Elegy

by Andrew Roberts

  TOMMY TRIUMPHANT

  A Tommy of the Royal Fusiliers from Maxse’s 18th Division, sporting a particularly fine pickelhaube at the capture of Theipval, 26 September 1916.

  A truce that had been expressly forbidden by GHQ went ahead at Beaumont Hamel anyway on 2 July, though from the German side there might have been a self-interested aspect to it, besides mere human decency. Lt.-Col. John Hall, who commanded the 16th Battalion Middlesex Regiment, and who had been wounded in the attack, recalled how at 2.30 p.m. the Germans raised a white flag ‘and sent over stretcher bearers to no man’s land; in addition to helping our wounded, he was no doubt helping himself to the machine guns, Lewis guns, rifles, etc., lying about close to his front line.’35 When this was reported to the brigade HQ, further permission to send out stretcher-bearers was refused, and orders issued to fire on the German stretcher-bearers. ‘These instructions were not acted on with any enthusiasm by our riflemen in the front line’, recalled Hall. This was understandable; it offended the norms of civilized behaviour that still mattered to the British Tommy, would not redound well on the captured British POWs and would discourage future truces of that nature, but above all it would sentence to death any men still trapped in shell-holes between the lines. Sure enough, as Hall recalled, ‘Thereafter, whilst daylight lasted the enemy was reported as firing on any wounded man in no man’s land who showed the slightest movement.’36

  A DEAD CAPTAIN

  A German grave for an Allied soldier at Gommecourt.

  ‘We started to retrace our steps to the assembly trench, back over the battlefield of yesterday, now strewn with thousands of our boys and the enemy’, wrote Ted Higson of the Manchester Pals on 2 July. ‘It was awful to see the boys who forty-eight hours ago were full of life, now lying on the battlefield… The Sergeant-Major was there calling out the names—some were answered, others would never hear their names again on this earth but by this time would be answering the roll call on the other side… From July 2nd to 8th we were occupied in re-organizing ourselves and burying the dead. The latter was worse than all the fighting, a nightmare to us all.’37 On 9 July Higson was wounded in the shoulder by shrapnel and he was sent back to England.*5

  Soon after 1 July, Gen. Maxse visited the 11th Royal Fusiliers, which had done very well near Montauban, to congratulate them. ‘Morning gentlemen, damn good show, thank you very much, you did very well, marvellous’, he told Lt. Richard Hawkins and his fellow officers. ‘Tell me, where would you expect to find a group of officers congregated together in the middle of the greatest battle there has ever been?’ He answered his own question: ‘I’ll tell you, walking about on the skyline looking for souvenirs! I saw them through my field glasses.’38 (Hawkins himself had managed to pick up a magnificent pickelhaube helmet.) The robbing of both friendly and enemy corpses is understandably not an aspect of the war mentioned in the official histories, but it was certainly widespread on both sides. An aspect of this practice was that anything valueless found in wallets, such as personal letters, were discarded. As Pte. Stephen Graham of the Scots Guards recalled of this paper debris on the Somme battlefield, ‘When the wind rose they blew about like dead leaves. There were photographs, too, prints of wife and sweetheart, of mother, or perchance a baby born whilst the father was at the war—priceless, worthless possessions.’ Graham watched a gunner from a 60 lb battery searching the corpse of a German machine-gunner ‘without success, and he gave the dead body a kick. “The dirty bastard,” said he, as if he were accusing the corpse. “Somebody’s bin ’ere before me.”’39

  On 3 July the writer Robert Graves, who served with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, went into Mametz Wood looking for German overcoats to use for himself and his men at night. In his haunting autobiography Goodbye to All That, he recorded how,

  It was full of dead Prussian Guards Reserve, big men, and dead Royal Welch and South Wales Borderers, little men. Not a single tree in the wood remained unbroken. I collected my overcoats and came away as quickly as I could, climbing through the wreckage of green branches. Going and coming by the only possible route, I passed by the bloated and stinking corpse of a German with his back propped against a tree. He had a green face, spectacles, close-shaven hair; black blood was dripping from his nose and beard. I came across two other unforgettable corpses: a man from the South Wales Borderers and one of the Lehr Regiment had succeeded in bayoneting each other simultaneously.

  Later in the battle Graves was wounded by a shell fragment through the lung and was wrongly reported to have died from his wounds.*6

  Sir Douglas Haig started his diary entry for 2 July 1916 with the words: ‘A day of downs and ups!’40 With the enemy holding Fricourt, La Boisselle and Thiepval, and two battalions cut off at both the Schwaben Redoubt and at Serre, he was characteristically positive as he and Launcelot Kiggell went to church that morning and then motored over to Querrieu to see Rawlinson, whom they ordered to capture Fricourt ‘and then advance on the enemy’s second line’.41 The fog of war was rarely foggier. Haig added in his diary that the adjutant-general, Lt.-Gen. George Fowke, had reported to him ‘that the total casualties are estimated at over 40,000 to date. This cannot be considered severe in view of the numbers engaged, and the length of front attacked.’42 In a letter to his wife on 3 July, Haig wrote: ‘Things are going quite satisfactorily for us here, and the Enemy seems hard pushed to find any reserves at all.’ This sense of quasi-success was surprisingly widespread after the greatest single-day disaster ever to overcome British arms; Gunner Gambling recorded how at 11.20 a.m. on 2 July ‘we received the news that the German losses were greater than our own’.43 It was completely untrue, of course, but good for morale.

  It was not until 6 July, almost a week afterwards, that the High Command knew for certain the sheer scale of the catastrophe in terms of killed, wounded, missing and captured.44 Before that Haig and his Staff did not fully understand that the attack had failed north of the Albert-Bapaume road, despite some expensive successes at the Schwaben and Leipzig Redoubts, and that this failure was not compensated for by XV and XIII Corps’ limited successes south of the road, or even the success of the French. Of course the offensive could not be simply broken off because of the terrible losses on the first day. ‘Day One on the Somme’, points out one historian, ‘was Day 132 at Verdun.’45 And the attack had been co-ordinated with more than just the French; the Russians were also simultaneously attacking on the Eastern Front and the Italians on the Isonzo River, so the Somme Offensive was part of the war’s first—and as it turned out, last—fully co-ordinated, simultaneous attack by all the Entente Powers. The continued attack on the Somme did indeed put huge pressure on the Central Powers, as both Hindenburg and Ludendorff were later to acknowledge, with the latter stating that the battle meant that Germany ‘had to face the danger that “Somme fighting” would soon break out at various points on our fronts, and that even our troops would not be able to withstand such attacks indefinitely’.46

  So the British kept up the mutually murderous assaults for five more months, with Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, telling Haig from London on 7 July: ‘We have these Germans this time… if we take the chances offered.’47 After the disaster in the northern sector became apparent, Haig and Rawlinson concentrated on the southern sector, and in the first half of July the British 4th Army and French 6th Army continued their attacks, pushing the Germans back towards Bapaume at terrible cost. Strategically speaking it bore fruit: from 2 July onwards, the Germans started withdrawing heavy batteries from the Verdun attack and transferring them to the Somme for defence. Nine days later, on 11 July, Gen. von Falkenhayn ordered the German army to go onto ‘the strict defensive. The serious crisis in the Somme battle did not permit of the continuation of the attacks against Verdun.’48

  It was Lt.-Gen. Walter Congreve*7 who came up with the idea of an innovative dawn surprise attack by his XIII Corps on 14 July.49 This succeeded in capturing the German second-line position, and Haig hailed that
day as ‘the best day we have had in this war’. Yet it was not the much needed breakthrough, and by 24 July he was describing his strategy as being to ‘peg away slowly eastwards’.50 By the end of July the drive had fizzled out, despite a Reserve Army attack on Pozières Ridge. By then X Corps, which had been shattered at Thiepval, had been removed from the front line to 4th Army reserve. It was only given minor roles in the 1917 battles and stayed in rear areas in 1918 until its commander, Lt.-Gen. Sir Thomas Morland was removed from command that April.51

  In all, the British suffered 82,000 further casualties between 5 July and 14 September on the Somme, although of the 141 days of the battle the first was by far the worst in terms of casualties.52 Despite worsening weather and catastrophically mounting casualties, the 4th and Reserve (later 5th) Armies continued attacking the German positions until 18 November 1916.

  In early August, Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria reported to Hindenburg: ‘Though on a front of about 28 kilometers [17 miles] they have driven a wedge of about 4 kilometers [2.5 miles] depth, they themselves will not assert, after their experiences of July 20th, 22nd, 24th and 30th that the German line has been shaken at any point… The total losses of our enemies must amount to about 350,000, while ours, though regrettable, cannot be compared to theirs so far as numbers are concerned.’53

  GERMAN PRISONERS OF WAR

  A clearing depot in Abbeville, northern France.

  Tanks were first used on 15 September 1916 at Flers and Courcelette, and then put into action again ten days later. They succeeded in taking much of the original German third line, but by that time the enemy had built a fourth and fifth line of defence in front of Bapaume, the original final target on 1 July.54*8A soldier called Bert Chaney recorded what it was like when the thirty-six Mark 1 tanks, each weighing 30 tons (29.5 tonnes) and with a top speed of 8 kmph (5 mph), were unleashed: ‘We heard strange throbbing noises, and lumbering slowly towards us came three huge mechanical monsters such as we have never seen before. My first impression was that they looked ready to topple on their noses, but their tails and the two little wheels at the back held them down and kept them level.’ Chaney, a 19-year-old signals officer with the Territorial 7th London Battalion, recalled how the tanks ‘moved on, frightening the Jerries out of their wits and making them scuttle like frightened rabbits.’

  That same day, 15 September, the prime minister’s son, Lt. Raymond Asquith, was killed, and a future prime minister, Capt. Harold Macmillan of the 4th Battalion Grenadier Guards, was badly wounded. Macmillan lay throughout the morning and early afternoon in a shell-hole in no man’s land, where he first read Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound and then took morphia, before his company sergeant-major found him, saying, ‘Thank you, sir, for leave to carry you away.’ A future cabinet colleague of Macmillan’s, Capt. (later FM) Harold Alexander of the 2nd Battalion Irish Guards, also fought that day; of his battalion of 1,000 only 166 men were still alive and uninjured by the end of it.55 On 14 November, just as the battle was ending, the writer Hector Munro—whose sublime short stories were published under the pseudonym ‘Saki’—shouted ‘Put that bloody cigarette out!’ to a comrade, but it was too late; a German sniper had seen the light and fired, killing Munro, whose body was subsequently so badly ground into the mud that it was never found. His name is on the Thiepval Memorial.

  ‘Our losses in territory may be seen on the map with a microscope’, wrote Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria on 15 September.

  Their losses in that far more precious thing—human life—are simply prodigious. Amply and in full coin have they paid for every foot of ground we sold them. They can have all they want at the same price… We are not, like the Entente generals, forced to throw raw, untrained recruits into the very front of the fighting… It saddens us to exact the dreadful toll of suffering and death that is being marked up on the ledger of history, but if the enemy is still minded to possess a few more hectares of blood-sodden soil, I fear they must pay a bitter price.56

  Yet by then he was wrong; the Germans had begun to lose more men than the British, even taking into account the losses on the first day of the offensive.

  It was not until the end of September that the British captured Thiepval and at no point during the entire battle did the British get further than 7 or 8 miles (11.3 or 12.8 km) from their original 1 July positions. By then it was very much an imperial battle, involving Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans and Indians, as well as of course as the remaining Newfoundlanders.57

  On Sunday, 15 October, 2nd-Lt. Alfred Pollard of the 1st Battalion Honourable Artillery Company, a London insurance clerk who was later to win the VC, was scouting out in no man’s land in the cold and damp under a full moon, his face blackened with burnt cork and revolver in hand. ‘I had not proceeded very far before I felt something yield and scrunch under me’, he recalled in his autobiography. ‘It was the skeleton of a corpse, its bones picked clean by the army of rats which scavenged the battlefields. The rags of a tunic still covered its nakedness… Further on I found another; then another and another. They were the bodies of those slain in the fighting at the beginning of July. All were British.’58

  The Battle of the Somme ended on 18 November 1916, having cost the British army 419,655 casualties, an average of almost 3,000 per day.59 In all, the 141-day battle between 1 July and 18 November 1916 left 1.22 million men dead or wounded, of whom 194,451 were French.60 The German figure was around 600,000, but it is very hard to tell accurately as they only took count of their wounded every ten days whereas the British did so every single day. So a German soldier might have been wounded, patched up and returned to his unit within ten days and it would not show up in the figures whereas it would have in the British statistics.

  Over the whole Somme Offensive, over four and a half months, the maximum depth of advance was 8 miles (12.8 km) of devastated ground, six villages and some woodland, along a 20-mile (32 km) front.61 From Albert to Berlin there was still another 585 miles (942 km).

  THE ALLIED CEMETERY AT FRICOURT

  This cemetery contains graves where more than one casualty is buried and on which more than one headstone is erected.

  Morale remained surprisingly high in the British army then and afterwards, despite the losses of the first day. In 1917 French units refused to return to the front line and their commander, Robert Nivelle, was relieved of his post. The French mutinies of 1917 were not against the war, argues one historian, ‘but against the murderous way in which it was being fought’.62 Nivelle’s replacement, Philippe Pétain, restored order partly by shooting about forty mutineers (out of half a million), initiating reforms and halting frontal assaults.**9 By contrast, morale in Haig’s British army was far better than in the mutinous French and Russian armies in 1917 or the equally mutinous German and Austrian armies the following year.

  The Battle of the Somme changed the war psychology of both Britain and Germany, broadening the boundaries of what nation-states felt able to inflict upon each other. After it, the Germans moved to unrestricted submarine attacks in the Atlantic, recognizing that since they probably could not defeat the British in a conventional land or sea battle they must try to starve Britain into surrender.63 When this unrestrained assault saw American commercial ships also sunk, it had the effect of bringing the United States into the war on the Allied side, with huge strategic implications. Furthermore, there could be no peace after the Battle of the Somme, except after total victory; so many men could not be seen to have died for a patched-up semi-peace.

  ‘Neither Haig’s view of Lloyd George nor Lloyd George’s view of Haig is likely to be accepted by history’, wrote Winston Churchill in Great Contemporaries. ‘They will both be deemed better men than they deemed each other.’64 The Somme left Lloyd George ‘deeply shaken’, as the size of the losses were unprecedented in British military history, although they were proportionately the same as those suffered by the Germans and certainly the French at Verdun, or the Union and Confederates armies at Antietam.65 ‘T
he horror of what I have seen has burnt into my soul,’ he told his mistress Frances Stevenson on his return from visiting a friend’s partially paralyzed son in hospital, ‘and has almost unnerved me for my work.’66 The battle left Lloyd George preferring a strategy of peripheral attacks, despite Robertson and Haig insisting that the Germans could only be defeated on the Western Front. Unable to sack Haig for political reasons, after the Somme Lloyd George instead undermined him, and by 1918 hoped to have him superseded by Pétain in the Supreme War Council.

  The Battle of the Somme also brought a new degree of respect for the British army in Germany. The British-born Princess Evelyn von Blücher (née Stapleton-Bretherton), noted how much it had ‘veered round’ attitudes in Berlin. ‘Men who were scoffing and railing at England twelve months ago are beginning to express their admiration, and even dare to display a certain affection and attachment publicly.’67 In February and March 1917 the Germans, by then suffering from a severe manpower crisis, abandoned their positions on the Somme and went back to their pre-prepared ones on the Hindenburg Line 20 miles (32 km) behind the Somme front. This retreat was presented in the press as ‘an elastic bend’ in the front line, but soldiers were returning home with harrowing stories of the sheer firepower of the British artillery. The Battle of the Somme saw the pendulum of war swing in the Entente’s favour for the first time, though of course not on its first day. The Germans had retained the initiative, an all-important factor in warfare, throughout 1914 and 1915, and to an extent during the Battle of Verdun. It was at the Somme that the British and French wrested it from them for the first time, and although it was to be lost for short periods afterwards—primarily during the Ludendorff Offensive in the spring of 1918*10—the Allies retained the power of initiating the action for the rest of the war.