SOMME

by Lyn Macdonald

  Just before Zero Hour we heard this damned racket, and I remember saying, ‘What the hell is this?’ Then these tanks appeared, one on our front and one a bit away from us. We were all absolutely flabbergasted. We didn’t know what to think. We didn’t know what they were because we hadn’t been told anything about them. It was an amazing sight. It crossed my mind about the old Duke of Wellington’s remarks about the Battle of Waterloo. He said, ‘I don’t know. My troops scare me, I don’t know what the hell they’re going to do to the French.’ They scared Jerry all right! The tanks scared the Jerries more than what we did!

  They came up right in front of us and swung round and went straight for the German line. The barbed wire entanglements had been pretty well smashed by our artillery but the tanks just rolled over what remained of them and smashed them all to pieces. They scared the guts out of the Germans. They bolted like rabbits. We saw them! Our tanks went straight over the German first-line trench and straight on and the boys just had to walk across behind it and occupy the front line. It was easy.

  It was so easy that the second wave went over just ten minutes after the first, got caught up with the fighting in Pint Trench and, in their enthusiasm, were carried forward to the Switch Line by the momentum of the first wave. The Switch Line, which had loomed so large and so sinister in all the attacks of the last two months, was subdued with comparative ease. And there, according to the battle plan, they should have waited until twenty-past seven before moving on to the second objective at Gap Trench. No orders in the world – no shelling, no machine-gun fire, no casualties, no risk, no battle plan – could compete with the heady thrill of the dash forward. The remnants of the first wave advanced together with the remnants of the second. They lost the tank and they lost Ted Gale almost simultaneously. The tank ground to a half before Gap Trench and almost at the same moment Gale was hit.

  Corporal E. Gale, No. 3774, D Coy., 7th Btn., The Rifle Brigade, 41st Brigade, 14th Division

  There was another Corporal alongside of me. I grabbed hold of him and I said, ‘I’ve stopped one!’ I felt it go through me, into my shoulder, and the feeling was just like somebody jabbing a needle or a pin into your hand. Just a short sharp dig. No pain really. I knew it was a Blighty one – and I was thankful! I can remember what I thought before I passed out. I felt that faintness coming over me and, as I began to fall down, I thought, ‘Oh, good! I’m on the way home.’

  The rest of the battalion were on the way to Gap Trench in a hurly burly of troops which had become hopelessly mixed up in the excitement and confusion of the advance. For Burton Eccles, one of the new draft, it was the first time over the top.

  Rifleman Burton Eccles, No. 203694, 7th Btn., The Rifle Brigade, 41st Brigade, 14th Division

  We’d only been with the battalion for a matter of days. I was in a draft of King’s Royal Rifle Corps but they called us out in the middle of the night, changed our shoulder badges and put us in the 7th Battalion, The Rifle Brigade. I had my first drink of rum that morning, before we went over. I’d never tasted spirits in my life! I was ready for anything after that.

  The bombardment was terrible and, by the time we got over the top, the machine-gun bullets were simply racing at us. You’d wonder how anybody got through it! I had my clothing torn and something hit my tin hat – but the very worst thing was that I had a shovel on my back and a bullet hit the shovel. You never heard such a clang and a row as it made. It scared the life out of me!

  I didn’t see any Germans at all until the third line of trenches. I must have been looking a lot more fierce than I felt, because out of the trench came about twelve big Germans. I thought, ‘Here goes! This is it!’ And then they all put their hands up! I thought, ‘Thank God for that!’ We didn’t need to give them any guard to take them back – we just waved them through. As they were running back towards our line one of our chaps turned and he fired at them. I was shocked. I stopped and I yelled at him, ‘You dirty dog!’ He yelled back, ‘We were told not to take prisoners!’

  We got into this trench and there wasn’t really room for us, there were so many milling about. The trench was really badly knocked about, full of Germans, wounded and dead, and our own chaps as well. You couldn’t move. And we stood there while the Germans counter-attacked from further on. We beat them off. Later we went on again.

  We had to go through a perfect hail of stuff, branches and bits of tree trunks were flying about in all directions and our chaps were falling all the time. We had to go forward in short bursts from one shell-hole to another. I lost touch with my party in the smoke and, at one point, I found that the fellow in front whom I was following was actually not moving on because he was dead. He had died in a kneeling position.

  Of my draft of twenty-five, only ten of us got out and of my own five pals who’d all stuck together, I was the only one to answer the roll call. I never saw anything of them after we started. In an advance over so much ground, in such terrible fire, it is impossible to keep in touch with one’s pals.

  Perhaps remembering their innocent curiosity of the night before and the jaunt which had so infuriated Ted Gale, Eccles later wrote home, ‘I could have got heaps of souvenirs, but I only wanted one. That was myself!’ He might also have added that, in any event, he had been rather too busy to collect any.

  The 14th Division was advancing across the open country that lay between Lesboeufs and Flers. On their left the 41st Division was advancing on the village of Flers itself.

  Afterwards, when the name of the battle had become synonymous with the capture of Flers and Courcelette, when it had been forgotten or only dimly remembered that the tanks had been intended to lead the infantry far beyond, it seemed a signal honour that this youngest and most inexperienced of Divisions had been chosen to attack Flers – and a signal achievement that they had captured it. The 41st had been given ten tanks to help them. Seven had trundled up to the start line, but the troops, lying well out in No Man’s Land, were up and away and ahead of them. They went so fast that the tanks had no chance of keeping up. They went so far that they ran into their own barrage and so enthusiastically that the Germans in the first line of trenches were overwhelmed almost before they realized that the attack had begun. And the tanks rumbling up behind bowled them forward to the second line and into the fight for Switch Trench.

  The Yeoman Rifles, with the exception of Billy Banks, took off in the first wave. Billy did not see them go. He was oblivious to the tanks, although they must have rumbled past within feet of the shell-hole where he lay. He was oblivious to the victory. He had not even heard the whistle blow at Zero. His last recollection was of waiting in the advanced position to go over and of the whistle of a shell that seemed to be making straight for him.

  Rifleman W. Banks, No. 12021, 21st Btn., King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 41st Division

  It was a long time before I woke up and when I did it was ever so quiet. Oh, I could hear the guns and the sound of fighting in the distance, but there wasn’t a sound near me and there wasn’t anybody in sight either. I wondered where my pals were. I climbed up out of the shell-hole, looked around and I still couldn’t see anybody. I felt myself all over and there wasn’t a scratch on me, so I thought I’d better follow on. I went Over the Top by myself!

  I kept looking around and, after a bit, I saw a group of men about half a mile away and I thought, ‘That’ll be the lads.’ So I set off to catch up with them and I’d gone no distance when a machine-gun opened up and I got one in the left arm. I looked at it and I thought, ‘That’s nothing.’ So I carried on, and I hadn’t gone ten steps when I got hit in the other arm. That was it!

  Banks never did succeed in catching up with the lads nor in completing his one-man advance on Flers. Fortunately his assistance was not required. D16 was already making its triumphal progress down the main street and D6, D9 and D17 were smashing through a hornet’s nest of strongpoints on the eastern edge of the village and putting the Germans to flight. They were the only tanks on the Divisional Fr
ont which were still in action. The others lay ditched in the shell-holes along the line of the advance. One wreck, foundered just two hundred yards from the British line, was at least serving some sort of purpose. It had been pressed into service as a makeshift dressing station and the wounded who could hobble or crawl were crouched in the shelter of its battered bulk. Sergeant Norman Carmichael was there with a number of his men, for it was his Number 10 Platoon, in the vanguard of the Yeoman Rifles, which had taken the first shock of the attack and suffered the first casualties.

  Sergeant Norman Carmichael, No. 10 Platoon, C Coy., 21st Btn., King’s Royal Rifle Corps, 41st Division

  Lieutenant Benton and myself took the platoon across. We were the first to go in C Company. I think our Captain gave the order to advance a little bit before the time because we’d been trained that the closer you kept to the creeping barrage the safer you were. But we overdid it. We walked into it and it has to be said that there were a lot of shorts. The artillery was very good but they weren’t all that perfect and they couldn’t guarantee to put a curtain in a straight line that you could keep behind.

  I went down very early and I saw my officer going on just in front of me. He was brandishing his revolver and shouting, ‘Come on, Number Ten!’ And he just went down. He got a machine-gun bullet right through the head. The Germans had got up by then and my platoon was literally put out of action in a very short time. The last I saw of them there were about half-a-dozen going through the smoke climbing up this ridge to get into the German trenches and I was left lying there. It was a gorgeous summer’s day and, after the rest of the Battalion had gone through, I was able to crawl about. I put a bandage round my leg and crept about going to the rest of my lads in the platoon that were wounded. Some of them were shouting. They used to make horrible sounds when they were in pain, when they were wounded and some were wounded pretty badly. I went round to as many as I could, just to try and cheer them up and then I went in and sheltered behind a tank that had broken down trying to get up this ridge. It stopped there all day and we collected as many of the walking wounded as we could. It was doubly safe, behind the ridge and behind the tank.

  It was a long time before the Germans got the range and started shelling. When they did, it was a horrible sight. The shells were falling on Delville Wood and it had been fought for over and over again, so it was full of dead bodies and they were being tossed up by the explosions. In a strange sort of way it was fascinating to watch these bodies rising into the air above the tree stumps and circulating almost in slow motion and coming down again. Horrible, but fascinating. It seemed so strange to be lying there on that lovely warm summer’s day watching these bodies going up and down.

  Beyond Delville Wood, the New Zealanders too had leapt forward ahead of schedule without waiting for the snail-crawling tanks to lead their advance. They too had suffered casualties from their own bombardment but they had kept going, spurred on by the sight of some two hundred Germans running for their lives. They were bellowing and cheering as they went. Disdaining the tanks, lumbering up painfully slowly behind them, they took the Switch Line with the bayonet. They took it so quickly that Harry Baverstock, asleep in his rabbit-warren in Mametz Wood, was roused by ‘… fellows rushing around yelling that the Green Line had been taken by the Dinks’. It was just ten minutes to seven and the attack had been underway for exactly half an hour.

  Looking over the parados of the captured trench the New Zealanders could see, on their right, the ruined village of Flers tucked into its shallow valley. They could see the troops and the tanks making steadily towards it. And now that they had a chance to look around, they could see how thin they were in numbers. When they realized the full measure of New Zealand casualties, they sent a message back urging the Reserve Battalion to prepare to take over the line.

  At High Wood, on the 47th Divisional Front, the tanks had been a positive hindrance. One of them had even been responsible for a fair number of the New Zealand casualties. It strayed out of the wood, was confused by the lie of the line, unsure of its direction. It opened fire on what it took to be enemy troops. In fact it was firing directly at the New Zealanders as they advanced with the 7th Royal Fusiliers on their left and just behind.

  Of course the tanks should never have been ordered into High Wood at all and so the Commander of the 47th Division had told GHQ in the frankest of terms. In the opinion of General Sir Charles Barter, even a child could have seen that the pitted, fought-over ground, the upturned trees, the stockade of jagged stumps, the morass of craters and shell-holes lying lip to lip, were insurmountable obstacles to any vehicle, regardless of its might, regardless of the brilliance of its trials over open country. He had not succeeded in convincing the powers-that-be. They patiently pointed out that the British and German lines lay too close to each other in High Wood for the artillery to bombard and crush the enemy defences. The tanks must do the job. The powers-that-be had not seen for themselves the conditions in High Wood. The General had. Let the tanks go round the perimeter of the wood, he suggested, and the wood itself could then be crushed as easily as a walnut in the jaws of a nutcracker. The General had been overruled, but he had been right. Only one of the tanks had been able to move forward through the wood and, before long, it had stuck. Its crew fought on with the infantry, and the fighting was hand-to-hand.

  But, beyond High Wood, the tanks were ranging towards Martinpuich, across the tangle of trenches that had so formidably defended it, followed by the triumphant 50th Division. Soon they were in the outskirts of the village, prisoners were streaming back and the demoralized German line began to crack.

  In High Wood the Tommies lay low while trench-mortars poured a short-range barrage into the Switch Line. The bombing parties, creeping forward in its aftermath, found little opposition. By one o’clock, the wood had fallen. It was two months to the day since the three Brigadiers had walked towards it through fields of standing corn and in those two months High Wood had cost the lives of several thousand men.

  Just as they had been waiting two months before, the cavalry was massed behind the line, impatient for the order to dash through to Bapaume. Again the order never came. But the German line had been broken. Like the New Zealanders four kilometres away, the Canadians had swept ahead well in advance of their tanks, and swept right into Courcelette. A tank had driven ‘up the main street of Flers with the British Army cheering behind’. The British Army had undoubtedly advanced – and further in a few hours than in the previous ten weeks. But they had not advanced quite far enough. The cavalry would not be required to exploit the breakthrough. For the moment the advance had stuck.

  It had stuck on the far side of Flers. It had stuck in front of Gueudecourt and in front of Lesboeufs. It had stuck at the Quadrilateral. It had stuck beyond Lousy Wood at the foot of the road that led into Combles. And more than half the tanks which had boosted the infantry on its way had stuck as well, or been wrecked by enemy fire. Most divisions were reduced to half their strength long before the day ended. Most battalions had lost their colonels. Some had lost every single officer.

  The 7th Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, were holding five hundred yards of Gap Trench with a modest force of five officers, one warrant officer, four sergeants and no more than one hundred and fifty riflemen. They were uncomfortably aware that, if the Germans decided to counter-attack, they would stand little chance of beating them off. The best they could do was to set up a Lewis-gun in a forward post and reinforce the gun-team with a sergeant and a few riflemen to lend moral support. Burt Eccles was one of the party. The men were exhausted and dazed by the day’s fighting. They had had little sleep the night before and another sleepless night lay ahead. They set off up a long narrow trench which, until that morning, had been manned by Germans. The Germans were still there in heaps of contorted bodies that smothered the floor of the trench. Eccles hesitated and stopped. The Sergeant prodded him roughly from behind. ‘Get on!’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’ Eccles stood, paralysed. ‘I
don’t like treading on their faces.’ The Sergeant had no time for such niceties. ‘Never mind their bloody faces! MOVE!’ Eccles moved, through the sweet stench of blood, wobbling as the bodies yielded softly under his feet, fighting the impulse to vomit. It was the worst moment of the day.

  Captain Brown had established what passed for Battalion Headquarters in a ‘well-furnished Boche cubby-hole’ in Gap Trench. It contained a welcome supply of food. There was rye bread, dried figs, prunes, dates, dried meat, mineral water, lump sugar and cheese. There was not a great deal, but there was plenty to go round what was left of the Battalion.

  The Yeoman Rifles were considerably fewer than this time last night when they had been marching to the line with the tanks. Now they were out in the fields beyond Flers and, at the head of a reconnoitring party, Lord Feversham had gone farthest of all. His body still lay in the uncut corn. Billy Banks had been found by stretcher-bearers. Others had got back under their own steam.

  When the shelling became too hot, when a battery of guns had moved forward and opened up disconcertingly close to them, when it was only a matter of time before the German guns would register on such a tempting target, Sergeant Carmichael had left the shelter of the tank and made for safety. Nelson Lawson and Geoff Hutchinson went with him. Together they crawled back to the British wire and pulled stakes from the entanglements to serve as makeshift crutches. They could never have made it across the moonscape surface of Delville Wood itself, so they worked their way round it and hit on a half-constructed highway of planks and a Pioneer Battalion working flat out to extend it up to the new line. It made the going easier. They must have passed within yards of the New Zealand reinforcements, who were on their way through Carlton Trench to the front.

  Now, the ground where their comrades had gone over cheering in the morning was strewn with hideous evidence of the fight. The bodies of four New Zealand soldiers lay staring from one shell-hole. Baverstock’s section faltered and the Sergeant urged them on. ‘Come on, never mind them. They’ve only stopped for a rest!’ There were a lot of ‘resting’ bodies about and Baverstock had a black premonition that the bodies of Hickmott, Jackson and Biss were probably among them. He was right. And he was also right in his conviction that they too would be ‘for it’ in the morning.1