SOMME
Page 20
Corporal Jack Beament, MM, No. 1 Platoon, A Coy., 16th King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade)
Just picture a lovely July sunny day. As we were waiting so many paces apart, I noticed there were hazel trees growing on the edge of the wood – hazel trees, with nuts on them. I was a stretcher-bearer in this attack and I was with George Illife who was my partner, the other stretcher-bearer. Then the Very light went up, which was the signal, and we had to go into the wood. Illife had got wounded while we were waiting and he cleared off, so I was there on my own.
Rifleman J. Brown, MM, No. 3 Platoon, A Coy., 16th King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade)
The order come. Away we go! I remember Major Cooban – he was our Company Commander – going into High Wood bent forward, like, on the trot, with his revolver in his hand, and that’s the last I see of him! We follow on. There was some troops dug in about twenty yards inside High Wood, in little shell-holes, leaning forward on their arms, because the machine-gun bullets was whizzing about something awful. We went through past those chaps, but we didn’t get much further. Me and another fellow got into a shell-hole, because there was no point just going on against these machine-guns and bullets spitting everywhere, so we had to sit there for a time and wait to see what was going to happen and if anyone in front was going to knock these machine-guns out so that we could get forward.
Corporal Jack Beament, MM, No. 1 Platoon, A Coy., 16th King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade)
Major Cooban was a very, very brave man. He ought not to have been in that attack at all. He had lumbago so, technically, he was unfit, but he would insist on leading our Company. I never saw him after we got into the wood. It was an absolutely raging inferno. Shells and rifle fire, machine-gun fire, but, strangely enough, looking back on it, I don’t think I felt all that frightened. You couldn’t let fear get into your brain. You’d go berserk! All you could do was hope for the best and get on with the job. You hoped you wouldn’t get killed though! I came across a chap who came from Cork, he was an Irishman and he was wounded in the head – badly, but I got him into a shell-hole and bandaged him out and he managed to get out of the wood and cleared off. Then I went on a bit further, looking for more wounded but I had to take shelter, which is what all the boys were doing. I don’t think that we really got twenty or thirty yards into the wood.
Rifleman J. Brown, MM, No. 3 Platoon, A Coy., 16th King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade)
All of a sudden something hit me in the back. I thought it was the Jerries up behind me with a mallet! So I puts my hand round on my back and it was covered with blood. I thought to myself, ‘I’m going to get out of this!’ But when I tried to move my legs, they wouldn’t go. I was all on my own in this shell-hole and – this is God’s truth! – I lay down, put my arms under my head, laid my head on my arms and laid myself down to die. All I could think of was, ‘Fancy training more than fifteen months for this!’
Corporal Jack Beament, MM, No. 1 Platoon, A Coy., 16th King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade)
I got a bullet in the left shoulder, so I packed up. I started to crawl back where we’d come from and, while I was doing so, I came across a fellow from Redhill called Johnny Redman. He was wounded. He was a very tall, heavy man, but I got hold of him and I half-dragged him and half-carried him out of the wood. I got him somehow on to my shoulder and I remember wondering if the Germans had machine-guns up in the trees because, as we were getting back, I remember the bullets hitting the ground, just like heavy raindrops. They couldn’t have been spent bullets from a distance, because they were so near and of course the Germans were shelling as well. There were explosions all over the place. It wasn’t very pleasant. But I just had to struggle on as best I could and hope to God we would get back. What a shambles it was. I didn’t get more than thirty yards, or forty yards at most. We just couldn’t make any advance at all.
Rifleman J. Brown, MM, No. 3 Platoon, A Coy., 16th King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade)
I was really resigned to dying and I just lay there quiet. After a while I said to myself, ‘I’m a long time getting unconscious! I’ll have another go.’ So I had another go and my legs worked. They told me afterwards that the nerves in my spine must have been numbed with the bang of the bullet in my back, and they’d recovered a bit by then. It wasn’t easy, but I chucked my equipment off and my rifle and left it in the shell-hole and when I looked at my haversack as I took it off (I’d got a primus stove in there, one of them little ones) and whatever it was that hit me had smashed that and it was full of petrol. It’s a good job it never went up! So I started to crawl back out of the wood and, when I got clear of it, I was able to stand up a bit – but still creeping along like a half-shut knife because of this thing in my back.
Corporal Jack Beament, MM, No. 1 Platoon, A Coy., 16th King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade)
It was a good struggle back over the open with this chap Redman over my shoulder – the one I hadn’t got the bullet in! When I got out of the wood I was carrying him over open land. There were no trenches there, and I was going through the remains of this Cavalry. I remember a poor horse with no guts – guts all hanging out – and I had to pass that and get down somehow to the aid post. I passed Colonel Wyld on the way. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. ‘Lizzie Wyld’ we called him. He became our CO when we got out to France and he used to ride round and, if he saw something he didn’t like, he would bellow, ‘I can see you all from my horse and I have the power to send you all home.’ It was a joke in the Battalion; we made up a song, or a kind of a song and we used to sing it.
I can see you all from my horse
And I have the power
To send you a-a-all home!
Well! To see him then, I really felt sorry for him. There was a bank halfway across, just a low bank. He wasn’t in the wood with us, because he was in charge of the four Companies and the other three were going in the other direction and only ‘A’ Company had gone into this part of the wood, to fix the Jerries on the right flank, you see. And so he had to stay outside to co-ordinate and give them the orders. He’d had to get messages somehow to each Company as to what action they could take. But things were going so badly against us that I suppose the poor devil didn’t know what commands to give! And that look of anguish on his face! Poor old Lizzie! I suppose he must have been a bit shell-shocked. He was sent home after that.
Rifleman J. Brown, MM, No. 3 Platoon, A Coy., 16th King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade)
There was a little doctor’s shelter thing dug into the side of the hill, so I went in there and got bandaged up and that’s where I did see Jack Beament. He’d just brought this chap Redman in and he’d got wounded and all. But the doctor said, ‘Can you make it further back on your feet?’ We both said we could, so we set off back together. What with the loss of blood, we was both feeling pretty queer by the time we got down to Happy Valley and there was a battery of guns firing there, just over the top of a steep bank. You wasn’t supposed to go that near the guns but we was just plodding on. Anyhow they stopped firing and let us go by and then they started again when we’d got past. We get down to the dressing station eventually and then we was shipped off to the casualty clearing station in an old general service waggon. The Padre was at the dressing station asking us all when we came in if we’d seen anybody get killed and who they were. See anybody get killed! I should say we did!
The Ground Attacked on 14th/15th July
Corporal Jack Beament, MM, No. 1 Platoon, A Coy., 16th King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade)
It was a horrible, terrible massacre. We’d lost all the officers out of our company. We lost all the sergeants, all the full corporals and all the NCOs right down to Herbert King who was the senior Lance-Corporal. He was my pal and he brought ‘A’ Company out of the wood. He rallied them and brought them out. There were more than two hundred of us went in. And Herbert brought them out. Sixty-se
ven men. That was all.
It was 15 July. It would be exactly two months to the day, 15 September, before High Wood would be taken.
The trouble was the Switch Line, so long, so deep, so formidable, so heavily manned, so closely interlinked to the trenches that lay in front of it by a network of fortifications, that it was virtually impregnable. It ran from the village of Martinpuich along the valley, through the northeastern corner of High Wood and out beyond it, slicing across the open ground to pass behind Delville Wood and to form a bastion in front of the village of Flers. Switching direction as it went, with High Wood and Delville Wood beyond it, the Switch Line was an iron gateway, defending Flers and Martinpuich as a portcullis might once have defended the gateway of a castle against a besieging horde. So long as they held the Switch Line, the Germans would hold High Wood. From whatever direction they attacked – frontally or from the boundaries of the wood to the south or to the north – blundering through the thickets and briars or down the long rides that divided it, no matter how they scraped, dug, entrenched and consolidated, no matter how often successive lines of attack swept over the front line that stretched from the northwest to the south-east corner of the wood, no matter how they hacked and battled their way beyond it, again and again the troops came up against the deadly strong triangle that still held out at the corner of the wood. The cavalry who had galloped into the wood with pennants flying, the soldiers who had fought their way through it on 14 and 15 July were the vanguard of a whole host who were to fight in High Wood and to die in it.
At Delville Wood, just along the road, the story was even more appalling. Here they had pushed in the South African Brigade and, together with Scottish troops, they had taken the wood and had held it. But it had been held at a terrible cost. The South Africans had gone in three thousand strong. At roll call, when they eventually came out, seven hundred and sixty-eight men answered their names. The South Africans had suffered more than two thousand casualties – and, in this case, casualties meant dead. It was possibly the greatest sacrifice of the war.
In ‘normal’ battle conditions the proportion of casualties was reckoned to be, on average, four men wounded or taken prisoner for every man who was killed outright, or died within hours of his wounds. Even on the first black day of July, when the final casualty list had numbered more than fifty-seven thousand, appalling though the total was, roughly one man in every three casualties had been killed. Proportionately, the South Africans’ losses had been far greater. Of the three thousand soldiers of the South African Brigade who went into Delville Wood, the handful of wounded were outnumbered, four to one, by the dead. None was taken prisoner.
Sunday, 15 July, dawned a fine morning in Winchester. The cathedral was packed and in the streets outside, the pavements were crowded with bystanders. Accustomed though they were, even in peacetime, to seeing soldiers about the city, the townspeople of Winchester still dearly loved a parade. So they lingered in the warm sun, feathered hats nodding, shoes polished to Sabbath brilliance, to enjoy the sight of the Reserve Battalions of The King’s Royal Rifle Corps and The Rifle Brigade as they marched the short distance from the barracks to the cathedral. The soldiers had been roused at dawn and it had taken hours of preparation and spit and polish before their turnout had achieved the standard of smartness necessary to satisfy the critical eyes of sergeant-majors and inspecting officers. It was no ordinary Church Parade. Even the King, although not actually present in person, would be represented at the head of the city’s dignitaries by the venerable Field-Marshal, Lord Grenfell, and as many of its congregation as the cathedral would hold were admitted after the troops and official guests had filed into their places.
In spite of the glorious music and singing, it was a sombre service, dedicated to the memory of the soldiers who had a special bond with Winchester, the home of their Regimental Barracks. They were the officers and the men of The King’s Royal Rifle Corps and of The Rifle Brigade who had fallen on the field of battle since the war had begun almost two years before. There were too many of them to enumerate. Besides, precise statistics might have been lowering to morale and might also, perhaps, have taken the edge off the note of ringing patriotism that crowned the solemnity of the service with a full-blooded rendering of the National Anthem.
As the second verse began and the verger swung open the big oak doors, the notes of the anthem spilled out of the cathedral into the streets. Passers-by froze where they stood; men removed their hats and most of them joined in:
O Lord our God, arise,
Scatter his enemies,
And make them fall;
Confound their politics;
Frustrate their knavish tricks;
On Thee our hopes we fix,
God save us all!
There were rather more of the fallen of The King’s Royal Rifle Corps to honour than if the service had been held two days earlier. And a hundred and fifty miles away, on the scarred uplands of the Somme where the same morning sunlight shafted through the crippled trees of High Wood, more King’s Royal Rifle Corps were dying, even as the patriotic notes swelled through the sunlit streets of Winchester.
The lucky ones, the boys who had been wounded and had dragged themselves or been carried away from the wood, were pressing towards the dressing station. By five in the evening, some one hundred and fifty of them had managed to reach it and had passed through it down the line.
Jack Brown ended up in the mortuary. Such was the chaos and disorganization, such was the flow of casualties pressing towards the second-stage dressing stations in the rear, where ambulances would take them to casualty clearing stations on the other side of Albert, that the walking wounded were literally queuing up for treatment. It was a long wait and, having just received an anti-tetanus injection, Jack was feeling distinctly queer. An orderly ducked out from a tent as the long line of men shuffled slowly past, and, through the flap, Jack glimpsed the still forms of wounded soldiers lying on stretchers inside. It did not occur to him that the soldiers lay very still indeed, only that there was one stretcher unoccupied. ‘This’ll do me!’ he thought, as he slid discreetly from the throng of wounded into the dim half-light of the tent and painfully, gratefully lay down.
It was many hours before he awoke, and, even then, he only had the energy to open one eye, half-blinded by the swinging lantern in the hand of the orderly who bent over him. It was not until he heard the orderly yell as he ran out of the tent that Jack woke up fully and realized that something was wrong. The mistake was soon put right and, early in the morning, Jack was sent off in the first of the day’s convoys to the casualty clearing station at Warloy on the first stage of his journey to a long convalescence at home. The unfortunate orderly, whom Jack had scared out of his wits, helped to load him into the ambulance. The parting glance he cast upon him was not a friendly one.
Jack Beament was already on his way to a base hospital at Rouen. His wound was not so serious as Brown’s, and, in normal circumstances, his chances of getting home at all would have been slim, but the circumstances were far from normal. For, even two weeks after the disastrous first day of the battle, casualties who had been lying out from the first and later attacks were still being rescued and brought in and the seriously wounded men who had been rescued early from the battlefield, or who had been wounded in the line, were not yet fit to be moved by train, ship, and train again on the long haul back to Blighty. The situation had improved since the first calamitous forty-eight hours of the offensive, when the overflow of wounded arriving at casualty clearing stations was so great that even the vast reserves of spare stretchers were soon used up and, all around the big marquees, men were laid in patient rows on the bare earth, without even the benefit of a blanket to cover them.
It had been a miracle of organization that all had received emergency treatment and had been swiftly sent on to the superior comforts of base hospitals at Rouen or on the coast. But the base hospitals themselves were now packed far beyond their capacity. Beds were moved toget
her, so close that there was barely room for the nurses to pass between them. When the beds ran out, stretchers were pressed into service, laid crossways at the foot and, in the largest marquees, in rows down the middle. And still more wounded were arriving all the time. It was the lightly wounded who came off best the men who, otherwise, would have been treated for a week or so at the base hospitals, sent to convalescent camps for a few days and then returned to their units in the line. But there was no longer room for them. They, at least, could stand the journey and must be shipped off as quickly as possible to make room for the serious cases. Such fortunate soldiers found little to object to in this arrangement and simply thanked their lucky stars that they were out of it.
In the desperate aftermath of the big attack with every dressing station, casualty clearing station and hospital in France strained ten times beyond its limit, with every orderly, nurse and doctor working hollow-eyed around the clock, some men had not even passed through the base hospitals at all. The transport authorities, at their wits’ end, had sent three train-loads of walking wounded straight from the front to the harbour at Boulogne, and, to the delight of their passengers, loaded them directly on to hospital ships bound for home. A few were ‘accident cases’, suffering from nothing more serious than a sprained ankle, but, now that they had been packaged into the system, they could be sure of at least a few days’ rest in a Home hospital, of a period of sick leave and then the blessed respite of a few weeks at their Regimental Base Camp before being drafted back to France and up the line.
Jack Beament, sent to hospital at Rouen, was not quite so fortunate in the short term, but he was nevertheless in for the greatest surprise of his life. It was also the greatest coincidence.
Corporal Jack Beament, MM, No. 1 Platoon, A Coy., 16th King’s Royal Rifle Corps (Church Lads Brigade)
It was a hutment hospital on Rouen Racecourse and I was directed to Ward C.3. I could move under my own steam, because my legs were all right. When I got there, the nurse met me at the door and said to me, ‘That’s your bed over there on the right-hand side.’ I thanked her and, as I was making for the bed, I heard a whistle and I looked round. On the other side of the ward, almost immediately opposite my bed, there was my brother Stanley! Just imagine! In all the scores and hundreds of hospitals in France, with all their scores and scores of wards in every hospital, I ended up in the same ward as my brother Stanley. And the even more amazing coincidence was that he had an almost identical wound to mine, only it was in the opposite shoulder. What a reunion that was! And how delighted the nurses were too! They simply couldn’t get over it and they made a terrific fuss of us both.