14

October 1916: The Grand Design begins

THE RENEWED OFFENSIVE began on 1 October 1916 – ‘a fine autumn day’, wrote Captain Miles in the official history. From the start, the attackers met with tenacious German machine-gun fire and made almost no progress. The Canadians, attacking a thousand yards north-west of Courcelette, captured the first German trench, but were driven out of it the following day. They also failed to occupy another section of German trench that they had attacked. Haig was indignant, noting in his diary on October 2, after driving to see General Byng at Canadian headquarters at Contay, ‘I think the cause was that in the hope of saving lives they attacked in too weak numbers. They encountered a brigade of the German Marine Corps recently arrived from Ostend, and had not the numbers to overcome them in a hand-to-hand struggle. They (the Canadians) have been very extravagant in expending ammunition! This points rather to nervousness and low moral in those companies which are frequently calling for a “barrage” without good cause.’

On the morning of October 2, President Poincaré visited Haig at Val Vion. He apologized for the fact that the French troops south of the British lines were so far behind the British right flank, but explained that they were unable to make full use of the large reserves at their disposal because the German artillery commanded the defile north of Combles through which they would have to pass to be able to join the battle.

The French President then asked Haig his views about continuing the fighting on the Somme. ‘I pointed out’, Haig answered, ‘that we had already broken through all the Enemy’s prepared lines and that now only extemporised defences stood between us and the Bapaume ridge; moreover the Enemy had suffered much in men, in material, and in moral. If we rested even for a month, the Enemy would be able to strengthen his defences, to recover his equilibrium, to make good deficiencies, and, worse still, would regain the initiative! The longer we rested, the more difficult would our problem again become, so in my opinion we must continue to press the Enemy to the utmost of our power. The President quite agreed, and assured me that the French Army would continue to act with energy.’

 

Heavy rain fell on the Somme front on October 2. The mud of Picardy was sticky and deep, so that prolonged rainfall made it difficult for artillery ammunition to be brought forward. This forced a reduction in the scale of the artillery barrages that were an essential preliminary to any infantry advance. However, on October 3, two companies of the 10th Battalion, Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, attacked that portion of Flers still held by the Germans. The historian of the 23rd Division wrote, ‘To gain their objective the Duke of Wellington’s had but one hundred yards to cross. But their advance lay across mud and mire of the most appalling description, and was met by a withering fire of rifles and machine guns. Nevertheless they reached the German wire, but could get no further. The distance from their assembly trenches to the wire had been too narrow to allow the British artillery to destroy it.’

Of the three officers who led the attack, two, Second Lieutenant Henry Stafford and Second Lieutenant Henry Harris, were killed. Stafford’s body was never identified: his name is on the Thiepval Memorial. Harris lies in the predominantly Canadian Adanac Military Cemetery. (‘Adanac’is ‘Canada’ backwards.) The third officer leading the attack, Second Lieutenant Henry Kelly, survived, leading the only three available men into the German trench, and fighting alongside them until they were wounded and German reinforcements came up. He then carried them, and another wounded soldier, back, under German fire. He was awarded the Victoria Cross. Twenty years later he went to Spain to fight with the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. In the Second World War, while serving as a lieutenant in the Cheshire Regiment, stationed in London, he was court-martialled and severely reprimanded for making two false claims for travel expenses to the value of two pounds, ten shillings. He resigned his commission, dying in 1960 at the age of seventy-three.

French forces were in action on October 4 just east of Cléry. That day twenty-year-old Gustave Fuméry and 150 of his comrades-in-arms were killed. After the war, a memorial cross was erected in their memory.

 

Rain fell again on October 5, 6 and 7, preventing the Royal Flying Corps observers from acting as spotters for the British artillery. The ground became so wet as to be impassable for any sustained infantry assault. Gough and Rawlinson were therefore forced to postpone their second attacks, planned for October 5 and October 7, which gave the Germans time to repair and strengthen their defences. At the same time, the German artillery wreaked havoc on the British front-line trenches, and on the men waiting to go forward.

Another problem in the air was that German aviators had begun to outfight their British opponents, while photographing the British lines and occasionally machine-gunning British troops on the ground. Trenchard had warned Haig on the last day of August, ‘Within the last few days the enemy has brought into action on the Somme front a considerable number of fighting aeroplanes which are faster, handier and capable of attaining greater height than any at my disposal’ with the exception of three squadrons. Other than these three, all the ‘fighting machines at my disposal are decidedly inferior’.

 

Haig remained confident, writing to the King on October 5, ‘I venture to think that the results are highly satisfactory, and I believe the Army in France feels the same as I do in this matter. The troops see that they are slowly but surely destroying the German Armies in their front, and that their Enemy is much less capable of defence than he was even a few weeks ago. Indeed there have been instances in which the Enemy on a fairly wide front (1,400 yards) has abandoned his trench the moment our infantry appeared! On the other hand our divisions seem to have become almost twice as efficient as they were before going into the battle, notwithstanding the drafts which they have received.’

Once a division had been engaged, Haig told the King, ‘all ranks quickly get to know what fighting really means, the necessity for keeping close to our barrage to escape loss and ensure success, and many other important details which can only be really appreciated by troops under fire! The men too having beaten the Germans once gain confidence in themselves and feel no shadow of doubt that they can go on beating him.’

Among the German regiments brought as reinforcements to the Somme for the fighting in October was the List Regiment. A German corporal, Adolf Hitler, who was a dispatch runner with the regiment, was later to recall this fierce conflict in his memoirs. ‘At the end of September, 1916,’ he wrote nine years later, ‘my division moved into the Battle of the Somme. For us it was the first of the tremendous battles of materiel which now followed, and the impression was hard to describe – it was more like hell than war.’

Hitler’s account in his book Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’) continued, ‘Under a whirlwind of drumfire that lasted for weeks, the German front held fast, sometimes forced back a little, then again pushing forward, but never wavering.’ On October 7, a British shell penetrated his dispatch runners’ dugout and exploded. Several of his fellow runners were killed. Hitler was wounded in the left thigh. After treatment in a field hospital he was sent to hospital in Germany, at Beelitz, near Berlin. Later he was assigned to light duty in Munich, but after five months asked to go back to the front. Permission was granted.

 

To help bring a vast quantity of supplies up to the front – weapons, ammunition, barbed wire, food and clothing – across the areas that had been captured from the Germans, a series of light railways was being constructed. By the first week of October several of these railways were in operation. One ran from Albert to the British military cemetery that had been established near Pozières. Another ran from the River Ancre up Nab Valley to Mouquet Farm. A third railway – broad gauge, and thus capable of taking heavier loads – ran from Dernancourt to Trones Wood, serving both British and French needs. Its last section was completed on October 4.

 

Each week soldiers were taken out of the line and back to rest areas. In the first week of October the 1st Battalion, Northamptonshire Regiment, was at Acheux-en-Vimeux, thirty miles from Albert and less than eight miles from the English Channel – ‘in some lousy old stables of a farm’, grumbled Private Bernard Whayman. A few dozen of those at rest were sent to attend a bombing school at nearby Frières. Whayman later commented, ‘as we had all thrown plenty of live bombs this seemed superfluous.’

There was another hazard. ‘Unfortunately,’ Whayman explained, ‘we had two men killed here by an instantaneous burst when throwing, caused by a flaw in the casting. They were buried in the churchyard at Acheux.’ Also buried there is Private Alexander Scott, killed in action nearby in May 1940.

 

On October 5, the 11th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, was ordered to take up its position in the front line that night, facing the German-held village of Le Sars. In the battalion was Second Lieutenant Eric Poole, who had earlier been knocked unconscious by a shell explosion, hospitalized for a month with shell shock, and declared unfit for further front-line service. That decision was later overturned, and he was sent back to his battalion. Instead of going up the line on October 5, Poole disappeared for two days. His battalion attacked north of Le Sars, losing 8 officers and 217 other ranks in an attack that achieved its objective.

When Poole was court-martialled, the arresting officer told the court that he had found him ‘in a confused state of mind’. The battalion medical officer spoke sympathetically about his previous shell shock, suggesting that the battle conditions on October 5 might have caused him to ‘succumb to such a condition’. Poole was sentenced to death, with no recommendation for mercy. Despite an appeal for the commutation of his sentence from his brigadier general, he was executed. His army death certificate states, ‘Shot for desertion’. His father was told that he had died of wounds. He was buried far from the Somme, in the Poperinghe New Military Cemetery, Ypres.

 

In the early afternoon of October 7, the Fourth Army attacked the Transloy Ridge. One French and six British divisions took part. The French under General Fayolle, using the British artillery-barrage system, advanced almost to Sailly-Saillisel. The Fourth Army took the village of Le Sars, straddling the Albert–Bapaume road. But the Transloy Line was unbroken. One reason for the failure was noted by the commander of XV Corps, General du Cane, who wrote in his corps war diary, ‘Perhaps all concerned were too optimistic owing to previous successes.’

General Gough had another criticism of one sector of the line – that from which the Canadian 3rd Division was to advance. ‘In some parts’, he told Haig the next day, ‘they had not left their trenches for the attack.’ The Canadian 1st Division, which had attacked north-west of Le Sars, had gained some trenches but ‘been driven out again’. In many sectors of the Canadian advance the preliminary British artillery had failed to cut the German wire. In some places the Germans had filled the gaps in the wire by pushing new barbed wire into No-Man’s Land just as the Canadians were going over the top. Almost all the Canadians who reached the German wire were shot by German machine-gun fire before they could try to cross it.

The 12th Battalion, London Regiment – The Rangers, a Territorial battalion – also took part in the attack of October 7. The Rangers’ war history described the scene: ‘October 7th 1916 was a disastrous day for the Rangers and for many others. The attack of the Brigade on our left failed as also did that of the troops on our right. The weather was appalling – the ground was greasy and slippery with recent rain and there was more than one subsequent abortive attack after we were relieved before the position was finally won.’

Among those fatally wounded during this attack was twenty-seven-year-old Sergeant Frederick Coulson, in peacetime a Reuters news-agency correspondent, who had refused an officer’s commission on the grounds that he preferred to ‘do the thing fairly. I will take my place in the ranks.’ He is buried in Grove Town Cemetery, Méaulte, just south of Albert. A week before his death he had written to his father, ‘If I should fall do not grieve for me. I shall be one with the wind and the sun and the flowers.’ After his death a poem entitled ‘Who made the Law?’ was found among his possessions, and sent back to his family. The first two stanzas read:

Who made the Law that men should die in meadows?

Who spake the word that blood should splash in lanes?

Who gave it forth that gardens should be bone-yards?

Who spread the hills with flesh, and blood, and brains?

Who made the Law?

Who made the Law that Death should stalk the village?

Who spake the word to kill among the sheaves,

Who gave it forth that death should lurk in hedgerows,

Who flung the dead among the fallen leaves?

Who made the Law?

In the 56th Division’s attack on the Transloy Ridges on October 7, heavy rain had turned the fields into liquid mud. Reading the reports of the fighting, Lord Cavan, whose XIV Corps included the 56th Division, questioned whether the continuous effort was worth the loss in men.

Inexorably, the losses of battle were mounting. At their talk on October 8, Haig advised Gough that he should ‘hold back from the fight the best drill sergeants in a battalion because they cannot be replaced now’. Senior officers were also at risk. On October 7, Brigadier General Philip Howell, the General Staff Officer of V Corps, had been killed instantly by a shell fragment that struck him in the back while he was walking through Authuille village, more than three miles behind the front line. He was thirty-seven years old. His grave is in the Varennes Military Cemetery, just south of the Doullens–Albert road.

 

The heroism of war was inextricably bound up with its horrors. On October 8 a Scottish-born Canadian soldier, Piper John Richardson, having played his company over the top near Morval, saw that the men were being held up by the strong German wire and intense machine-gun fire. Determined to help maintain the fighting spirit of the men, he reached the German wire and, in the words of his Victoria Cross citation, ‘strode up and down’ in front of it, ‘coolly playing his pipes’. The citation continues, ‘Inspired by his music and his bravery, the company rushed the wire with such ferocity that the position was captured.’

On the following day, October 9, while carrying a wounded man 200 yards back from the front line, Richardson realized that he had left his pipes behind. Returning to get them, he was killed. His grave, marked with the insignia of the Victoria Cross, is in the Adanac Military Cemetery.

 

On October 9, in London, the War Committee noted a communication from Haig urging the continuation of the Somme offensive ‘without intermission’. The committee made no comment. On the Somme, the Canadian effort continued for four days, with small gains made but no breakthrough until October 11. That day a Canadian soldier, Private Earl Hembroff, who was serving with the Canadian Field Ambulance, described in his diary a captured German trench being used as part of an advance dressing station to which the wounded were being brought. It had earlier been the scene of a desperate struggle. ‘Dead lying all over, especially in pieces as shells persist in bringing them to the surface. Bodies in chamber all blackened from smoke bomb. One Tommy with arms around Boche as in a deadly struggle.’ Chaplains buried the dead at night. The troops were exhausted, ‘and some of the biggest cried like babies’.

That day, a British visitor, Viscountess D’Abernon, reached the town of Albert, seven miles behind the front lines. ‘I left Paris full of eagerness and excitement to see the British Front, where, up to the present, no women visitors had been allowed,’ she wrote in her diary. Looking over the battlefield with her military escort, General Davidson, ‘we saw the whole Pozières–Thiepval horizon come under a barrage of German fire.’ For more than an hour she watched the bombardment. ‘Several of our aeroplanes came over, making for hangars, many miles behind, and tales were told of gallant deeds and especially of the prowess of a young fellow, named Albert Ball, who has just brought down his thirtieth Boche aeroplane, is aged nineteen, and lives to tell the tale’.

Ball was killed in action on 7 May 1917. He was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for his conspicuous bravery during the eleven days before his death. He was buried in Annoeullin Communal Cemetery, behind German lines: one of twenty-three Britons among 1,600 Germans.

 

Lady D’Abernon’s visit on October 11 was remarkable. ‘We stood for a long while riveted by the strange Satanic scene,’ she wrote, ‘but, at last, it was a relief to turn away. The ground which we were treading, the shellholes we avoided, are broken patches of the battlefield of only a short month ago. It was here and then that Raymond Asquith’s brilliant promise was extinguished and my dear nephew, Charles Feversham, was killed, and on the grey horizon beyond Albert there are, at this moment, thousands of fellow-countrymen, their trenches the playground for shells bursting so thickly and continuously that General Davidson thought they must herald an impending attack. The scene had a Lucifer, Prince of Darkness kind of splendour, but uppermost in my mind was a sense of the wickedness and waste of life, the lack of any definite objective commensurate with all this destruction, desolation and human suffering.’

Lady D’Abernon was taken to a casualty clearing station. ‘The beds are very small,’ she wrote, ‘and have only one regulation blanket on the top of the coarsest of unbleached sheets. In the officers’ tent the only difference made (but religiously observed) is that a coloured cotton quilt instead of a white one covers the regulation blanket. Except for this mark of somewhat chilly, comfortless distinction, everything is identical. In the officers’tent the faces were, almost without exception, the faces of mere boys. Special tents are set apart for the abdominal wounds, for chest wounds, for eyes, for gas-gangrene, etc., and of course separate tents for the Boches. Amongst these, one lonely figure, still on a forgotten stretcher, was lying with his face turned to the wall. Unlike others he did not speak nor even look round as we passed through, and remains in memory a lonely pathetic figure.’

 

The soldiers in their rest billets had a brief respite from the battle. As it had been before the Big Push, Amiens was a favourite watering hole for officers. Among them was Captain Theodore Percival Cameron Wilson, who wrote:

Lord! How we laughed in Amiens!

For there were useless things to buy.

And still we laughed in Amiens

As dead men laughed a week ago.

What cared we if in Delville Wood

The splintered trees saw hell below?

We cared. We cared. But laughter runs

The cleanest stream a man may know

To rinse him from the taint of guns.

Wilson survived the Somme, but not the war. Killed in March 1918, his name is on the Arras Memorial to the Missing.