HAVING VISITED THE Western Front for the first time on 6 September 1916, Field Marshal Hindenburg and General Ludendorff, who hitherto had entirely focused on Germany’s war with Russia, came to the conclusion that it was in the West that the war must be won; that a victorious peace could be secured for Germany only by the defeat of the Anglo-French armies in France and Flanders. But already, the Romanian entry into the war on the side of the Allies had raised the spectre of Germany’s vulnerability in the East.
Hindenburg reacted swiftly. On September 15, the very day of Britain’s greatest success thus far on the Somme, he declared, ‘The main task of the Armies is now to hold fast all positions on the Western, Eastern, Italian and Macedonian Fronts, and to employ all other available forces against Romania.’
Not only military manpower, but civilian labour was to be conscripted into the German war effort. A newly devised ‘Hindenburg Industrial Programme’ involved the recruitment of German labourers and the forcible deportation to Germany of 700,000 Belgian workers. These forced labourers were to be put to work immediately. On September 16, while visiting Cambrai, Hindenburg gave orders for a ‘semi-permanent’ defence line to be constructed behind the Western Front, ten to thirty-five miles east of the front-line trenches. This was to be known as the Hindenburg Line, a deep fortified zone that was intended to halt any Allied military breakthrough before it could approach the Belgian or German frontier.
The struggle on the Somme continued. Among those killed on September 16 was Dillwyn Parrish Starr, a thirty-two-year-old American, serving as a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards. Born in Philadelphia and educated at Harvard, Starr had volunteered in 1914 as an ambulance driver with the French, served with the British armoured cars at Gallipoli, and then transferred to the Guards, with whom he went to the Somme. He is buried in the Guards’ Cemetery at Lesboeufs.
Among the thousands of soldiers ordered into action on September 16 was one who was soon to face a firing squad of his fellow soldiers. When the order came to move forward to the front line, Private Henry Farr refused. ‘I cannot stand it,’ he said. He was then dragged forward, screaming and struggling, but broke away and ran back. He had only recently been released from hospital after treatment for shell shock, having been at the front since the outbreak of war more than two years earlier. Court-martialled for cowardice, Farr was executed.
Seventy-seven years after Farr’s execution, his granddaughter, Janet Booth, hoped that a Private Member’s Bill, introduced by Andrew Mackinlay into the House of Commons on 19 October 1993 on behalf of all those executed for cowardice and desertion in the First World War, would lead to a posthumous pardon. The bill was unsuccessful. Fifteen year later, on 9 January 2006, a former child refugee to Britain, Lord Dubs, raised the issue in the House of Lords. Andrew Mackinlay plans an amendment to a future Armed Forces Disciplinary Bill. The search for pardons goes on.
As September 16 came to an end there was yet more action. Private Thomas Littler noted in his diary how, that night, ‘we had reinforcements sent to us, and went forward and dug an advanced fire trench, but the guide took us the wrong way, and led us into the enemy lines, the Germans opened a heavy fire on us, and we retired hastily but with casualties.’
Also during the night of September 16, the 6th Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry – the Oxs and Bucks – moved forward into the line from its billets in Corbie and Méaulte. Leaving its billets at 8.30 p.m., the battalion reached the front line a gruelling six hours later, at 2.20 a.m. Among those going forward was Captain Arthur Graeme West. A student at Balliol College, Oxford, when war broke out, he had been rejected for an officer’s commission because of poor eyesight. He therefore enlisted as a private, becoming an officer in 1916.
From his forward trench on September 17, Captain Graeme West wrote to a friend, ‘The men were dog-tired when they got here, and though ordered to dig, complied very unwillingly, and were allowed to sit about or lean on their spades, or even to stand up and fall asleep against the side of the trench. It was a smelly trench. A dead German – a big man – lay on his stomach as if he were crawling over the parados down into the trench; he had lain there some days, and that corner of trench reeked even when someone took him by the legs and pulled him away out of sight, though not out of smell, into a shellhole. We sat down and fell into a comatose state, so tired we were. On our right lay a large man covered with a waterproof, his face hidden by a sandbag, whom we took to be a dead Prussian guardsman, but the light of dawn showed him to be an Englishman by his uniform.’
Three days later, Captain West described the arrival of a German shell on the Oxs and Bucks trenches. ‘It exploded, and a cloud of black reek went up – in the communication trench again. You went down it; two men were buried, perhaps more you were told, certainly two. The trench was a mere undulation of newly turned earth, under it somewhere lay two men or more. You dug furiously. No sign. Perhaps you were standing on a couple of men now, pressing the life out of them, on their faces or chests. A boot, a steel helmet – and you dig and scratch and uncover a grey, dirty face, pitifully drab and ugly, the eyes closed, the whole thing limp and mean-looking…Perhaps the man is alive and kicks feebly or frantically as you unbury him: anyhow, here is the first, and God knows how many are not beneath him. At last you get them out, three dead, grey muddy masses, and one more jibbering live one. Then another shell falls and more are buried.’
In aerial combat on September 17, against British pilots who had flown from the Somme to Cambrai on a bombing mission, the future German air ace Manfred von Richthofen had his first ‘kill’, qualifying him for the award of a silver drinking goblet with the inscription ‘To the Victor in Air Battle’. He quickly ordered a miniature version from a Berlin jeweller. A year and a half later, with as many as eighty downed British and French aircraft to his credit, Richthofen – the Red Baron – was shot down and killed over the very area that had been the Somme battlefield.
During that aerial combat on September 17, led by the then top German air ace, Oswald Boelcke, the British planes met their match in a new German aeroplane, the Albatross, that was both faster and better armed than its British and French counterparts. This German superiority would soon become clear to the British commanders, and to the infantrymen watching the fierce and often fatal struggles in the sky above them.
Among those killed on September 17 in an attack on a German trench near Mouquet Farm was Private Herbert Rice of the Lincolnshire Regiment. His name is on the Thiepval Memorial. Eighty-nine years after his death his niece Irene Palfrey and her husband, George, left a message at one of the cemeteries on the battlefield: ‘Lost forever on the Somme, never found, never forgotten’.
Private Herbert Rice’s brother Arthur was killed almost a year later; his name is on another memorial to the missing, at Arras, on which are inscribed the names of 34,739 soldiers with no known grave. A third Rice brother, Ernest, who had emigrated to Canada before the war, fought on the Somme with the 4th Canadian Division, and survived. Irene Palfrey’s grandfather on her mother’s side, Gerard Miles, a skipper in the Royal Naval Reserve, was killed at sea on Christmas Day 1916. His name is inscribed on the Chatham Memorial; he is one of 8,500 First World War British sailors with no known grave.
George Palfrey’s side of the family also fought in the First World War. His grandfather Harry, who was wounded during the retreat from Mons in 1914, was killed in Palestine in 1917. His name is one of 3,298 on the Jerusalem Memorial to the Missing.
Encouraging news reached Haig on September 18, when General Trenchard reported, in what turned out to be one of his last encouraging reports that year, that the Royal Flying Corps aeroplanes were ‘taking the offensive and carrying the war in the air beyond the Enemy’s lines’, with the result that they were ‘free to carry on their important duties of observation and photography unmolested’. The most important result of this was that those who were planning the coming battles were able to examine detailed photographs of the German trenches and fortifications.
The prospect of success was ever-present in Haig’s mind, and in the minds of many of the commanders. On September 18 there was a large cavalry march near Hardecourt Wood, watched by the infantrymen, who were still the main arm of the offensive. But there was, even so, no sector of the front where the cavalry could exploit an infantry success.
Although the British and French offensives had been delayed, the daily hazards of trench warfare continued without respite, for both sides. On September 19, after only a week in action against the French forces south of the River Somme, the German 13th Division suffered such heavy losses that it was forced to pull out of the battle altogether. New troops on both sides were always ready to be sent into the line. On September 22 a Canadian officer, Major William Ashplant, from London, Ontario, who three weeks earlier had been wounded in the head by a shellburst, returned to action with his battalion, in an attack on the German trenches east of Courcelette. His military file records that he was last seen that day ‘in a shellhole with Machine Gun wounds in stomach and leg’. A search party on the following morning ‘failed to locate him’. His name is inscribed on the Vimy Memorial to the Missing; he is one of 11,167 Canadians killed in France in the First World War who have no known graves.
On September 22 there was another British attack on Lesboeufs. Among those who took part was nineteen-year-old Lieutenant Edward Wyndham Tennant. Having left his school, Winchester, at the age of seventeen in order to enlist, he had been in the trenches since shortly after his eighteenth birthday. His poem ‘The Mad Soldier’ opened with the lines:
I dropp’d here three weeks ago, yes – I know,
And it’s bitter cold at night, since the fight –
I could tell you if I chose – no one knows
Excep’ me and four or five, what ain’t alive.
I can see them all asleep, three men deep,
And they’re nowhere near a fire – but our wire
Has ’em fast as can be. Can’t you see
When the flare goes up? Ssh! boys; what’s that noise?
Do you know what these rats eat? Body-meat!
The rats were a never-forgotten feature of the battlefield. In 2004, eighty-six years after he was on the Somme in 1918, Private Cecil Withers, 17th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers, then aged 106, told the historian Max Arthur, for his book Last Post, ‘I remember once, on the Somme, seeing half a dozen of our English boys, all in pieces in a big shellhole. They were half buried, stinking. It was hot and there was a terrible stench and they were covered in bluebottles and cockroaches. It was a terrible sight. These poor boys. It made me sick. We had to smoke strong Turkish cigarettes to hide the smell. On the firestep in the trenches during the night, you could hear the groaning of the dying – but you couldn’t go out to help them. There were rats feeding on their flesh. They were dying there, dying in misery and pain, and the rats were nibbling away at their flesh.’
Two days before going into action, Lieutenant Tennant wrote to his mother, ‘I am full of hope and trust and pray that I may be worthy of my fighting ancestors. The one I know best is Sir Henry Wyndham, whose bust is in the hall of 44 Belgrave Square, and there is a picture of him on the stairs at 34 Queen Anne’s Gate’: their two London homes. As to the coming action, ‘We shall probably attack over about 1,200 yards, but we shall have such artillery support as will properly smash the Boche line we are going for, and even (which is unlikely) if the artillery doesn’t come up to our hopes, the spirit of the Brigade of Guards will carry all resistance before it. The pride of being in such a great regiment! The thought that all the old men “late Grenadier Guards”, who sit in the London clubs, are thinking and hoping about what we are doing here!’
Tennant added, ‘I have never been prouder of anything, except your love for me, than I am of being a Grenadier. Today is a great day for me.’ A line of General Sir Henry Wyndham, who as a young officer had served at the Battle of Waterloo, rang through his mind: ‘High heart, high speech, high deeds, ’mid honouring eyes.’ Tennant told his mother, ‘I went to a service on the side of a hill this morning and took the Holy Communion afterwards, which always seems to help one along, doesn’t it? I slept like a top last night, and dreamed that someone I know very well (but I can’t remember who it was) came to me and told me how much I had grown. Three or four of my brother officers read my poems yesterday, and they all liked them very much which pleased me enormously.’
On September 22, Lieutenant Tennant was sniping, in a sap – a covered trench dug to a point near or within an enemy position – that was occupied by both British and German soldiers, separated only by a small barrier. He was killed by a German sniper. His grave, like that of his family friend Raymond Asquith, who had been killed a week earlier, is in Guillemont Road Cemetery. The two graves were deliberately put near each other by their commanding officer. On hearing of Raymond Asquith’s death, and the deaths of several others whom he knew, Tennant had written home, ‘It is a terrible list…Death and decomposition strew the ground.’
Still in the forward trenches with the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, on September 24 Captain Arthur Graeme West was spurred to a reflection on war-making. ‘Most men’, he wrote, ‘fight if not happily, at any rate patiently, sure of the necessity and usefulness of their work. So did I – once! Now it all looks to me so absurd and brutal that I can only force myself to continue in a kind of dream-state; I hypnotise myself to undergo it. What good, what happiness can be produced by some of the scenes I have had to witness in the last few days? Even granting it was necessary to resist Germany by arms at the beginning – and this I have yet most carefully to examine – why go on? Is it not known to both armies that each is utterly weary and heartsick? Of course it is. Then why, in God’s name, go on?’
Captain West survived the fighting on the Somme, including a shell that killed seven men at the moment his battalion reached Trones Wood on September 29. Then, six months later, in a trench outpost far to the east of the Somme battlefield, he was killed by a stray bullet. His grave is in Ecoust-Saint-Mein Cemetery, five miles north-east of Bapaume.
On September 25 a substantial and sustained British attack was launched along a six-mile front, when Lord Cavan’s XIV Corps moved against Morval and Lesboeufs. As the battle began, Royal Flying Corps airmen bombed German troops in their trenches, and British counter-battery work silenced 24 of the 124 German heavy-artillery batteries, one of the highest success rates in the Somme battle.
The strongly fortified Morval, which was on high ground, fell to the 5th and 6th Divisions. Unusually for a commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel P. V. P. Stone of the 1st Battalion, Norfolk Regiment, received permission to lead his battalion forward in person, on the grounds that the many newcomers from three other regiments had not yet settled down. Stone was said at the time to have ‘treated the attack as a pheasant shoot, with his servant as loader’. He and the men he led forward took the first objective in a single rush, killing many Germans and capturing more than a hundred.
Lesboeufs – in earlier attacks on which Raymond Asquith and Edward Tennant had been killed and Harold Macmillan wounded – was attacked by the Guards Division, including the 2nd Battalion, Grenadier Guards, who, when they found the German wire uncut by the British artillery, braved intense German machine-gun fire to cut it by hand.
By late afternoon on September 25, some of XIV Corps had penetrated 500 yards beyond Morval and Lesboeufs. When Haig visited Cavan that afternoon at his headquarters at Méaulte, Cavan told him ‘that the Enemy only put up a good fight on the first line which was attacked. After that was taken they held up their hands and surrendered on the advance of our troops to the succeeding lines. The losses were comparatively small in consequence. The Guards had only 800 to 900 losses.’
During the battle on September 25, forty British soldiers, mostly men of the 2nd Battalion, Grenadier Guards, who were killed near Lesboeufs, were buried near where they fell. That site became the Guards’ Lesboeufs Cemetery. More than three thousand soldiers are buried there now, many brought to the cemetery after the war from other parts of the battlefield. Among those buried there on September 25 was Captain Harry Verelst, commanding the 2nd Battalion, Coldstream Guards, killed by the same shell as his adjutant as they went forward in support of the Grenadiers.
As part of the Battle of Morval, General Horne’s XV Corps advanced towards Gueudecourt, which was entered by the 21st Division, against heavy opposition, as darkness was falling. The 55th Division and the New Zealand Division were in action west of Gueudecourt, reaching Factory Corner. To the left of the New Zealanders, the 1st and 50th Divisions advanced to within 700 yards of Le Sars. But the 23rd Division, attacking north of Martinpuich, was beaten back.
Encouraged by the Fourth Army successes of September 25, on the following day General Gough launched his Reserve Army in a sustained five-day frontal assault on the village of Thiepval, which had held out since the first day of the Somme offensive. As a result of the repeated shelling since July 1, not one house in the village was intact, but more than a hundred cellars – the official British estimate was 144 – had been prepared by the German machine-gunners to serve as their strongpoints.
Of the four assault divisions, two were Canadian.
The battle on September 26 saw tanks in action once more, to good effect. Thirteen took part in the attack on Thiepval, which, Haig noted in his diary, ‘was defended with desperation’. During the assault, Second Lieutenant Tom Adlam, acting as a bomb-thrower, and his men ‘came under heavy machine-gun and rifle fire’. Nevertheless, as his Victoria Cross citation noted, ‘Adlam ran from shellhole to shellhole under fire, collecting grenades and gathering men for a sudden rush on an enemy village. Despite receiving a leg wound, he led the rush, captured the village and killed its occupants.’ Forty dead Germans were brought out of the trenches.
Thiepval was taken that day; its capture removed a serious German vantage point in the centre of the British line. Also on September 26, Lord Cavan’s XIV Corps took part in an advance on Combles, which fell to an infantry assault, supported by two tanks. At Gueudecourt, where the tanks went forward assisted by air reconnaissance, 500 Germans were taken prisoner for only 5 British casualties.
South-east of Gueudecourt the Germans counter-attacked in force. More than a hundred British artillery pieces were turned against them. The ‘Enemy’, Haig noted, ‘literally ran away, throwing down his arms’. Haig added, ‘We now have the observation which makes so much difference to the success of our operations.’ Success was also measured by the low casualties compared with earlier attacks. ‘The casualties for the last two days’ heavy fighting’, Haig noted on September 27, ‘are just 8,000. This is very remarkable, and seems to bear out the idea that the Enemy is not fighting so well, and has suffered in morale.’
In the attack on the Schwaben Redoubt on September 27 the British infantrymen were driven back after much hand-to-hand fighting, bayonet against bayonet. Not until October 2 did they secure a strongpoint on the southern edge of the redoubt, but the fortified mass remained in German hands.
Organizing the communications back from the Schwaben Redoubt through Thiepval Wood was Second Lieutenant Tolkien, who had reached the wood with his eight runners on September 27. On the following day, when the 11th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers – Tolkien’s battalion – raided the German trenches from which machine-gun fire was impeding the main attack, more than thirty German prisoners were taken. When Tolkien, speaking German, offered a drink of water to a wounded German officer, the German corrected him on his pronunciation.
On the following morning the captain who had led the trench raid was killed by a sniper’s bullet as he was returning to the British trenches with yet more prisoners. Later that day the senior lieutenant, Rowson, was talking to his commanding officer when a shell burst between them. When the dust and debris settled, Rowson had disappeared. Second Lieutenant Stanley Rowson’s body was never found. He is commemorated today on the Thiepval Memorial.
It was at this time that Tolkien received a letter from the wife of one of his signallers, Private Sydney Sumner, who had not been seen for more than two months. ‘I have not heard from him for this long time’, wrote Sumner’s wife, ‘but we have had news from the army chaplain that he has been missing since July the 9th. Dear Sir I would not care if I only knew how he went. I know that they cannot all be saved to come home.’ Sumner had left a one-year-old daughter in England. His name is inscribed on the Thiepval Memorial.
The fears and destruction of trench warfare were unremitting. So too was the routine of shellfire, death and injury. On the last day of September, Lieutenant Arthur Preston White, of the 1st Battalion, Northamptonshire Regiment, wrote to his father, ‘Our last three days up were fairly uneventful, though we had two officers killed and two wounded. Most of our work consisted of digging a new communication trench, and carrying up supplies to a regiment which had taken a bit of the German line. The digging was conducted part of the time under shell fire, but as we had orders to carry on regardless of that sort of thing, we had to stick it out. Three of my party were buried, but they were a lot more scared than hurt. I got one bit on the top of my steel helmet, but no damage was done.’
The carrying parties, White added, ‘were rather a sweat for the men, as we had to go a couple of miles over country we did not know at night. There were no distinctive landmarks, so I had to rely mainly on the compass. We had guides, of the usual stamp. The fellow we had on Tuesday night informed us at the start that he wasn’t quite sure of the way, which was about the truest thing he ever said in his life. He then proceeded to lead us into a barrage, after which we took charge of affairs ourselves. We got into a trench just in time to escape machine-gun fire at uncomfortably close range. Finally I picked up a wandering machine-gunner who led us to our destination.’
As he and his men were sent far to the rear, to Acheux-en-Vimeux, for a complete rest, White confided to his sister, ‘Those who have been right through the show in this part want a rest pretty badly.’
The fighting between September 15 and 30 captured as much ground from the Germans as all the attacks between July 1 and September 14. The tanks had shown that they could be effective against German defenders in the ruins of villages. Encouraged by the successes of the last two weeks of September, Haig devised, in his words, a ‘Grand Design’ for October: the breakthrough in which he had always believed. The French were supportive. At Val Vion on September 28, Foch was insistent that he would continue the battle into November, ‘or until the bad weather stops all chance of attacking’.
Under Haig’s plan, the Reserve Army and the Fourth Army, in a concerted attack, would advance to Bapaume and beyond, followed by an advance to Cambrai, more than twenty-four miles from the Fourth Army front. One encouraging fact with regard to this plan was that the first, second and third lines of the German trenches – the original German defence lines on July 1 – had all been captured by the end of September. But a fourth line had already been built, in depth, along the Le Transloy ridge four miles south of Bapaume, and a fifth and sixth line were under construction, the work being done on them clearly visible to British aerial reconnaissance.
To reach the fifth and sixth lines would require – once the Transloy Line had been overcome – an advance across five miles of German-held ground, the same distance that it had taken the previous three months to achieve.
On September 29, Haig went to Querrieu to explain his plan to Rawlinson. ‘He is a bold fighter’, Rawlinson noted in his diary, ‘and I greatly admire his scheme…I am sure he is right to widen the battle front, and I pray that Gough’s army may succeed.’
Under Haig’s plan, what had proved impossible in July would be achieved in October. It would be accompanied and assisted by an attack fifteen miles to the north, from Arras, under General Allenby, driving eastward more than ten miles, as far as the Canal du Nord, to a point six miles north of where Gough and the Reserve Army would cross the canal. Encouraged by Haig, Rawlinson called for detailed maps of Beaumetz, Marcoing and Cambrai, the latter fifteen miles beyond Bapaume.
This was the bold vision that had impelled Haig’s thinking on the eve of the Battle of the Somme. Late, but not too late, this two-pronged attack would constitute the final phase of that battle. But Haig understood the problem confronting the British artillery. ‘Our position is difficult from artillery point of view,’ he wrote on the last day of September, ‘as our troops are on the forward ridge of the slope, time is required to bring guns forward to new positions from which to deal with hostile artillery, and further, concealed positions for guns are difficult to find on forward slope! When Le Sars is taken, situation will become better.’
That day Haig lunched at Val Vion with General Kavanagh, commanding the Cavalry Corps, and Kavanagh’s Chief Staff Officer, General Home. After their talk, Haig discussed with his own Chief of Staff, General Kiggell, his ambitious plan for a cavalry breakthrough. ‘I pointed out that the attack on north side of Ancre might take Enemy by surprise,’ Haig wrote in his diary, ‘and at any rate it turns the lines of trenches which he is now making to envelop our left on the Ancre.’ As regards the direction of the pursuit, Haig told Kiggell that, ‘if the Enemy breaks’, he would ‘aim at getting the Enemy into a trap with the marshes to the east of Arras (about Hamel) on his north side and the Canal du Nord on the east of him. The latter is a broad new canal running in deep cuttings in places 150 feet deep. With the object of carrying out this manoeuvre, I hope to arrange for Allenby to attack on the south side of Arras and capture Monchy-le-Preux ridge. On the south side Rawlinson (if the Enemy breaks) would press on and occupy the ridge near Beaumetz. Kavanagh must think over the best dispositions for his Cavalry Corps.’
Haig’s next visitor at Val Vion was General Allenby, commanding the Third Army, whose task was the ten-mile advance to the Canal du Nord. ‘Bombardment should commence now’, Haig told Allenby, ‘and be carried out methodically at different hours by day and night, cut wire, keep gaps open etc. Attack will then come as a surprise and will be preceded by a line of tanks; only a barrage at zero hour, no preliminary bombardment.’
After three months of fighting, many severe setbacks and several dramatic successes, yet another struggle on the Somme was imminent, even more ambitious in its scope than that of July 1. It was the successes since July 1, small though they were on the map, that made such a plan possible, for the German Army had suffered losses as high, if not higher, than those of the British and French combined.