ guns were still going. But then the remains of the Battalion began to come back past me. One of them stopped to see how I was and he told me it was all over. He couldn’t help me. He was a little chap and he was wounded in both arms. After a while it got dark and, although I could hear voices, I didn’t know whether they were friends or enemies. So, I just had to stop there.

  As the wounded lay waiting for rescue or waiting for dusk to cover the long crawl back and, as the survivors were leaving the captured lines to get back as best they could to their own, the barrage started up. It was fired by the British guns and it was a devastating barrage.

  It was not the fault of the artillery. They had been notified in good time about the cancellation of the attack and, as no news had reached them to the contrary, they had no reason to think that it had gone ahead. The guns were firing in response to an SOS signal from troops in Contalmaison. Seeing the affray in the trenches above them to their left, they had assumed that the Germans were about to counter-attack the village from that direction. The guns, trying to balk the counter-attack before it could get going, registered with uncanny accuracy on the trenches the Rifle Brigade had just attacked and also on the ground beyond, where the remnants of the Battalion were struggling to make their way back. Despite the awful losses on the way across, it was under their own bombardment that the 13 th Rifle Brigade died, as a battalion, on the way back.

  It was dark when the barrage lifted and in the terrible silence that followed those who remained alive and could still move, dragged themselves back to the line.

  A little later, the shaken Germans sent a reserve company forward. They trickled down the hill from Poziéres to rescue their wounded, to remove their dead and to file back into their empty line to the left of Contalmaison.

  The 13th Battalion’s own Medical Officer had been killed and, in the nightmare conditions at the Field Dressing Station – a dugout in a deep cutting on the side of the road to la Boisselle – it was impossible to give more than cursory first aid to the wounded. It was not even possible to crowd more than a tenth of them into shelter and so they lay, waiting to be carried back, in the open roadway, sprayed from time to time with bullets from a German machine-gun, firing along the road on fixed sights. It was not a pleasant experience. But they were the lucky ones. They were not so lucky as the men who had escaped uninjured, now gathered in small exhausted groups in the support trenches, but luckier by far than the wounded men who still lay painfully out in front, with little hope of rescue. ‘Old Chelsea’ was there, and there he would stay for five days and five nights until he was picked up – still alive – when the line advanced.

  Ed McGrath lay out for a whole week. Ted Murrell was in, but his brother George was still out. For three days he would be crawling between the lines, dragging his useless left leg, unsure of his direction, until, on the 13 th, by a happy chance, he struck the outlying trench of a neighbouring unit.

  Company Sergeant-Major Croucher was back, but only because he had been brought in by his sworn enemy, Welch, the most disreputable man in his company whom the Sergeant-Major had personally put on many charges. Inadvertently firing off his rifle on parade while drunk was the most serious of a whole catalogue of Welch’s misdemeanours and the very sight of him had been enough to send Croucher into a fury. Now, Welch was at the Field Dressing Station with Croucher on his back, demanding that he should have attention and refusing to take no for an answer. He personally saw to it that the Sergeant-Major was the first casualty to travel down the line. Thompson had followed and, sometime during the night, so had Jack Cross, Weeber and Monckton, among a hund
red or so others. Colonel Pretor-Pinney, his left arm mangled by machine-gun bullets, was the last to go.

  Most of the officers had been killed, among them all four Company Commanders. Horace Smith kept seeing them in his mind, conferring together in one shell-hole, after the order to retire had reached them. He had also seen the explosion that wiped them out. When the small force of survivors took stock in the morning, there was no sign of the Platoon Commanders. Lieutenant Reviere was the only officer in sight – apart from the Second-in-Command, Major Sir Foster Cunliffe. They would not have seen him had he not tied a handkerchief to his swagger-stick. Now he was waving it above the shell-hole where he lay far out in No Man’s Land, close to the German front line. Looking through binoculars, they could easily identify him for the shell-hole, steep on the German side, was shallow where it faced the British.

  Fred Lyon and Joe Hoyles stood side by side looking across and Lyon muttered, ‘There’ll be a VC for whoever brings him in.’

  It was broad daylight now. It would be certain death to go back alone. Hoyles was almost too exhausted to shake his head. ‘I’ve had enough, Fred. Enough.’ Like Lyon, like Jolly, like Thompson, like Smith, he had got right up to the third line and he had even gone back to it, just before the Germans reoccupied the trench, to rescue his badly wounded officer, Lieutenant Fitzgibbon. Hoyles was not interested in winning the Victoria Cross. He was even a little surprised, when they came out of the trenches, to find that he had been recommended for the Military Medal.

  Arthur Wright, burglar, reprobate and King of the Crown and Anchor Board, who had gone out three times to bring in wounded comrades, had earned one too. So had eight others.

  Gradually, over the next few days, what was left of the Battalion moved back by stages to the trenches behind the Tara-Usna Ridge. It was just ten days since they had marched into them on their way up the line.

  Sergeant Howard Rowlands had gone up with the boys, but almost immediately he had been ordered back again to Albert to join Headquarters Detail as orderly sergeant. He had spent an anxious ten days. No one at Headquarters knew quite what had happened ‘up there’ – only that there had been some kind of mess. After a scratch roll-call, all that could be done in the trenches was write the ominous letter ‘M’ after most of the names. ‘M’ stood for ‘missing’.

  Brown… Missing. Smith… Missing. Jones… Missing. Robinson… Missing. The dreary litany carried on through three hundred names, or more – for no one knew, in the confusion of the aftermath, who was alive, who was dead, who had been wounded and evacuated and who was still lying or dying out in the horrid scrubland that lay between the Battalion and the German line. It would be many weeks before the battlefield could be cleared and bodies – or those that had not been blown out of existence – could be identified and buried. It would be weeks before the names of the wounded, so hastily evacuated, would appear on the returns of clearing stations close to the front, of hospitals at the coastal base and even across the Channel at home.

  In the meantime, Howard Rowlands took it upon himself to find out what he could. From morning until night, on foot, near the line and, further afield, on a borrowed bicycle, he scoured every aid post, every dressing station, every casualty clearing station, not once but many times, asking the same questions. ‘Any 13th Rifle Brigade here?’ ‘Any 13th Rifle Brigade been here?’ ‘Any 13th Rifle Brigade burials here?’

  Even the unofficial list that Rowlands was able to compile appalled him. And it appalled Colonel Pretor-Pinney. Rowlands had found the CO after four days, still in the big dressing station outside Albert, and too ill to be moved. It shook Rowlands, as nothing else had, to see his stiff and disciplined Commanding Officer in tears; to hear him say, over and over again, ‘What a mess they’ve made of my Battalion! What a mess they’ve made of my Battalion.’

  On 19 July, the Battalion marched back to Albert, and stopped there for the night. When they marched out again on the road to Bresle, they looked – at least in numbers – something like a battalion, for a large draft of new men had met them in Albert and had been hastily grafted on to the ranks. A new Commanding Officer rode in front of them. Colonel Prideaux-Brune showed his mettle during the march. It was the front ranks who heard him. As they were approaching a village, Keene, who, since his predecessor was ‘missing’, was now acting-Regimental Sergeant-Major, passed the order: March to Attention. Prideaux-Brune put a stop to that with an impatient wave of his hand. ‘Cut it out, Sergeant-Major! And the men can smoke if they like.’ The Battalion appreciated that.

  The road back to Bresle seemed considerably longer than it had seemed eleven days before on the way to the line. But then they had been singing and no one was singing now. Even the men of the new draft were silent and half-embarrassed. But the Battalion stuck it out. They only broke when they got to Bresle. The Colonel had to allow the Sergeant-Major to march the men to attention, for the Divisional Band had paid them the courtesy of turning out to meet them, and it was only good form to ‘put on a show’. The band struck up what must have been felt, in all innocence, to be an appropriate tune, and played it in quick time to keep pace with the Riflemen’s brisk ceremonial march. The tune was all the rage, and, from a hundred sing-songs, the boys all knew the words.

  Here we are! Here we are! Here we are again!

  There’s Pat and Mac and Tommy and Jack and Joe.

  When there’s trouble brewing —

  When there’s something doing –

  Are we downhearted? NO! Let ‘em all come!

  Here we are! Here we are! Here we are again!

  We’re fit and well, and feeling as right as rain.

  Never mind the weather.

  Now then, all together,

  HULLO! HULLO! HERE WE ARE AGAIN!

  Percy Eaton, the only one of the ‘South African Mob’ who had returned unscathed, found that tears were gushing from his eyes. As they were still marching to attention, they had to gush unchecked. He was not the only one. Not many of the boys had yet reached their twenty-second birthday and it was all a little too much for them.

  Part 3

  ‘High Wood to Waterlot Farm, All on a summer’s day’

  High Wood to Waterlot Farm,

  All on a summer’s day,

  Up you get to the top of the trench

  Though you’re sniped at all the way.

  If you’ve got a smoke helmet there

  You’d best put it on if you could,

  For the wood down by Waterlot Farm

  Is a bloody high wood.

  E. A. MACKINTOSH, August 1916.

  (written as a parody of

  Chalk Farm to Camberwell Green)

  Chapter 12

  It was 14 July and neither the Battle of the Somme, neither the struggle still raging at Verdun, nor even the war itself was sufficient reason to deflect the French from celebration of their national day. Before the war, in towns and villages all over France, local bands had turned out, there had been picnics, merrymaking, much toasting of the Republic and, weather permitting, dancing in the streets. Now, in addition to the traditional celebrations, there were military parades, medals were presented, local heroes were fêted and a fever of patriotism added point and poignancy to the occasion. France, always quick to rouse herself to a pitch of nationalistic fervour, had more reason than ever to do so. The French were united in a common hatred of the German invader who had jack-booted across the frontier, just as he had done less than fifty years before, and they were united in their intention of kicking him back where he belonged. So, Bastille Day this year – the second since the war began – had taken on a greater and deeper significance than ever before. In Paris, parades marched down the Champs Elysées, cheered on by crowds who reserved their loudest cheers for the contingents of marching poilus, many of them veterans of Verdun, who obliged them, when the parade was over, by peeling off and allowing themselves to be marched into cafés by enthusiastic bystanders, who were only too anxious to buy them drinks and to join them in
toasting France and Victory.

  More sedate, but no less fervent, toasts were drunk at official ceremonies and receptions at the Hôtel de Ville and also at the Elysée Palace, where the President of the Republic received a large company in which military dignitaries almost outnumbered civilians. There was, after all, something to celebrate. If the Germans had not yet been defeated at Verdun, their defeat, it seemed to its stalwart defenders, was only a matter of time. There was the victory on the Somme, where the French Army had advanced gloriously through the German lines and, so some thought privately, would have advanced a good deal further, had it not been for the less magnificent performance of the British Army beyond their immediate left. But, before the end of the President’s reception, Lord Esher was able to give him news which he had just received at first hand by telephone from GHQ. In a series of dawn attacks on a wide front, the British had broken through to the Germans’ second line.

  But, whatever satisfaction Lord Esher may have felt in conveying such gratifying tidings to President Poincaré in Paris, it was nothing to the satisfaction with which the British on the Somme battlefront itself were able to inform the neighbouring French Army that their attack had succeeded. The French, and in particular General Balfourier, had been bitterly opposed to the whole idea of a night manoeuvre, involving some thousands of troops – and inexperienced troops at that. In their view it was madness to contemplate such a thing and they had forcibly made the point. The sheer assembly of such a force behind the battle-line in darkness, the very idea of sending them stumbling through the night to attack the enemy line, was unutterably foolish. To expect them to make a considerable advance, to capture the bulwark of the Germans’ second-line position at a single bound, was insanity. Failure would be inevitable and, in the confusion of the aftermath, the whole front would be left wide open and vulnerable to a German counter-attack. The French feared that the enemy might even be able to seize back most of the ground he had lost and wipe out the gains which the infantry had won, inch by slogging inch, in the first two weeks of July. Furthermore, such a failure would leave the French flank on the right of the British dangerously exposed.