Elegy

by Andrew Roberts

  ‘Men were falling faster now,’ recalled Raley, ‘the machine gun fire was appallingly heavy but the steadiness of the men was quite unshaken. On they went with never so much as a waver anywhere. Each man as he fell, if life was still in him, endeavoured to roll out of the way of his comrades, there to lie until those wonderful Newfoundland stretcher-bearers found them.’

  ‘It seemed impossible that men could live to get through those gaps,’ another observer recalled,

  yet here and there a man could be seen to dash forward as if bursting through a hedge. Here and there could be seen an officer, looking for men to lead. They were through the last belt now, but oh! how few… In one case, towards the left of the line, a section advanced on the last belt almost intact—or possibly others had joined it. In the rear of this last section walked two men carrying a ten-foot [3 m] trench bridge. As the section approached the gap, the leading man of the two was hit and, as he fell, brought down the bridge and his partner. Without the least sign of flurry, the second man got up, hoisted the bridge onto his head and slowly picked his way through the now-crowded gap. Whether the German machine gunners withheld their fire in admiration is not known but this hero stolidly advanced until he could advance no further.19

  Virtually no men reached the German barbed wire, let alone their trenches, and those who did were cut down before they reached the parapet.20

  The contemporaneous regimental war diary states:

  The distance to our objective varied from 650 to 900 yards [595 to 823 m]. The enemy’s fire was effective from the outset but the heaviest casualties occurred on passing through the gaps in our front wire where the men were mowed down in heaps. Many more gaps in the wire were required than had been cut. In spite of the losses the survivors steadily advanced close to the enemy’s wire by which time very few remained. A few men are believed to have actually succeeded in throwing bombs into the enemy’s trench.’21

  This cannot be verified, however. A rumour credits a Pte. Thomas Carroll with reaching the German trenches.22 ‘No words of mine can give a fair account of the advance’, wrote their proud but heartbroken adjutant, who won a Croix de Guerre to add to his Military Cross. ‘It was just a steady walk forward of several hundred Newfoundlanders, each one knowing that he was going to be hit but determined to carry out his orders until he could advance no further.’

  The scene in the Beaumont Hamel trenches during and after the attack was truly dreadful. ‘The trenches were literally packed with the wounded and dead of all regiments’, recalled an eyewitness. ‘The heat was unbearable and added to this was the incessant bursting of heavy shells on parapet, traverse and in the trench. Wounded men who had managed to crawl a little rolled down into the trench, falling with a sickening thud on the bottom or some wounded comrade and they lay there under a sweltering sun, groaning and waiting for a stretcher-bearer.’23

  Before the attack, metal triangles of 18-inch (46 cm) sides made from biscuit tins had been stitched onto the men’s backs in order to help the British forward observation officers plot the advance of the infantry, but these glinted in the sunlight when the men tried to get back to British lines from no man’s land, attracting the German machine gunners’ attention.

  The universal question asked by the men as they got back to the trenches, wounded or not, was ‘Is the Colonel satisfied? Is the Colonel pleased?’24 It was asked without a trace of irony. Hadow was indeed pleased with their heroism, but within twenty minutes it was clear that the battalion had been effectively destroyed with absolutely nothing to show for it, and at 9.45 a.m., only half an hour after the attack began, he had to report to Brig.-Gen. Cayley at brigade headquarters, a hundred yards (91.4 m)behind the British firing line, that the attack had completely failed. ‘Shortly afterwards,’ the regimental war diary recorded, ‘[the] enemy opened an intense bombardment of our trenches with heavy artillery which was kept up for some time.’25

  BEAUMONT HAMEL

  The terrain which the Newfoundlanders, 1st Essex and others had to try to cross in the teeth of German machine gun fire.

  The Newfoundlanders’ losses were horrific—89 per cent of the men who went over the top had been either killed or wounded, including all of their twenty-six officers.*2 Nonetheless, Cayley ordered Hadow to gather together any unwounded Newfoundlanders that he could find, and attack the German positions once again.26 Hadow dutifully returned to the trenches looking for enough men to carry out what amounted to a suicide attack, but the order was fortunately countermanded in time by a senior staff officer from VIII Corps HQ.

  For Hadow and his decimated regiment, at least, the bloodiest day in the history of the British army was almost over. Cayley nevertheless still ordered the 1st Essex to go over the top at 9.55 a.m.; in the words of the war diarist, ‘i.e. after our attack had failed’.27 They also suffered terribly, but it was not until Maj.-Gen. de Lisle heard at 10.05 a.m. of the total failure of his two leading brigades that he called off further attacks, at least until he ordered the 4th Worcesters to try to capture the Y Ravine salient at 12.30 p.m., although the impossibility of carrying out that order was also recognized in time. Instead, the order was given to prepare for a German counter-attack that never transpired. Attached to the Newfoundlanders’ war diary is a statement from Capt. G.E. Malcolm, who commanded D Company of the 1st Battalion King’s Own Scottish Borderers, which formed part of the first attack of the 87th Brigade, who wrote to his adjutant: ‘I should like to congratulate the Newfoundland Regiment on their extreme steadiness under trying conditions’28—a form of British understatement that has rarely been exceeded.

  ‘During the night and evening,’ recorded the war diary, ‘unwounded survivors managed to crawl back to our own lines and by next morning some 68 had answered their names, in addition to stretcher-bearers and HQ runners.’29 The men left out in no man’s land after the collapse of the attack suffered badly from thirst during that warm summer’s day. They could not move back for fear of snipers and machine guns. Pte. Byrnes, whose entire machine gun team had been killed, found himself a shell-hole: ‘a nice new shell-hole—it wasn’t big, but I couldn’t see a better one handy. I was only young—nineteen. There was no-one to give any orders… I slung the ammunition boxes down and dived into it… And there I stayed all day’30 He recorded how out in no man’s land, ‘One man lost his head and stood up and tried to run back. He’d got a terrible wound in his leg and what with the heat and everything I expect he’d gone barmy. He’d got one leg dragging and he tried to get back. He didn’t get far. He got peppered. He was dead. You could see the sun glinting on the tin triangles some of them had [on] their backs… I lay there and watched it all… It was a long, long day.’31

  That night, with the Germans putting up flares so that their machine gunners could fire at anything that moved, Byrne crawled back ‘not on hands and knees, but toes and elbows, hugging the ground. It was slow work.’ He abandoned everything but his gas mask as he crawled from shell-hole to shell-hole, back through the gaps in the wire and eventually into the Newfoundlanders’ trench in one piece. The next day an informal truce allowed many of the wounded who had survived the night to be evacuated from no man’s land. Over the next week, the Newfoundlanders buried their dead, sometimes in abandoned trenches.32

  Their parents were later able to leave messages on their gravestones: George and Jessie Reid of St John’s, parents of Sgt. Charles Reid, chose ‘He died that others might live.’ In the Y Ravine cemetery lies Pte. C.F. Taylor, who was twenty-three, whose parents chose this text: ‘His last words when leaving home were I have only once to die.’ Nearby in that cemetery lies LCpl. C. Smalley, of the South Wales Borderers, aged nineteen. His widowed mother, Elizabeth Smalley of Warrington, wrote: ‘Oh for a touch of a vanished hand and a sound of a voice that is stilled.’

  ‘More success would probably have attended our efforts had we surprised the enemy by an attack at dawn’, wrote Maj.-Gen. de Lisle ten days later, ‘and had we concentrated our artillery fire on the fi
rst objective, leaving the second objective to be dealt with in a subsequent operation.’33 A total of 8,408 infantrymen, including 226 officers, had gone over the top from the three brigades of his 29th Division on 1 July. Of these, 185 officers (or 82 per cent) and 4,926 other ranks (60 per cent) were casualties by the end of the day.34 For the Newfoundlanders in particular, the statistics were even worse: of the 801 men of the Newfoundland Regiment who went over the top, 266 were killed and 446 wounded.35 Hardly a family on the island was untouched by the massacre at Beaumont Hamel. Some lost two, three or even four members that day.*3 The Newfoundland casualties were only exceeded proportionately by one other battalion in the British army, the 10th West Yorkshires of 17th Division.36

  As well as being the only non-Regular unit in the 29th Division, the 1st Battalion Newfoundland Regiment was the only non-British unit of the 3rd and 4th Armies to take part in the offensive on 1 July. It was not part of the Canadian army because Newfoundland was Britain’s oldest colony—settled by John Cabot in 1497 and annexed to the crown in 1583—and did not join Canada until 1949. On the day that Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, the governor of Newfoundland, Walter Davidson, sent the British government a telegram saying that the colony would immediately supply 500 men to the war effort, even though at the time the 42,000 sq. mile (108,780 sq. km), 242,000-person island had no standing army, militia, nor even a government office.37 Instead there were local voluntary Christian organizations such as the Church Lads’ Brigade, the Catholic Cadet Corps and the Methodist Guards, which along with other groups formed the Newfoundland Patriotic Association, which raised the number of men promised by their governor. Even though Newfoundland itself was in no danger from Germany or the other Central Powers, her young men volunteered in droves to defend what was then still widely thought of as ‘the Mother Country’.

  The regiment had trained on the old cricket grounds on the north side of the Quidi Vidi Pond in the military encampment at Pleasantville, Newfoundland. The initial contingent of 537 men of the 1st Newfoundland Contingent wore Australian slouch hats, Canadian army overcoats and the distinctive blue puttees that were worn by the Church Lads’ Brigade.*4 In October 1914 they crossed the Atlantic in the converted sealing ship Florizel, part of a Canadian convoy 9 miles (14.5 km) long and three abreast, landing at Devonport, the naval base near Plymouth. Meanwhile Davidson told his superiors in London that the men were ‘very hardy and accustomed to hard work and little food’.38 They trained for a year on Salisbury Plain because the clay plains were thought to be similar to what they would find in Flanders. Transferred to Scotland for further training, they were joined by another thousand reinforcements from home. In September 1915 the regiment arrived at Suvla Bay in Gallipoli, just as the campaign there was winding down. They were soon evacuated, and so had lost only thirty-eight men killed by early January 1916. They arrived on the Somme via Cairo that April.

  After the Battle of the Somme, Lt.-Col. Hadow, who had taken over as commanding officer in December 1915 and had the reputation of being a strict disciplinarian, rebuilt the regiment with a large draft of new men. With his second-in-command, Maj. James Forbes-Robinson, who was to end the war with a VC, DSO and Bar and MC, he subjected the regiment to long training parades, which on occasion could last from 5.30 a.m. to 7.30 p.m. Hadow restored them to full fighting efficiency, and the battalion went on to follow up the breakthrough at the Battle of Arras in April 1917, losing 460 men in a few hours at Monchy-le-Preux, then smashing through the German army’s great series of defensive fortifications known as the Hindenburg Line after the Battle of Cambrai that November. On 1 December 1917 they lost more than 400 men in the German counter-attack, and they fought at Passchendaele twice and at the Battle of Lys in 1918. Of the 4,212 Newfoundlanders who fought on the Western Front in the First World War, no fewer than 1,300 were killed.39 After the war, Basil Gotto sculpted five magnificent bronze caribou memorials to the Newfoundland dead, which can be found at their bloodiest battlefields.

  Writing to the prime minister of Newfoundland about the performance of the regiment on the first day of the Somme Offensive, Maj.-Gen. de Lisle said: ‘It was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault only failed of success because dead men can advance no further.’40 It was true, but Hadow’s vital question—‘Has the enemy’s front line been captured?’—was all too often answered in the negative that day. The brigade’s battle plan had been based on the assumption that Y Ravine would be virtually clear of living Germans by the end of the week-long bombardment. The Newfoundlanders’ experience on 1 July 1916 therefore echoed many of those battalions in the north and centre of the battlefield which, ordered to advance at no more than walking pace and weighed down by almost half their body weight in equipment, were methodically massacred by an annihilating machine gun, rifle and artillery fire that should have been silenced beforehand. For all too many men who served along the 18-mile-wide (29 km) battlefield, that is the simple, tragic story of the first day of the Somme.

  *1 He is among forty-five Newfoundlanders buried in Y Ravine cemetery, one of three Commonwealth War Graves in the Beaumont Hamel Memorial Park.

  *2 The battalion lost three more officers than should have gone into action because they volunteered to take part despite not being required to by their duties.

  *3 Charles Robert Ayre, who owned the department store chain Ayre & Sons in St John’s, lost four of his five grandsons.

  *4 Although their blue puttees were replaced with khaki ones, the nickname ‘Blue Puttees’ stuck.

  ONE

  STRATEGY

  ‘Trenches and barbed wire fastened their paralyzing grip on the field… war sank into the lowest depths of beastliness and degeneration. The wonder of war, the glory of war, the art of war all hung on its shifting scenery. For years the armies had to eat, drink, sleep among their own putrefactions.’1

  GEN. SIR IAN HAMILTON

  *

  ‘We had “Gott Mit Uns” on our belt buckles, but we still lost the war.’2

  GFT HUGO VAN EGEREN,

  55th Reserve Regiment

  The orders given to Gen. Sir Douglas Haig were as crisp as the seams on his staff officers’ trousers. ‘I was to keep friendly with the French,’ he noted in his diary after a meeting with Lord Kitchener at the War Office in Whitehall on Friday, 3 December 1915. ‘General Joffre should be looked upon as the C-in-C… In France we must do all we can to meet [Joffre’s] wishes whatever may be our personal feelings about the French Army and its Commanders.’ Kitchener was not a man to cross, and as Secretary of State for War he had the final say over whether Haig would be given the job of commander-in-chief of the BEF, the post Haig had been angling for ever since the current occupier, Sir John French, had badly mishandled the Battle of Loos that October. Kitchener was older than Haig, a military hero since Victorian days, an earl, the man on ten thousand recruitment posters and the proud possessor of an even more luxuriant moustache than Haig’s own.

  At the meeting Kitchener had confirmed that he ‘had taken the matter in hand’ and would be pressing the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, to give Sir John French’s job to Haig over the next few days, so, as Haig recorded, ‘I must not trouble my head over it. As soon as I was in the saddle he would see me again.’ Such was Kitchener’s confidence and invulnerable position in public esteem that he told Haig he ‘must not be afraid to criticize any of his actions which I found unsatisfactory: he had only one thought, viz. to do his best to end the war.’3 Beyond replacing his superior, that was Haig’s main thought too, but when he left the War Office that day, he was under no illusions but that he would be implementing General Joseph Joffre’s overall strategy once he got the job he craved.

  Sir Douglas (later Field Marshal Earl) Haig is easily the most controversial commander-in-chief in British history. It could hardly be otherwise with the man whose battle plans were responsible both for the slaughter of the Somme in 1916 and Passchendaele a year later but also for the s
tunning series of victories on the Western Front that sealed Germany’s fate in the last hundred days of the war in 1918. His reputation has veered between mass national veneration—his funeral in February 1928 was the largest since the Duke of Wellington’s—and denigration of him as a callous, ignorant war criminal in Alan Clark’s book The Donkeys, written in 1961 and immensely influential in popular culture, as the TV comedy series Blackadder Goes Forth showed to such absurdly poignant effect.4

  Douglas Haig was fifty-five years old when he was appointed commander-in-chief of the BEF in December 1915. He came from a Scottish whisky distilling family, and had gone to Clifton College, Bristol, then Brasenose College, Oxford, and on to the British Army’s officer training establishment at Sandhurst. A cavalryman, he had done well in the 1898 Sudan campaign and, unlike many British officers, also distinguished himself in the Boer War. Far from being the hidebound reactionary idiot of popular misconception, he was an Army reformer who had collaborated with the visionary Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane, between 1905 and 1912. These reforms created the Territorial Army and the British Expeditionary Force, among other innovations, and as director of military training Haig wrote Field Service Regulations, the first-ever tactical manual for the British army. He taught himself French, and some historians believe that he was more fluent in that language than in English; he has been described as ‘a reserved, tongue-tied Lowland Scot… positively incoherent once he strayed off a written paper’.5 He was highly enthusiastic about and supportive of new inventions that he hoped might provide his longed for breakthrough on the Western Front, such as mortar shells for smokescreens, wireless sets, poison gas, aeroplanes, and of course tanks, which he championed from the start, unlike some other cavalry officers.*1 The accusation that he thought machine guns were overrated, or ever said that two per battalion were enough, has also been comprehensively discredited.6 He might not have been a particularly endearing person but generals do not need to be; much more importantly, he had a burning desire to win the most vicious conflict in human history, which had become an immovable war of position by the autumn of 1914.