Introduction

IN THE EUROPEAN summer of 1916, a few thousand South African men found themselves in muddy trenches along the Somme River in France. They were there out of choice, having volunteered to sail across the sea to fight in the Great War with the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front of Europe. Fired with patriotism, at first they could not wait to get there, but before long they must have wondered what they had got themselves into, as their world shrank to mud and filth, hunger, thirst and exhaustion. The continual crack of bursting shells was a stark reminder that death was their constant companion.

It was a truly dramatic and devastating chapter in twentieth-century history. From Longueval to Cape Town, the war touched the lives and homes of millions of people around the globe, and would never be forgotten by those who lived through its horrors.

The global conflict centred in Europe and commonly known as the Great War broke out on 28 July 1914 and lasted for more than four years, until 11 November 1918. On opposing sides were the Allied Powers, based on the Triple Entente of the United Kingdom, France and Russia, and the Central Powers of Germany and Austria–Hungary. These alliances were expanded as more nations entered the fray, with Italy, Japan and the United States joining the Allies, and the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria joining the Central Powers.

By the end of the First World War, the Allies had mobilised almost 43 million people, while the Central Powers had mobilised just over 25 million. A staggering figure of nearly 10 million combatants were killed.

Underlying the causes of the war was a resurgence of imperialism, but one immediate trigger was the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, on 28 June 1914 in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. He and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead in their motorcade by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip, one of a group of six assassins that included five Serbs and one Bosnian Muslim. During the month that followed, the Allied and Central powers were involved in desperate diplomatic negotiations. Austria-Hungary firmly believed that Serbian military officers of the so-called Black Hand were involved in the plot, and served Serbia with the July Ultimatum consisting of ten demands, intentionally made unacceptable in the hope of provoking war with Serbia. When Serbia agreed to only eight, Austria–Hungary declared war on 28 July. The Russian Empire rallied behind Serbia and started partial mobilisation the very next day.

In response, Germany mobilised on 30 July and, after a tense stand-off, declared war on Russia on 1 August, putting into action its Schlieffen Plan, which involved a ‘wheeling arc’ invasion through Belgium and France, designed to capture Paris before Russia on the Eastern Front could mobilise its forces and before Britain could effectively intervene in France. On 2 August, Germany invaded Luxembourg, and the following day it declared war on France. On 4 August, after Belgium had refused to permit German troops to cross its borders into France, Germany declared war on Belgium. That same day, when Germany failed to give a firm assurance that Belgium would be kept neutral, Britain declared war on Germany. As a dominion of the British Empire, South Africa was now involved in the conflict.

The war was fought on two fronts, a Western Front and an Eastern Front. The latter stretched from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Black Sea in the south, encompassing most of eastern Europe and stretching deep into central Europe. The Western Front extended from the North Sea to the frontiers of Switzerland, and embraced France and Belgium. Across this area, the British Commonwealth and French armies (including the South African forces) faced the German and Austro-Hungarian armies. Their lines were fixed by miles of heavily defended trenches, decorated with barbed wire and machine guns, where soldiers lived and died like rats in their holes.

Futile campaigns to break through these almost impenetrable defences with infantry wielding rifles and bayonets, such as those at the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele, were reminiscent of medieval armies laying siege to their enemies’ fortresses and, predictably, resulted in massive loss of life.

World War I commanders such as Douglas Haig, John French and Ian Hamilton were Imperial soldiers schooled in the relatively archaic theatres of smaller wars like those in the Sudan and South Africa in the late nineteenth century. The industrial–scientific world of the twentieth century placed new weapons at the disposal of military commanders. The machine gun, for example, dominated Western Front battlefields and established a superiority of defence over offence and, along with heavy artillery bombardments and gas, shaped the suffering of both the Allied and German soldier. The massive artillery bombardments that preceded every offensive ploughed up the landscape and destroyed centuries-old drainage systems, creating a no-man’s-land of mud flats and shell-holes that obstructed infantry attacks. The soldiers cowered helplessly in their trenches, waiting for death as shells rained down upon them, before being ordered over the top with fixed bayonets to cross the stretch of noman’s-land in the face of enemy machine-gun and artillery fire.

Terrible casualties characterised every futile offensive. On the first day of the Somme Offensive alone (1 July 1916), 19 240 British soldiers were killed and more than 36 000 were wounded. In the entire five-month battle, more than 300 000 Allied and German soldiers were killed and double that number were wounded.¹ In the 1918 Second Battle of the Somme – the Allied response to the German Spring Offensive launched in March 1918 – the Allies suffered 250 000 casualties and the Germans 240 000. The Battle of Passchendaele, from 31 July to 6 November 1917, claimed over 200 000 Allied casualties and an equivalent number of Germans.

Over 146 000 men served in South African units on three principal fronts. An expeditionary force of 67 000 men was deployed to capture German South-West Africa. An infantry brigade and various other units were sent to France, where they were described by the commander of the British Expeditionary Force, General Douglas Haig, as ‘as fine a unit as there is in the Army’.² And others were involved in the conflict in East Africa. In addition, about 3 000 South Africans joined and served in the Royal Flying Corps.

The South African soldiers are, however, mainly associated with the Battle of the Somme, which took place between 1 July and 18 November 1916 on either side of the River Somme in France. The battle saw the British Expeditionary Force and the French Army mount a joint offensive against the German Army, which had occupied a large part of the north of France since its invasion of that country in August 1914. The plan for the Somme Offensive resulted from Allied discussions at Chantilly, in northern France, in December 1915, where it was agreed that the French, British, Italian and Russian armies would mount a concerted offensive against the Central Powers. The Somme was to be the Anglo-French contribution to this general offensive, intended to create a gap in the German line that could be exploited with a decisive blow. But with Germany’s attack on Verdun in February 1916, the Allies were forced to adapt their plans.

By the end of the Somme campaign in mid-November, British and French forces had penetrated ten kilometres into German occupied territory, but were still five kilometres from their major objective, Bapaume. Over the winter of 1916–17, the German Army maintained much of its front line before withdrawing from the Somme to the fortified Hindenburg Line in February and March 1917.

During the campaign, the South African brigade had been involved in major engagements at places with pleasant-sounding names, such as Bernafay Wood, Longueval, Butte de Warlencourt, Arras and Ypres. But there was nothing pleasant about the horrific and costly battles fought there. By the time the armistice came, the South Africans had suffered some 15 000 casualties in France, including some 5 000 deaths. Total South African casualties during the war amounted to 18 600, of whom more than 6 600 lost their lives.