ON 18 AUGUST 1916, at an army barracks at Warley, in Essex, a court martial took place, not of a soldier charged with desertion, but of a pacifist charged with refusing to agree to any form of military or non-combatant service. This was twenty-six-year-old Clifford Allen, a Cambridge University graduate and the President of the No-Conscription Fellowship established after the government brought in its first compulsory-service legislation at the beginning of the year. Allen had refused his call-up papers, being convinced that the war was wrong: that it was a violation of human brotherhood.
Allen told the officers trying him, ‘I believe in the inherent worth and sanctity of every human personality, irrespective of the nation to which a man belongs.’He was sentenced to three months’ hard labour. After serving those three months to the last day, he was released for a few hours, rearrested, court-martialled again, and then sentenced to a longer period of imprisonment; this pattern was repeated until the end of the war. All imprisoned conscientious objectors were then deprived of their right to vote for five years.
On the day of Clifford Allen’s first sentence for refusing to be conscripted, a Scottish officer, Captain Hugh Stewart Smith, was in action with the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in an attack on High Wood. A few members of his battalion entered the German trenches. All were forced back to their own front line. Smith was killed in the attack. In his pocket book was found a piece of light verse:
On the plains of Picardy
Lay a soldier, dying
Gallantly, with soul still free
Spite the rough world’s trying.
Came the Angel who keeps guard
When the fight has drifted,
‘What would you for your reward
When the Clouds have lifted?’
Then the soldier through the mist
Heard the voice and rested
As a man who sees his home
When the hill is breasted –
This his answer and I vow
Nothing could be fitter –
Give me Peace, a dog, a friend
And a glass of bitter!
Captain Smith, who was twenty-seven years old when he was killed, lies today in Caterpillar Valley Cemetery, Longueval.
Captain Charles Wilson was among the medical officers who went forward with their battalions on August 18. The objective of his battalion, the 1st Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, was Guillemont Station. After the British artillery bombardment of the German trenches, they were to assault in the second wave. ‘We sat listening to the din as if we would miss nothing of it,’ Wilson wrote. ‘All at once the men ran out, in spite of the stuff that was falling all around; Boche prisoners were passing. The moral effect on our fellows was astonishing. I looked at my watch, it was exactly fifteen minutes after zero time. At the head of the prisoners was a German officer who halted and saluted whenever he met one of our officers moving up Longueval Alley. Then the string of Huns behind him, going along in their bandages with heads down, jolted into each other like trucks when the engine pulls up sharply and there was a lot of guttural murmuring.’
One or two wounded British soldiers also came: ‘They told how the Huns offered them money, wrist watches, cigarettes, all that they had; how they came out of their trenches with hands up immediately the barrage lifted; our men talked on and did not notice me dressing their wounds.’
Captain Wilson then went back to headquarters for news, ‘but they knew very little. We had succeeded in taking Guillemont Station. The day they thought had gone well, but Milner, who had just got his commission and was still wearing a sergeant’s coat, had been shot through the head at short range, and Rowe, who had gone back to duty from the stretcher bearers to try for a commission, had come down shot through the chest, and Babs was badly smashed up going over with “A” Company, and Barnes and Steele had been killed, and the best of the men seemed to have gone out. Somewhere up there out of reach, the battalion was slipping away and I could do nothing.’
Among those killed in the struggle for Guillemont Station, while attacking a German machine-gun post that was holding up his men, was Second Lieutenant George Marsden-Smedley, 3rd Battalion, Rifle Brigade. In a letter to his parents a day before he died he thanked them for the new identity disc they had sent him. ‘It makes such a difference,’ he wrote, ‘having a nice chain around one’s neck instead of a dirty old bit of string.’ Neither his body nor his new identity disc was ever found. His name is on the Thiepval Memorial. But immediately after the war his parents put up a private memorial as close as possible to where they believed he must have been killed, on the German parapet. On the memorial stone are the words ‘Lively and pleasant in life. In death serene and unafraid. Most blessed in remembrance.’ He was just nineteen years old, having gone straight into the army from school. Thirty members of his family were at the rededication of his memorial in 1997.
On August 18, the 6th Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry, returned to Delville Wood, where, in preparation for a new attack, they spent the night in the British front-line trenches that wended their way through the pulverized woodland. The supporting artillery bombardment began at 6 a.m. on the following morning. During the bombardment, twenty-two-year-old Second Lieutenant William Berridge, an Oxford University graduate, sent a poem home. ‘I am writing this in the midst of a din which you can and probably do hear on the Leas…I enclose my most recent spasm,’ he wrote – it ‘was only half an hour old’ – ‘which you had better revise and set to music!’ The poem reflected a deep, widespread religious faith that there was a meaning and a plan even to the worst of slaughters:
God, wheresoe’er Thou may’st be found
And Whosoe’er Thou art,
Grant in the Scheme of Things that we
May play a worthy part;
And give, to help us on the way,
An all-enduring heart.
We know Thou watchest from above
This fantasy of woe;
And, whatsoever pain or loss
We here may undergo,
Let us in this be comforted –
None from Thy sight can go.
Sometimes in folly we upon
Thy Name profanely call,
And grumble at our destiny
Because our minds are small,
And so we cannot understand
The Mind that ruleth all.
Grant us to see and learn and know
The Greatness of Thy Will,
That each one his allotted task
May grapple with, until
We hear at last Thy Perfect Voice
Bidding us ‘Peace, be still.’
The Somerset Light Infantry, with Second Lieutenant Berridge leading his platoon, attacked in Delville Wood at 2.45 p.m. As the infantrymen entered the German trenches they bayoneted or shot those who refused to surrender. An attack was then made on two German machine-gun posts that continued to harass the attackers from one end of the German trench, and were defended by a heavy trench-mortar barrage. The machine-gun posts were overrun and the trench secured. Ninety Germans were taken prisoner, but Berridge, the first man to enter the trench, was mortally wounded by a sniper. He died the next day. His body lies today in Heilly Station Cemetery.
In London, the War Committee met on August 18. The minutes record a reference to a ‘temporary standstill’ on the Somme. When Balfour asked Robertson about the German losses – ‘wastage’ in the terminology of the time – the Chief of the Imperial General Staff replied that he ‘did not really know what it was’, but added that it was his ‘impression’ that the Germans ‘were losing as many and more than we were’. Robertson then explained that the British losses ‘amounted to about 6,000 or 7,000 a week’. This was the figure for dead and wounded; the number of British dead was about 2,000 a week. Balfour, after noting how many German divisions were facing the British on the Somme, ‘suggested the possibility of our striking elsewhere at a thinner line’. Robertson replied that ‘it could not be done’. The British did not have enough extra heavy guns for a second assault elsewhere on the Western Front.
The Somme offensive would go on. Balfour’s hesitations were not enough to curb it. At this meeting, the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, made another point in favour of continuing. ‘The French’, he said, ‘would not like the idea of another winter without a definite advance to our credit.’ For Robertson, it was not even necessary to have a military success. ‘We should be doing very well’, he told the War Committee on August 18, ‘if we only held the Germans there’ – and let the Russian armies in the East ‘get on’ against the Germans.
Holding the Germans on the Somme, as opposed to pushing them eastward, was a substantial reduction of aim. But it did not mean a reduction of effort, or of suffering. On August 20, during an attack west of High Wood, Private Reginald Giles, of the Gloucestershire Regiment, was among those killed. He was fourteen years old. His body was never identified; he is the youngest soldier recorded on the Thiepval Memorial.
In the third week of August, the Australians were in action beyond Pozières. ‘When you get this, I’ll be dead; don’t worry,’a former bank clerk, Sergeant David Badger, wrote to his parents before the attack. He was killed on August 21. His name is on the Australian Memorial to the Missing at Villers-Bretonneaux. Lieutenant Neil Shaw Stewart, Rifle Brigade, was killed that day leading his company in an attack on Guillemont. He is buried in Delville Wood Cemetery. After the war a plaque was put up in his memory in Rancourt Chapel with the inscription: ‘I thank my God always on thy behalf.’
Among the Australians in action on August 23 was thirty-three-year-old Second Lieutenant John Raws. A few days earlier he had written to his brother in Australia, ‘The men who say they believe in war should be hung. And the men who won’t come out and help us, now we’re in it, are not fit for words. Had we more reinforcements up there many brave men now dead, men who stuck it and stuck it and stuck it till they died, would be alive today. Do you know that I saw with my own eyes a score of men go raving mad! I met three in No-Man’s Land one night. Of course, we had a bad patch. But it is sad to think that one has to go back to it, and back to it, and back to it, until one is hit.’
Raws was killed on August 23. His body was never identified, and his name is on the Australian Memorial to the Missing.
On August 24, Second Lieutenant Herbert Crowle, Australian Infantry, was wounded in action. The next day he wrote to his wife and son from the casualty clearing station at Puchevillers, two miles from Haig’s headquarters chateau at Val Vion, ‘Just a line, you must be prepared for the worst to happen any day. It is no use trying to hide things. I am in terrible agony. Had I been brought in at once I had a hope. Now gas gangrene has set in and it is so bad that the doctor could not save it by taking it off as it had gone too far and the only hope is that the salts they have put on may drain the gangrene otherwise there is no hope.’
The journey to the casualty clearing station had started across open ground in front of the German trenches. One stretcher-bearer walked in front, waving a Red Cross flag. The Germans did not open fire. After explaining this to his wife, Crowle continued, ‘The pain is getting worse. I am very sorry dear, but still you will be well provided for I am easy on that score. So cheer up dear I could write a lot but I am nearly unconscious. Give my love to dear Bill and yourself, do take care of yourself and him. Your loving husband Bert.’
A few hours later Lieutenant Crowle was dead. He is buried next to the casualty clearing station where he died, in Puchevillers British Cemetery.
The exhaustion of battle could not be assuaged. ‘All around me are faces which sleep might not have visited for a week,’ Captain Charles Wilson, Royal Army Medical Corps, wrote in his diary on August 22. ‘They have dark shadows under eyes that are older, more serious. Some that are lined before look ill, and boys have lost their freshness in the mouth. Voices too are tired and the very gait of men has lost its spring. The sap has gone out of them, they are dried up. During breakfast two officers of the 20th Division came into the dugout to take over. They looked so fresh and sleek and young they might have stepped out of a hot bath after hunting. They seemed to listen for shells though it was peaceful enough.’
The arrival of the new officers was welcome news. ‘So it was true that we were to be relieved immediately,’ Wilson wrote, and ‘that very afternoon we should go out to a camp in Happy Valley. We were to march by platoons assembling at Carnoy where the cookers with tea, the officers’ horses, and buses for the men would meet us. On the road we passed a Kitchener Battalion going up, they were resting by the roadside.’ There was to be no pause and respite in the feeding of men into the front line.
New casualty clearing stations were also needed. In late August Casualty Clearing Station No. 49 was established at Contay, joined within a month by Casualty Clearing Station No. 9. More than a thousand men who could not be saved, despite devoted medical attention, were buried in the nearby Contay British Cemetery. Outside the village of Varennes, near Acheux-en-Amenois, Casualty Clearing Station No. 39 cemetery, established in August, was first used by mobile divisional field ambulances. Within two months it was also being used by Casualty Clearing Stations Nos. 4 and 11. The flow of wounded men was unabated.
A report by Haig’s Intelligence Branch gave him cause for satisfaction on August 22. It revealed that, whereas a German division was worn out in four and a half days when it was opposite the British lines, opposite the French it lasted as long as three weeks. ‘This clearly shows’, Haig noted in his diary, ‘how regular and persistent is the pressure by the British.’ Haig had no illusions, however, about the desperate nature of the fighting or the advantages that the Germans could command. After lunching with Rawlinson at Querrieu on August 22, and hearing of Rawlinson’s plan for an attack against the Ginchy– Guillemont road and into the north edge of Guillemont village, which was overlooked by the German machine-gun posts on Guillemont Ridge, Haig noted critically, ‘Numerous shellholes afforded excellent cover for his machine guns. In fact I thought the scheme doomed to failure.’
From General Trenchard came news in mid-August of a setback in the air. Owing to clouds over the battlefield, German aircraft were able to carry out their observations relatively unmolested. But on August 23 the weather changed, and the number of German aircraft engaged by their British aerial adversaries was then considerable. ‘Fighting was continuous to dark,’ Haig noted in his diary that day. ‘We suffered no casualties, though Enemy in several cases was pursued back to his aerodrome.’
Air power helped the British more than the Germans. A German officer, Friedrich Steinbrecher, a veteran of the fighting on the Eastern Front, wrote that what he had been through on the Somme ‘surpassed in horror all my previous experiences during the second year of the war’. He explained that ‘the English, with the aid of their airmen, who are often 1,500 feet above the position, and their observation balloons, have exactly located every one of our batteries and have so smashed them up with long-distance guns of every calibre that the artillery here has had unusually heavy losses both of men and material. Our dugouts, in which we shelter day and night, are not even adequate, for though they are cut out of the chalk they are not so strong but that a “heavy” was able a few days ago to blow one in and bury the whole lot of men inside.’
Steinbrecher did not survive the Battle of the Somme. Nor, in a political sense, did General Grünert, Chief of Staff of the German Second Army, who was replaced by a relatively junior officer, Colonel Friedrich von Lossberg, with a reputation as a ‘defence specialist’. But the most serious doubts were being cast against the capabilities of the German Commander-in-Chief, General Falkenhayn, the mastermind of the Verdun strategy that had turned – from the German perspective – into both the failure of Verdun and the bloodbath of the Somme.
At the end of August, Falkenhayn was replaced as Commander-in-Chief by the soldier who had directed the successful German offensives on the Russian Front, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who brought with him from the Eastern Front, as his Chief of Staff and close adviser, General Erich von Ludendorff. Henceforth this duo would direct German war policy until the end of the war.
In the last week of August, from the Russian capital, Petrograd, came appeals by the Russian High Command for a renewed Anglo-French offensive on the Somme as early as possible in September, to take the pressure off the struggling Russian forces. Haig was convinced, however, that no further attack ‘on a large scale’ could be launched until September 15. Meanwhile, sufficient tanks had reached the Western Front to enable a demonstration to be carried out for the benefit of the Staffs.
For twenty-four hours without a break, the tank officers worked to prepare the demonstration. It took place on August 26. A battalion of infantry and five tanks, operating together, assaulted three lines of specially prepared trenches. ‘The Tanks crossed the several lines with the greatest ease,’ Haig noted in his diary, ‘and one entered a wood, which represented a “strong point” and easily walked over fair sized trees of 6 inches through!’
Peacemaking was much in the air in the autumn of 1916. At the end of August, the Pope, Benedict XV, told the French President, Raymond Poincaré, that the Germans would be forced to ask for an armistice by October. At a conference on August 27, held on Poincaré’s train, at which Haig was present, Poincaré had no doubt what the Anglo-French answer should be. Haig noted it down: ‘No talk of peace so long as one enemy remained on the soil of the Republic.’
German troops were then in occupation of most of north-eastern France, including the country’s most productive coal-mining region.
The war would go on. Haig explained to Poincaré that he would launch a ten-division attack – some 120,000 men – in co-operation with Foch, on August 30. He would then make preparations for a fourteen-division attack – 168,000 men – two weeks later. For this he had ‘every hope of success’, but he was ‘anxious that ample French reserves should be available to exploit our success’.
Poincaré, whose mind was much on the Russian appeal for help, pointed out that September 15 must be the latest date for the second major attack, ‘as the weather breaks on September 25 and is usually bad for some weeks after that’. Haig said he would do his best to arrange for the attack no later than September 15. Poincaré was relieved. He had been worried by reports that the Germans were trying to get the Russian government to make a separate peace, offering Russia territorial gains greater than those that Britain and France could offer, and leaving Germany free to transfer its large eastern armies to the Western Front.
On August 27, as Haig and Poincaré were talking on the French President’s train, the 1/5th Battalion, Gloucestershire Regiment – a Territorial battalion – attacked a German trench near Ovillers that had been one of the first objectives on July 1. After a fierce struggle the trench was overrun. Two hundred Germans were killed and wounded, and fifty taken prisoner. Four British officers and fourteen other ranks were killed, among them Lieutenant Cyril Winterbotham, a twenty-nine-year-old Oxford University graduate and prospective parliamentary candidate for East Gloucestershire, who, a month before he was killed, had written a poem which he entitled ‘The Cross of Wood’:
God be with you and us who go our way
And leave you dead upon the ground you won;
For you at last the long fatigue is done,
The hard march ended, you have rest to-day.
You were our friends, with you we watched the dawn
Gleam through the rain of the long winter night,
With you we laboured till the morning light
Broke on the village, shell-destroyed and torn.
Not now for you the glorious return
To steep Strand valleys, to the Severn leas
By Tewkesbury and Gloucester, or the trees
Of Cheltenham under high Cotswold stern.
For you no medals such as others wear –
A cross of bronze for those approved brave –
To you is given, above a shallow grave,
The wooden Cross that marks you resting there.
Rest you content, more honourable far
Than all the Orders is the Cross of Wood
The Symbol of self-sacrifice that stood
Bearing the God whose brethren you are.
Because the battlefield continued to be pounded by artillery and mortar fire after the August 27 attack on the trench near Ovillers, Winterbotham’s body was never identified. He therefore has no cross or grave. Like the other 73,335 men with no known resting place, his name is inscribed on the Thiepval Memorial.
Above the battlefield on the following day, August 28, Captain Basil Radford – the inventor of Gilbert the Filbert – was in a tethered observation balloon with his fellow observer, Second Lieutenant Moxon, watching the German lines along the River Ancre, and registering artillery targets for V Corps. Then one of the two balloon cables broke and the balloon began to drift away. The two men immediately signalled to be hauled down. As the balloon was about to reach the ground, however, the winch overran and damaged the metallic ‘vee’ running from the nose to the tail of the balloon, which provided the attachment point for the tethering cable from the winch. When the cable broke, the balloon shot up into the air and drifted towards No-Man’s Land and the German lines, seen by thousands of British troops.
Before the balloon reached No-Man’s Land, Moxon was seen to jump with his parachute and land safely. Radford was then seen to fall without a parachute. There was much speculation about what had gone wrong. It seemed most likely that, in preparation for a rapid departure from their basket as soon as it was to have reached the ground, both observers had undone their parachute harness. When their balloon subsequently broke away and flew off, Moxon managed to reattach his harness and was therefore able to jump to safety. Radford, not having refitted his harness, or having refitted it incorrectly, fell to his death. He is buried in Couin British Cemetery. He was twenty-eight years old.
On August 31 the Germans launched an attack north and east of Delville Wood, to try to pinch out the British salient there. Reserve Lieutenant Trobitz, 7th Company, 88th Infantry Regiment, who was among the German attackers that day, later recalled, ‘When the green flares went up we rose as one out of the trenches and, no sooner had we set off, than the enemy artillery opened up, which wiped the smile off the faces of the succeeding waves.’
‘We ran and ran,’ Lieutenant Trobitz continued, ‘but you have to bear in mind: first, the ground, which was completely covered with shellholes; second, the clay, which sucked at our boots; and third, the load we poor soldiers were carrying: assault order, rifles with bayonets fixed, bandoliers of rifle ammunition hung around the neck, revolvers, signal pistols, with flares carried in sandbags, ration pouches, filled water bottles and, finally, digging equipment.’
After what seemed like about fifteen minutes, Lieutenant Trobitz felt that he and his men ‘had possibly advanced about 300 metres without enemy interference. Then the British placed a machine gun in position and opened a slow rate of fire, but still we were not really close enough. With each step we drew nearer, until, silhouetted against the horizon, we must have presented a perfect target and they began to pick us off, one by one. There we lay; dead, wounded and unwounded, in shellholes, in the bright sunshine between the lines. Above us, enemy aircraft, some as low as one hundred metres, filled the sky and swooped down to machine gun us.’ The British aircraft were learning how to participate in the land battle.
Lieutenant Trobitz’s account continued, ‘Those who have not lain out wounded between the trench lines can barely imagine the situation. All sorts of thoughts run through your mind: tetanus, stomach wounds, wife and family. There is plenty of time for this, until you are enfolded by blissful unconsciousness. To awake is exquisite, you are still alive! The will to resist grows. One hand clasps the revolver, while the other clutches the wound. If they come, you will not make it easy for them.’
Then the British artillery opened up. ‘A comrade in the same shellhole, so far unwounded, is suddenly hit on the collarbone by a shrapnel bullet,’ Trobitz recalled. ‘It is a blow like a box on the ears. Our spirits sink as he goes down. Once it goes dark, he will have to try to crawl off to get aid. The sun burns down unmercifully, torturing us with thirst. Minutes become hours. We exchange addresses. If one of us escapes, he will inform the relatives of the other. All too slowly the sun sinks. It is just 7 p.m. Suddenly the comrade who was hit on the collarbone awakes from a deep sleep, feels his shoulder and discovers that the shoulder strap of his equipment has stopped the shrapnel ball. Apart from severe bruising to the shoulder, nothing has happened to him. He offers to go and get help. Another hour passes and the shadows are lengthening across the battlefield.’ That help, when it comes, will be British, not German. ‘It will soon be on the way,’ Lieutenant Trobitz reflected, and he added, ‘The British are a noble lot. They will not shoot at stretcher-bearers working under the Red Cross flag. I have witnessed this myself.’
But no help came, either German or British. ‘The waiting becomes agonising,’ Lieutenant Trobitz recalled. ‘We have been lying here for six hours. Many, those who can still walk, have already made it back. Why should we not try it too? Initially it is very hard, but the emergency brings forth an iron will and the waiting has become unbearable. Supporting one another, or crawling on all fours, we move carefully from shellhole to shellhole and so towards safety. The first aid men have their hands full. Tirelessly they gather in the wounded, without being interfered with by the British. Sadly there were a great many victims.’
The British line was pushed back that day – back a hundred yards into the north and eastern edges of Delville Wood. But the Germans had failed to make the advance they had hoped for, and the wood remained to all intents and purposes under British control.
Towards the end of August, the American volunteer Second Lieutenant Harvey Augustus Butters, Royal Field Artillery – who at the Battle of Loos had suffered a nervous breakdown from shell shock, but had insisted on returning to the front within a week – wrote to the chaplain of his brigade, on a personal note: ‘You know how much my heart is in this great cause, and how more than willing I am to give my life for it.’ Butters was killed on the night of August 31. A few days earlier a volunteer had been called for to replace a casualty, and he had volunteered, just as, a year earlier, he had done the same in order to serve with the British Army.
Second Lieutenant Butters was buried the next day in Méaulte Military Cemetery, just south of Albert. In his letter of condolence, his section commander, Captain Zambra, wrote to Butters’s sister, 5,000 miles away in California, ‘Harry and another officer were in the dugout at the gun position. The Germans were putting over a heavy barrage of gas shells and the air became very poisonous and oppressive. Harry said, “It’s time we moved out of this,” and went out. Immediately he was outside, a gas shell hit him direct. Death must have been instantaneous, and the officer with him removed his gas helmet to make sure. So some little consolation remains to us that he was spared all pain.’
Captain Zambra continued, ‘A Roman Catholic Chaplain buried him beneath the Union Jack (we tried to get an American flag, but one was not procurable or he should have been honoured by both countries) in a military cemetery just outside of Méaulte, a village a mile south of Albert. The graveyard is under the care of the Graves Registration Commission, and his grave will be well tended. His body was in a coffin. There were many officers at the funeral, as many as could be spared from duty, including the Staff Captain, representing the General, and Colonel Talbot, a detachment from his battery and my section. A trumpeter sounded the Last Post.’
Six months before his death, Butters had befriended Winston Churchill, then the colonel commanding a battalion at Ploegsteert, in Flanders. Ten days after Butters’s death, Churchill wrote an obituary in the Observer, in which he explained that he was writing about Butters ‘not because his sacrifice and story differ from those of so many others in these hard days, but because, coming of his own free will, with no national call or obligation, a stranger from across the ocean, to fight and die in our ranks, he had it in his power to pay a tribute to our cause of exceptional value. He did not come all the way from San Francisco only out of affection for the ancient home of his forbears or in a spirit of mere adventure. He was in sentiment a thorough American. All his ordinary loyalties rested with his own country. But he had a very firm and clear conception of the issues which are at stake in this struggle. He had minutely studied the official documents bearing upon the origin of the war, and he conceived that not merely national causes but international causes of the highest importance were involved, and must now be decided by arms. And to these he thought it his duty to testify “till a right peace was signed”. Such testimony cannot be impeached.’
On the evening of August 31, Captain Charles Wilson noted in his diary, as he and his medical orderlies and stretcher-bearers went off in search of Carlton Trench, where they were expected as reinforcements, ‘The rain and the traffic had played havoc with the road near Mametz and the wheels of the Maltese cart that was carrying spare stretchers stuck fast in the mud; we pushed and heaved and attempted with the stretcher poles to lever out the wheels, but nothing happened. We left it in the mud and pushed on.’
Darkness had fallen, and Wilson ‘wondered vaguely if it was the cold night air that made my teeth chatter’. Then the Germans began firing shells ‘in great numbers. They detonated almost silently and without the burst of an ordinary shell. We had run into a gas shell barrage. I wanted to ask my servant if his chest felt as if it were being pressed in by an iron band that was gradually getting smaller. I wondered what gas they were using. I remembered we were told that many of the men had heart failure after the last attack.’
At that moment, Wilson recalled, a gunner came by, ‘spitting and rubbing his eyes. He said there was a sunken road a little further on which led to the quarry. He thought there was an aid post there; this was the landmark we had been told to look out for. We stumbled on and met an officer, hatless and supported under each armpit by two stretcher-bearers. They said he was gassed and it may be that he was. Two winters he had been out here as a sergeant, a bold and efficient NCO. All last winter he felt the damp more and more and began to carry a flask. The damned stuff had done its work. “I wish to God I could get hit,” he had once confided in me, “I am not the man I was.” Now he was done.’
Captain Wilson, his battalion commander Lieutenant Colonel M. V. B. Hill and his men reached some rising ground that was fairly clear of gas. It was after three o’clock in the morning, ‘and we decided to wait for the light. The night lifted reluctantly as if it were loath to let us escape and the cold dawn had passed slowly into the promise of a summer day before we found Carlton Trench. The last two companies had just arrived after eight hours’ pilgrimage in the gas to find that no one expected them or knew why they had come. The Colonels of five battalions were collected in one dugout and the men were packed in the trench like herrings. It was clear we were not wanted, why were we there? Hill answered tersely “Wind.”’
Fear was an integral part of the battlefield.
Three weeks later Captain Wilson’s ‘conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty’ on August 31 were to win him the Military Cross, the citation for which read: ‘He worked for over an hour digging out wounded men at great personal risk. He then returned to his aid post and attended to the wounded. Later, hearing that an officer had been wounded, he passed through a hundred yards of the enemy’s artillery barrage, dressed his wounds, and finally got him to safety as soon as the barrage permitted.’
The battalion, with 52 men killed and 345 wounded, was pulled out of the line. In Wilson’s laconic words: ‘It seems that a division is dipped twice into the Somme, with perhaps a week’s rest in between. The second time it is kept in until it has no further fighting value.’