SOMME
Page 32
Rifleman F. C. White, No. R.8529, B Coy., Bomber, 10th Btn., King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 59th Brigade, 20th Division
It was getting dark and we come across some troops in a slit trench. They were the 16th Irish Division and one of them had found a full bottle of rum. They was all blotto! This was outside Guillemont. Beyond Guillemont. We was through Guillemont by now, digging in on the final objective. We felt rough – rough, I’ll tell you! Actually that was our first real experience of warfare. Three or four times they had a go at Guillemont and they couldn’t get it! But we got it!
In the general attack that had taken place along the length of the line, they had taken Guillemont – but they had been intended to take more.
For more than two months Thiepval village had scowled from behind the keep of its defences on the summit of the Thiepval Ridge and it seemed to the Tommies, creeping slowly towards it from the direction of the Leipzig Redoubt, and to the Aussies battering out from Pozières to take it in the rear by way of Mouquet Farm, as dauntingly impregnable as it had been on 1 July. So long as the Germans held Thiepval, they would be able to overlook almost the whole British advance and direct their guns to crush it.
From its heights, Thiepval could look over her shoulder to the high ridges that climbed up beyond Mametz – to Delville Wood, to High Wood and to Martinpuich. Just behind her back, the captured village of Pozières was in full view with the windmill up the hill beyond it and, beyond even that, the land that swept in a bleak uninterrupted vista to Courcelette was clearly visible. Nearer still, Mouquet Farm held out and, as long as it did, Thiepval would hold out too. Looking out from Thiepval village across the treeless swampland of the Ancre Valley, the Mesnil Ridge, blasted and pockmarked by continuous bombardment, was bald of vegetation and, to the vigilant German observers, the chalk-white furrows of the spiralling communication trenches scarring the face of the hill pointed unerring fingers to the network of cable communications, and signposted with awful precision the journeyings of the passageways that led the British troops towards comparative safety and dubious shelter on the other side of the ridge.
The longest and most tortuous of the communication trenches, so steep that in places steps were built into it, was nicknamed Jacob’s Ladder. But it was hardly a stairway to Paradise. By day it was bombarded with high explosives; by night unfortunate wayfarers were sprayed with shrapnel. Mingling with the burst of the explosions was the soft dull plopping of the gas shells that, night after night, soaked the Mesnil Ridge with deadly fumes. The last straw, in the backbreaking ascent, was having to sweat it out in the stifling confines of a gas helmet. The trench petered out into a muddy lane at the village of Mesnil.
The ‘muddy lane’ was a sunken road that ran from Mesnil past ‘Brock’s Benefit’ to the trenches facing Beaumont Hamel. Radiating from it, other tracks and even a light railway ran towards the shoulder of the hill where the trenchline faced Y Ravine. One day’s fighting and more than two months’ incessant bombardment had reduced the battlefield to a wasteland and razed the British trenches almost out of existence. The task of a thousand unfortunate working parties had been to build them up again.
Working under the eyes of the enemy on the ridge beyond it was no easy job.
It was impossible to clear the land between the lines of its gruesome burden of dismembered dead. Even the old front line was so damaged and so choked by bodies, that it could only be held as an outpost and garrisoned by small parties of men. In the few places where the parapet had not been competely shattered, they stood guard, nauseated by the sight and smell of carnage as the working parties laboured to rebuild the line. The few hours of darkness between the long summer evening of one July day and the dawn of the next, were all too brief for the job because there was hardly a foot of trenchline in the sector between the Ancre and Serre which had not been damaged. During the last two weeks of August, in a final spurt of effort, the work on the trenches had been completed and now, on 3 September, the 39th Division filed into them to take part in the general attack from Thiepval to Guillemont which it was hoped would prepare the way for the Big Push that would finally break the line.
Their orders were to attack and capture three lines of trenches on the spur of high land south of Beaumont Hamel Valley; their real task was to cover the 49th Division across the Valley of the Ancre, as they went forward from Thiepval Wood to capture the Schwaben Redoubt and the line that linked it to the village of St Pierre Divion in the valley below. It was almost a blueprint of the attack of the First of July. But a new jumping-off line had been dug precociously near the German line, so close that it seemed inconceivable that, even against this now legendary rampart of steel and fire, the attack could fail. On the night of 2 September, the 6th West Yorks were back in Thiepval Wood – not, this time, in reserve but in the forefront of the attack. Now they were required to bloody the Pope’s Nose.
The unflattering sobriquet had been coined, as might have been expected, by the 36th Ulster Division to describe the ugly little salient that thrust out, jagged with defences, to within yards of the British lines. It was armoured to the teeth and it adjoined another fortified strongpoint, dubbed the Triangle, which lay astride the old track that ran through the fields to St Pierre Divion. Concrete machine-gun posts dominated every possible approach but, from the new jumping-off trenches, audaciously far advanced beyond the old ones on the edge of Thiepval Wood, it seemed that one short sharp rush behind the creeping barrage would overwhelm the Pope’s Nose and the Triangle at one swift decisive stroke. Meanwhile troops up the hill to the right would rush the German line and swarm across the Schwaben Redoubt. They had done it before. They could do it again. This time they would hold it.
But it was the few remaining old hands who had done it before. The new men, drafted in to fill the gaps in the decimated ranks of the 49th Division, were raw and inexperienced, newly out from home, so innocent that, when the principle of the creeping barrage was explained, there were anxious, mutinous mutterings, exclamations of disbelief. Misunderstanding the concept, the rumour spread that they had been earmarked as a suicide force and were intended to ‘draw fire’ by walking into the enemy’s barrage. The misapprehension was resolved but, in the suspicious minds of the troops, a lingering doubt remained.
Even the officers and experienced NCOs anticipated the attack with misgiving. They knew that their men were exhausted. For the last six days they had spent every waking hour – including many, in the dead of night, which should properly have been devoted to sleep – humping ammunition and reserve rations from Aveluy Wood, across the Ancre and along the slogging miles of Black Horse road to forward dumps in Thiepval Wood. At the end of every exhausting trip, they were put to work again. The advanced trenches and saps had to be dug and there was no one else to do it.
Captain E. V. Tempest, DSO, MC, 1st/6th Btn., West Yorkshire Regiment, 146th Brigade, 49th Division
They returned an hour or two before dawn so exhausted they could hardly walk and would have laid down in hundreds on Speyside or Paisley Dump, anywhere, but for officers and NCOs who were compelled to urge on the men to other fatigues and preparations during the daylight. Moreover, the Battalion was no longer the Territorial Unit of July First, but a mixture of reinforcements from twenty-seven different battalions from all parts of England, who had had no opportunity of shaking down into one efficient unit during the past few weeks of trench warfare. It was said that, if the men reached the assembly trenches on the morning of the battle, it would be a feat worthy of praise! And the most that was hoped for was that, with an extra rum ration, and the excitement of the moment, the attacking waves would reach the enemy support line and remain there from sheer physical inability to go back.
Sergeant J. E. Yates, 1st/6th Btn., West Yorkshire Regiment, 146th Brigade, 49th Division
The experience of my platoon was an average one. When we marched into support on 27 August this platoon was thirty-three strong and in fair condition. After a week of working parties, etc., the
re remained to go over the top eighteen decrepit old men. The rest were dead, wounded or in hospital. It was my unfortunate duty to wake my men and parade them for the fatigues. They lay like men drunk or dead. For instance, there was one decent average man who, I knew from experience, always pulled his last ounce. One night I could wake him by no ordinary means, and in the end he had to be pulled on to his feet, held there, and kicked into consciousness. He said, ‘I can’t do it, Sergeant! I’m done!’
I knew he was done, but there were sacks of trench mortar bombs to carry across the marsh up to the line and I had seen men do miracles before. He made an effort to pull himself together, and he moved off with the party. He collapsed after a few steps – but he was one of the eighteen in my platoon who went over the top two days later!
Talking together, the Platoon Sergeants had come to the disquieting conclusion that any remote possibility of success would depend on one of three remote contingencies. First, that the enemy had been completely exterminated by the British barrage. Second, that he was shocked into a state of instant paralysis at the very sight of them. Third, a miracle. Even without a miracle, if the Duke of Wellington’s, on their right, had succeeded in capturing the Pope’s Nose there might have been some flimsy chance of the West Yorks capturing the infamous Triangle. But they were too weakened by casualties and wearied by labour.
Under cover of the barrage, they had crept up right to the edge of the Pope’s Nose, but the barrage of machine-gun fire directed from the Schwaben Redoubt up the hill snuffed out any hopes of holding on to the first few tenuous footholds they managed to gain. When their attack had been easily repulsed, the machine-gun crews in the Pope’s Nose were able to swing their guns about to fire at point blank range on the men of the West Yorks who had penetrated the Triangle. And the German barrage, opening up within three minutes of Zero, was pounding the trenches where the troops of the second wave were waiting, with such lethal effect and with such uncanny accuracy that the ‘second wave’ never materialized at all. Those who were not blown sky-high by the shelling were pinned down and unable to move.
Arthur Wilson, newly commissioned, had joined the battalion in Thiepval Wood only three weeks before.
2nd Lieutenant Arthur Wilson, 1st/5th Btn., West Yorkshire Regiment, 146th Brigade, 49th Division
We had moved forward and we got right up to the German saps, almost under the German wire, but we simply couldn’t move. The shelling was so furious and our casualties were so enormous! Most of the Company Commanders were killed – there was no one to lead the men and the number of shells that fell was absolutely fantastic. We were simply blown to blazes and we couldn’t do a thing. We were waiting for signals, but of course no word came back. It was a misty morning, so we could see nothing, and no runner could have got through that shelling. It was quite frightful. It was a wonder any of us escaped alive. One shell nearly took my hair off. The blast all went the other way and it killed Company Sergeant-Major Iredale. When we got out, I discovered that my right sock had been unravelled by the force of the explosion. It was completely unknitted for at least six to eight yards by the blast. It was quite extraordinary.
One message got through. It arrived at Battalion Headquarters at ten minutes past six. It had been scribbled by Lieutenant Armistead and it had taken an intrepid and lucky runner more than half an hour to cover the eight hundred yards to Battalion Headquarters. It was the first real information they received and the first they knew of what was happening beyond the thunder of the exploding barrage.
We got part of the front wave into the enemy line. But the rest of the front wave stuck in front of the enemy wire, and then retired, leaving only a few scattered men in front line who have had to come back. I am trying to collect men into front parallel trench, but there are very few.
The few hardened survivors of the original battalion were grimly holding on. The new men, or those of them who had not been knocked out by the vicious whiplash of fire that traversed the Triangle, had indeed retired, fumbling back exhausted to huddle in small terrified groups against the low bank of the sunken road. Later, under repeated questioning, they all told the same story and could not be budged from it. They had been ordered to retire. Some of the men expressed the belief that the order must have been given by a German disguised as a British officer. It was an unlikely tale. Sadly, Captain Temple remarked that the evidence to support this claim was ‘not very strong’. But none of the few remaining officers had the heart to blame the few remaining men. They had, quite simply, been asked to do the impossible.
At the pinnacle of the chain of command, opinion, less well-informed, was less sympathetic. General Gough had no hesitation in laying the blame for the failure of the attack squarely on the shoulders of the 49th Division, nor did he hesitate so to inform the Commander-in-Chief.
Extract from the diary of General Sir Douglas Haig
Monday, 4 September: I visited Toutencourt and saw Gen. Gough. The failure to hold the position gained on the Ancre is due, he reported, to the 49th Division. The units of that Division did not really attack and some men did not follow their officers. The total losses of this Division are under a thousand!1 It is a Territorial Division from the West Riding of Yorkshire. I had occasion a fortnight ago to call the attention of the Army and Corps Commanders (Gough and Jacobs) to the lack of smartness, and slackness of one of its Battalions in the matter of saluting when I was motoring through the village where it was billeted. I expressed my opinion that such men were too sleepy to fight well, etc. It was due to the failure of the 49th Division that the 39th (which did well and got all their objectives) had to fall back.
On the crown of the ridge the fortress of Thiepval still stood inviolable and secure. It had been touch and go. If the redoubt at Mouquet Farm had gone, the rear would have been threatened and vulnerable. But Monquet had not fallen, even to the invincible Australians. Exhausted now, waiting for relief, the 1st Australian Division had been urged to make one final effort to take the farm. They had advanced their line, but they had not captured Mouquet. Away to their right, the troops had battered yet again into High Wood and, yet again, they had been hammered out of it. The attack at Delville Wood had resulted in a slight improvement of the line but the Germans were still strongly entrenched on its eastern edge and were fighting on. They were fighting on at Ginchy, waveringly captured, then lost at nightfall in a German counter-attack. But the village was half encircled and, a mile away, in the one real success of that day, the third of September, they had, of course, captured Guillemont.
They had not however captured Falfemont Farm and Harold Hayward believed with youthful egotism that, had he not been prevented by the Colonel from going forward with the rest of his Battalion, it might just have tipped the balance. His Battalion was the 12th Battalion, the Gloucestershire Regiment – the Bristol Battalion, which that city proudly referred to as ‘Bristol’s Own’.
When the Battalion had been formed in September 1914 a rash of advertisements had invited ‘mercantile and professional gentlemen’ to join its ranks. The ‘mercantile gentlemen’ had joined in large numbers. So had their clerks and the commissionaires whose pre-war duties at the entrances of business premises had mainly consisted of opening doors and respectfully saluting the denizens of the commercial world who presided over the offices inside. Now the situation was reversed. Most of the commissionaires were ex-soldiers, bemedalled veterans of previous wars, and they were promptly given the rank of sergeant and entrusted with the task of instructing their erstwhile superiors in the arts of drilling and musketry.
For the first few weeks, before billeting arrangements could be made, most of the mercantile and professional gentlemen continued to live in their own homes and some were even able to continue attending their offices, unless prevented from doing so by the receipt of a polite postcard which expressed the hope that they would find it convenient to attend a drill. The drills themselves did little to lower their dignity. No khaki was available. Attired, as usual, in city su
its and bowler hats the new recruits good-humouredly did their best to comply with polite requests from their former employees to ‘Right wheel and left turn, if you please, sir.’ The first parades were held on the artillery ground in Whiteladies road and, as they seldom lasted for more than an hour, the mercantile gentlemen had ample time in which to continue to look after their commercial interests. Unless, of course, they were courteously requested to perform guard duty.
Ten men each day were required to guard the Cumberland Basin, presumably to thwart the intentions of any German agent with villainous designs on the Bristol Docks. As this duty involved a march in the country, the gentlemen felt it appropriate to turn out in shooting-suits, Norfolk jackets and gaiters. Few of them, however, yet knew how to shoot and they harboured the secret hope that the very sight of the rifles they were privileged to carry (there were only enough of them to go round the guards and sentries) would be sufficient to terrify the enemy – should they be unfortunate enough to meet with Germans in such unlikely surroundings. The rifles were long, heavy, old fashioned and a distinct encumbrance, for the ‘guard’ did not travel light. They were laden with rugs, umbrellas, and picnic baskets containing wine, pickled herrings, hard-boiled eggs, cold salmon and tongue, and most hip-pockets contained the additional comfort of a brandy-flask. They looked less like a guard than like a party of country gentlemen on their way to a shoot or a picnic and the only enemy they met with in the course of their long day’s vigil were groups of children who marched, jeering, behind them and occasionally, from a safe distance, favoured them with a volley of stones and, now and again, a brick.