by Robin Prior
On the 8th it was the turn of the Reserve Army. Here the 3 and 1 Canadian Divisions attacked from the left of Le Sars with the objective of capturing their old nemesis, Regina Trench. They were no more successful than Rawlinson's troops. In many areas of the front the bombardment had failed to cut the wire and the Germans had adopted in some places the expedient of pushing rolls of barbed wire into no man's land at zero. The result was that most Canadians proceeded no further than the wire and were then shot down by German machine-gunners.16 In small areas where the wire had been cut a few companies forced their way into Regina Trench but without support they were soon counter-attacked back. Only on the right where the success of 23 Division carried them through were they able to make any gains at all to the north-west of Le Sars.17
The October Battles
Gough did not see this matter as a command failure – he blamed the troops. After lunch on the 8th, Haig visited the Reserve Army Commander at Touten-court and obtained the following reflections on the battle:
He [Gough] was of opinion that the Canadian (3rd Division) had not done well. In some parts, they had not even left their trenches for the attack.18
The next attack on the outer defences of the Transloy Line was mounted on the 12th by five divisions of Fourth Army. The weather on the 10th and 11th was fine but dull with low cloud which prevented aerial observation. Nevertheless, the absence of rain was what decided the command to proceed. The results were much the same as those on the 7th – a few battalions gained 400–500 yards but none captured even their first objective.19 The reports identified two factors which had led to failure. The first was the weather, which robbed the artillery of photographs and reconnaissance reports.20 The second was well summed up by the commander of 30 Division:
The principal cause of failure appears to me to have been due to a well organized enemy employment of machine gun fire. It remains to be discovered how we can deal with enemy machine guns, scattered all over this evenly but not placed in his trenches, which by indirect or long range fire can erect a ‘barrage’ on No Man's Land.21
One worrying aspect of the attack had been the high ratio of casualties among the Fourth Army battalions. The four battalions of 4 Division suffered 1,446 casualties, an average of 360 per battalion.22 The 7 Seaforths from 9 Division suffered 467, the 2 York and Lancaster from 6 Division 200, the 7 Norfolks from 12 Division 222.23 These are high figures but they are even more alarming when it is recognised that few battalions in the Fourth Army could muster more than 400 men for an attack.24 The Royal Irish Fusiliers (4 Division) even had to summon the normal 10 per cent of officers and men left behind in any attack to build up sufficient strength to go over the top. One of its companies had just 76 men out of a normal complement of 250.25 Incessant operations since mid-September had worn down the Fourth Army to the extent that even new divisions introduced to the front (and for the attack on the 12th, the 4, 6, 30, and 9 Divisions were designated as ‘fresh’) were running out of men. The weather, the new German tactics, and the loss of observation left the army with very poor prospects for future success.
The failure on the 12th caused much soul-searching at Fourth Army head-quarters. A few home truths were beginning to clarify in Rawlinson's mind. He recorded in his diary:
There are numerous [cases] of wire uncut, distant machine gun fire and strong counter attacks but the fact is that bosh [sic] put up a better fight of it this time and until we can reduce his [resistance?] further by shaking his moral[e] we shall not I fear drive him out of his present line though it is by no means a strong one. – In places it is difficult to oversee – Since we came forward off the high ground we have to a great extent lost the advantage we had over him of observation.26
Here at least was recognition that the new conditions, new tactics, and a new determination on the part of the enemy to resist were serious factors, which needed careful thought. Rawlinson followed up on these thoughts by calling his corps commanders with their artillery experts (and the Prince of Wales!) to a conference at his headquarters on the 13th.27 After listening to his commanders for some hours, Rawlinson went on to produce a document summarising the reasons for failure. They were:
1. absence of surprise – all attacks occur between 12.00 noon and 3.00 pm;
2. difficulty of observation – because of poor weather [and, although he did not state it here, loss of the commanding position on the ridge];
3. recovering enemy resistance;
4. lack of clearly defined departure trenches to give the creeping barrage a regular starting line;
5. distant machine gun fire.28
His remedies were to state that any future attack required good aerial observation in order to deliver an accurate bombardment; to vary zero hour; to allow sufficient time to dig departure trenches so the artillery could be certain of their location, and to extend the creeping barrage so as to deal with the distant machine-guns.29 (Cavan also suggested to Haig that the distant machine-guns be blinded by smoke shells.30 Neither man seemed to realise that at this moment the Fourth Army had no smoke shells.31)
But Rawlinson had wider concerns. Before even the first failed attempt against Le Transloy, Haig had visited headquarters with truly alarming news:
He [Haig] is bent on continuing the battle until we are forced to stop by the weather, indeed he would like to go on all through the winter.32
Rawlinson pointed out that the three constraints were ‘ammunition, weather and men’.33 By this he meant that there was an insufficiency of the first and third commodities, and even had they been available the weather would prevent them being used optimally.
It was not that Haig was unaware that these problems existed. Indeed, on the following day he enumerated them in a letter to Robertson, the CIGS, as the three factors on which further operations would depend.34 However, he did not act on this logic by announcing an immediate halt to operations. Instead he called for better rail communications to deliver more ammunition to the front and ‘the utmost efforts of the Empire’ (i.e. more men). As for the weather, Haig merely deemed that ‘an ordinary winter’ ‘should not suffice to put a stop to my advance’.35 In any case, he concluded, it was imperative to press on because although ‘it was not possible to say how near to breaking point the enemy may be ... he has undoubtedly gone a long way towards it’.36
It would be satisfactory to report that the disastrous efforts of 7 and 12 October were sufficient to change Haig's view of the prospects of the campaign. But no such change took place. Another attack was ordered for the 18th.
In the event the attack was as complete a failure as those on the 7th and 12th. The bombardment had largely missed the German defences, the enemy artillery was still intact, and the attacking troops suffered from long-range machine-gun fire. Hardly any of the recommendations laid down by Rawlinson on the 13th seem to have been acted upon. A period of fine weather had not occurred – it rained or was cloudy for most days between 13 and 18 October – assembly trenches were not in many cases properly constructed because of the conditions, the barrage (perhaps because of lack of ammunition) had not been extended rearwards to take account of the German machine-gunners, and no smoke barrage was fired.37 Only in one instance was a recommendation of the conference implemented. Zero hour had been changed from the afternoon to 3.40 a.m. As it happened, this made things worse. It meant that any attack would take place in the dark. Let the account of the 1 East Lancashire (4 Division) stand for many others on that day.
At zero hour 3.40 am the weather conditions were appalling, pitch black, extremely cold, and pouring with rain. The waves advanced.... No organized line held by the enemy was met, but heavy machine gun and rifle fire was directed on to our waves from front and flanks....38
The situation at the front was always obscure. No officers or Senior N.C.O.'s of [the leading companies] came back, and no messages were received back. I think that no rifles of the men who went forward could have been in working order 10 minutes after they left our lines. The gr
ound was terribly torn up by shell fire, and as slippery as ice. The men kept on slipping and falling into the holes in the dark. The few who returned were one mass of mud from head to foot, and completely exhausted.39
Such were the fighting conditions in an ‘ordinary winter’.
Even Haig was forced to modify his plans after this failure. Rain had continued to fall and so bad were the conditions that the Official History, a work not noted for its vivid prose, was moved to eloquence:
By the middle of October conditions behind the battlefront were so bad as to make mere existence a severe trial of body and spirit. Little could be seen from the air through the rain and mist, so counter-battery work suffered and it was often impossible to locate with accuracy the new German trenches and shell-hole positions. Objectives could not always be identified from ground level, so that it is no matter of surprise or censure that the British artillery sometimes fired short or placed its barrages too far ahead. Bursts of highexplosive were smothered in the ooze; many guns had been continuously in action for over two months and were too worn for accurate fire; in some particularly flooded battery positions sinking platforms had to be restored with any battle debris which came to hand. The ground was so deep in mud that to move one 18-pounder ten or twelve horses were often needed, and to supplement the supplies brought by light-railway and packhorse, ammunition had to be dragged up on sledges improvised of sheets of corrugated iron. The infantry, sometimes wet to the skin and almost exhausted before zero hour, were often condemned to struggle painfully forward through the mud under heavy fire against objectives vaguely defined and difficult of recognition.40
An artilleryman reflecting on conditions after the war confirmed these observations:
The 11th. Brigade R.F.A., in which I was commanding A Batty., was in action close to MOUQUET FARM, within a few yards of what appeared on the maps as a road, and which, judging by the orders which we received, when we were withdrawn in November, was believed by the Staff to be a road. Actually for hundreds of yards round the Battery positions there was not a square inch of the original surface of the ground visible; the whole area was a mass of shell craters of every calibre of shell, all running into each other, and superimposed on each other. The road was merely a line of craters, and it was so completely under water the whole time that it was never possible to see where they were. One battery tried to use it once, and in the first few yards lost a mule in a large hole.
Ammunition was brought up on a light railway, to within a quarter of a mile of the battery positions, and horses came up every morning from the wagon lines to transfer it in pack to the batteries. This railway was shelled and broken every night, and the ammunition often did not arrive until midday. Meanwhile the unfortunate horses and their drivers had to hang about, often in pouring rain, always in unspeakable mud, for hours; the only water available was the foul water in the shell holes and when they returned to the wagon lines at dusk or after dark both men and horses were done in; while the shoeing smiths were up half the night replacing shoes which had been sucked off in the mud. It was not unknown for a horse to lose three shoes during the day. My [quartermaster] established himself in an abandoned dug-out on the edge of this morass, not too far from the battery, to which stores and rations for the battery were taken by wagon, and were brought on in pack at convenient times. My request that, to save the horses, I might supply myself with ammuntion in the same way, was curtly refused; the railway had been made to supply us, and we were to use it, happen what might. No Artillery Staff Officer ever came near us, except once, when the Corps Commander, Sir C. Jacob, came to see us, and they had to accompany him.
At my battery position two cases occurred of the ground collapsing into, presumably, holes made underground by heavy delay action H.E. shell. In one case two men of a gun detachment were completely overcome by the poisonous fumes thus released; they were still unconscious when they left the battery, but whether they died or not I do not know. In the other case the collapse was under the feet of an officer sleeping in a shelter and he was not hurt.
When it came to evacuating the positions one battery dismounted its guns in order to get them out. In my own case orders received at 11 a.m. gave me three hours to pass a certain cross-roads; but although we started getting the guns out as soon as the teams arrived my last vehicle only managed to clear the point in question at 6 p.m. the following day.
The very fact that such orders could be issued proves that the Staff had not the remotest idea of what conditions were like in the line.41
Operations on this part of the front, it seemed evident, would have to be suspended. But Haig refused to draw this conclusion. Certainly in a note to Rawlinson and Gough written on the 18th, he considerably scaled back his expectations of earlier in the month. The Third Army would now not take part in operations and the Reserve and Fourth Armies' objectives were limited to those that were facing them (the Miraumont Spur and the Transloy Line respectively).42 But this was to miss the point. Distant objectives such as Cambrai and the marshes east of Arras had all along been unrealistic propositions. But in the weather conditions in which Haig was now operating, so was the Transloy Line. This did not mean that the odd yard of coagulated mud might not be wrested from the enemy. But given the lack of accurate fire support these trivial gains would be bought at prohibitive cost.
It might be thought that Rawlinson, on receiving this missive from Haig, would register the strongest protest at continuing on after a trio of failures. The contrary proved to be the case. At a conference of his corps commanders called on the afternoon of the 18th and when it was clear that his latest effort had failed, he said:
the attack [scheduled for the 23rd] was to be made with a large number of troops organized in depth, and every effort was to be made to make it a success, as it was most undesirable to remain for the Winter in the position on the low ground which we now occupy.43
This too was to miss an important point. Did not the failures of 7, 12, and 18 October suggest that the Fourth Army lacked the power to improve on its position on the low ground? Certainly it was undesirable to remain in a slough of mud, but the time to make this point had been back in September when the ridge had been captured. Now all the Fourth Army commander was doing was committing his hapless troops to another series of attacks in the most unpropitious of circumstances.
The results of Rawlinson's fourth effort were the same as the first three. A few sections of trench were captured but they were of no consequence. The 4 Division suffered 1,200 casualties, the 8 Division somewhat more.44
We last encountered 8 Division when it had failed so disastrously on 1 July. On that occasion the commander of 25 Brigade of the division, responding to his superiors, had included the percentage casualties suffered by his assault battalions, thereby making clear the calamity which had befallen his unit. After 23 October the commander of the same brigade, although a different officer, went through the same exercise. Of the four attacking battalions the casualties suffered amounted to 51 per cent, 38 per cent, 51 per cent and 38 per cent of their strength.45 These percentages were certainly less than the figures for 1 July, which ranged from 53 per cent to 92 per cent. However, they were high enough, and with miscellaneous casualties to units such as the machine-gun companies amounted to 50 per cent of the strength of this unit. And it may be added that these casualties were suffered, not in pursuit (however misguided) of the larger purpose of 1 July, but in order to capture two insignificant lines of mud called Zenith and Misty Trenches.
The prospects for future operations were now extremely bleak. Incessant rain had turned the battlefield into a quagmire. Only with the greatest difficulty could ammunition for the guns and food and water for the troops reach the front. The mud confined all traffic supplying the Fourth Army to a single narrow road from Longueval to Flers. The German artillery soon became aware of this. Every two minutes the road in the vicinity of Flers was the recipient of a salvo of 5.9-inch shells.46
The consequent conditions
for the troops in the front line were laid bare by a GHQ staff officer, Lord Gort. (By 1940 he was the commander of the British army.) After a visit to the front Gort passed on to Haig a number of comments. These describe men ‘living on cold food and standing up to their knees in mud and water’, afflicted by trench foot and in too poor a physical condition to conduct an attack successfully. Those moving up to the front were reduced to ‘a state of physical exhaustion in a very short time’ by the condition of the road. And so all-encompassing was the mud that troops making an attack had to ‘help each other out of the fire trenches as they cannot get out unaided’.47 Another source described attacking infantry as not only unable to keep up with their own creeping barrage but as being reduced to almost stationary targets in no man's land for the enemy machine-gunners.48
At this time another factor, which had already affected operations, began to reveal itself, as an officer subsequently commented:
By the time the troops got to the area [of the front] the actual trench system, owing to shelling and new digging by both sides and errors in map compilation bore little recognisable resemblance to the actual trench system.49
What this meant was that commanders and staff officers and artillerymen were using maps that now bore no relation to reality. This could lead to farcical situations where men occupying a trench fired in the wrong direction on troops moving forward to relieve them. Moreover, it made it impossible for the artillery to give close support to an attack.50