It began to get on your nerves after a while. It wasn’t so much that we were being shelled – although we were, because the Germans used to put over these big 5.9 shells and then they’d follow them up with shrapnel shells to catch anyone who was running away. But what really began to get me was the sound of our own guns. The sound waves were going over your head all the time, like a tuning fork being struck on your steel helmet. A terrible sound – ping, ping, ping, ping – this terrible vibration day and night and this noise in your head, just like a tuning fork being rung again and again. It went right through you. You couldn’t get away from it. It went right down into your nerves.
On the 8th, the infantry went for Guillemont and the French attacked simultaneously on their right on a front that stretched across the valley to the high spur and beyond that to the River Somme. Just as they had done on the morning of the First of July the two armies went forward shoulder to shoulder. But this time they did not sweep all before them. The French edged forward on their right but, where their line met the British, they were stopped by a hail of enfilade fire. In spite of attacking with two divisions ranged against the short line on either side of Guillemont, in spite of a week’s backbreaking work digging advanced trenches for the jump-off, in spite of a carefully planned protective barrage, the German bombardment had stopped the British soldiers in their tracks. A few gallant parties, pitifully small, broke through and were annihilated by storms of machine-gun bullets, streaming from Waterlot Farm, from Guillemont Station, and from the trenches that stretched in front of the village itself. The whole débâcle was horribly reminiscent of the attack at Serre just five weeks earlier and the lessons which had been learned there seemed already to have been forgotten. Once again the ‘supporting’ barrage went ahead in a series of predetermined lifts in accordance with a rigid timetable. Once again no messages came back. Once again the infantry attacked with all the panoply of visual communications, bearing on their backs those shining markers, the cut-out diamonds of tin that would glint in the sun as they made their way forward, carrying the flares that would signal their position to patrolling aeroplanes.
But there was no sun. There were no aeroplanes. There was mist – heavy, thick mist that mingled with the smoke and fumes of the crashing bombardment and swirled and clung round the infantry in a blinding suffocating curtain as impenetrable as the German line itself.
Later, when darkness fell, when the reliefs came up and the remnants of the shattered battalions stumbled back to the rear to lick their wounds, to hold scratch roll calls, to make the first sickening estimates of how many of their number had been killed or wounded or were missing, the rumour began to spread that, in the mist and confusion, two British battalions had attacked each other.
The bombers of the 5th King’s Liverpools had somehow managed to work their way forward, had somehow managed to capture a length of trench, but they were sharing it with the Germans. They blew in part of the trench to block the passage and somehow managed to hold on. They called it Cochrane Alley, and its capture was the only real gain of the day. Some troops had managed to penetrate the field of heaped-up rubble that once was Guillemont village, where as at Thiepval, as at Ovillers, la Boisselle, Pozières and Beaumont Hamel – every tumbled ruin concealed a warren of deep dugouts and fortifications. Sure of their own terrain, German reserves attacked through the mist and the smoke and the British battalions were overwhelmed. They could ill be spared, for these were no amateurs, no lambs sent in the innocence of inexperience to the slaughter. The 8th King’s were the Liverpool Irish, like the rest of their brigade, hard-fighting, experienced Territorials. The 1st King’s were Regulars and they had been in France since the first days of the war.
The 8 August was a black day and an inauspicious day for the King’s arrival in France. Sir Douglas Haig would have liked dearly to show him a victory.
The King had reached Boulogne by destroyer in the same morning mist that enveloped the troops attacking at Guillemont and motored to Montreuil where he lunched at GHQ before driving on to Haig’s advanced headquarters at Beauquesne. The Commander-in-Chief was waiting to receive him with his mounted escort of the 17th Lancers and a guard of honour of fifty Artists’ Rifles. The two men were old friends. Ten years earlier while on leave from India Douglas Haig had met and, after an uncharacteristically whirlwind courtship, had married Miss Dorothy Vivian who was Maid of Honour to Queen Alexandra and a close connection of the Royal Family. The wedding had been held in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace, graciously offered by the King and Queen who were delighted to see their protégée marry a distinguished soldier whom King Edward held in high regard.
The intimacy had continued into the next reign and now, after inspecting the troops drawn up to await him, after exchanging courtesies when the General presented his Staff, King George V was anxious to broach a subject which he suspected might be troubling the mind of the Commander of his armies. It was 4.30 in the afternoon. The two men repaired to Haig’s writing room and tea was brought.
The Commander-in-Chief gave the King a general outline of the situation along the front, touching on Guillemont, where Cochrane Sap was still being held, where some troops were reported to be in the village and more were holding out round Guillemont Station.
If the attack had not been an overwhelming success, the scant information which had reached GHQ gave no reason to suppose that it was a total failure either. It was, after all, only a local engagement designed to assist the French – and the matter was still not concluded. Fresh troops of the Reserve Battalions would be attacking again tomorrow. They might well succeed. Short of omniscience Haig could hardly have given more information.
The King had confidence in his Commander-in-Chief, but, like Haig, he was subject to the Government. Already there had been rumblings in the Cabinet, but it was an outsider, Winston Churchill, who was causing the most trouble, and the King was furious.
Churchill had written a carefully considered paper criticizing the whole conception of the Somme offensive and, weighing the awful cost of losses against gains measured in yards rather than miles, against stalemate rather than advance, and against the grand strategy which had been swept away on a tide of bloodshed, he had concluded that little or nothing had been achieved and questioned the wisdom of continuing what he saw as a vain sacrifice of life and endeavour for what appeared to be no foreseeably fruitful result. Churchill had circulated the paper to every member of the War Cabinet, and the Cabinet had been just sufficiently perturbed to make polite enquiries of the Commander-in-Chief as to his intentions. That very day (although Haig had penned his answer on 1 August) his reply was being read to the War Committee by Sir William Robertson. The occasion was recorded in the Minutes:
The C.I.G.S. read a letter from General Sir Douglas Haig dated August 1st, giving his appreciation of the general military situation, more particularly as affected by the offensive of the Allies on the Somme. It was agreed that the C.I.G.S. should circulate it to the Cabinet.
It was further agreed that the C.I.G.S. should send a message to General Sir D. Haig assuring him that he might count on full support from home.
(August 8th)
WAR OFFICE
The following day Sir Douglas would have the gratification of receiving that message. In the meantime he had the natural gratification of hearing the King express the utmost personal confidence in him and the very human satisfaction of hearing him refer to Churchill and his ‘cabal’ at length and in terms of robust disapprobation which entirely coincided with the General’s own opinion. Thus fortified and encouraged Haig bowed his monarch off the premises to be driven off to a château near St Pol forty kilometres to the north, well away from the battle zone and behind the ‘quiet sector’ at Arras.
This billeting arrangement had not in the least suited the King who, short of running the unconstitutional risk of going into the actual firing zone, was anxious to get as near the battle as possible. A message from Buckingham Palace, a day or so be
fore his arrival, had made this fact plain and had asked for a change to be made. But Haig had quietly insisted that the present arrangement should stand. He confided his annoyance to his diary:
Extract from the diary of General Sir Douglas Haig
Friday, 4 August: A château in the area of the battle further south is desired. These courtiers at home evidently do not realize the congestion of troops and the dust on the roads when fighting is in progress.
Even miles back from the line, with the constant movement of troops, of long slow cavalcades of transport, of speeding despatch riders and powerful staff cars carrying supplies and ammunition, the roads were a nightmare of flying chalk, grit, dust and eternal sweating hold-ups. And, all along the roadsides, the spectral dust-covered figures of Pioneer troops and sullen patient German prisoners leaned on shovels as they waited for a gap in the traffic which would let them resume the endless task of repairing surfaces which, as fast as they worked, were ground back in the same old shambles of ruts and potholes with every passing day.
Beyond the old front line where battered tracks ran across land that had been wrested from the enemy, the shambles reached horror proportions. There were miles of abandoned trenches, pounded almost out of recognition. There were old artillery positions surrounded by mountains of empty shell cases that advertised the weight of fire thrown back at the Germans. There were live shells too, the duds that had failed to explode, and they lay in disturbing quantities wherever the plodding battalions looked. There were shattered limbers, dead mules, tumbled mounds that once were villages, splintered sticks that once were woods. And there were the dead.
Corporal O. W. Flowers, No. 133480, Motor Transport Section, Army Service Corps
I was a driver. I’d been a driver before the war, and a fitter as well. I had a licence but, in those days, it didn’t matter if you didn’t have any legs on, if you didn’t have any arms or even any eyes, if you wrote up for a driving licence and sent five shillings you got one.
I joined up in 1915. There was an offer advertised in the papers – six shillings a day for drivers and fitters if they joined the Army. Well, the Tommy was only getting a shilling a day, and if I joined up I knew I’d get my choice of job. But if conscription came in, that would be that! It wasn’t just the money. I wanted to go into something where I didn’t need to use a gun.
It was all right until the Somme got really bad. We were running from a village just outside Doullens, and we had twenty-four lorries parked in the main street. We used to run the rations up to the line, or as near as we could get. We used to help the Tommies too, because there was a tremendous number of troops going up. And one of the worst jobs I used to have was when a division was going up (they were marching up of course) and we would relieve them of their blankets, so that they wouldn’t have to carry them. Well, they was all rolled up and it wasn’t a case of, ‘This is my blanket, that’s your blanket.’ You got a blanket and it didn’t matter whose it was when you got to the end of your journey. Of course these were all stuffed into my lorry until it was completely full. It wasn’t so much a lorry full of blankets as a lorry full of lice! We were all covered. They were all over us! And that happened again and again.
I was attached to the motor transport department of the Army Service Corps and it was mainly supplies we were taking up to the dumps. We used to load up in the afternoon and deliver in the morning and there was every kind of thing we had to carry – including food and stuff for the horses and mules, because the horse transport was further up the field than we were. One day you would load up with coal for the cooks to cook the meals with. The next day, perhaps, you would be on tinned stuff. That was all in boxes. Next day you would be on hay. If you got that you were well away because we had to sleep on our lorries after we’d loaded up – sleep literally on top of the load. One night we had frozen sides of beef!
There were so many casualties that they kept trying to run the ambulances up nearer and nearer the line and these ambulances kept breaking down or they got damaged by shelling or knocked out. But the further the ambulance could get up to the line, the better it was for the wounded men, so they decided that they would have an advanced workshop and, being a fitter, I was sent up to it. It was at Mametz – an old barn that was more hole than wall – and it wasn’t a case of the ambulances coming in there, we had to go up to fetch them. I was running to Guillemont, just to the right of Delville Wood.
There was no road at all – neither road nor anything else! It was a track for the ambulances and I don’t remember ever seeing another lorry other than my own. They were all a lot further back. Well, there were horses, mules, men, bodies strewed all over the place. If ever hell was let loose, it was let loose then. A few of those nights I went out I used to dread going, not so much because of the danger to myself but because I didn’t know what damage I was doing to other people. You couldn’t see them. It was too dark. Sometimes a Very light would go up and it would just give you a glimmer of light, for a second or two, and then it was out. But by that time it was too late. You’d gone over somebody. I don’t know how many people I may have killed with the lorry, but I’d known I’d gone over them because I’d felt the bump. I didn’t hear screams, and I tried to cool myself down with the fact that I’d have heard them if they’d yelled out. I tried to cool myself down with the idea that they must have been dead when I went over them.
Up there at Guillemont it didn’t matter where men dropped, they just stayed there with nobody to pick them up. It was days and days before anybody dared to go out to pick them up and bury them. The bodies were piling up all the time, piling up by the roadside.
The Battle of Guillemont and Ginchy
One particular night it was a real horror. I was going towards Delville Wood, and what a bombardment there was! There were ever so many ambulances knocked out. They were little ambulances, Tin Lizzies, and they only held two or three wounded, but they were very manoeuvrable. You could just swing your tow rope round the axle and loop it over your hook and away they’d go. Some had tyres blown off and some even had a wheel blown off and I’ve many a time towed one with three wheels on. (You could do it with a Ford as long as you changed the weight so that there’s no one on the side where the wheel’s come off.) But that night!
Quite a few ambulances had had a direct hit and we couldn’t
The General Attack on 15th September
do much about those, but some of the others had been pretty well splintered with shrapnel and the wounded men they’d put inside had been wounded again after they’d been put in the ambulance. When you looked inside you got the shock of your life! All we could do was load them into the lorry, try and get them back as quick as you can, because this shelling’s going on all the time. When we got back there were five dead in the lorry and the lorry floor was swimming with blood. We made six runs that night towing in ambulances and taking these poor wounded chaps out of the ones we couldn’t shift. When I got back from the last run, my mates in the advanced workshop, said, ‘What’s the matter with you? You look like a ghost!’
I simply couldn’t speak. It was a long time before I could speak, I was so terrified. Once we’d handed the wounded over I just crawled into the lorry and lay on the floor and went to sleep. The following morning my uniform was soaked in blood, sodden with it. They had to give me a new one. I looked at it and I can remember thinking, ‘If the British people could see what I’ve seen and experience what I experienced last night, this war would stop. They wouldn’t have it!’
I’ve never been able to stand the sight of blood since. If I prick my finger, I feel sick, even after sixty-five years and more.
The next night, when I had to go up, my heart was in my mouth every foot of the journey – driving in the dark all the time, not knowing where you were going, not knowing what you were hitting. But you just had to do it. You know it’s your duty. It has to be done and there’s men there that may be in the ambulance and we had to get those ambulances back. It was as simple as t
hat. They were going down by the hundred. It was a blood bath, running up to Guillemont. It was a terror. And the shelling never ceased.
The Germans were shelling indiscriminately behind the immediate front line with far less accuracy of registration on distant targets (as they themselves admitted) than the British. During the Battle of the Somme the Royal Flying Corps exulted in the fact that it ‘had the sky to itself’ and it was only a slight exaggeration. Far above the duelling guns, the fliers of both sides were duelling in the air in a battle of quite another kind. Few German reconnaissance planes got far behind the British lines without being challenged by a buzz of British fighters swooping in pursuit like a swarm of angry bees and, far above the battle, soundless and graceful as kites, the fighting machines soared and dipped, circled and manoeuvred and were cheered to the echo by watchers below when a burst of flame, a spiralling stream of smoke, signified a kill.
No one greeted a kill with more enthusiasm and relief than the men who were the eyes of the guns, the Observers, swinging lonely in fragile baskets beneath the gas-filled balloons riding cloud-high behind the British lines. They were particularly vulnerable to attack from the air. One burst of machine-gun fire, even a well-aimed rifle shot, could destroy the balloon in a fiery explosion that sent its cable whiplashing to earth and its observer to Kingdom Come.
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