As the allied artillery lifted, the stout-hearted Germans ran up the dug-out steps and soon the rattle of machine-guns was heard amid the thunder of field and heavy artillery. How well we got to know the sound of that gun, a little slower than our own and with, it always seemed, a slight stutter in its burst of fire! Into this storm marched the infantry.
South of the Somme the French gained a brilliant and complete success. Some British historians have ungraciously asserted that this was because the Germans did not expect them to attack at all after their losses at Verdun, but it is clear from German accounts that such was not the case. Their tremendous superiority in heavy artillery, which resulted in the pulverizing of large sections of the German defences, had something to do with it, but they merit the credit due to speed, dash, and tactical brains. As on many occasions in this battle, their formations were less rigid than those of the British and proved less easy targets. The single French corps north of the Somme also did well, as did Sir Walter Congreve’s XIII Corps next to it, capturing Montauban and smashing a German counter-attack to fragments. In the orders of this corps the sentence appears: ‘The field artillery barrage will creep back by short lifts.’ This is the first British mention of the ‘creeping’ or ‘rolling’ barrage, which shortly afterwards became a matter of standard practice, though constantly developed. The main object was to keep the defenders’ heads down till the last moment. Only in the XIII Corps was it used on 1 July. The next corps farther north had a partial success at Mametz.
This was all. On nearly half the allied front and three-quarters of the British there was at most temporary progress. The rest of the story is complete and bloody defeat. Heroic deeds were performed all along the battlefield, but heroism was not enough. The resistance was very stout. The German artillery was crippled, so that the defence fell largely upon the machine-guns, and it was the machine-gunners, perhaps only a hundred teams and guns doing the real work, who kept the front from breaking in pieces. The British losses were 57,470, of whom 19,240 were killed or died of wounds. The German losses were much lighter, though still heavy. One division immediately south of the Somme, relieved next day, suffered a loss of 5,148; another, facing the British right and French left, relieved on 4 July, a loss of 4,187.1
Haig must have been bitterly disappointed that night, but he was not yet aware of the terrible total of his losses. On discovering them and the vast expenditure of ammunition on 1 July, he decided to confine the offensive for the present to his right, where he had success to exploit. He placed General Sir Hubert Gough in command of a new army, later numbered the Fifth, astride the Ancre.
How was one to cross the fire-beaten ground and get to close quarters with the enemy? Rawlinson showed imagination and daring in his solution. After fierce local fighting bringing only small gains, he launched an attack, four divisions abreast in darkness in the early hours of 14 July. The objective was the Bazentin Ridge, on the forward slope of which ran the German second position. The ground was fairly open, but the risk of troops swerving off their true line of advance or of being caught by daylight without cover were scaring, so much so that the French left would not take part. Careful leadership brought it off. Some six thousand yards of the second position were captured, without undue loss. The Germans hurried forward three divisions, all their available reserve at the moment, to plug the breach. Six days later the French XX Corps captured a strong intermediate position between Maurepas and the Somme.
German reinforcements were now coming in fast, particularly artillery units and extra guns to replace those captured or destroyed. The number of corps and divisions engaged became too great for one army headquarters to control. Below’s command was therefore limited to the north side of the Somme and Germany’s best general-utility man, General von Gallwitz—he had within the past twelve months held commands in Russia, in the Balkans, and at Verdun—took over south of the river. He was also given command of both armies as a group.
The success of 14 July had re-created hopes in many British minds. The carnage that bought so little, the deadening influence of a war of attrition, were not, it seemed, inevitable. If the fortunes of the next big thrust, farther north along the ridge by Pozières, were to be as fair as those of the last the chances of such a happy development would look good.
No, it could not be done. Rawlinson’s effort on 23 July was a failure. The sole success, and a fine one, was on Gough’s front, the capture of Pozières itself by the two Australian divisions of the I Anzac Corps. The corps, commanded by a British officer whom the Australians were happy to serve under, Lieut.-General Sir William Birdwood, had only just arrived from Egypt. Elsewhere it was all death, taking, losing, and retaking the remnants of woods or pulverized villages. Haig had gone over to la guerre d’usure, the warfare of attrition. What is more, he had adopted it more completely than Joffre, who had been a disciple of attrition when Haig was hoping for a break-through and a wheel north-east. Foch, commanding the G.A.N., did not use the word attrition, but he at no time looked forward to a break-through. When the French front was cut down he was deeply disappointed and did not see the value of the offensive, except to ease pressure on Verdun.1 Nearly all his interventions had for their purpose the broadening of attacks to the utmost. He often failed to get his way.
So it went on, Haig imperturbable and nursing the hope that by mid-September the German resistance would be so reduced that a powerful assault might lead to a break-through. August was the month of attrition at its height: continuous, heart-breaking milling at close quarters, minute gains at best, each ending with groups of crumpled corpses strewn about the objectives. The battle was becoming as hideous as Verdun, with the one exception that Verdun was fought in generally bad weather and the Somme in weather generally good, though Verdun ran into summer and the Somme into November. Divisions in which the tattered ranks of the infantry had been filled up again were appearing a second time. The German defence was becoming more and more one of tiny groups of men crouching in shell-holes. It proved effective, though it seared the nerves and exhausted the bodies of those who carried it out.
In the skies the battle was going well for the French and British. The French Nieuport Scout, made available to the British, and then the Spad, also of French design, won the mastery of the air. The German Fokker’s great days were over. The original makeshift British antiaircraft guns—cavalry 13-pdrs. mounted on car chassis—were being replaced by 18-pdrs. bored out to 3-in., excellent guns of their time. Yet for upwards of three months anti-aircraft artillery was needed only to a limited extent by the Allies. Their policy was offensive: the object of their fighters was to allow artillery-contact, reconnaissance, and photographic aircraft to live over the enemy’s lines. The Germans were driven to fight almost entirely on the defensive and suffered in consequence great losses in artillery. But by October the Halberstadt and Albatross had redressed the balance and the German Air Force was going in for contact work in a big way. All in all, however, 1916 was a good year for the R.F.C. and French Air Force. Their infantry owed much to them.
The losses incurred at Verdun and on the Somme, criticism of the conduct of both battles, a great Russian success, and the declaration of war by Rumania had weakened Falkenhayn’s position. The Emperor, who liked and trusted him, defended him firmly. However, the pressure for a change grew when Hindenburg’s staff, inspired by Hoffmann, induced their chief to take part in it—and aim at the succession. They goaded him into threatening his own resignation if his rival were not removed. This would have been a moral shock for all Germany, which regarded the old man as a hero-god, Wotan in human form. After a painful struggle William II gave way: Falkenhayn was dismissed on 29 August. He was succeeded by Hindenburg, with Ludendorff as First Quartermaster-General.1
Falkenhayn did not pass into obscurity and will make further appearances, but this was the end of his power as virtual German Commander-in-Chief and the guiding spirit of the German-Austrian-Turkish-Bulgarian alliance. It may well be that new blood was called for. There may have been greater strategists in the First World War, though he was superlatively good at his best, but there is no more interesting or remarkable figure. No other of anything approaching his position held the doctrine that ‘a good peace’ rather than decisive and overwhelming victory should be the goal. It is true that this doctrine was not based on the virtue or the profundity of the philosopher who argues that excessive force must always be an evil and the bane of him who uses it as well as of him who is subjected to it. Falkenhayn advocated unrestricted submarine war. Had he been 25 per cent stronger he would probably have fought for a military triumph rather than ‘a favourable draw’. And yet perhaps he had an inkling of the subtler and more disputable theory too. He writes in his typically aloof, deadpan third person:
He felt no regret that the burden which had been laid on his shoulders two long years before, at the most critical moment of the war, should be taken off... he believed that he was no longer in a position to do useful service to the Fatherland in his present office.
But it was only with great anxiety that he contemplated the certainty that a change in that office, under the circumstances, must inevitably mean a change of system in the conduct of the war.1
He did not deign to add, nor did he need to: ‘It is you I mean, General Ludendorff.’
When the new régime took over, Falkenhayn and O.H.L. had been installed for about a fortnight at Pless, which he had quitted at the beginning of the Battle of Verdun. His reason for the move was that the situation on the Eastern Front appeared worse than that on the Western—hardly a compliment to the Anglo-French effort. Hindenburg reached Cambrai on 16 September. On the very day of his arrival he issued orders for the construction of a vast new line of defence which would greatly shorten the front and serve for a voluntary withdrawal in case of need—and this was a compliment to Joffre, Foch, and Haig. Meanwhile he had scored a political victory: unified command for Germany over the whole alliance. Conrad was infuriated. Hindenburg, he wrote, was ‘simply a popular cover-name for Ludendorff’, and while Falkenhayn had sought only German ascendancy in the alliance, Ludendorff sought ‘the submission of our monarch to German leadership’; he was said to have asserted that ‘Germany’s victory spoils must be Austria.’2
The Hindenburg-Ludendorff combination did not alter the situation on the Somme. In fact September, particularly the latter half, was for the British the best month of the year. On the 4th the French Tenth Army under General Micheler entered the battle on the French right and the fighting front was extended to some twelve miles south of the Somme. On both banks and on the whole British front to the Ancre the Allies bashed their way forward in fierce and bloody fighting and weather which had turned wet. Then the British took a short breath before the great co-ordinated assault that Haig had prepared. He attacked on 15 September on a ten-mile front from Combles to the Ancre valley beyond Thiepval, with twelve divisions, including the fine Canadian Corps, engaged for the first time in this battle, and the equally fine New Zealand Division. They were faced by six and a half German divisions. This time Haig put in—where they did not break down or even fail to start—thirty-six armoured tracked vehicles, ‘males’ mounting 6-pdr. guns, ‘females’ machine-guns, which in messages about their progress from workshop to railhead had been described as ‘tanks’. That day a page in the annals of warfare was turned.
The first entry recorded promise rather than performance; indeed the results of the fighting made it painfully clear that no break-through would come that autumn. Yet the moral effect—three-quarters of the value of the tank, at all events in that war—was striking. As New Army troops of the 41st Division swarmed, cheering wildly, in the wake of the single tank which passed through the village of Flers, it did look as though the British had got a battle-winner. Haig thought so, and five days later sent home a request for a thousand tanks. Yet the advance, though good, was not sensational—on that and the following days the depth extended to an average of a mile and a half and a good deal more in the centre at Flers. Though the 15th was fine, the ground was sticky from past rains, and further wet days gradually bogged the offensive. The German view is that the defence was ‘virtually broken’ on that day, but the latest batch of divisions formed on Falkenhayn’s initiative and others more or less recovered from the effects of Verdun had provided reinforcements to solidify the front. Micheler’s Tenth Army scored a success, but the capture of Berny and Vermandovillers, five to eight miles respectively south of the Somme, had little effect on the main battle.
Haig has been bitterly reproached for having used his tanks, divulged their existence, and exhausted their strategic surprise value at a moment when he had only a handful, forty-nine in all, available. All the parents and early leaders of the new force were agreed that it should be used in mass. Haig was rash. Yet, while the criticism of experts like Major-General J. F. C. Fuller as a staff officer in tanks and Captain Liddell Hart as a student of war is sound, most of the attacks on Haig have come from those without either knowledge or imagination. This was to be the great blow of the autumn offensive. Haig based high hopes on it, and the German evidence just mentioned shows that they were not ill founded. In any case, how long should he have waited? Six months? Well, just six months later he mustered forty-eight tanks for the Battle of Arras. It might not have been possible to keep the secret so long. Haig made a mistake, but it was, at the time, excusable. Indeed, some Tank Corps officers considered in retrospect that the experience gained outweighed the disclosure.1
Haig may no longer have counted on a break-through, but he had no intention of relaxing the pressure. In fact, he hoped to extend the attack far north of the Ancre again. The next attack, on 25 September, had results similar to the last. The chief British prizes, if such they can be called, were the villages of Morval and Les Bœufs. Thiepval, now with hardly a stone standing on another but with many deep cellars in the chalk intact, was stormed on the 27th. It had been held with wonderful tenacity. The British had come to regard it as a site accursed, and few so small can have spirted forth death to so many.
The weather had now completely broken and the battlefield became a wilderness of mud. The mud of the Somme is notorious, but rather less so than that of Ypres next year. The connoisseurs, survivors of both battles, are not all agreed that Ypres should prevail. Ypres the more holding, but the Somme the more slippery is one verdict. Men were frequently so deeply bogged that it took an hour or more to dig them out. In these circumstances Haig’s plan to capture the high ground south of the Ancre known as Transloy Ridges and those on the north bank could be effected only by a succession of small attacks with limited objectives and at high cost.
At the instance of Joffre the attack was continued after even Haig would have closed it down for the winter. And then, as late as 13 November, Gough won a battle which Ludendorff has called ‘a particularly heavy blow’ to the Germans. The ground had dried a little; Gough had concentrated exceptional weight of artillery; and he had driven a mine-shaft under a strong point in the German trenches. On the dark morning of 13 November, in dank, clinging fog, seven divisions went forward to the assault astride the Ancre, two south of the river. The mine destroyed a considerable number of the defenders in its neighbourhood. On the left two divisions failed, but the other five advanced three quarters of a mile and upwards, capturing the field fortress of Beaumont-Hamel. Twelve hundred prisoners were taken out of this place alone. The troops were astounded by what they found: underground refuges, some two stories deep, fitted with bunks, tables, and chairs and lit by electricity; stocks of canned meat, sardines, cigars and thousands of bottles of beer. Next day Beaucourt, in the Ancre valley, was stormed and more ground was gained south of the river on the 18th. But a blizzard that day and rain the next brought the offensive to an end. The Battle of the Somme was over.
There have been disputes about the casualty figures, the critics of Haig and Joffre striving to make the most of them. Those given by the British official historian are British 418,654 and. French 194,451, a total for the western Allies of 613,105; German 650,000. The German total is an estimate, whereas the British and French figures are as precise as research could make them. British divisions engaged numbered fifty-five (including four Canadian, four Australian, and one New Zealand), French twenty, and German ninety-five. A considerable number of these had a second spell and a few came in three times.
The French fought finely on the Somme, but after the first short phase it was largely a British battle. From the British point of view this battle was fought in the wrong place—where there were no strategic objectives—and at the wrong time—before sufficient resources had been gathered. The lack of heavy artillery on and before 1 July was a main factor in the failures of that day. The British started with one heavy or medium gun or howitzer per 57 yards, as against the French scale of one to twenty. On the British front the deep dug-outs were nearly all intact after the bombardment, whereas on the French a considerable number had been destroyed. Defective ammunition—‘dud’ shells which did not explode—added to the trouble. It would be absurd to argue that there would have been a break-through, perhaps even that the battle would have been a satisfactory one but for these handicaps, but it would certainly have been more successful. This was an offensive on a front undisturbed for nearly two years, on which the defenders had worked like beavers, very different from the half-dug trenches at Verdun, a legacy of slackness and over-confidence.
The British tactics were in the main clumsy, lacking the skill shown by the Germans at Verdun—the evidence of study and German comparisons between British and French troops point to the same conclusions here. The British Army was, as pointed out, largely an amateur force and its tactical instructors were too stiff and conventional. Yet for determination and devotion the army that fought on the Somme has never been surpassed. Many Germans, foremost among them Ludendorff, have borne witness to the weight of the blows delivered on the Somme and their effects upon the defending German forces. One consequence was to be the retreat to the Hindenburg Line, another the peace proposals of December, though here the summer victory of Brusilov in Russia played its part. In view of the later achievements of the German Army the claims of Joffre and Haig to have worn it down have been derided, but they are supported by admissions from the German side. The loss in officers and under-officers was particularly damaging.
Only high hearts, splendid courage, and the enormous endurance of the flower of the nations of the British and French Empires engaged could have won the results attained. Only wonderful powers of resistance by the Germans could have limited them to what they were.