SOMME

by Lyn Macdonald

  2 MORE ZEPPELINS DOWN, trumpeted the Daily Mail in inch-high letters. The Continental Daily Mail copied the headlines plus four pages of coverage and carried the news to France.

  Three weeks after his experience at Thiepval with the West Yorks on 3 September, Arthur Wilson was at the Base in hospital and he was having a painful time. He had been wounded by a chance shell and wounded in an awkward place. Now the pleasure of being in a real bed, the

  The October Fighting

  relief of being in hospital and out of the line, was offset by considerable discomfort. His stomach was distended, his bladder was bursting and he could do nothing about it. It was hell. That morning Sister had come down the ward with a catheter in her hand and a purposeful look in her eye. ‘Just another hour!’ Wilson begged. Sister relented. ‘One hour then, Mr Wilson, and then we really must use the catheter.’ Ten minutes had ticked past when the newspapers arrived. Heedless of the dignity that hospital protocol dictated should prevail in an officers’ ward, a VAD burst through the door shrieking, ‘Two Zeppelins shot down last night!’ Wilson’s bed was nearest. She brandished the newspaper under his nose and he grabbed it. As he read, he became aware of a warm moist sensation which had nothing to do with excitement, and it went on and on and on. The nurses roared with laughter, produced clean pyjamas, changed the sheets without complaint and teased him without mercy. After a few days the joke began to wear thin. Every nurse who presented him with a bottle or a bedpan felt obliged to remark encouragingly, ‘Two Zeppelins brought down, Mr Wilson!’

  It was not the only good news. The same edition of the Daily Mail reported that Morval and Lesboeufs had been captured. Next day, eighty-eight days after the first attempt, they would at last conquer Thiepval.

  Chapter 23

  The Germans fought to the death for Thiepval – for every inch of trench dug deep through the pulverized rubble, for every strongpoint hidden in the old vaults and cellars, for every gallery and dugout burrowed into the chalk. One by one they were overwhelmed. When night fell the few who were left were still fighting to retain a last foothold in the northwestern corner of Thiepval village. The British infantry paused, drew breath and attacked again in the morning. Before the sun rose through the thick autumn mist, Thiepval was finally captured.

  The Germans had been in possession for exactly two years. It was 27 September and, on just such a morning, through just such a mist, two years ago to the day, Boromée Vaquette drove his cows for the last time up the narrow road from Authuille to their pasture on the hump of the ridge above and never came back. It was two years since the villagers of Thiepval had peeped warily through neat cottage windows as German horsemen clattered through the village. Two years since German officers took up their quarters in its spacious château and, dining at a table heavy with the Comtesse de Bréda’s china and silver, planned the disposition of their forces who, even as their officers savoured the old Count’s best wine, were digging trenches across the meadows of Thiepval Ridge. Now nothing was left. Not a blade of grass. Not a tree. Not a bird. The roads and tracks had all but disappeared. Here and there on the site of the old village a line of brick-dust staining the cratered earth between the trenches hinted at a long-vanished row of cottages. The twisted fragment of a weather-vane, a few chips of brick marked the church; a scattering of jagged grey stones was all that remained of the château and, as far as the eye could see, the churned-up land was covered with the grey humped bodies of British and German dead.

  In a terrible travesty of that other harvest-time two years and many lives ago, they looked like haycocks through the morning mist.

  In the eighty-nine days since Thiepval had been first attacked, it was Kitchener’s Army which had borne the brunt of the fighting on the Somme and it was not surprising that certain people in high places were beginning to question the rate at which the Empire was eating into the capital of its young manhood. In 1914 – in four months’ fighting – there had been 90,000 casualties of whom more than 50,000 were killed or missing. That had put paid to the old Regular Army. In 1915, with its dreadful chronology of disaster – Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge, Festubert, Ypres, Loos – the toll of casualties had mounted to 285,000, of whom 92,000 were killed or missing. That had put paid to most of the Reservists and Territorials and it needed no statistician to work out that the Somme Campaign was well on the way to putting paid to Kitchener’s Army. Already, between July and September, more than 90,000 men had been killed and the medical records showed that 228,632 others had been sent, badly wounded, to the Base – just 4,000 fewer in three months than in the first sixteen months of the entire war.

  For four months now the hotly-debated Military Service Act had been in force. By early next year the first batch of conscripts would be trained and ready for active service. How were they to be used? Among politicians high talk of ‘victory’ and ‘breakthrough’ began to give way to mutterings of ‘attrition’ and to doubts that the High Command of the Army should continue to be given a free hand to prosecute the war on the nation’s behalf entirely as they saw fit and to dispose with such profligacy of its young men. It was an over-simplified view but, in some quarters, it was strongly felt – particularly among the cabal within the Cabinet itself which was now actively canvassing peace. Lloyd George was not among them. He had been a champion of conscription but he was not immune to doubt and, now that he was Secretary of State for War, he saw it as a duty to inform himself on matters which were believed by some to lie outside his province.

  During the first half of September, Lloyd George had made an extended visit to France on what Haig described as ‘a huge joy ride’. Haig looked askance at Lloyd George’s untidy dress – the flowing, undisciplined locks, the long shapeless overcoat, the battered trilby hat, the artistic disarray of his floppy ties. He disapproved of Lloyd George’s propensity for changing plans at the last minute, sneered at his willingness to be convivial with newspapermen and photographers, and was censorious about his unpunctuality. The Secretary of State spent a mere two days as Haig’s guest at GHQ. He had spent five times as long as the guest of the French Army, talking his way along the French Front from Verdun to the Somme – and he had talked a little too much. Lloyd George liked talking to people. Since the start of the Somme Campaign he had gone out of his way to meet officers and men home on leave from the front and to sound out their opinions. But it was one thing to quiz the fighting men; it was quite another to invite General Foch to express his opinion of the performance of British Generals as a whole and of the Commander-in-Chief in particular, and to hint, moreover, that his own confidence in their ability was far from complete. As a high-ranking officer in the French Army, Foch was no stranger to interference by politicians. He was shocked at such a breach of protocol, discreetly replied that he ‘had had no means of forming an opinion’, and took the first opportunity of repeating this conversation to Sir Douglas Haig. Despite his disapproval of Lloyd George, Haig was genuinely astounded ‘… that a British minister could have been so ungentlemanly as to go to a foreigner and put such questions regarding his own subordinates’.

  The Commander-in-Chief was rightly aggrieved, but his own ingrained gentlemanliness and phlegm, and a strong awareness of the importance of ‘pulling together’, decided him that the whole affair was best ignored. He had more than enough on his plate. Besides, even if they had not achieved the hoped-for breakthrough, the Army’s achievements during the latter half of September had been considerable. On the 15th they had crushed the enemy’s formidable second line. On the 18th they had captured the Quadrilateral. A week later they had secured Lesboeufs, Morval, Gueudecourt, and one last valley lay between them and the Transloy ridges that snaked round to Bapaume. The Germans had been forced to loosen their grip and retire from Combles. Now the bastion of Thiepval village had crumbled in the face of the British assault, and Mouquet Farm with it.

  But although the Germans had been shrugged from the shoulder of the Thiepval Ridge they still held the crest, and the crest
was crowned with formidable defences – Schwaben Redoubt, with Stuff Redoubt to the east of it and Zollern Redoubt between that and the Albert–Bapaume Road. The Canadians had pushed well up the road, beyond Courcelette. They were within sight of le Sars and they were almost halfway to Bapaume. It had taken the Army almost three months to get this far and the autumn was well advanced. They must make one last effort to gain the redoubts, to conquer the whole of the Thiepval Ridge with all its advantages of observation, to link up the line that ran along the high ground through Morval and Lesboeufs, through Gueudecourt and Martinpuich to Courcelette on the other side of the Albert–Bapaume road. The September weather had been mixed and could be expected to worsen at any moment. Before it did, there was one last chance – and it was almost a gamble – that they could make the breakthrough. The Commander-in-Chief was convinced that the enemy was almost at his last gasp, that his casualties had been enormous, that his reserves were few, that his morale was quite possibly about to crack.

  Along the straggling line of advance between Thiepval Wood and the Albert–Bapaume road the situation was confused and the Signallers were having the worst of it. General Gough, in command of the attack, heard disturbingly conflicting reports and often, by the time a runner had managed to get back through the bombardment with news of an advance made or an objective captured, the fortunes of the troops had been reversed by a German counter-attack. Shells damaged signal lines as soon as they were laid and it was up to the Signallers to mend them and to carry the line forward over the captured ground. Eric Rossiter was not aware that he was performing a personal service for General Gough. He only knew that he was somewhere in the chaos of the thundering battle, that Mouquet Farm was behind him, that Hessian Trench was somewhere out in front and that somehow the cable had to be got up to it. Not far to his left the fighting sounded disconcertingly close, for the 11th Division, also acting under General Gough’s instructions, was trying to ‘clear up the situation’ at Stuff Redoubt. They would finally clear it up on 14 October.

  Corporal Eric Rossiter, MM, 7th Canadian Infantry Battalion

  Until that moment I’d always considered myself to be a lucky soldier. I’d been at the Signals Headquarters at Ypres the year before, so I’d missed that horrible business when the Germans attacked with gas and the Canadians had to cover up. I’d been in and out of the line on the Somme and never got a scratch. I nearly got it another time at Ypres when the Germans blew a mine right underneath us. We lost seventeen guys, but I wasn’t touched. Then we came down to the Somme and this was my second stint in the front line. We’d been out on so-called rest, on fatigues all the time carrying sandbags of rations and supplies up to Pozières and, even then, I’d had a lucky escape just the week before. We were going up in single file in a carrying party and there was a fellow in front of me carrying a sandbag of Mills bombs. A pin in one of the bombs must have worked loose, because suddenly the whole lot went up. It killed and wounded a lot of men. I was only seven or eight yards back, but I never got a scratch.

  That night, I suddenly had the feeling that my luck was going to run out. It was the toughest job I’d had. My pal, Jimmy Leaken, and I had to lay a line up from Battalion Headquarters to Hessian Trench. We only had a single Company there, so we didn’t have much of a hold on it and it was touch and go if the guys could hang on. We tried to keep in the communication trench as far as we could go but it was so blown in by shellfire that we had to get out in the open. Imagine laying these goddam wires in the daylight, diving from shell-hole to shell-hole and dashing out when the coast seemed to be a bit clear. I was shaking, absolutely.

  We made a dash and jumped into one shell-hole and there were five Canadians lying dead there. Jesus! It gave me a fright. Something flashed into my mind that I’d completely forgotten about. I had an uncle who’d dabbled in palmistry and years ago he’d read my hand. He said, ‘You’re going to get killed before you’re twenty years old.’ It never hit me till then. There I was, lying there in that shell-hole with those five dead Canadians and I thought, ‘Jesus! I’ve only got four days to go!’ It was no comforting thought.

  Beyond the Canadians, across the Albert–Bapaume road, Ernest Deighton, now recovered from his wounds and his ordeal at the Leipzig Redoubt on the First of July, was back with the 8th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, but he hardly recognized it as the same Battalion. Most of the new men were not even Yorkshiremen. There were Northumberlands, there were men from the Durham Light Infantry, there were some from the King’s Royal Rifle Corps and there was even a bunch of Scots of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. He looked in vain for familiar faces but, like familiar landmarks, there were few to be seen. To crown the confusion the Brigade was no longer apprenticed to the 8th Division but back again with the 23rd and occupying a newly-captured trench on the far side of Martinpuich. An abandoned tank was inextricably ditched half in, half out of the trench, blocking it so effectively that some unfortunates whose positions were on the other side had been obliged to leave the trench and run the gauntlet of the skyline in order to reach them.

  Corporal Bernard Minnitt, MC, MM, 11th Btn., The Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment (The Sherwood Foresters), 70th Brigade, 23rd Division

  It was one of the best trenches imaginable – well buttressed, with fine solid firesteps and beautifully clean deep dugouts. It was pretty evident that the enemy had panicked and left in a hurry and it was probably the tank coming over the hilltop just a few yards away that had put the breeze up them. They could have taken their time if they’d known that the tank’s engine was about to give out! There was no sign of any troops in the trench, though it made a sharp turn and appeared to wind away to our right, so we weren’t sure if we were alone. To be on the safe side, Lieutenant Lacey strolled up to me and said quite casually, ‘Come on, Corporal, let’s go for a walk.’ I picked up my rifle and we went off down that trench as if we were going for a walk along a promenade. We walked what seemed like half a mile and saw nothing and heard nothing – for which yours truly was really grateful!

  Late in the evening I was told to take a fighting patrol of twenty men and go with Lieutenant Benton of B Company on another exploration down the trench. This time we were to go further and try to make contact with another division who someone had a half idea was occupying the same trench about a mile away. I was at the front of the party with my rifle loaded and very cautiously I kept climbing up on the firestep and looking over the top. I’d taken my bayonet off, because it was very awkward in getting round the trench corners. I pushed the safety catch of my rifle forward and stopped every time we came to the corner of a bay and looked round very carefully before going on to the next. Then a Very light burst just as I was looking round the corner ahead – and there was a face looking back at the other end of the bay!

  Lieutenant Benton was just at my back and he whispered, ‘Challenge them.’ So I said, ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ There was no reply. I tried again, ‘Halt! Who goes there?’ Still no reply. Then one of the men behind shouted, ‘If you fellows don’t reply we’ll throw this bloody bomb among you!’ Someone shouted back, ‘We’re the 5th Northants.’ What a relief! I walked on round the corner and met this chap halfway along the traverse. It was too dark to tell from the shape of his tin hat if he was English or German but the gleam of his bayonet was at the high port position, above my head and I had my loaded rifle pointed towards him, so it seemed all right. Then a very windy voice behind me shouted, ‘Look out, Corporal. They’re Boches! The 5th Battalion’s a training battalion!’

  Then things started happening. The man facing me took a step backwards to bring his bayonet down six inches from my stomach. I knocked it away just as he fired and I heard someone behind me fall with a groan. I fired back, went down on one knee to make a smaller target and reloaded just as a Very light showed up the trench. There was no one in front of me. They had backed round the corner and, when I looked behind me, my ‘fighting patrol’ had disappeared except for the man who had been hit.
He was groaning on the ground and I knew I couldn’t move him without help. I dodged back two or three bays, thinking the patrol had moved back for shelter, when someone came jumping over the top of the trench from the direction of the enemy and he shouted, ‘Is that you, Corporal?’ He was just in time to stop me from shooting him! I said, ‘Come and give me a hand. Someone’s hurt. Where are the others?’ He said, ‘They all skedaddled so fast that they knocked the rifle out of my hands and broke my thumb. I can’t lift anything.’

  We had to leave the wounded man and go back for help. When we got to our sector there was great excitement. The patrol had come rushing in and told the Colonel that we’d run into a crowd of Germans, Lieutenant Benton and Corporal Minnitt were killed and Private Green was missing. They were standing by for an attack when we got there! Dawn was breaking by the time I got back with a stretcher-party to the wounded man. It was Lieutenant Benton and by then he was dead.

  It was an awful business – a complete shambles. I was very upset about it and I made it my business to get hold of three men of the patrol we’d clashed with. They were from the 12th Durhams, in our own Brigade, but they hardly knew who they were themselves. They’d joined the Battalion with a new draft a few days before and the man who was out in front as number one bayonet man was on his first patrol and scared stiff. When we’d challenged them everything had gone out of his head but the title of his training battalion in England. He was very down in the mouth over the death of Lieutenant Benton. I told him not to blame himself. It was the fortune of war.

  When daylight came, we could see that during the night an assembly trench had been dug at right angles to our old position. It was directly facing the Germans’ line where they were dug in in the village of le Sars and our job was to shift them out of it. About half-past twelve we got orders to pack up and move into the assembly trench and keep our heads well down until Zero.