Ernest Deighton was one of the two hundred men who had dug the assembly trench in the night and now he too was crouched in it waiting with the first wave of the 8th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry for Zero. Unlike most of the Battalion, Deighton’s platoon had lunched after a fashion. A shell exploding in the ragged field behind had fortuitously dug up some potatoes and showered them into the trench along with a fountain of earth. Hardly troubling to clean them, the boys had eaten them like savages. Now, as they waited for the off, the raw potatoes lay heavy on Deighton’s stomach. He still had vivid memories of the nightmare of July and the long solitary wait in his sniper’s post in No Man’s Land. He was now a Lewis-gunner. Charging into a fight with a heavy machine-gun on your shoulder was no joke but at least the course at the Machine-Gun School had kept him out of the line for a while. For Minnitt waiting fifty yards away, it would be the first time over the top.
Corporal Bernard Minnitt, MC, MM, 11th Btn., The Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment (The Sherwood Foresters), 70th Brigade, 23rd Division
My position was on the extreme right, next to Lieutenant Coates from Nottingham. As we were on the top of the slope, we could see all the men of the Battalion and they were all looking in our direction for the signal to go. It was a bright sunny day and the whole outlook seemed unreal to me. Suddenly, with one movement, all the bayonets flashed in the sun as the men fixed them on their rifles. Mr Coates’ watch showed ten seconds to go, then five, four, three, two, one – then up went his arm and the Battalion went over the top like one man and off at the double into No Man’s Land. I was so fascinated at the sight of it all that I suddenly came to my senses and realized that I was still standing there and Lieutenant Coates was thirty yards in front of me. I pulled myself together and jumped over and, just as I did, it seemed as if all hell was suddenly let loose. Every Gunner behind us must have had their fingers itching to fire and thousands of shells started screaming over our heads, firing the creeping barrage and four hundred yards away Jerry’s trenches disappeared in smoke and explosions.
I came to a large shell-hole with half a dozen of our fellows in it, scared stiff and sheltering. I ordered them out and rushed on, making sure they came with me, and we came to the one gap in the enemy’s barbed wire that seemed to have been broken by our shellfire. We doubled through it and fanned out again and went on to the German trench. We started taking prisoners right away, and we could see other Germans hopping it, back to their next trench. We’d been given four minutes to get to the first trench, two minutes to clear it and then to move on to number two, but the Germans were obviously so surprised and stunned by our barrage that we jumped the first trench and went straight on to the next and started to clear that and dig ourselves in. We were so far ahead of ourselves that the barrage hadn’t lifted past the last trench. Unfortunately we had to put up with being shelled by some of our own missiles before it did lift.
Private Ernest Deighton, No. 25884, 8th Btn., King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry
My objective was Destremont Farm, just this side of le Sars. We had to pass to the right of it, but I never got any distance! I went over with my whole Lewis-gun section – eight trained gunners and eight reserves, because I was learning them the job. They were carrying extra ammunition and the idea was that if I got hit they would take over the gun. But we all got hit. I lost the lot! The shell hit us all.
We’d just got set up in a shell-hole and I’d started firing the gun when this shell came, and I don’t know if it was ours or theirs. That was the last I knew. When I come round I was still in the same position but all I could see was part of the Lewis-gun butt against my face on the side of the shell-hole. Where the rest of the Lewis-gun had gone, I don’t know, and there was no sign of any of my section either. I never saw any of them again.
I don’t know how long I was knocked out cold. They were still banging away when I came round and my leg was all anyhow and covered with blood. I took my puttee off the other leg and grabbed the shattered one and straightened it and wrapped my puttee round it. Then I pushed in my entrenching tool and turned it round like a tourniquet to stop it bleeding and I reckon that’s what saved my life. Then I started to crawl back to the trench the best road I could. It was dark by then, so I couldn’t see much and I fell into the trench all anyhow and my legs fell in after me. The stretcher-bearers picked me up straight away and put me on a stretcher and they shoved me for shelter underneath this knocked-out tank that was half over our trench and I stopped there till they were able to carry me down, right the way through to the dressing station under the ruins of the church at Contalmaison. It was a hell of a journey and I was in agony, for the numbness had worn off. My knee was shattered and my whole leg was burning. But I knew I was on my way to Blighty. I’d a fair idea I was on my way out of the war.
But Deighton’s Battalion had managed to join hands with the Canadians north of Destremont Farm across the Bapaume road. The Brigade as a whole had taken the first three lines of trenches, but they had not managed to get into le Sars. Later that night the boys were relieved. It had started to rain and the Germans, well aware that troops would be on the move, bombarded the tracks with tear-gas. The new drafts, who now outnumbered the old hands in most battalions, were not familiar with the soft plopping of the gas shells and, by the time the order was passed to don gas helmets, most had received a generous dose. Rain beating on the outside of their goggles and eyes streaming within, did not add joy to the journey.
It rained hard for the next four days. The mud, which had been bad enough after the changeable weather of September, turned to mire. The broken land, raked and cratered by a thousand bombardments, trampled by regiments of feet, scarred and rutted by a million wheels creaking under heavy loads of ammunition and supplies, cut to its chalky bone by the thunderous passage of countless guns, mashed to a porridge by the monstrous weight of the tanks, now sank beneath the lashing rain into a viscous swamp. It engulfed every landmark, every duckboard track, every gun site; it engulfed the bodies of the dead and sucked at the bodies of the living as if to engulf them too. The trenches crumbled and dissolved into runnels of liquid mud that streamed into dugouts and rose in the trenches to the depth of a man’s thigh.
Mud. A hundred years earlier, Napoleon’s Army, floundering in its glutinous grip, had called it ‘the sixth element’. Now, on the Somme, every relief resembled the Retreat from Moscow. Now it took two days to travel from reserve lines to the front through a succession of miserable staging posts, miscalled camps, where the troops could shiver for an hour or two beneath flapping tarpaulins before shouldering mud-encrusted rifles and sloshing on through the waste. Every Battalion on the move left the smell of sodden khaki in its wake. Even the metalled roads – the arteries of the battlefield, the lifelines of supply – were coated with a layer of mud two inches deep, despite the efforts of an army of Pioneers, equipped with heavy brooms and scrapers, to keep them clear. Lorries skidded and gave up the ghost; wagons floundered and sank; for hours at a time traffic ground to a halt and even when it managed to keep going, found no feature or landmark to guide it.
Corporal J. Pincombe, No. 40045, 1st Btn., Queen’s Westminster Rifles, 56th Division
A convoy started out on the Somme with the hope of a quiet trip, but each one was an adventure. My job was to take up the Battalion stores – food and, most important, water. By October the conditions had got so bad that we could get nowhere near the line with a limber and so the ration parties from the Battalion had to come down further and further to meet us and carry the stuff back in sandbags. We made the sandbags up at the transport lines – so many to each Company, and the water we poured into old petrol cans. That was an awkward load to carry. The men hated it. It was a terrible job struggling back through the muck with a heavy petrol can of water in each hand and your rifle over your shoulder and the mud two or three feet thick.
On this particular night the battalion rendezvous was at Ginchy. I knew the ration party would be waiting
and I knew I was late but I simply couldn’t find it in the dusk and the mist. Then, out of the dark, in the flash of the guns I saw a battalion straggling along – a big bunch of soldiers all looking exactly the same in tin hats and capes, and I stopped the limber and shouted, ‘Hey! Where’s Ginchy, can you tell me?’ A Sergeant stopped and came over to me. He said, ‘Do you see those two bricks? Well, that’s Ginchy!’
Sergeant George Butler, 12th Machine Gun Coy., 4th Division
Sometimes the supplies never came up at all – especially if you weren’t attached to a big unit, as we weren’t. A guide met us and took us to our positions in a cemetery and, when we got there, there were as many dead on top of the ground as underneath it. We were supposed to be relieving a four-gun platoon and there was just one gun and five men out of a platoon of thirty-odd left. There was no shelter anywhere, only shell-holes. The people we were relieving were glad to be off. They just said, ‘There’s the front. Fritz attacks with machine-gun fire night and morning.’
It had taken us a long time to get up to the line at Lesboeufs. We walked all the way, through thousands and thousands of shell-holes, rim to rim. Every time you put a foot forward you sank, and you were sinking into a mass of dead as well as mud, because there weren’t enough people to collect the bodies in.
We had nothing to eat for three days – no food! Of course, all the time we were under shellfire and that’s why they couldn’t get the supplies up. We lost three guns and more than a dozen men. Eventually my gun was the only one left. I sent the rest of the fellows off, crawling round the dead looking for food and water and ammunition off dead machine-gun teams. What with this collecting ammunition and running from one shell-hole and one body to another one, we lost a devil of a lot more men, but we collected the best part of seven or eight thousand rounds of ammunition off the dead.
We were in a devil of a state by the time we got to the fifth night. We were starving, nothing to drink or any damned thing and lying there in all the slush in that cemetery. So I thought it out. I decided that we’d fire all the ammunition we had into No Man’s Land. We couldn’t see the Germans. You could see odd parties when the flares went up, that was all. But we fired off all these guns – I was practically buried in empties when we’d finished. When I’d fired off the last round I said to my men, ‘Pick up your kit. We’re off out.’ I knew I could be shot for it, but I couldn’t see the sense in staying. We waded back through the mud and eventually we hit the duckboard track. We’d only gone down it about two hundred yards when we met a party coming up. It was our relief! There was an officer with them, but he said nothing. He probably thought I’d got the order from elsewhere, but I knew myself I was cutting things a bit thin.
Private J. L. Bouch, No. 11776, 1st Btn., Coldstream Guards
We set off. A ghastly night. We followed this line, everybody carrying something and we fell and floundered. There was a fellow who had come to join us and he was a baker and he was a strong man. He could do fifty press ups on his thumbs because he had very strong hands with kneading the dough – a fair, tall chap, very strong. His name was Howarth and we called him Snowball because of his white hair. He went down in the mud. He says, ‘It’s no good, I can’t get up. I can’t get up, leave me, leave me here,’ and I went to him and I got hold of him. I said, ‘l’ll kick your bloody guts out if you don’t get up,’ and he got up and off we went. We came to a sunken road, narrow and fairly steep at the sides. It had been raining and we slithered down to the bottom without any bother. Then we had to get up the other side. Do you think we could get up? No matter how we clawed we just kept slipping back. I threw my can of water up first of all and my rifle and I scrambled and scraped and dug my way up this bank and eventually I managed to get to the top and pulled the others up and we went across to this post that we were relieving.
You couldn’t imagine such a shambles. It was a machine-gun post. They would be a machine-gun detachment and possibly twenty men, and it was a round emplacement and it was a shambles of mud and old equipment and rubbish. You couldn’t sit down. You sank in the mud. I don’t think there would be three rifles that would have fired because you see we’d gone in and out the mud, and down in the mud and some had got it in the barrel and others had all their mechanism covered in mud. Anyhow, the amazing thing was that the following morning in front of us we could see fairly open ground sloping down and no sign of the Germans at all. We’d no rations. I think the only thing we’d got was this can of water, because the rations that we were carrying had gone into the mud. We were a hundred per cent miserable. We had a Sergeant named Dukes and, after a couple of days of this, he said, ‘I’m going back to tell them we’ve got to be relieved,’ and he went back and they sent a relief for us and out we went.
When we came out of the line, I didn’t appear to be walking on my feet at all. I was walking on my knees. We went into some rest huts and took off our boots and clothing and you were given a ration of tea and rum and you went to sleep like a log and, when I woke up in the morning, my feet were just like huge bladders of lard with the toes sticking out at the top, no feeling at all. Trench feet. No excuse for it. You weren’t supposed to have it but, there is was, you got it. All of us had it.
Private Arthur Hales, No. 302, 2nd/2nd London Field Ambulance
On our second night on the Somme the stretcher-bearers were called out and marched off in pitchy darkness, through mud and pouring rain, blindly following an officer. How he found his way is a marvel to me for, even if there had been any landmarks, it would have been impossible to find them on such a night. After about an hour, we struck a surfaced road which made the marching, if anything, more difficult. We were split up and forced through narrow passages between the waggons, up to our eyes in mud. The only objects we could see in the blackness were the roadway filled with traffic and the flashing of the guns nearby. The officer had to ask the way and then we set off again – not on the road, but across a trackless main of mud, down a slope. It was almost impossible to stand upright. Most of us did it on our hands and knees. All over the place were dumps of stretchers, ammunition boxes, shell cases and so on. We stopped at one heap of stretchers and were told that this was our ‘station’. They said we could rest for a while before starting our stretcher-bearing stint. We were so dog-tired that we dropped on to the soaking stretchers to try to sleep for a while and forget our misery. Very soon we had to rouse when some stretcher cases arrived from some unknown place in the dark. Our job was to carry them over the sea of mud back to the road and the waggons. It took so long that it was dawn before we completed even the first journey.
Trooper Reg Lloyd, No. 1035, Cheshire Yeomanry (attached to 8th Btn., South Lancashire Regiment, 25th Division)
They were short of troops and no cavalry were wanted by then, so they dismounted us. It was a terrible come-down. To be turned into infantrymen, was like being pole-axed. Of course, we weren’t very good at walking at the best of times, never mind in those conditions. We’d just arrived in France and they gave us a couple of weeks’ infantry training at the Bull Ring until we were ready for the slaughterhouse. We went up to relieve the Canadians. We’d never seen anything like it. Going up through this area it was just as if an earthquake had been there. It was all mud and I was frightened to death. Eventually we came to a noticeboard. That’s all. Just a noticeboard in among a bit of rubble. And the noticeboard said Pozières. That was all there was! Just a noticeboard that said Pozières to tell us where we were.
Gunner George Worsley, No. 690452, 2nd West Lancashire Brigade, Royal Field Artillery, 55th Division
We’d moved the gun-lines forward and the Headquarters, just behind the gun-line, were set up in some old deep German dugouts and the Germans started firing over gas shells. When a gas shell comes over it makes the same noise as a light shell but, instead of a bang, there’s just a plop, although the impact moves the earth. You say, ‘Thank goodness, that’s a dud!’ We got about five of these before we realized that they weren’t duds. I said,
‘Good Lord, out luck can’t be as good as this! All these dud shells!’ A couple more came and then we smelled the gas and put our gas masks on. The Germans simply saturated us with gas shells – they reckoned later there must have been more than twenty thousand, trying to knock the gun-lines out and knock out the reserves coming up. We had those gas masks on for twenty-four hours. You can’t describe how uncomfortable they are, because they make you feel as if you’re choking. There’s a grip that holds your nose tightly and you have to breathe through the mouth, through a tube you hold between clenched teeth. Your mouth and throat get unbearably dry.
The telephone lines were down in all the other dugouts so, after twenty-four hours of this, the Colonel came to my telephone to get through to General Headquarters fifteen miles behind. When he asked to speak to the General, some young cub at the other end, said, ‘I’m afraid you can’t speak to the General. He’s dining.’ Well, the Colonel absolutely howled down the phone. He said, ‘Do you realize, young man, that’s it’s only by the grace of God I’m speaking to you now? Get me the General at once!’ So, after quite a while, the General came to the phone and the Colonel said, ‘We’ve had our masks on for twenty-four hours. We can’t live here any longer. What must we do?’ Well, the General gave him orders to abandon the area. The whole Brigade moved out and that full brigade of guns was left untended for forty-eight hours.
Two of us were ordered to stay to keep the telephone line open and I was unfortunately one of them. What a night that was! The dugout was about ten feet under the ground and we took turns sleeping on the floor. In the early hours of the morning, it was my turn to keep watch. Shells were coming over steadily and it was freezing cold in there, with just a tiny dim light. This other chap was snoring on the floor and I looked at the dugout entrance and I noticed for the first time that there were five gas cylinders dumped at it. I knew that, if one of those shells hit one of those cylinders, we’d absolutely had it.
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