SOMME

by Lyn Macdonald

  The sentry was not only every inch a soldier but every inch a Guardsman. The place was Querrieu and he was on guard outside the château where General Rawlinson presided over 4th Army Headquarters and where, even now, the finishing touches were being put to the plans for the next big effort on 15 September. This time it would not, must not, fail. This time even partial success would not be good enough. This time they would smash the German line and break through, at last, to Bapaume and beyond. Like the New Zealanders, the cavalry was already moving towards the line and the time had surely come, after so many disappointments, when they would at last come into their own and dash triumphantly through the German lines to exploit the advance, to finish the job. It only needed the infantry to punch the first hole and, with the help of the new Secret Weapon, the infantry could scarcely fail.

  There were fewer than sixty tanks, to be sure, and far fewer than the Commander-in-Chief had desired, but there were enough to scare the wits out of the Germans. The tank was the ace in the British hand, but there was one small anxiety. The Germans still held two trump cards on the front between Delville Wood and Guillemont and, at all costs, they must be forced to relinquish them before the battle for the breakthrough began.

  By some feat of tenacity, which even the British Staff were reluctantly forced to admire, the Germans still clung on to part of Delville Wood. They still held Ginchy village to the right of it. Worst of all, they still held the Quadrilateral. Nothing, it seemed, would push them out of it and, until they were pushed out, the troops could barely budge beyond Guillemont.

  They wanted to go up the hill. It was such a short distance – a mere ten minutes’ brisk stroll to the woods that lay so tantalizingly close to the village on either side of the road that led to Combles hidden in the dip beyond. The maps proclaimed them to be Leuze Wood on the right and Bouleaux Wood on the left. With natural logic they became, in the language of the Tommies, ‘Lousy’ and ‘Bollocks’ and as they stumbled and fumbled and fought and died in attempt after attempt to capture the woods the names seemed more and more to be appropriate.

  It was the 56th Division, regrouped, reinforced, rested and refreshed after their ordeal at Gommecourt who were, for a second time, burning out their strength in the furnace of Lousy Wood and it was the Quadrilateral that thwarted their every effort. To the right of Guillemont village the 56th had managed to fight forward in the shelter of the valley to capture part of the wood, to drive the Germans out of their deep dugouts and to cling obstinately to one corner, but unless they could advance from Guillemont itself, straight up the slope of the hill, they could do no more. The Quadrilateral, away to the left, dominated the road and everything that tried to move along it.

  This strongpoint was a complex of entrenchments built round part of the old railway cutting. It was furnished with fortifications of iron and concrete, stalwart enough to defy an earthquake and skilfully sited to command a field of fire which, in every direction, was absolute.1

  Linked by a strongly held trench to another strongpoint (the Triangle) on the Ginchy Ridge which dominated the village of Ginchy beyond, the Quadrilateral was the king-pin and the key to the solid second line of the Germans’ defences, built as an impregnable insurance three miles behind the first. Their front line had long been shattered. The Germans were resolved to hold on to the second. The British were equally determined to dislodge them. If, on 15 September, they were still in possession of the Quadrilateral it would imperil the whole attack. Ginchy was taken on 9 September. The Guards moved in to secure the village and, in the scant week that remained before the new offensive, to have one more go at the Quadrilateral.

  Two miles away, on the evening of the same day, Arthur Agius found himself in command of his Battalion among the bloody stumps of Lousy Wood. Every other officer had been killed or wounded. He noted rather sadly that, after the day’s fighting, there was precious little left of the Battalion to command.

  It was as well that Agius had plenty to do. It kept his mind occupied and the responsibility of holding the Battalion together helped him to hold himself together too. His sojourn behind the lines had cured him of his ‘nerves’ after Gommecourt but now he was shocked to notice the old familiar symptoms of ‘shakiness’. He hoped to God that this time he could hang on. Being busy helped. The saddest and most dispiriting of the manifold duties of command were the letters which had to be written – and written as soon as possible – to the relatives of the people who had been killed. Agius sat in the newly captured German dugout and, by the light of a candle that guttered and sank in its evil-smelling, airless depths, penned letter after letter in a hand that showed a disturbing propensity to shake.

  Dear Mr and Mrs O’Dell, It is my very sad duty to have to tell you that your son Oliver… Dear Mrs Scarlett, I am so very sorry… Dear Mr and Mrs Starling, By now you will have received official notification…

  They were painfully difficult letters to write but there was a formula which eased the process and which Agius, in common with a thousand other officers engaged on the same sad task, fervently hoped would ease the hearts of sorrowing relatives.

  … always so cheerful. He will be greatly missed… much loved by his men who would have followed him anywhere… one of our best officers… a real loss to the battalion… genuinely missed… although he had not been with the battalion for long… loyal, reliable and trustworthy… the men adored him… wise beyond his years… hope that it will be at least some comfort to you to know… he died bravely, doing his duty… was shot through the head and died instantaneously… immediately became unconscious… killed outright by a bullet through the heart… could have felt no pain… assure you that he did not suffer… Deepest sympathy… Deepest sympathy… Deepest sympathy.

  It was kinder that way. The aim of every man who wrote such a letter was to preserve the illusion of heroic death, of a clean fight, of noble warriors struck down in battle by a bullet which flew straight and true to extinguish a brave life in the execution of some desperate advance or noble act. The ugly truth would be too hard to bear. Few of the bodies that littered the battlefield lay in the classic attitude of the Fallen Warrior. Few bore the single disfiguring mark of a neat bullet wound. Many had not even been killed ‘in action’ as people at Home could have understood the term. The vast majority had been tossed, mutilated, dismembered, decapitated by monstrous splinters of shells. Some were sliced apart by machine-gun fire. Some, like Harold Scarlett, caught in the epicentre of an explosion, had been scattered to the four winds. It was just two months since Scarlett had joined the Battalion in the wake of the Gommecourt disaster, fresh from England and newly married. How, Agius asked himself, could you tell a young wife of four months that her husband’s body had simply been blown out of existence? Agius wrote on… died doing his duty and was buried where he fell… In a sense, it was true. Even as he wrote he could hear, barely a mile away, the awful clamour of the battle bursting in the night. With every breath, with every stroke of his pen, with every earsplitting explosion, more men were falling wounded and dying in the struggle for the Quadrilateral and already, in preparation for the big breakthrough on 15 September, the troops were moving closer to the line.

  The Canterbury Battalion had marched on Sunday morning from Laviéville to bivouac on the hill above Fricourt and ‘bivouac’ meant bedding down and finding such shelter as they could manufacture by their own efforts. Even the succession of draughty barns and shell-torn attics, which were a good deal too airy by half, seemed, in retrospect, like luxury to the Three Musketeers. There was nothing for it but to dig a man-sized rectangle on the sloping hillside, line it with a waterproof sheet and, with an overcoat masquerading as a blanket, to settle down to uneasy slumber and to try not to dwell on the close resemblance of the ‘bivouac’ to a grave. To cap it all it rained. Nevertheless, it had been an exciting day.

  As the boys marched past Bécordel on the Fricourt road, the New Zealanders, who had moved up ahead of them, were lining the road to cheer them on, and o
ne particular shout directed at Bav came from four pals from his schooldays, Jackson, Ricketts, Biss and Hickmott. Rupert Hickmott had been the idol of Christchurch High School. He was the school’s top cricketer – a skilful batsman, a deadly googly bowler and his fielding was an inspiration. It was no surprise to any of his schoolmates that he was chosen to play for New Zealand and, for three years before the war, the school had basked in reflected glory. Now, like the rest of them, Hickmott was in khaki and in France, and a new generation of schoolboys was basking in a glow of patriotism. No less than 786 Old Boys were serving in the forces and, since the entire roll of pupils numbered only 390, the school considered that this was not a bad record. Now that all the New Zealanders were assembled together, Baverstock kept bumping into old friends. Having dug his gloomy bivouac he went visiting and then, with Kip and Gee, indulged in a little sightseeing.

  Private H. Baverstock, No. 11608, 1st Canterbury Btn., New Zealand Division

  It was an unforgettable sight. On the other side of the valley was the totally wrecked village of Fricourt. As far as the eye could see there were shattered forests, the mutilated skeletons of the trees. Down below us there were several nine-inch long-barrelled guns and on the opposite slope between Fricourt and Mametz Wood was a long line of six-inch Howitzers about thirty yards apart and, up near the front line, the eighteen-pounders were barking away. The nine-inch monsters just below our bivouacs erupted from time to time in groups of four and the detonation was so terrific that it hurt horribly. Without thinking I stood just a yard away from one of them. There was a sudden rush of hot air and then concussion, so loud that you actually couldn’t hear it. That sounds paradoxical, but it is quite true. I caught just a fleeting glimpse of the shell tearing through space.

  The same night, we were ordered to go on a road-repairing expedition to just behind the front line. We wandered off with shovels and got as far as the high ground beyond Caterpillar Valley, not far behind where the Aucklands (the Dinks) had gone into the line on the 9th. I hate to say this but, as we had no officers with us, we didn’t do a tap of work. The sights we saw were far too tremendous for that.

  It was a panorama you could never hope to see again. The sky was deep opalescent blue and it was continuously being stabbed by spurts of flame, just like lightning. The din was diabolic and the devil must have been grinning. All that inferno was right up his street, because it was like hell let loose. Overhead we could just hear the boom, boom, boom of huge shells lumbering over to the German back-areas. They were so big and huge that they seemed to take an unconscionable time and occasionally we could see a glare spreading out as they exploded far off in the distance. We had to run the gauntlet of the big guns in Mametz as we went back to our bivouacs.

  The Reserve Brigades of some six Divisions were packed in a vast gypsylike encampment across the slopes of the ridge beyond Fricourt and Mametz and, as they awaited orders to move up to relieve their comrades in the front line, they led a gypsylike existence, sleeping in holes in the ground and, with water strictly rationed, washing infrequently, if at all. Only the Guards managed to conduct themselves as if they were still quartered at Pirbright or Caterham. They were disciplined and immaculate. They kept themselves apart, posted sentries round the limits of their exclusive area and dared any disreputable Tommy to put so much as a toe within it.

  Lance-Corporal Len Lovell, No. 18692, A Coy., King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry

  We were lying next to the Guards and you couldn’t help admiring them. They were in exactly the same conditions as we were. It had rained on them just the same as it had on us. We were all in the open air, but we were all scruffy and dirty and they were clean and tidy. We didn’t know how they did it! Their Quarter Guard was spick and span. Their sentry was on his beat, marching up and down, saluting officers and presenting arms as if they were all still at home in barracks. What discipline! It was marvellous!

  Lance-Corporal Charles Frost, MM, No. 17256, 1st Btn., The Leicestershire Regiment

  I only joined up two years under age in March 1915 but I was drafted to the 1st Leicesters after they’d had a lot of casualties and, of course, being a Regular Battalion, a bit of their glory rubbed off on us. We thought we were a cut above the rest of Kitchener’s mob, but we were nothing to the Guards. We saw a lot of them, because we were in the same Army Corps, and they were often up with us. We used to think they were looked after a damned sight better than we were. Nothing was too good for the Guards! The things they got from home! Well, the officers of the Guards were nearly all moneyed people and their women organized a lot of things for the Guardsmen. They even had a chip van right there, behind Fricourt. They’d got an old caravan frying chips for them! You could smell them all over the place. The smell was all we got. That was my biggest worry in the Army – I never got enough to eat and, being only seventeen or eighteen, I was growing all the time.

  Private John L. Bouch, No. 1176, 1st Btn., The Coldstream Guards

  I enlisted in the Coldstream Guards at the end of August 1914. You’d never believe the training and discipline we went through at the Guards Depot at Caterham. We were subjected to a volume of abuse and scorn which is difficult to imagine. I found out swear words I’d never heard before. I found out a combination of swear words of such degree and magnitude that weren’t imaginable! They called us these things in front of officers and nobody said a word.

  We were run until we were breathless and then we had to run again simply because we couldn’t do a complicated piece of drill as quick as they wanted us to. ‘On the left, form SQUAD!’ When you found that the man next door had two right feet instead of a left and a right and he went the wrong way, the Drill Sergeant would shout, ‘You bloody idiot! Double up the parade ground!’ And up we would all have to go, up the parade ground and back again, up again and back again until he shouted, ‘Have you had enough, you buggers?’ The Drill Sergeant had a voice that carried fifty miles! ‘You’re in the Guards, remember!’ he used to shout. ‘This is not a regiment of the line. You are supposed to be the people to guard the Sovereign, God help him!’

  All our officers were lords, or nearly so. The Honourable Charles Knowles was our Company Commander. Lord Hugh Kennedy was a Lieutenant in charge of Number 12 Platoon. Viscount Holmesdale was another Lieutenant in our Company. I was a Private. We were worlds apart. Even the distinction between Private and non-commissioned officers was very, very marked. In fact a private couldn’t speak to an NCO without standing to attention. At the barracks at Caterham, we even had to stand to attention to speak to an old soldier who was in charge of the barrack rooms – and he was just a private like ourselves!

  Private William Jackman, No. 2604675, 3rd and 4th Btn., The Grenadier Guards

  I was Captain Morrison’s servant. He was a multi-millionaire and he used to pay for a lot of the stuff that came to the Officers’ Mess. Before we went to France in 1915 I had to go to Fortnum and Mason’s and arrange for what you might call tuck boxes to be sent out to the Battalion regularly. Then I had to go to Berry’s, the wine merchants, and place an order with them – a bottle of 1900 port to be sent to us every three days and cases of whisky and brandy. They used to arrive marked with a red cross. Medical comforts!

  By the time we went down to the Somme Captain Morrison had left the Battalion, but he never cancelled the order and the stuff kept on coming. It used to arrive in batches and sometimes we’d have as many as a dozen boxes from Fortnum and Mason’s arriving at the same time. They were boxes of tinned stuff, mostly, like galantine of chicken, soups, puddings, tins of fruit, tins of grouse and pheasant, ham – everything you could think of for the Officers’ Mess. We used to have that much stuff that we couldn’t cart it about with us, so we had to make dumps here and there. Often we didn’t go back to the same place, so there must have been some farmhouses who did very well out of us!

  After Captain Morrison left to go back to England, Lord Henry Seymour, who was our Commmanding Officer, asked me to go into the Officers’ M
ess, on the catering staff. That suited me! It was a good job with plenty of perks. We were living like lords and I wasn’t anxiously looking for promotion, believe me!

  When the Battalion went up the line on 9 September I went up with Battalion Headquarters to look after the officers. We had a cook when we were out at rest, but he didn’t come with us into the line. I used to take up soup cubes and dried eggs and make scrambled eggs for the Colonel and the officers at Battalion H Q and before we went up I made four sandbags, one for each company to take into the forward line to feed the Company officers. They couldn’t do any cooking there, so they were filled with tinned stuff and a bottle of whisky, a bottle of brandy and one of port.

  Battalion Headquarters was in a shell-hole – a huge shell-hole. You could have put a bus in it! Of course we were a bit to the rear of the companies and that saved us, although when they started throwing shells and stuff over you had to take what came the same as the rest.

  Jackman was better off by far than the Grenadier Guardsmen of the four companies in the front line. It was hardly a line at all. The trenches were so broken and so shattered that in places they had all but disappeared and where they did exist they were littered with the dead of the 47th Brigade whom the Guards were relieving. The relief took a long time. In the grizzly shambles of the ground to the south-east of Ginchy, the Guards had had difficulty in finding the positions so neatly marked on the trench maps. They had been on the move since dusk, but the relief was completed just sixteen minutes before the sun rose beyond the German line to reveal the full havoc and destruction around the Quadrilateral. There was no rest for the Grenadiers after their sleepless night. If the line was to be held, let alone advanced, it would need the efforts of every man to improve it. The Guardsmen slogged at the job all day and they worked on for most of the night. For once, they were cursing the fine weather. For five days it had been warm and summerlike. The night was clear and starry. The moon was not quite full, but it was almost as bright as day and every inadvertent movement brought swift retribution from enemy machine-gunners.