By 1917 there was a new fuse and HE could be fired by howitzers onto reverse slopes, but all that was too late for the men of the Somme, or at least those who survived the first day. For 1 July, each field battery was assigned a sector to try to cut gaps in the wire, the guns in the centre firing straight and the outer ones aiming inwards. The planners expected there would be easily enough gaps for the attackers to get through to make the offensive a success.48
While on leave, Siegfried Sassoon bought two pairs of rubber-handled wire-cutters from the Army & Navy Stores in London, as his company did not have enough of them and what they did have were of ‘savage bluntness’. He used them the night before the assault to cut some of the wire ahead of the Manchester Regiment, as he was concerned about what the Manchesters would say about his regiment the Royal Welch Fusiliers if the wire was not properly cut.49 When he went out that night with a party of eight, he found ‘More than once we were driven in by shells which landed in front of our trench (some of them were our own dropping short)’, and it took him three and a half hours, ‘but the hedge hadn’t suffered much damage, it seemed’. With the fear of machine-gunners and snipers, Sassoon wrote, ‘It was rather like going out to weed a neglected garden after being told there might be a tiger among the gooseberry bushes.’50 Small wonder he was later put up for the Victoria Cross.
Chlorine gas had first been used on the battlefield at Langemarck, Ypres, on 22 April 1915. By 1 July 1916 the protection issued to the troops consisted of a ‘small box respirator’ with a filter cartridge carried in a haversack on the wearer’s chest, connected to the respirator by tube. Warnings of the use of gas came from klaxons, bells, banging on an empty shell case or even football rattles. After problems with gas at Loos, the British did not envelop the German trenches in gas prior to 1 July, although, as one historian attests, ‘nothing else could have neutralized dugouts burrowed into the Picardy chalk to depths of forty feet.’51 Gas was released day and night later on in the battle, at irregular intervals to increase the terror, but was not used strategically on the first day of the offensive, as it ought to have been.
The Somme was not the most heavily bombarded battlefield of the First World War. Verdun suffered more in terms of shells per square metre. Nor was the preliminary bombardment the longest of the war—those at the battles of the Aisne, Chemin des Dames and the Ypres salient were longer. Yet for all that, 1.6 million shells were fired and those Germans who had to stay above ground during the preliminary bombardment for any reason, were, in the words of Philip Gibbs, ‘blown to fragments of flesh’.52 The vast majority went into the dugouts for protection. In the BBC television series The Great War broadcast for the war’s half-centenary in 1964, John Terraine’s script stated that under the great British bombardment ‘even the rats became hysterical’.53 Perhaps they did, but the Germans generally were not, and waited patiently for days for it to end and the race to the parapet to start. One German in a dugout on 30 June wrote of how, ‘We are quite shut off from the rest of the world. Nothing comes to us, no letters. The English keep such a barrage on our approaches it is terrible. Tomorrow evening it will be seven days since this bombardment began. We cannot hold out much longer. Everything is shot to pieces.’54 A German prisoner told Gibbs: ‘Those who went outside were killed or wounded. Some of them had their heads blown off, and some of them had both their legs torn off, and some of them their arms. But we went on taking turns in the hole, although those who went outside knew that it was their time to die, most likely. At last most of those who came into the hole were wounded, some of them badly, so that we lay in blood.’55
‘In particular, one concentration of fire at a quarter past two outdid anything there had been up to that point’, another German soldier, the writer Ernst Jünger (see page 142), recalled. ‘A hail of heavy shells struck all around my dugout. We stood fully armed on the shelter steps, while the light of our little candle stumps reflected glitteringly off the wet, mildewed walls. Blue smoke streamed in through the entrances, and earth crumbled off the ceiling.’56 The atmosphere in the German dugouts, and especially the bad air, was recalled by Kresten Andresen, a Danish-speaking schoolteacher from Holstein who spent eight hours on 30 June digging and repairing connecting trenches 12 miles (19.3 km) behind the front lines. ‘When you’ve been lying there asleep for five or six hours you get a tight, spongy feeling across your chest as if you had asthma, but it goes away fairly quickly once you get into the fresh air and light.’57 The mattresses were stuffed with wood shavings that clumped together in lumps and the beds were so narrow the men had to sleep on their sides, with their hips under one of the few slats.*7
There was fine weather till 23 June, when it broke and a thunderstorm brought torrential rain, which continued to fall intermittently for the next week, with the skies never less than overcast. Because the weather was so bad just before the attack, the RFC could not get their planes up to look for the German guns, and its work was seriously interrupted for the rest of the month. It also meant that there was a good deal of water in the bottom of the trenches, which seeped through puttees and turned the soil into clinging mud that stuck to the men’s boots in stiff blocks, and made each step feel as if the wearer were lifting weights.
‘The whole heaven is lighted up by the glare of the gun flashes,’ recalled Pte. Frank Williams of the 88th Field Ambulance of the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) on 25 June. ‘The night sky was a mass of lurid light from the star shells and the incessant flash of guns, while the scream of aerial torpedoes and tear gas shells and the general booming artillery was punctuated by the explosion of mighty monsters of destruction, the whole combined coming to us with an ominous rumble, like the sea on a cavernous coast.’58 Yet a captured letter from a German called Otto Sauer, ‘written under heavy shellfire’ to his girlfriend Sophie, read ‘Dear Sophie, Your loving postcard I received with joy, many best thanks. I am otherwise in good order, am still thank God healthy and jolly.’59 It was a bad sign when even under this bombardment Germans stayed ‘healthy and jolly’, even if he was exaggerating.
The next day, 26 June, after Lt. William Bloor’s C Battery of 146th Brigade of the Royal Field Artillery had fired 598 shells continually from dawn to 1.30pm, Bloor noted how on the enemy’s side:
The whole countryside was just one mass of flame, smoke and earth thrown up sky high. About 5,000 shells per diem are pitching on a front of about 500 yards [457 m]. Whilst observing, I could not resist feeling sorry for the wretched atoms of humanity crouching behind their ruined parapets, and going through hell itself. Modern war is the most cruel thing I ever heard of, and the awful ordeal of those poor devils, even though they are Boche, must be impossible to describe.60
Interestingly, Pte. Frank Williams also noted how at a service the day before, ‘the crashing roar of some of the [artillery] reports made me pray for the Germans’, although of course he would have been praying for their souls rather than their survival.
That same day, 26 June, Capt. Harold Bidder of the 1st South Staffordshire Regiment, recalled the sights and sounds of the bombardment:
There were heavy clouds, and under them a red band of sunset in the north-east. The continuous flashes of the guns played on the clouds like summer lightning, while over the German trenches the shrapnel was bursting in white flares, the High Explosive in dull red glows… Our shells whistled overhead, and, as it got darker still, showed as red shooting stars whizzing across. We opened up with two machine guns. The noise of a stream of machine-gun bullets is like waves on a stormy beach, a prolonged swish. The biggest noise was the earthquake crashing of the French trench mortars.61
Cpl. Appleyard remembered marching up to the front on 27 June, singing ‘Blighty Land’ and ‘I Want to Go Home’. ‘Great scenes were to be seen along the roads and long streams of ammunition columns and motor lorries were making their ways to the scene of operations’, he wrote in his diary. ‘The guns were now heard distinctly and the crump of our big guns encouraged us greatly for we infant
rymen always like to know that we have got good artillery behind us.’62
Gunner F. J. G. Gambling was an unmarried Worcestershire artillery signaller telephonist with B Battery, Royal Field Artillery in the 97th Brigade of 21st Division. On 27 June he noted in his diary: ‘At 7.30 a.m. on the morning of the fourth day [of the bombardment] a batch of prisoners were taken by us. A more dejected crew could not be found in a week’s march. Dirty, unshaven with hang-dog expressions on their faces.’63
Of course the Germans responded with their own artillery bombardments. Working in the outside behind the lines all morning, trying to build a splinter-proof shelter for their observation post on 28 June, Lt. William Bloor and his party were bombarded either by German shells or by a British shell that went off too early. Just as they were finishing the job at around noon, Bdr. Greenwood was hit and Bloor recalled how,
THE APPLEYARD BROTHERS
Corporal Sidney Appleyard, left, was initially rejected as unfit when he first volunteered but eventually joined Queen Victoria’s Rifles. He was wounded on the Somme and lived to see the war’s end.
It was a horrible wound in the stomach, and all the bleeding was inward. In ten seconds this fine big fellow, who was as strong as a lion and always had a beautiful ruddy colour, was writhing on the ground and his face was green in hue and he was in awful agony. I knew there was no hope for him from the first, but told him the usual lies about it being nothing serious, etc. I got an old wire bed out of a deserted billet near and we carried him to the dressing station half a mile [800 m] away.64
Greenwood died later that afternoon. Revd Montague Acland ‘Monty’ Bere was Anglican chaplain to the 43rd Casualty Clearing Station, part of the 3rd Army. After Marlborough, Oxford, and sixteen years as a vicar among the slums of West Ham and Leytonstone in London’s East End, he volunteered to be a field chaplain aged fifty. ‘One has had the chance of shooting a beam of light in the darkness’ was how he summed up his service, during which time he contracted diphtheria.65 On 28 June 1916 he wrote to his wife back in Bovington, Dorset: ‘The shell-shock men are sad. One is an officer who has forgotten his home address, another is dumb and so on.’66 The next day he added:
There is nothing much to be done with dying people in this sort of place—they come in and stay unconscious. The wounded are practically all Londoners so far and are wonderfully entertaining even if they are short of an arm or a leg.*8 A convoy of wounded on arrival is an extraordinary sight, particularly the walking cases. They beggar description—rags, dirt and bandages, trousers torn off at the knee, unwashed and without any expression… The men come in apparently stark naked from time to time. One was sent to the train with nothing on but identity disc and small bandage.67
Siegfried Sassoon recalled Wednesday 28 June as ‘miserably wet. Junior officers, being at a loss to know where to put themselves, were continually meeting one another along the muddy street, and gathering in groups to exchange cheerful remarks; there was little else to be done, and solitude produced the sinking feeling appropriate to the circumstances.’68 That same day the Lonsdale Battalion, part of 97th Brigade of 32nd Division, paraded in fighting order to go over the top, but on the 29th word came postponing the attack until further notice. The British preliminary bombardment was supposed to have ended with the Z Day attack on 29 June but it was extended forty-eight hours after the very wet weather on the 26th, 27th and 28th. The Lonsdales then heard nothing till the night of 30 June when they were told they would be going over the top at 7 a.m. the next morning.*969
‘A little rain made a big difference to life up there,’ Siegfried Sassoon recorded, ‘and the weather had been wet enough to make the duckboards wobble.’70 He added: ‘In spite of the anti-climax (which made us feel that perhaps this was only going to be a second edition of the Battle of Loos), my personal impression was that we were setting out for the other end of nowhere.’71 ‘In the evening’, Gunner Gambling recorded in his diary on 29 June, ‘Fritz opened fire with some of his gas shells, dropping them dangerous near a battery in our rear, and of course, the wind blowing in our direction, we got a good amount of the gas, but he finished up having done no damage at all (as per usual.)’72 There is a terrible irony to this last comment, as Gambling was himself to die from the effects of gas poisoning a few years after the war.
Cpl. Appleyard also remembered 29 June: ‘The Thursday was spent in bayonet fighting and bomb throwing [practice], and in the afternoon we had an enjoyable game of cricket, which helped to take the weight of coming events off our minds… According to a report from the 8th Middlesex, our guns were effectively smashing up the Huns’ positions. A patrol who successfully entered the trenches reported that the first two lines of German trenches had already been evacuated.’73 Like so many rumours swirling around at that time, it was wildly over-optimistic. ‘Everybody seemed anxious to dispose of their remaining cash,’ Appleyard wrote of 30 June, ‘so we bought champagne, which put us all in good spirits and everybody was merry and bright when time for parade was called.’74 That night just outside Souastre, ‘an excellent view of the artillery duel was witnessed, and the flashes from the guns and the bursting of the shells formed a grand spectacle, and it was very fine to watch this from a distance but totally different when we entered the inferno.’75
In the days just before the assault, Sassoon also noticed how:
There was harmony in our Company Mess, as if our certainty of a volcanic future had put an end to the occasional squabblings which occurred when we were on each other’s nerves. A rank animal healthiness pervaded our existence during those days of busy living and inward foreboding. The behaviour of our servants expressed it; they were competing for the favours of a handsome young woman in the farmhouse, and a comedy of primitive courtship was being enacted in the kitchen. Death would be lying in wait for the troops next week, and now the flavour of life was doubly strong.76
As the regimental servants wooed the pretty farm girl, their officers played tug-of-war against the officers of the 9th Battalion.
Going up to the front on 30 June, Capt. Harold Bidder of the 1st South Staffordshires noted, ‘By way of a cheerful send-off, a gramophone in one of the houses I passed was playing the ‘Dead March’ in Saul!’77 That same day Pte. Frank Hawkings of the 1st/9th London Regiment (Queen Victoria’s Rifles) noted: ‘Today is my birthday, and anyone will concede that it is hardly an appropriate time to have one. We suddenly got order to move this afternoon.’ He was eighteen. ‘Am feeling dreadfully tired,’ he wrote at 1 a.m. once he reached the front-line fire trench, ‘so I’m going to try to snatch a little sleep, though I don’t expect to be very successful.’ Gunner Gambling noted in his diary that day, ‘At 6 p.m. a chum and myself were taking a stroll after coming off duty in what was a nice small village just behind our positions and there we realized what war really was, as we watched ambulance after ambulance go slowly by, filled with the wounded.’78 And that was the night before the big attack.
BRITISH TROOPS WAIT PENSIVELY
British troops rest on their way to the trenches, with wire cutters attached to their rifles;
Waiting for the order to advance on Beaumont Hamel on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
Although they were ordered to get some sleep on the night of 30 June, many of the troops, such as LCpl. Arthur Cook of the 1st Somerset Light Infantry, knew that ‘[we could rest] our weary limbs, but sleep was out of the question’.79 Sassoon later recalled ‘the blood-red sky’ of that night and how ‘we halted with the sunset behind us and the whole sky mountainous with the magnificence of retreating rainclouds’. He thought ‘the symbolism of the sunset was wasted on the rank and file, who were concerned with the not infrequent badness of their boots, the discomfort caused by perspiration, and the toils and troubles of keeping pace with what was required of them.’80 The next day another poet, Cecil Lewis of the RFC, recorded the situation from the air at 7 a.m., during the crescendo of the preliminary bombardment: ‘Half an hour to go! The whole salient
, from Beaumont Hamel down to the marshes of the Somme, covered to a depth of a hundred yards with the coverlet of white wool—smoking shell bursts! It was the greatest bombardment in the history of the war, the greatest in the history of the world… Nothing could live under that rain of splintering steel.’81
He was wrong.
*1 Appleyard was wounded in the Battle of the Somme and while recuperating he met a nurse called Rosie Phillips. He saw further service on the Western Front in 1917 before he was sent out to Aden. He was demobilized at the end of 1919, whereupon he qualified as a quantity surveyor, founded his own successful practice, and married Rosie. His is one of the very few happy endings in this book.
*2 The German dugouts were sometimes up to 60 feet (18.2 m) underground. In Fricourt, 5 miles (8 km) from Albert, one was found with nine bedrooms with bunk beds, five exits, a bathroom and electricity for lights and bells.
*3 The unusual name derived from his ancestor Ynyr, King of Gwent.
*4 In the 1970s when his radiologist gloomily announced, ‘Your X-Rays show your back to be full of metal’, Probert replied, ‘You don’t want to touch that stuff, it’s been there for sixty years.’
*5 The maybugs are still there today.
*6 The Germans also had nicknames for different types of ordnance; mortar bombs of a particular type were called ‘toffee apples’, for example.
*7 Andresen, who did not even like Germans, later died on the Somme, though his body was never found.
*8 One cockney, who had just had his left arm amputated, described the latest type of British bomb, ending, ‘If that doesn’t put the wind up Fritz, nothing will.’
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