Elegy
Page 13
‘The Lonsdales wished each other luck and shook hands,’ records their historian, ‘then they started to advance, some cheering and singing as if at a football match.’33 They moved in what was called ‘blob formation’, in small groups slightly to the rear and flank of the group in front, which was considered the best position to adopt under shellfire. Yet it was not shellfire they had principally to worry about as a hailstorm of bullets ‘cut furrows in the earth as the machine-gunners found their range’. Seeing what was happening, Col. Machell ‘rushed to the front to lead his men on’, whereupon he was immediately shot through the head, and his adjutant Lt. Gordon was severely wounded as he stood over the body. By then Maj. Diggle, the second-in-command, was already wounded. Pte. Thomas Hartness, from the village of Skelton in Cumbria, who had joined up aged only sixteen, was killed next to Machell, and watching him die was Richard Hartness, his nineteen-year-old brother, who was to die of wounds six weeks later.*4 The Lonsdales who survived the opening machine gun bursts, all too few of them, nonetheless pressed on, joined up with the HLI as planned and captured the German front trench, which together they managed to defend from counter-attack.
An account of going over the top was left by an unnamed nineteen-year-old member of B Company of the Lonsdales, which deserves repetition:
What a long quarter of an hour it seemed to me. I wished hundreds of times it was up, every minute seemed like an hour. My heart thumped so hard I am sure it could be heard, but others must have felt the same as nobody commented on it. All talking stopped and to this day I can’t say for sure whether the order came to fix bayonets or not, I was so worked up. The suspense ended with the command ‘Come on “B” boys get out’, or something like that. I set my teeth and jumped out of the trench and followed the rest in single file. Captain H was standing at the edge of the trench the same old smile on his face and as cool as if he was on parade.34
It did not last long. Within moments:
A machine gun somewhere opened out. A bullet burned at the back of my neck. TN, my best pal dropped, I looked back to see if he was wounded or what, he raised himself up on his hand, gave a smile and then drooped back—he gave a shudder and then lay still. I knew he was out. This lad was only seventeen… We had barely gone another 5 yards [4.5 m] when it seemed to rain bullets, it was hell let loose. The Corporal dropped, shot through the hand. I made one dive for a shell hole for cover.*5 A few more dropped beside me; we stayed there for a moment, we had only got to our feet again when those cursed machine guns opened up worse than ever.35
Although the young soldier did move closer to the German lines in a small group, they were all killed save him: ‘Men were laying every few yards and some were hanging on the German wire.’ He stayed still in no man’s land, while those who moved were killed by sniper or machine gun fire. ‘A bumblebee buzzed once or twice round my head then settled on a flower,’ he recalled, ‘up above a skylark was singing.’36 At one point ‘A man jumped up screaming “Mother, Mother”, he made towards me tearing at his clothes. I shut my eyes expecting to feel his hands at my throat but he ran past me towards the German trenches. The poor fellow must have went mad with pain or something.’ Afterwards the narrator was wounded in the hand and elbow by shrapnel but got back safely to the British trenches and made his way to the dressing station. ‘The whole place both inside and out was crowded with wounded, some seriously, others, like myself with nice cushy ones. Dead men were laid out all round, some covered but the majority as they had been carried in.’37 Of Col. Machell, he wrote that he ‘died like the man he was, and the way he would have wished, leading his beloved battalion in one last rush against almost impregnable positions.’38
‘Throughout that long blazing summer’s day,’ writes the Lonsdales’ historian, ‘shocked men, their uniforms torn and bloodied, clung to shell holes out in no man’s land as shells fell among them, praying for night.’39 Of the 28 Lonsdale officers and 1,800 men who left Authuille Wood that morning, 23 officers and 500 men failed to attend evening roll-call. Back in the villages and towns around Penrith there was hardly a house which did not have its blinds drawn once the post offices there and in Appleby, Shap and Tebay started to deliver the hundreds of much-feared telegrams, and newspapers published the photographs of local men under the headline: ‘Fallen for their King and Country’.40
FIRST CASUALTIES
Wounded British soldiers resting at Mametz, July 1916.
To the south of the 32nd Division was the 8th Division, whose duty it was to capture the Ovillers spur to the north of the Albert-Bapaume road, a very wide section of no man’s land 750 yards (686 m) across. Maj.-Gen. Henry Hudson chose to attack with three brigades abreast of each other. Some 200 men of the 2nd Middlesex and 2nd Devonshires captured the German second-line trench, a number that was down to only seventy by the time they were forced to retreat at 9.15 a.m., but on their left the 70th Brigade made it to even the third line of trenches.41 As so often elsewhere, however, the German barrage managed to cut these men off from reinforcements, a situation that the General Staff did not seem to have reckoned with, or at least for which they had no answer. The 2nd Middlesex suffered 540 casualties that day, and two months later its commander, Lt.-Col. E.T. Falkner Sandys DSO, shot himself in the Cavendish Hotel in London while convalescing from his five wounds. ‘I have never had a moment’s peace since July 1st’, he said in his suicide note. Overall the division suffered over five thousand casualties, while only managing to inflict 280 on the Germans.
The battleplan of the 34th Division to the south of the 8th was to attack over a frontage of 2,000 yards (1,829 m) towards La Boisselle with the 102nd Brigade on the left and the 101st on the right. They were intended to take the German front and intermediate lines, before the 103rd Brigade passed through them to capture the day’s ultimate objective, the village of Contalmaison. As it was, La Boisselle did not fall for another two days and Contalmaison not until 10 July. Lt. (later Lt.-Col.) Walter Vignoles was company commander of D Company in the 10th Battalion Lincolnshire Regiment (Grimsby Chums)*6 and recorded how ‘There was a kind of suppressed excitement running through all the men as the time for the advance came nearer.’42 Pte. Harry Baumber recalled how at 6 a.m. that morning he and a dozen friends ‘had a bit of a sing-song in one of the dug-outs. I remember two of the songs very well—“When You Wore a Tulip” and “I Love the Ladies”.’43*7
Vignoles and Baumber were so close to the La Boisselle mine when it exploded at 7.28 a.m. that the chalk came down around them in the form of powder, making it hard for them to see anything. ‘We seemed to be very close to it and looked in awe as great pieces of earth as big as coal wagons were blasted skywards to hurtle and roll and then start to scream back all around us’, wrote Baumber. ‘A great geyser of chalk, mud and flame had risen and subsided before our gaze… I vividly recall as the barrage lifted and there was the very slightest pause in this torment, several skylarks were singing.’44 It did not last long, for as Baumber wrote:
By now it was over the top and away down a gentle slope to the German lines behind a line of steadfast men walking grimly forward and wondering what was in store. We soon found out. I noticed men falling thick and fast about me and all the time a remorseless chatter of machine guns. It was akin to riding into a hailstorm… All too soon it was obvious Jerry had not been obliterated, his wire was not destroyed and we had been called on to walk 800 yards [732 m] across no man’s land into Hell. A far cry from the walkover we had been promised… We who were left were simply pinned down where we lay. There was no going forward and at this time no way of getting back to our lines—an absolute bloody and desolate shambles. If you moved an inch it brought a sweeping crackle of fire and we survivors began to realise our only hope was to wait until dark, but that was a long way off. We also realised, lying there in shell holes, that the Grimsby Chums must be no more.45
He was right; of the full complement of officers who were with the battalion when it was formed, only three were left. In t
heir first ever attack, the Chums had achieved nothing, at the cost of 502 casualties, of whom 187 had been killed. With a fighting strength of 849, some 59 per cent of those who took part in the assault were listed as dead, wounded or missing by the end of the day. When Baumber returned to Grimsby in February 1917 he described it as ‘a town in mourning after the Somme with almost every street affected in some way’.46
The Tyneside Scottish and Tyneside Irish battalions also suffered terribly that day, for equally little gain. ‘As the time approached, I passed the word along for the men to get their hats on and for the pipes to get going’,47 recalled Capt. Herries of the Tyneside Scottish. ‘The pluckiest thing I ever saw was a piper of the Tyneside Scottish playing his company over the parapet in the attack on the German trenches near Albert’, recalled an unnamed officer of the 2nd Middlesex Regiment.
As their officers gave the signal to advance I saw the piper—I think he was the Pipe Major—jump out of the trenches and march straight over no man’s land towards the German lines. The tremendous rattle of machine gun and rifle fire, which the enemy at once opened up on us, completely drowned the sound of his pipes. But it was obvious he was playing as though he would burst the bag, and just faintly through the din we heard the mighty shout his comrades gave as they swarmed after him. How he escaped death I can’t understand for the ground was literally ploughed up by the hail of bullets. But he seemed to bear a charmed life and the last glimpse I had of him, as we too dashed out, showed him still marching erect, playing furiously, and quite regardless of the flying bullets and the men dropping all around him.48
It was Pipe Maj. John Wilson and he won the MM, the citation reading, ‘For conspicuous bravery and devotion to duty on 1 July 1916’.
PIPE MAJOR JOHN WILSON
The Tyneside Scottish soldier won a Military Medal for indefatigably playing his pipes throughout his company’s advance towards the German lines.
Someone else for whom the pipes were drowned out by the ordnance was Pte. J. Elliot of the 20th Battalion, who said: ‘I never heard the pipes but did see poor “Aggy” Fyfe.*8 He was riddled with bullets, writhing and screaming. Another lad was just kneeling, his head thrown right back. Bullets were just slapping into him knocking great bloody chunks off his body.’49 Piper Alexander Boyd of the 22nd Battalion wrote to his mother from a hospital in Cambridge after having a finger shot off: ‘The only thing disabled is the pipes, I got them blown away when I was playing the charge… I was playing “Tipperary” and all the boys were singing and shouting. I could see them falling all about me. It was a lucky day for me that I was not blown away. I shall never forget it as long as I live.’50
Although only 120 seconds had passed between the blowing of the mines at 7.28 a.m. and the launch of the attack, the Bavarian machine-gunners were already in place as the Tyneside Scottish advanced towards them at walking pace. They allowed the Tynesiders to get to a midpoint across no man’s land before unleashing their retribution. ‘You know Fritzie had let us come on just enough so that we were exposed coming down that slope,’ recalled Pte. Elliot. ‘That way we would cop it if we came forward and cop it just as bad if we tried to go back. We were just scythed down.’51 The German machine-gunners were ordered to fire at the thighs, so that there would be a good chance of a second bullet hitting as their victims fell. ‘It was hell on earth,’ recalled Pte. William Bloomfield of the same battalion, ‘that is the only name I can give it. We were the first over the trenches after the sign to advance and never a man faltered. It was like going to a picnic, the way the men marched on, but it was only for a few yards, until the Hun got sight of us.’52
The 20th and 23rd Battalions Northumberland Fusiliers (Tyneside Scottish) were caught in devastatingly accurate cross-fire from Hptm. von Rohr’s 55th Bavarian Landwehr Regiment from the directions of Ovillers and La Boisselle. ‘We swarmed over the parapets at a given time and we went over the ground as if on parade, but it was a tough job’, Pte. Thomas Grant of the 23rd Battalion wrote to his wife. ‘Numerous German machine guns thinned the Scottish ranks, but still the men went forward. It was glorious!’
A few of the men reached the German second line of trenches, but all too few, and those who did were all but wiped out. The 4th Tyneside Scottish lost the third highest number of men of any battalion that day. Because the men were given strict orders not to stop to look after the wounded in order to maintain their forward momentum, there were heart-rending scenes on the battlefield. ‘That was awful, hearing men who were your mates pleading with you and pulling at your ankles for help but not being able to do anything’, recalled a soldier of the 20th Battalion. ‘One lad alongside me was chanting “Mother of God No! Mother of God No!” just like that. Others were effing and blinding. I don’t know how I got through it. I could see men dropping all around then [his sergeant] Billy [Grant] yelled “Down on your bellies!”’53
Although they threw themselves down, they were now effectively pinned down in no man’s land somewhere between the Tara–Usna Ridge and La Boisselle, and as another survivor later wrote:
Pzzing, pzzing, those machine gun bullets came buzzing through the grass all around us. Through the din we could hears screams behind us but no one dared look round. It would have been suicide just to raise yourself up to look. At one moment there was silence—maybe Fritzie boy was changing his ammunition belts. At any rate for a few moments above it all we could hear was larks. A bomber near me shouted ‘Hey, I’ve been shot in the arse!’ Billy Grant shouted back, ‘Haven’t we all!’54
There were plenty of examples of extraordinary bravery that day. As an unknown Tyneside Scottish corporal reported to the Evening Chronicle: ‘One of our chaps did an amazingly plucky thing. He was a bit of a sprinter and easily outdistanced the rest of us, so he dashed right up to a machine gun that was worrying us and put it out of action on his own.’55 It was all too rare an occurrence, however, especially with the heavy packs that so many of the men were carrying. Capt. Herries reached the second line of German trenches, but ‘Beyond that they were very strong and several of us who got over the parapet had a hot time of it’. Pte. Tommy Easton of the 21st Battalion found that the wire ‘was reasonably destroyed and we tumbled into the first German trench we came to’. But as an unnamed corporal also recalled, ‘The Huns fought desperately and we had a tough job of clearing them out. They simply crushed us with machine gun fire. It was real red blistering hell hot and make no mistake.’56
Because 101st Brigade was slightly slower to move off at Zero Hour, the 21st Battalion of the Tyneside Scottish suffered heavier casualties. ‘I don’t know how I got through it,’ recalled Pte. J. Barron. ‘I could see men dropping all around, and then someone yelled “Get down! Get down!” and I was on my belly for the next eleven hours. I crawled, if you stood up the machine gun would get you for sure.’57 The brigade bombing company assaulting La Boisselle beckoned the 21st up to support them, but the machine guns prevented it. ‘The lads up in front must have put up a good fight’, recalled Pte. Elliot, ‘because we could hear bombs and shouting and Lewis guns well into the afternoon. So if the lads in front went down, they went down fighting.’58 The Germans, well dug in at La Boisselle and largely unaffected by the barrage, were able to man their positions before the British bombers of the 21st and 22nd Battalions Tyneside Scottish could arrive, a story that was repeated up and down the entire northern and central sectors of the line.
Capts. W. Herries and J. M. Charlton managed to get a Lewis gun up into a hollow in the ground outside La Boisselle and, in Herries’ words,‘Then we gave it to them hot’, but ‘Further along Forster, McIntosh and Lamb got over with a party of men, but the whole lot were mown down by a machine gun’. Back in their hollow, as Herries wrote, ‘For a while we did great execution but the gun jammed at a critical moment. Poor Charlton was shot down while attempting to charge a German strongpoint and the initiative passed to the enemy.’59 Herries defended the lines that had been captured as best he could, but reported how exhausted
his men were, and how he ‘had to pull myself together with a mouthful of brandy once or twice’. In all, the 34th Division suffered 6,380 casualties for next to nothing achieved.60
In Ovillers British Cemetery lies Lt.-Col. F.C. Heneker, aged forty-three, who commanded the 21st Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers (Tyneside Scottish) and whose gravestone reads: ‘He died the noblest death a man may die.’
To the south of the 34th was the 21st Division, which needed to break through north of Fricourt. It took 4,256 casualties in the unsuccessful attempt, some of which were entirely unnecessary, as when A Company of the 7th Green Howards attacked a German machine gun team at 7.45 p.m. on its own and without orders, in what has accurately been described as ‘one of the most bizarre episodes of the whole battle’.61 The company was under orders to hold the front-line trench until 2.30 p.m. when they were to join an attack with other troops, but the very experienced Maj. Kent saw the damage being done by a machine gun and presumably thought he could take it out with a determined rush. Personal initiative always carries a risk and he was among the one hundred fallen. The machine gun was still in action in the afternoon when it cut down another battalion.