15
The soldiers’ sacrifice: ‘What else had they been born for?’
ON 12 OCTOBER 1916, in a renewed attempt to break through the German lines, Lord Cavan launched an attack on the XIV Corps front towards the Transloy Ridges beyond Gueudecourt. In Haig’s words, it ‘was not altogether a success’. One reason was that the Germans had sited their machine guns not in the front line – where they could have been vulnerable to the British artillery barrage as it moved forward in front of the attacking troops – but 500 to 800 yards in the rear. When the attacking troops reached the German trenches, the machine guns opened fire, intact in their rearward positions. Cavan suggested to Haig, when they met two days later at Méaulte, that the British use smoke shells to mask the advancing troops from these well-sited machine-gunners. But the artillery on the Somme had not been issued with smoke shells.
There were other problems making things difficult for the attackers. The British battalions, which at the beginning of the battle had consisted of a thousand men each, had been so depleted by the losses since July 1 that few of them could muster more than four hundred men for an attack. Many of those who could be mustered were not fully trained. In addition, the essential aeroplane support that enabled the British counter-artillery batteries to locate German artillery in the rear was severely limited by poor visibility.
For the first time since their costly struggle on July 1, the 1st Battalion, Newfoundland Regiment, was among those in action on October 12 in the attack on the German front line just north of Gueudecourt. The British were experimenting with a creeping barrage, whereby the men moved forward behind a steadily advancing curtain of explosions designed to pulverize the German wire and to stun the German soldiers. The barrage was timed to go forward in lifts of fifty yards each minute. But, in the words of the Newfoundlanders’ official historian, ‘in their eagerness to get to the grips of the enemy many pressed ahead through the curtain of fire; and platoons of the supporting companies, treading impatiently on the heels of those in front, became mixed with the leading waves, the result being partial loss of control.’
More than one in ten of the attackers were killed by this barrage, as they moved forward too quickly, or as shells fell short. Among the advancing Newfoundlanders was eighteen-year-old Lance Corporal Raymond Goodyear. It was his first battle. As he ran forward, he seemed to stumble and fall; his captain turned to help him up, then saw that Goodyear had been hit by a shellburst just below the waist. The historian of the Goodyear family, David Macfarlane, writes: ‘For a moment his round blackened face looked puzzled beneath his oversized tin hat. He didn’t seem to realize what had happened. He’d been ripped open as if he’d run into the full swing of an axe.’ Goodyear is buried in the Bancourt British Cemetery beyond Bapaume.
Despite running into their own artillery barrage, and also being hit by shells falling short, the Newfoundlanders advanced 600 yards, halfway to their objective, and then drove back a German counter-attack with sustained Lewis-and Vickers-gun fire. But they could advance no further. The German High Command had made special efforts to strengthen what it called ‘the apparently insatiable Somme front’. Among the German troops defending the Transloy Ridges was the 6th Brandenburg Division, known as the Iron Division.
Despite failing to reach their objective, the Newfoundlanders had made a greater advance into the German lines than any other unit advancing that day. They had killed an estimated 250 Germans, taken some 75 prisoners, and captured 3 German machine guns. The historian of the Newfoundland Regiment points out that ‘there was keen satisfaction’ in the regiment that ‘in some measure the losses of Beaumont Hamel had been avenged.’ Their losses in the Transloy battle had been 120 dead and 119 wounded. It was their second and last battle on the Somme; following this second encounter with the Germans they were relieved by an Australian division and sent back to billets at Ville-sur-Ancre, a mile and a half south of Albert.
Another of those killed on October 12 in the unsuccessful attack on the Transloy Ridges was a New Zealand artilleryman, Gunner Ernest Piner, aged twenty-nine, who, like many of the Newfoundlanders, had fought at Gallipoli. He is buried in the Dartmoor Cemetery, near Albert. Also killed that day was Second Lieutenant Donald Hankey, 1st Battalion, Royal Warwickshire Regiment. Hankey’s body was never identified; his name is inscribed on the Thiepval Memorial. His father, later Lord Hankey, a former Royal Marine, was the Secretary to the British Cabinet, and to the War Committee.
Since the autumn of 1915, Second Lieutenant Hankey had written articles in the Spectator magazine, signed ‘A Student in Arms’, that had made him, in the words of his Spectator obituary, a ‘liaison officer between the nation and its Army’. In his last letter he had written of the pleasure he felt in going back to the trenches, and the opportunity he would have ‘of testing once more in practice’ the theories he had about ‘the fear of death’. That letter was printed in the Spectator after Hankey’s death. In it he wrote of those who were killed, ‘They did not value life! They had not been able to make much of a fist of it. But if they lived amiss they died gloriously, with a smile for the pain and the dread of it. What else had they been born for? It was their chance. With a gay heart they gave their greatest gift, and with a smile to think that after all they had anything to give that was of value. One by one Death challenged them. One by one they smiled in his grim visage, and refused to be dismayed. They had been lost, but they had found the path that led them home; and when at last they laid their lives at the feet of the good shepherd, what could they do but smile?’
Haig’s plan for a breakthrough to the Canal du Nord and Cambrai had failed. As winter approached, the generals tried to find a balance between what could be done and what they felt ought to be done. ‘The bad weather which has forced us to slow down’, General Rawlinson wrote in his diary on October 14, ‘has given the Boche a breather. His artillery is better organised, and his infantry is fighting with greater tenacity, but deserters continue to come in; and, the more we bombard, the more prisoners and deserters we shall get. I should like therefore to be more or less aggressive all the winter, but we must not take the edge off next year.’
In his official history of the Battle of the Somme, Captain Wilfrid Miles wrote of how, by the middle of October, ‘conditions on and behind the battle-front 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 shellhole positions.’ Objectives could not always be identified from ground level, ‘so that it is no matter for surprise or censure that the British artillery sometimes fired short or placed its barrages too far ahead’.
Bursts of high explosive, Captain Miles wrote, ‘were smothered in the ooze; many guns had been continuously in action for over two months and were too worn for accurate fire; and in some partially flooded battery positions sinking platforms had to be restored with any battle debris which came to hand.’ The mud was so deep that in order to move a single eighteen–pounder gun ‘ten or twelve horses were often needed, and, to supplement the supplies brought by light-railway and pack-horse, 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.’
On October 18, Rawlinson’s Fourth Army launched a second major attack on the Transloy Ridge. Continuing bad weather made British artillery support difficult, but during the advance a thousand German soldiers were captured – a boost to the morale of the attackers. Later that day Haig wrote to the King, ‘The Fourth Army attacked in places this morning at 3.45 a.m. to straighten up their line with a view to getting into a more suitable position for a more serious effort later on…The ground was very slippery and unfavourable for the advance of infantry. However, the majority of objectives for this morning’s attack were at no great distance, and about 60 per cent of them were taken. In many places the enemy is reported as running away as soon as our infantry were seen advancing!’
On the French sector of the attack of October 18, the French forces entered Sailly-Saillisel village, but failed to take that part of the village from which there was a view of the next line of German trenches. Haig told the King, ‘There is no doubt that the French have not really exerted themselves on the north of the Somme: but then they rather meant to save their troops and avoid casualties in view of their losses at Verdun, and previously.’
A new British force was being made ready for the Somme: the Royal Naval Division, soldiers who had fought at Antwerp in October 1914, keeping the Germans from a sweep to the Channel ports, and then at Gallipoli. On October 18 they were put into the line facing Beaumont-Hamel, with their right flank on the River Ancre, in preparation for a major attack. A new commanding officer was sent to lead them, Major General Cameron Shute. His reiterated complaints about the state of their trenches, their weapons and their equipment grated on these battle-hardened men, one of whom, Sub-Lieutenant A. P. Herbert – later a distinguished humorist, writer and parliamentarian – wrote a poem that the men sang with glee, albeit only when Shute was not around:
The general inspecting the trenches
Exclaimed with a horrified shout,
‘I refuse to command a division
Which leaves its excreta about.’
But nobody took any notice,
No one was prepared to refute,
That the presence of shit was congenial
Compared with the presence of Shute.
And certain responsible critics
Made haste to reply to his words,
Observing that his staff advisors
Consisted entirely of turds.
For shit may be shot at odd corners
And paper supplied there to suit,
But a shit would be shot without mourners
If somebody shot that shit Shute.
As the rain continued to churn up the clay and mud of the Somme into glutinous slurry, efforts were made to hold the trenches that had been gained and make it possible to bring supplies forward. To supply the troops in the captured areas, more than 120 miles of water pipes were laid, and a hundred water-pumping plants were erected. Road surfaces were prepared to enable motor cars, motor lorries, motor ambulances and motor cycles, as well as horse-drawn vehicles, to traverse the battle-battered zone. By the end of October, the 7th Field Company, Royal Engineers, had completed eight more miles of prefabricated tramway tracks in two lines across the former battlefields: one from Contalmaison to beyond Martinpuich, and the other from Mametz Wood to High Wood. The officer in charge of this endeavour was Lieutenant John Glubb, who thirty years later was to be the commander of the Arab Legion.
On October 21, Edmund Blunden took part in a massive four-division, 48,000-man assault on the German-held Regina Trench and Stuff Trench. It was the coldest day since the battle had begun on July 1: the first day on which the temperature fell below zero degrees Centigrade. Even the ubiquitous mud was frozen. Six minutes after midday, the British artillery bombardment began. Then the infantrymen went forward. The action against Stuff Trench, the objective of Blunden’s battalion, was successful – ‘the first in which our battalion had seized and held any of the German area,’ he later wrote, ‘and the cost had been enormous; a not intemperate pride glowed among the survivors, but that natural vanity was held in check by the fact that we were not yet off the battlefield.’
Blunden’s battalion then went into a quieter section of the line, the trenches around Thiepval Wood. ‘The land in front was full of the dead of July 1,’ he recalled.
During the assault on Regina Trench and Stuff Trench on October 21, Second Lieutenant Tolkien was with his communications equipment and runners in the British front-line Hessian Trench. After the first two waves of infantrymen went over the top, Tolkien’s signallers followed in the third. Following them was the chaplain, Evers, and the stretcher-bearers. Within half an hour, the first German prisoners had been brought back to Hessian Trench.
Tolkien’s signallers had done their work well. At 1.12 p.m., when the Lancashire Fusiliers raised their red flags in Regina Trench, Tolkien knew that they had achieved their objective. But a heavy German artillery bombardment from far behind the lines caused a high toll of the wounded British soldiers in No-Man’s Land. At one point the signaller carrying the battalion’s pigeon basket was hit. Another man rescued the basket and its pigeons, bringing them back to Hessian Trench. A pigeon was then sent back to brigade headquarters with the message that Regina Trench had been captured.
It was on the following day that Chaplain Evers walked back into Hessian Trench, covered in blood. He had spent the night in No-Man’s Land in the fierce cold, under German artillery fire, tending the wounded and comforting the dying.
Haig was confident that a final offensive could push the Germans back even further – perhaps even as far as Bapaume, just over three miles beyond the new British front line. On October 18 the writer and poet John Masefield had visited him at Val Vion to ask if he could write an account of the battle for the British public. Masefield was impressed by this ‘wonderful’ man: ‘No enemy could stand against such a man. He took my breath away.’ In the book he agreed to write, which was published in 1917 as The Old Front Line, Masefield noted Haig’s ‘fine delicate gentleness and generosity’, his ‘pervading power’ and his ‘height of resolve’.
A less favourable portrait was penned by the future crime writer Dennis Wheatley, who served in the Royal Field Artillery in the First World War, and who wrote of Haig in his memoirs, ‘He was a pleasant, tactful, competent, peacetime soldier devoted to his duty, but he had a rooted dislike of the French and was not even a second-rate General. Many of the high-ups were well aware of that, but the question had always been, with whom could they replace him?’
Winston Churchill also left a portrait in words of the British Commander-in-Chief. It described the time in 1917–18 when Churchill, as Minister of Munitions, visited Haig on a number of occasions at Haig’s headquarters at Saint-Omer. After describing the participation of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, in the heat of battle at the beginning of the eighteenth century, Churchill reflected on how ‘All this was quite different from the trials of our latter-day generals. We will not belittle them, but they were the trials of mind and spirit working in calm surroundings, often beyond even the sound of the cannonade. There are no physical disturbances: there is no danger: there is no hurry.’ Churchill went on to explain, ‘The generalissimo of an army of two million men, already for ten days in desperate battle, has little or nothing to do except to keep himself fit and cool. His life is not different, except in its glory, from that of a painstaking, punctual public official, and far less agitating than that of a Cabinet Minister who must face an angry Chamber on the one hand or an offended party upon the other.’
There was ‘no need for the modern commander to wear boots and breeches’, Churchill wrote: ‘he will never ride a horse except for the purposes of health. In the height of his largest battles, when twenty thousand men are falling every day, time will hang heavy on his hands. The heads of a dozen departments will from hour to hour discreetly lay significant sheets of paper on his desk. At intervals his staff will move the flags upon his map, or perhaps one evening the Chief of the Staff himself will draw a blue line or a brown line or make a strong arrow upon it. His hardest trials are reduced to great simplicity. “Advance”, “Hold”, or “Retreat”. “There are but ten divisions left in reserve: shall we give three today to the beseeching, clamouring battle-zone, or keep them back till to-morrow or the day after? Shall we send them in trains to the north or to the south?”’
The modern Commander-in-Chief’s ‘personal encounters’, Churchill noted, ‘are limited to an unpleasant conversation with an Army commander who must be dismissed, an awkward explanation to a harassed Cabinet, or an interview with a representative of the neutral Press. Time is measured at least by days and often by weeks. There is nearly always leisure for a conference even in the gravest crises.’ It was ‘not true’, Churchill concluded, ‘that the old battle has merely been raised to a gigantic scale. In the process of enlargement the sublime function of military genius – perhaps happily – has been destroyed for ever.’
Churchill also wrote about Haig in an obituary article in Pall Mall magazine in November 1928, twelve years after the Battle of the Somme. It was a stern assessment. ‘He does not appear to have had any original ideas,’ Churchill wrote. ‘No one can discern a spark of that mysterious, visionary, often sinister genius which has enabled the great captains of history to dominate the material factors, save slaughter, and confront their foes with the triumph of novel apparitions. He was, we are told, quite friendly to the tanks, but the manoeuvre of making them would never have occurred to him. He appeared at all times quite unconscious of any theatre but the Western Front. There were the Germans in their trenches. Here he stood at the head of an army corps, then of an army, and finally of a group of mighty armies. Hurl them on and keep slogging at it in the best possible way – that was war. It was undoubtedly one way of making war, and in the end there was certainly overwhelming victory. But these truisms will not be accepted by history as exhaustive.’
As Churchill had written, Haig’s responsibilities were not to be belittled. They included the smooth working of a massive effort behind the front line. ‘The working of the railways, the upkeep of the roads, even the baking of bread and a thousand other industries go on in peace as well as in war!’he noted in his diary. In an attempt to improve the communications system behind the lines, on October 20 a leading British civil engineer, Henry Maybury, was appointed Director of Roads for the British Expeditionary Force. ‘To put soldiers into such positions, merely because they are generals and colonels,’ Haig noted in his diary, ‘would be to ensure failure!’ To give Maybury the authority he needed to deal with those ‘soldiers’, Haig appointed him brigadier general.
Two days after Maybury’s appointment, the First Lord of the Admiralty, A. J. Balfour, a former Prime Minister, who was visiting the Western Front, called at Val Vion. Haig was relieved to learn that Balfour no longer supported the primacy of the Balkan theatre of operations, as he had done earlier because, as Balfour explained to his host, ‘he then thought the German front in France could not be pierced’. ‘Now’, Haig noted, ‘our successes proved that his opinion was wrong.’
On the following day, October 23, General Joffre was the luncheon guest at Val Vion. Haig noted in his diary, ‘He did full justice to a good lunch and then we had a talk for an hour or more. He gave me his views on the general situation and agreed with me that we must continue to press the Enemy here on the Somme battle front throughout the winter. There must be no reduction of strength on this battle front, so that whenever the weather is fine, we can carry out an attack without any delay to concentrate troops etc.’
On October 26, with rain still falling, Haig instructed Gough to plan the next offensive as soon as possible. ‘We agreed that we should watch the weather,’ Haig wrote in his diary that day, ‘and be able to put his plans into execution after 3 fine days.’ That same day Haig rode around the billets of the 25th Division, meeting the three brigadiers and most of the battalion commanders, and shaking hands with and congratulating ‘four or five NCOs and men in each battalion who were brought to my notice as having performed specially good service’.
The last billets that Haig visited that day were at Beauval, just south of Doullens. ‘I was much struck’, he wrote in his diary, ‘by the small size and generally poor physique of the men in this division, yet no division has done better or seen more hard fighting.’ Also at Beauval was Casualty Clearing Station No. 4. At the time of Haig’s visit, a second casualty clearing station had just been opened there, No. 27. In the nearby Beauval Communal Cemetery are 248 First World War burials.
Among the troops whom Haig inspected and thanked on October 26 were the men of the 11th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers, who had taken part in the capture of Regina Trench. On the day after the inspection, the signalling officer, Second Lieutenant Tolkien, reported sick with a temperature of 103. It was ‘trench fever’, a bacterium that enters the bloodstream through the burrowing of the eager, ever-present lice. He was sent to the officers’ hospital at Gézaincourt, his fighting days at an end.
After his meeting with Haig on October 18, John Masefield had gone forward with an army escort into the battle zone. In his book The Old Front Line he described the way up to the trenches. ‘Here and there,’ he wrote, ‘in recesses in the trench, under roofs of corrugated iron covered with sandbags, they passed the offices and the stores of war, telephonists, battalion headquarters, dumps of bombs, barbed wire, rockets, lights, machine-gun ammunition, tins, jars and cases. Many men, passing these things as they went “in” for the first time, felt with a sinking of the heart, that they were leaving all ordered and arranged things, perhaps for ever.’
In some sectors men even passed rows of coffins.
During the fighting on October 26, twenty-year-old Lieutenant Roland Hett, Lincolnshire Regiment, a former pupil at St Edward’s preparatory school, Oxford, was badly wounded in the leg. After his wound had been dressed and bound at an advanced dressing station, he was being carried back by stretcher when a shellburst killed him and two of his four stretcher bearers. His name is on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing.
On October 28 the British 33rd Division captured several German trenches north-east of Lesboeufs, an essentially defensive operation. On the following day the German 6th Division was forced to withdraw from the Somme altogether after heavy losses near Gueudecourt, a mile north of Lesboeufs.
Slowly and steadily the British forces moved forward. Small though these advances were, they pushed the British front line three miles in front of its starting point. This created problems of its own. ‘The difficulties of the long carry to this part of our front’, Haig wrote in his diary on October 29, ‘are such that all reserve troops have to be employed. Otherwise necessities such as water, food, ammunition, bombs of all kind etc. cannot be kept up. The carry is roughly 5,000 yards each way. Some packhorses have had to be destroyed owing to being hopelessly bogged. One man does one round journey carrying a load per 24 hours.’
Lord Cavan estimated, so Haig recorded, that a pause of ‘at least four days’ was needed between each offensive operation ‘in order to keep up!’
Haig’s concern with the conditions under which the men were fighting was shown on October 31, when he rode to Reserve Army headquarters at Toutencourt. Lieutenant Colonel Neil Malcolm, Gough’s senior Staff Officer, received him. ‘I wanted definite information’, Haig wrote in his diary, ‘as to the state of the front trenches, and whether the winter leather waistcoats had yet been issued, also whether an extra blanket per man had been sent up. Malcolm assured me that everything possible was being done for the men, but the mud in front was quite terrible. Today, being fine, things were fast improving, and where the 5th Canadians are (north of Le Sars), the ground is fit to attack over.’ The Reserve Army had been given the extra services and Staff ‘to place it on the same footing as the other armies’. Henceforth it would be called the Fifth Army.
Yet another Somme offensive was imminent, the fourth in four months. It awaited only the arrival of better weather. And it would begin in some places as much as five thousand yards from the starting point on July 1; but in one sector, facing Beaumont-Hamel, from the July 1 starting point itself.