Sir John had spent the previous week inspecting artillery positions. The very fact of the coming attack, let alone the proposed date, or details of the weaponry to be used, were top secret. But while letters home from officers and other ranks were strictly censored, no one censored the commander-in-chief’s letters. Regardless of the security risk, he could not resist confiding the details to Winifred Bennett, his mistress.
‘I’ve just come back from a long day at the Front,’ he wrote on 6 March, four days before the battle. ‘More rain. Rain! It seems to do nothing else! I was on a horse for most of the morning and got a soaking! I’ve been looking at one of our big guns being put into position. It is what we call a 15 inch and throws a shell of 1400lbs weight – double the size of the biggest guns the Germans have used against us. All our preparations are complete for the Great Event. Every man is in splendid heart and spirit and only anxious to be “doing”. The mail has just arrived and brought me a letter from you. I will answer it in a day or two – before we “begin”. I know you won’t tell a soul!’
Sir John’s self-belief was boundless. He saw the assault at Neuve Chapelle as the prelude to a larger battle, one that would see the German Army driven out of France. On the morning of 9 March – the day before it began – he wrote to Winifred again: ‘I don’t expect to write more than one long letter for 2 or 3 weeks!’ he told her. ‘But be sure I shall write something every 2 or 3 days to tell you how we get on. I am always thinking of you my beautiful Beloved Lady, my beautiful Guiding Star! You are the mainspring of it all, my inspiration. Victory, when it comes, will be yours!’
That evening, shortly after nine o’clock, the low rumble of an approaching motorbike disturbed the sleeping residents of St Omer. It turned into the main square, the beam of its headlights sweeping across the shuttered windows; as the rider dropped down through the gears, the noise of the revving engine boomed off the walls of the houses and echoed around the square.
A few minutes later, an adjutant stepped into the dining room at 20 Rue St Bertin. He handed Sir John a copy of the Special Order which, minutes earlier, had been issued to the fifty thousand British soldiers massed beneath Aubers Ridge. It was a rallying message to the troops from Sir Douglas Haig, French’s second-in-command:
We are now about to attack with about 48 battalions a locality which is held by some three German Battalions.
Quickness of movement is of first importance to enable us to forestall the enemy and thereby gain success without severe loss. At no time in this war has there been a more favourable moment for us, and I feel confident of success. The extent of that success must depend on the rapidity and determination with which we advance.
Zero hour – the scheduled time for the start of the battle – was set for 07.30 hours. Momentarily overawed by his own omnipotence, French turned to Lord Esher: ‘It is a solemn thought,’ he said, ‘that at my signal all these fine young fellows go to their death.’
There was one ‘fine young fellow’ he did not need to worry about.
‘Trust me to see that he is all right so far as anyone can be so in this kind of a war.’
French had not forgotten his promise to the Duchess. The preparations for the offensive prevented him from putting his ‘plan’ into train, but he knew that for the time being at least, ‘Young Granby’, as he referred to John, was not in danger.
The previous week, French had placed the North Midland Division under his immediate command. They were now assigned to General Reserve. His intention was to keep these troops back until the main body of his army broke through the German lines. Only then would he deploy them to sweep up pockets of resistance and to press forward the attack.
That day, to make certain there was no confusion over the position of the General Reserve troops, he summoned General Allenby – their commanding officer – to headquarters: ‘I explained to him clearly,’ he noted in his diary, ‘that his forward units of the General Reserve were not to engage in any action until he received distinct orders from me.’
Later, after dining with Lord Esher, French wrote one last pre-battle letter to Winifred:
Darling, I must finish this quickly. We are very active and busy tonight for the big thing happens at daybreak tomorrow. The infantry fight won’t develop till well on in the day, but the guns start early. I am looking for great things from the 15 inch – known throughout the 1st Army as ‘Grandmama!’
‘Tomorrow,’ he added, I shall go forward with my war cry of “Winifred”!’
Then, with a confident flourish, he signed the letter ‘Peter Pan’.
Thirty miles away, the night was just beginning for the forty-eight thousand troops massed beneath Aubers Ridge. Stealthily, moving in single file through the narrow communication trenches, they were making their way up to the firing trench. To avoid the risk of being spotted by observers in the enemy’s trenches, they had waited for the cover of darkness.
The temperature hovered at freezing and a bitter north wind blew down the valley, turning the rain into gusts of wet snow. It had been a long day already. The forty-eight battalions had assembled behind the lines at dawn. There, bivouacked in the wide, flat fields, and along the banks of roads choked with the machinery of battle – supply wagons, artillery carriages and, more sinisterly, the SADS, the Supplementary Advanced Dressing Stations, spotlessly clean and, as yet, empty – they had waited for the order to move forward. The rain fell steadily; by nightfall, their greatcoats were wet through.
The operation to move the troops into position presented a logistical nightmare. The Front along which the commander-in-chief had chosen to position his forty-eight battalions was a mere two thousand yards wide. During the hours of darkness, twenty-four thousand men were to be crammed into the firing trench at the tip of the phalanx, and the remainder, lined up in the reserve trenches, ready to follow on. Just three communication trenches led up to the front line; it would be close to dawn before all the battalions were in position.
Charles Tennant was in charge of a company of Seaforth Highlanders: ‘I turned in at 10.30pm leaving orders that I was to be woken at one o’clock. Breakfast for the men was punctually at 2am and the Battalion was to be ready, formed up in the road, by 2.55. We took nothing with us but rations, coats, a spare pair of socks and twenty rounds per man.’
At the entrances to the communications trenches, bottlenecks formed as battalion after battalion waited to file up the line. The water table, following the deluge of continuous rain, had been rising all day. Further along, where the narrow roadways began their descent towards the front line, it was wet and muddy underfoot; by midnight, the water was lapping over the carefully laid duckboards, making progress slow.
The order to move forward had been issued at 18.30 hours – thirteen hours before zero hour. For those troops unlucky enough to be among the first to be ordered up to the firing line, it was a long wait.
‘Snow swept down on us as we waited in the flooded trenches,’ William Andrews, a corporal in the Black Watch, remembered: ‘We grew colder and colder – so cold that I never thought I could be so chilled and still live. It was sheer biting torture. At five in the morning my platoon was routed out again to move to a reserve trench. We shambled over ground hardened by frost. It was colder than ever. We called it a trench, but it was more of a breastwork, like a stockade, strengthened with sandbags of earth. My pals Nicholson and Joe Lee and myself huddled together close to each other with our backs to the stockade.’
Despite the cold, and the long, sleepless night, morale in the platoon, as Andrews recalled, was high: ‘We were Territorials and we were going into action for the first time. Our commanding officers told us we were facing the enemy with a numerical superiority of thirty-five to one. We felt honoured to think we’d been chosen to serve in the battle. We were eager to fight, smarting to avenge the things that had been said about the Territorials. We might be raw but we were keen men, intelligent men, and every one a volunteer. We meant to do our best and we were convinced
that this was the battle that might end the war! In those days we thought you only had to break through the German front and the enemy would crumple up and we would be done with the trenches because, once we had thrust through the trench system, the line would be rolled up. That was a favourite phrase then, rolled up! Of course battle plans were not revealed to a humble Lance-Corporal like myself, but at Neuve Chapelle we had a good idea of what we were after … the ground slowly rose towards the village of Aubers and we knew that about nine miles beyond was the city of Lille. We were hopeful enough to believe that there would be cosy billets for us in Lille on the night of the battle.’
To the right of the Black Watch, further along the firing trench, Lance-Corporal Hall was with the 2nd Battalion, Cameronians (Scottish Rifles). ‘We put up climbing ladders for jumping over the parapet. We were on tiptoe with excitement because we were fed up with trenches and living in a sea of mud and we just wanted to get the Germans out in the open. We’d seen them off at Messines Ridge when they attacked in November, but this was our offensive, the first our army had made since the trench warfare began.’
After the long, cold night, the sun rose at 6.30 a.m. Crammed shoulder to shoulder in the firing trench, the twenty-four thousand troops – the first wave to go over the parapet – were just a few hundred yards from the enemy. ‘When dawn came we peered across at the German lines, wondering if Jerry knew we were coming,’ Corporal Andrews remembered.
For the next hour, they waited for the bombardment to begin. Behind them was the strongest concentration of guns per yard ever before assembled: sixty-two batteries of eighteen-pounders; forty 4.5-inch howitzers and eighty-two siege and heavy artillery pieces.
‘At 7.30 punctually the whole sky was rent by noise – about four hundred British guns all opening fire at once in concerted bombardment of two hundred yards of German trenches,’ Tennant described. ‘We had a battery of – I think – 4.7s only forty yards behind us and the din was terrific. The whole air and the solid earth itself became one quivering jelly. Funnily enough, I normally have a fanatical dislike for mere noise of any kind, but I was conscious of nothing except the extraordinary sense of security the infantry man gets from hearing artillery fire from his own side.’
‘The bombardment started like all the furies of hell,’ Andrews remembered: ‘The noise almost split our wits. The shells from the field guns were whizzing right over our heads and we got more and more excited. We couldn’t hear ourselves speak. Now we could make out the German trenches. They were like long clouds of smoke and dust, flashing with shell bursts, and we could see enormous masses of trench material and even bodies thrown up above the smoke clouds. We thought the bombardment was winning the war before our eyes and soon we would be pouring through the gap.’
Looking up at the sky, blackened by the clouds of earth hurled by the falling shells, one image would remain in Tennant’s mind until he was killed, seven weeks later, at the Battle of Festubert: ‘Through all the bombardment,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘the larks mounted carolling up to the sky with shells screaming all round them, as though all that devil’s din was only some insane nightmare and as though all that was really true was the coming of spring.’
At precisely 8.05 a.m. the guns fell silent. Before the echo of the last boom had resounded across the valley, the air was filled with the shrill sound of hundreds of whistles as, in unison, company officers gave the signal to advance.
The offensive was destined to fail. Sir John French had made a catastrophic error of judgement. So keen was he to press the attack, he had decided to overlook a serious problem on his left flank.
In the run-up to it, two siege batteries, promised by the War Office and equipped with four 6-inch howitzers each, had failed to arrive from England. Since mid-February, they had been anxiously expected. Their targets had been allocated: they were to pulverize the German trenches around Mauquissart, a tiny hamlet on the extreme left of the battle front, where 23rd Brigade would attack.
As the weeks passed and there was no sign of the missing batteries, a series of telegrams – which grew more and more heated – flew between London and St Omer. On 26 February, the War Office informed GHQ that the batteries would leave England on 1 March. GHQ wired back requesting their immediate embarkation but they were not shipped until 5 March.
It was only on the evening of the ninth – less than twelve hours before zero hour – that the batteries were moved into position in the field. The destruction of the breastwork along four hundred yards of the enemy’s front depended on the firepower their eight guns delivered. But they had no time to range on their targets, much less fire a single shot.
Inconceivable as it seems, Sir John and his staff at GHQ had made no arrangements to cover the gap. For the soldiers in 23rd Brigade, the error was catastrophic; as they advanced across no-man’s-land, they were advancing against German trenches that were pristinely intact.
The 2nd Middlesex led the assault. They attacked in three successive waves, climbing over the parapet into a storm of point-blank fire. Some measure of their bravery is to be found in one sentence in the Official History: ‘It was thought at first that the attack succeeded in reaching the German trenches as none behind could see and not a man returned.’ In fact, every man, and there had been nearly a thousand, was killed.
While the troops to their right were able to advance quickly, capturing the village of Neuve Chapelle and gaining a thousand yards of ground in the space of forty-five minutes, by the second day of the battle, the Germans had reinforced Aubers Ridge and were able to counter-attack. After another day, with ammunition running low, the battle was called off. A post-mortem revealed that at the crucial moment after the capture of Neuve Chapelle, the troops had failed to exploit their gains. They had not pushed forward quickly enough. Part of their failure to do so originated in the chaos that had ensued on the left flank as the advancing battalions came under heavy fire from German defences that had survived the initial bombardment – the four hundred yards of enemy trenches that should have been destroyed by the inoperative batteries.
At the close of the battle, British losses amounted to 583 officers and 12,309 other ranks.
48
John handed his permit to the sentry at the checkpoint, who waved his car on. He was driving the Rolls-Royce his father had lent him for the duration of the war. Next to him, in the passenger seat, was Rothesay Stuart Wortley,* the general’s 23-year-old son. A second car followed behind them; inside it were four other staff officers from the North Midlands Headquarters. It was the 14 March – two days after the battle of Neuve Chapelle – and they were at the foot of Sharpenburg Ridge.
The ridge, eight miles to the west of Ypres, overlooked the Flanders plain; on a clear night, it was possible to see the front-line trenches – fifteen miles of them, stretching from Hooge to Messines.
The fog that usually shrouded it had lifted, and the smell of cordite hung in the air. It was seven o’clock in the evening and the noise of the distant firing was incessant. Strobing flashes of orange and white lit up the sky to the east. As the two cars wound their way up the narrow track to the top of the ridge, there were three further checkpoints. Sharpenburg was closely guarded; as one of the few high points held by the British in the otherwise flat landscape, it was an important piece of ground.
A few hours earlier, the Germans had launched a surprise attack at St Eloi, a quiet sector four miles to the south of Ypres. John and his fellow officers had come to watch the attack from the ridge.
In the two weeks since he had been out at the Front, this was John’s first sight of the battlefield. ‘The life here is almost identical to Bishops Stortford,’ he complained to Charlie: ‘spend most of the morning doing sham fights just the same as in England, except in England one got to London most Saturday to Mondays, which we don’t get here.’
To his frustration, the North Midlands had not taken part in the fighting at Neuve Chapelle. For three days, the division had waited, camped in a frozen fi
eld three miles behind the lines at Sailly-sur-la-Lys. They were under orders to move forward at an hour’s notice. But the order to advance had not come through. A few shells had fallen close to one of the brigades’ headquarters, but this had been the only excitement.
It did not seem to John that he would ever see action. ‘Here we are, and likely to be for some many weeks,’ he wrote to Charlie after the battle: ‘My Division is what is called General Reserve, which means we are not to go into trenches, but to be kept fresh for a dash through once the German lines have been broken. But as the breakthrough looks to be an impossibility, I fear we shall be where we are for a very long time.’
If and when the North Midlands were drafted into action, his job as galloper to General Stuart Wortley was to act as a liaison between division headquarters and the brigades’ battle headquarters close to the Front. On occasion, when the lines of communication were down, he would have to go into the trenches to relay messages to individual battalions. But as long as his division remained out of the line, he was consigned to the life of an ordinary staff officer. ‘I suppose people would say it’s a bloody sight better than being in the trenches. But I hate it,’ he confided to his sister, Marjorie. ‘It’s awful sitting here doing nothing when men are being killed and wounded. We’ve had 12000 casualties in this last fight. What it’s like to be in the midst of that shelling, I can’t imagine. The worst part of the waiting is the fear of being frightened – not knowing whether one would stand up to it.’
And yet despite the tense wait to go into the line, John knew his position was enviable. ‘The way the Staff Officers live is very agreeable, but the way the men are expected to live – even out of the trenches – is dreadful,’ he told his sister. ‘How they put up with it, I don’t know.’
The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Page 31