An unprepared little show
One lesson of the Great War is that any nation, even in times that suggest peace and tranquillity are the norm, needs to cull its military commanders ruthlessly. If it does not, it will one day go off to a big war – most likely one that comes out of nowhere – with its young men being directed by commanders who are out of time and place. Thinking in the upper reaches of the British army had begun to change by 1916. The old generation, the men who were in power, began to realise that an era, and a way of life, leisured and ordered, was ending, although they probably didn’t go about saying so, because that would have also been to say that so much of their lives had been in vain, that the verities they had learned and lived by had diminished relevance in the trenches of the western front. One British regular is supposed to have said: ‘I’ll be glad when this war is over and we can get back to proper soldiering.’ By which he meant horse sports and boisterous nights in the mess, rather than waking before dawn to the smell of whale oil on feet and mildew on sandbags.
The regulars’ world had changed so abruptly. Soldiers in helmets and khaki looked like miners, drab and careworn. The scale of killing was without precedent. Bordino, seventy miles west of Moscow, was the bloodiest battle of the Napoleonic wars with 75,000 casualties. Most of the battles of the 100-or-so years before 1914 had been fought on narrow fronts. Mostly they ended quickly, whereupon the winner imposed a deal on the loser. Mass armies conscripted from millions of civilians were not the norm, least of all in Britain. Neither was attrition. Napoleonic battles had been about colour and lightness of movement, both of which tended to distract from the brutishness that happened at close quarters. Cavalry and infantry had been more important than artillery. Killing was done with muskets at eighty yards and needle bayonets at arm’s length. Communications were seldom a problem. Generals could see where their troops were and direct battles from near the front, often without the need for written orders.
The Great War was a new thing in the world: attrition on a front of 400 miles, hardly any movement, lots of horses but mostly only as baggage animals, killing done from a distance (sometimes as far as twenty miles), men blown into so many pieces that there was nothing to pick up, trenches and tunnels and galleries and saps, massed artillery, mass armies, millions of civilian soldiers, nightmares of supply, administration and communication. The problem of communications was perhaps the worst. Commanding generals, as the historian John Keegan has noted, were now not even spectators. They tried to direct battles they could not see and seldom understood, because the messages coming back from the front were always late and often wrong or ambiguous.
And, as well, there were all these inventions from the industrial age: quick-firing artillery and high-explosive shells, machine guns, railways, traction engines, barbed wire, poison gas, aircraft, telephones, submarines. War, the older generation of soldiers felt, was losing its ‘human element’. Control was passing from gentlemen to technicians. Once the war of movement ended late in 1914 Kitchener said: ‘I don’t know what is to be done – this isn’t war.’
Most of Britain’s generals were in thrall to abstract notions they had absorbed at schools such as Eton, Harrow and Clifton and carried into the army, ideas about pluck and manliness and, above all, the importance of character and the power of will. They were not too much interested in down-to-earth matters, such as how to configure an artillery barrage.
Most were born between 1860 and 1870 and had grown up (and they can hardly be blamed for this) with Victorian values. They were predominately from the upper class (with the exception of Robertson, who came up through the ranks) and, while most had attended the famous public schools, few had gone to university. They liked sports, particularly polo and fox-hunting. Many had been to the staff college at Camberley and perhaps overestimated the quality of the scholarship there. They were not much interested in books or theories. In 1902 the assistant commandant at Woolwich, the academy for officers who would become engineers and artillerymen, said:
We would rather have a classically educated boy than one who has given his mind very much up to Electricity and Physics and those kinds of subjects. We want them to be leaders in the field first … I think the man who has a strong turn for science does not at the same time develop the soldierly side of his nature. Power of command and habits of leadership are not learned in the laboratory … Our great point is character; we care more about that than subjects.
The old guard believed in the cult of the offensive, masses of men closing in with bayonets, even though the Russo–Japanese war of 1904–05 had told them that future wars were going to be about firepower. In 1910 Sir Ian Hamilton, who later commanded at Gallipoli, wrote: ‘War is essentially the triumph, not of a chassepot [a breech-loading rifle closed with a bolt] over a needle-gun, not of a line of men entrenched behind wire entanglements and fireswept zones over men exposing themselves in the open, but of one will over another weaker will.’ Hamilton, courtly, brave, intelligent, a writer of sweet prose, was a poor commander at Gallipoli, weak even. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand modern war. He didn’t want to understand it: to do so would be a betrayal of the human qualities he held dear, an admission that the world of his youth had changed. The old guard was suspicious of citizen and dominion armies and many clung to this prejudice throughout the war, much like unionists forced to work with scabs.
The French generals at the outbreak of war were a touch older on average than their British counterparts, and more reactionary. They believed in attack: that was about the extent of their theory. Their plan, in the event of a German invasion, was to rush east, into their lost province of Lorraine. Charles de Gaulle was there when this happened in August, 1914. ‘With affected calm,’ he wrote, ‘the [French] officers let themselves be killed standing up, some obstinate platoons stuck their bayonets in their rifles, bugles sounded the charge, isolated heroes made fantastic leaps, but all to no purpose. In an instant it had become clear that not all the courage in the world could withstand this fire.’ De Gaulle, a soldier in the line, knew at once that a machine gun spitting out 500 rounds a minute could kill a lot of character. The French went to war dressed for Napoleon: turned-back blue greatcoats and red trousers. Eventually they turned to horizon blue uniforms, which still left them a little more conspicuous than the British in khaki and the Germans in field grey.
Before the Great War was over it would throw up ‘modern’ men, notably the Canadian Arthur Currie and the Australian John Monash. But in 1916, and even though it had seen what machine guns and howitzers could do to men advancing in extended lines, the British army was still running on Victorian and Edwardian values. Among these were courage and high moral purpose, and also cronyism, rivalries that sometimes had a feline edge, and patronage. Birdwood and Ian Hamilton were ‘Kitchener men’; Hubert Gough (commander of the Reserve Army) and Haking were ‘Haig men’.
HAIG WAS FOREVER saying that he liked ‘straight’ men, yet he had worked patronage more deftly than most all through his career. His best patron was King George V, who sometimes put aside the constitutional niceties to support him. The two men were clearly comfortable with each other. ‘No-one would have described George V as an intellectual,’ the historian Robert Rhodes James wrote, ‘indeed he would have been outraged by such a slur, but he was no fool.’ The same things might have been said of Haig. Both were men of simple tastes and a rigid sense of the proprieties. Neither possessed much curiosity. Both could keep their nerve. Both thought the side that showed the most character would win the war. Both were suspicious of ‘clever’ men like Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George and of liberal thought generally. The King had trouble with spelling and punctuation. Haig wrote with economy and a cold clarity, often reducing an argument to three or four numbered points, but he was inarticulate of speech. Haig and the King exchanged ‘secret’ letters throughout the war. When in 1915 Haig was intriguing to have Sir John French dumped as commander-inchief on the western front ‘for the sake of the empire’, Gough and Haking were looking after their patron. Both had been to see the King and told him that French was unfit, which he undoubtedly was.
HAKING WENT TO war in 1914 as a brigade commander and was soon wounded. Before the war he had lectured on tactics at the staff college and written a book, Company Training. Haking was the son of a clergyman and passages of his book could have been taken from a homily. Haking was concerned with the battle going on in men’s hearts: the struggle to go forward when one’s instincts were saying it was best to flee. The tone of the book was cool but the message was unmistakeable: attack was everything; attack was the way to victory. Haking even argued that if the attackers were weaker than the defenders, the attackers ‘will win as sure as there is a sun in the heavens’.
Haking’s book was read and reprinted during the Great War, probably because, for a few years anyway, it was somewhere near majority opinion. By 1918 majority opinion was closer to the theories of Monash. The true role of infantry, Monash was to write, ‘was not to expend itself on heroic physical effort, nor to wither away under merciless machine-gun fire, nor to impale itself on hostile bayonets, nor to tear itself to pieces in hostile entanglements … but, on the contrary, to advance under the maximum possible protection of the maximum possible array of mechanical resources’. Monash came from another place and, when it came to war, he was no mystic.
Haking was fifty-four at the time of Fromelles. After nearly two years he didn’t appear to understand that the Germans had thought about tactics much more intelligently than he had. They were on the ridges: at Aubers, at Pozières above the Somme, at Messines and Passchendaele in Belgium. They could see the British and French on the flats. They had lots of howitzers and machine guns; they had built concrete blockhouses and bunkers and galleries. They could be tossed off those ridges only by superior firepower. Haking seemed to believe they could be tossed off by force of character.
Haking, now promoted to command of the British 1st Division, was involved in the attack on Aubers Ridge in May, 1915. The preliminary bombardment was too light. When it ‘lifted’ to the support trenches the Germans rushed back to their machine guns in the frontline and shot down Haking’s troops as they left their trenches. In a few minutes the attack had failed. Several generals told Haig, who was then commanding the 1st Army, that fresh assaults in daylight would fail. Haking argued to push on. Haig agreed with him. An Indian brigade was sent in and lost 1000 men in a few minutes.
In Goodbye to All That Robert Graves, who was in Haking’s division, tells of the general going around the survivors, shaking hands with tears in his eyes. Graves quotes a sergeant saying: ‘Bloody lot of use that is: busts up his bloody division, and then weeps over what’s bloody left.’
The attack was called off. The British and Indians in the 1st Army had taken 11,600 casualties for no gain. The Germans may have lost less than 1000. The lesson was obvious. These attacks were pointless unless the British could bring up more heavy guns firing high-explosive shells. Eighteen-pounder field guns firing shrapnel could not be relied upon to cut wire.
Haking was promoted to command a corps and four months after Aubers Ridge he had charge of the reserve divisions at the battle around the slag heaps of Loos, south of Aubers Ridge, where the British used poison gas for the first time. Haking sent up two of his divisions on the second day. Both were made up of volunteers from Kitchener’s New Army. They had never been in action before. Somehow they ended up marching on the Germans, without covering fire, as if carrying out a parade-ground drill. The German machine gunners, less than a mile away, couldn’t believe what they were seeing. They shot down Haking’s troops without risk. The casualties in Haking’s two divisions came to about 8000, or roughly half the men involved.
Loos dragged on for a fortnight or so. By then the British had run up more than 40,000 casualties, including eight generals, Rudyard Kipling’s son, and Harold Macmillan, a future British prime minister, wounded in the head and shot through the right hand, so that decades later people who did not know about his war service would make fun of his weak handshake.
Robert Graves was there too, aged twenty. In Goodbye to All That he tells of a brother-officer who whistled for his platoon, which had gone forward twenty yards, to resume its advance. Noone moved. The officer jumped up and waved. No movement.
‘You bloody cowards,’ the officer shouted, ‘are you leaving me to go on alone?’
His sergeant, his shoulder broken, gasped: ‘Not cowards, sir. Willing enough. But they’re all f---ing dead!’ A machine gun had caught them as they rose to the first whistle.
Loos was a defeat, proof of the power of the machine guns and the insanity of attackers parading in front of them as though they were at Waterloo. Haig had said five months before Loos that the machine gun was ‘a much over-rated weapon’. He was being forced to change his mind. He had brought up cavalry at Loos in the hope of sending it through a gap. Cavalry in its traditional form had no place near machine guns. Here Haig would never change. One criticism of him, made so often that it has become a cliché, is that he lacked imagination. This needs qualification. All through the war he dreamed of cavalrymen galloping through gaps in the German lines.
LOOS, AND PARTICULARLY the massacre of Haking’s troops, also demonstrated that some British staff work was poor, and this went all the way to Sir John French. Just before the battle he moved to a château that had no telephone line to Haig, who was running the battle. Wounded men from Loos went home and said they had been asked to do too much. Politicians in London began talking about a string of defeats – Neuve Chapelle, Aubers, Loos – and began wondering about the men who were running the war for them, particularly Kitchener and French.
Haig felt that French had taken too long to hand over the reserve divisions to him at Loos. Haig became furious when French wrote a dispatch in which he claimed to have handed the reserves to Haig hours earlier than he had. Haig had been writing in his diary that French had an ‘unreasoning brain’, that his temperament was too flighty for command on the western front. Now he began openly to campaign against his one-time friend and benefactor, and French had no hope. Haig was aloof and unloved, mainly because he allowed hardly anyone to know him, and was laced up so tightly that in all his photographs he seems to be holding his breath. His speech was often a succession of grunts. He didn’t much understand political life and looked down on it as a calling. But he knew how to run an intrigue. He knew exactly where to plant doubts, what to say and what not to say.
King George V visited France a month after the opening of Loos. Haig told the King that French was obstinate and conceited and that he had handled the reserves badly at Loos. ‘I therefore thought strongly, that, for the sake of the Empire, French ought to be removed. I, personally, was ready to do my duty in any capacity, and of course would serve under anyone who was chosen for his military skill to be C. in C.’ When he said that, he was making a job application that he knew would be approved. The King told Haig that he had seen Gough and Haking that afternoon and, according to Haig’s diary, they had imparted ‘startling truths of French’s unfitness for the command’. The King had also seen Sir William Robertson, French’s chief-of-staff, who had told him that his commander’s mind was never the same for two consecutive minutes.
French had little leverage. Defeat, as someone said, is an orphan, and French throughout 1915 had lurched from one setback to another. Kitchener was implicated in all of them, and Gallipoli too, and most Cabinet members were more disenchanted with him than they were with French, but Kitchener couldn’t be sacked because he was a public idol. French was simply a soldier with a ruddy face, a white moustache and a skittish manner who seemed to fail a lot. Asquith sacked him in December and replaced him with Haig.
French had been unnerved by the destruction of the seven divisions of regulars he had taken to France in 1914 for a war that many thought would be over by Christmas. He often went to the hospitals to talk to the wounded; he couldn’t come to terms with the scale of the killing or the frightful wounds caused by shells. He belonged to the old colonial army and the hunting field, to good times in the mess and restless natives outside. He didn’t really understand what was happening in France. Haig hardly ever visited the wounded. His diary is a cold place, hardly about the real war at all. Seldom does he show any warmth for the young men from Manchester and Bendigo and Calgary who, thirty miles away, are dying in the mud for him. There is a kingly quality to him: he seems to imply that it is their duty to be there, at the grubby end, and his to be here, running a political salon. Haig’s son would later explain that he believed his father felt it was his ‘duty’ to refrain from going to casualty clearing stations because the visits made him physically ill.
THERE IS NO doubt Haig was better qualified to command than French. He was a more methodical soldier and, above all, steady and predictable. Haig never became fluttery. He didn’t torture himself with doubts, probably because he saw the world in monochrome. He had defined the task: Germany had to be beaten in the main theatre. That was the way, the only way, to win the war. Gallipoli, Salonika, Palestine, Italy: these were the dreams of the feeble-minded. He seemed to believe that God had put him in charge. He would therefore not be deflected by the antics of politicians who had merely been anointed by the people. What he couldn’t quite see was that this had to be a ‘political’ war. It touched everyone in Britain in a way other wars had not. It could not be left to the professionals like some punitive expedition up the Nile. Of course the politicians would meddle in it; they would have been derelict if they had not.
As French fell so did Archibald Murray, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. Robertson, Haig’s co-conspirator, replaced Murray. Robertson, known as ‘Wully’, was an exotic in the British army. He was the son of a village tailor and had worked as a domestic servant before enlisting as a trooper. Eleven years later he became an officer and after that his rise was relentless. Like Haig, he wrote with directness and clarity and was a hopeless speaker. Unlike Haig, he dropped his aitches. Like Haig, he was a ‘westerner’: he had no time for sideshows away from France. Unlike Murray, he was not going to be Kitchener’s flunkey and obtained a piece of paper from Asquith that said just that.
Robertson became the main adviser to the government with direct access to Cabinet. He was a hard man, particularly when it came to dealing with politicians, whom he saw as amateur strategists, but he tended to defer to Haig, always treating him gently. Anyone reading letters between the two might assume that Robertson was working for Haig.
HAKING MIGHT HAVE failed all through 1915 but so did many British generals. Haking remained one of Haig’s favourites. His failures were of the best sort. When an attack failed with light casualties there was a suspicion at GHQ that someone may not have tried too hard and a general or brigadier might be sent home for failing to show enough of the offensive spirit. On the other hand blood sacrifices with long casualty lists were seen as evidence of enthusiasm. Haking, like Hubert Gough, was known as a ‘thruster’. Haig liked thrusters.
Haking is a difficult man to find. He didn’t tell much about himself. The Who’s Who entry he submitted didn’t mention his place of birth, his parents or his education. Bean called him ‘experienced and distinguished’. Philip Game, a regular officer, served in a division under Haking. In a letter to his wife late in 1915 Game said he didn’t trust Haking ‘halfway across the road’. Two days later Game told her that Haking was ‘a bad man, though I think a good soldier’. Ten days later Game called Haking a ‘vindictive bully’. Game won the Distinguished Service Order and the Legion d’Honneur during the war and was five times mentioned in dispatches. As Sir Philip Game he became Governor of New South Wales and in 1932 reluctantly dismissed the Premier, Jack Lang. Game, a liberal, admired some of Lang’s ideals. If many disagreed with what Game called his ‘assassin’s stroke’, they also saw the governor as a man of integrity.
IN JULY, 1916, Haking commanded XI Corps, the northernmost corps of the 1st Army, on the flats below Aubers Ridge and Fromelles. He was confident that he could succeed in an attack on the Sugarloaf, pin down the Germans and prevent them sending reinforcements south to the battle of the Somme. In the previous month he had been confident about another similar, if smaller, attack he had thought up for Boar’s Head, a German salient two miles south-west of the Sugarloaf. This, like the coming battle of Fromelles, was a feint. It too was to stop the Germans sending reserves to the Somme, where the British build-up was becoming obvious.
Two Sussex battalions made the attack on June 29, when the Australians of the 5th Division were finding billets behind the lines and, being fresh from Gallipoli and Egypt, thinking that they had arrived at a kinder place. Two Sussex battalions: here was the first flaw in Haking’s plan of attack. Why would the Germans think a charge by less than 2000 men constituted anything but a gesture? The attack went in on June 29. The British artillery shot badly. ‘Come on Sussex,’ the Germans shouted as they opened up with their machine guns. The Sussex were not short on courage: they came on all right and briefly held parts of the German frontline. Then they had to retreat. When it was over the Sussex had lost 1153 men, a shocking casualty rate for a two-battalion attack. A communiqué dressed up the slaughter as a ‘successful raid’.
Edmund Blunden, the poet and critic, then nineteen, watched the madness of Boar’s Head. The salient was to be ‘bitten off’, he was told – ‘no doubt to render the maps in the châteaux of the mighty more symmetrical’. The German machine gunners had been presented with ‘hideously simple targets’; most of the men died against the uncut wire. Blunden thought the communiqué a travesty. A few days later he passed a lance-corporal making a cup of tea. A shell fell. Blunden went back to find the lance-corporal reduced to gobbets of blackening flesh, the earth wall sotted with blood and flesh, and an eye under the duckboard. ‘At this moment, while we looked with dreadful fixity at so isolated a horror, the lance-corporal’s brother came round the traverse.’
Most of the Australians taking part in Haking’s new attack towards Fromelles knew nothing of his debacle at Boar’s Head.
AS THE 5TH Australian Division took over the frontline on the plain below Fromelles the composition of the two Anzac corps also changed. The 1st, 2nd and 4th divisions left the area for the Somme and the sorrows of Pozières Ridge. These three divisions became the new I Anzac Corps under General Birdwood, who also had administrative control over all Australian forces. The 5th and the New Zealand Division (which had gone into the line near Armentières in May) now became II Anzac Corps under Lieutenant-General Alexander Godley. The 5th was made up of three brigades, each of four battalions. Brigadier-General Elliott’s 15th Brigade was on the right, looking at the Sugarloaf; the 14th Brigade was in the centre and the 8th on the left. About one quarter of the men in the 14th and 15th brigades and most of the officers had fought at Gallipoli. The 8th had never been under fire anywhere.
The three Australian divisions heading for the Somme had fought no big engagements during their stay in the line near Armentières but they raided the German lines often in June. The idea was to grab prisoners, identify the enemy units opposite, create havoc by killing as many Germans as possible during a few minutes of madness and bring back any papers they might be carrying. The raiders carried revolvers rather than rifles and knobkerries, short clubs with nails or bolts driven horizontally through the head, so that they looked like instruments that hang on the walls of torture chambers.
THE 5TH DIVISION, unlike the other three that were headed for the Somme, hadn’t been in France long enough to launch any raids or even to discover where the holes and horrors lay in no-man’s land. Its 17,800 men had taken over the frontline on the nights of July 10 and 11, just as Haking and others were cobbling up the scheme to attack towards Fromelles. Captain A. D. Ellis, who later wrote the history of the 5th Division, walked up the sap towards the frontline when he became aware of a ‘novel smell’ that he later realised was common to all trenches on the western front. ‘It is a mixture of damp earth, high explosive, and perhaps of other things.’ Godley handed the 5th Division over to Haking for the attack, which was to be over the very ground where the British, and Haking, had failed in the battle of Aubers Ridge the previous year. Why, someone might well have asked, was an attack going to succeed this time?
Sergeant Walter ‘Jimmy’ Downing arrived at the front and noticed the graves of Englishmen everywhere. The inscriptions on the little crosses had almost faded but he made out dates in 1914 and 1915. Charles Bean, Australia’s official war correspondent, wrote that by the time the 5th Division came to the front the stories of Aubers Ridge and Loos (when a British division again attacked towards Fromelles) had been almost forgotten: ‘… it remained only in the vague rumour that, quiet though the sector now was, certain famous British regiments spoke of it with dreadful memories of some futile and tragic attack.’
Godley apparently had no qualms about what was happening. He was a robotic soldier, tall and thin-lipped, made for drill and good order and peacetime. He was prickly and hidebound and thought all citizen-soldiers amateurs. His main interests seemed to be horses, hunting, fishing and garden parties. He took orders without question and expected his subordinates to do the same. On Gallipoli he had developed the skill of somehow not being seen to be responsible for anything that didn’t turn out well, which was most of the things he touched.
Birdwood and White did have qualms about Fromelles. Two days before the battle White said: ‘I hate these unprepared little shows. What do we do? We may deceive the enemy for two days; and, after that, he knows perfectly well that it is not a big attack, and that we are not in earnest there.’
HAKING’S PLAN FOR the attack now went through a series of hurried changes. Haking’s immediate superior, Sir Charles Monro, commander of the 1st Army, kept changing his mind about whether there should be an infantry assault. McCay seemed pleased that his would be the first Australian division to make a big attack in France. This may have caused him to brush aside the risks involved. After the battle Pompey Elliott wrote home that McCay wanted to lead the first Australian attack in France ‘and so get a big splash’. The other players, Haig and his staff at GHQ, were not only far away but also preoccupied with the battle of the Somme. Fromelles was always a sideshow and the staff at GHQ didn’t appear to share Haking’s confidence that the attack would succeed.
On July 5, a fortnight before the attack went in at Fromelles, Haig was confident of a breakthrough on the Somme. He wanted his northern armies to prepare to break into the German lines opposite them. Monro and the commander of the 2nd Army, Sir Herbert Plumer, thought the most prospective place for an attack was where their two armies met, roughly in front of Fromelles. On July 8 Monro asked Haking to draw up a scheme for an attack. Haking didn’t want merely to break into the German lines on the plain; he wanted to surge on, through the German support lines, through all the concrete fortifications that had been thrown up in the past year, and on to Aubers Ridge itself, where he would take the villages of Fromelles and Aubers. Monro next day rejected the plan, not because it was starry-eyed but because he thought capturing Aubers would not be much help if the British broke through on the Somme.
The British didn’t break through there. Haig had been too optimistic, as he so often was, and he didn’t know the true extent of his casualties. And now there was another problem on the Somme: the Germans were reinforcing their front there with troops drawn from the north. The Germans had to be pinned down in the north. Haig’s staff now thought an attack at Fromelles should be ‘an artillery demonstration’ only with the idea of making the Germans think an infantry attack was imminent. Then, around July 13, Monro and the GHQ staff decided the infantry should be part of the assault. Haking was not to try for Aubers Ridge. He was simply to break into the frontline and tell the Germans, in effect, that they could not afford to thin it out. The attack was set down for July 17. Haking would use the borrowed 5th Australian Division (Godley’s II Anzac Corps was then part of Plumer’s 2nd Army) plus two divisions of his own. There would be no secrecy. The preliminary bombardment was to make the Germans think an infantry attack was coming. This was going to make things particularly hard for the foot soldiers.
Haking decided to attack on a 6000-yard front. Then he realised that he didn’t have the artillery support and ammunition he had hoped for. He reduced the front to 4000 yards and the attacking force to two divisions, the Australians and the British 61st Division, a territorial outfit that was under strength. Each division would be supported by two divisional artilleries (in the case of the Australians the guns of the 5th and 4th divisions) plus about thirty heavy guns and several batteries of trench mortars. The attackers were to go no further than the German support lines.
McCay learned of the new plan on July 14, which meant he had just two-and-a-half days to prepare his division for a major attack. And his men had just two-and-a-half days to lay duckboards and tramways to the front and to bring up rifle and machine-gun ammunition, bombs, bundles of sandbags, scaling ladders, hundreds of picks and shovels, duckboards and light bridges. Telephone cables had to be buried and regimental aid posts set up. Artillery batteries recently brought up had to find firing positions. It was all too frantic: the men would be exhausted before they hopped the bags.
Haking thought the support trenches would be found about 100 to 150 yards behind the German frontline. There were four battalions in British and Australian brigades. Haking was so confident that he thought only two battalions in each brigade would be needed for the assault; the other two battalions were not to be committed without his consent, although some of these men could be used to provide carrying parties. McCay must have been confident too: he apparently thought his men should rush across no-man’s land two yards apart. This would only make sense if the Germans could not man their machine guns. McCay now issued an order that looked innocuous enough but which was to matter greatly. The first wave was to take the German frontline. The second wave would then pass through the first and go on to take the support trenches. Then the first wave was to also go on to the supports.
ON JULY 16, THE day before the assault was supposed to begin, Major-General Richard Butler, the deputy chief of the general staff, visited 1st Army headquarters and told Monro, Plumer and Haking that there was now no urgent need for the attack. Haig, he said, did not wish it to go ahead unless the commanders on the spot were satisfied they had enough artillery and ammunition to hold the enemy trenches they were going to capture. GHQ clearly didn’t believe in the attack or didn’t think Haking had the means to pull it off. Haking was ‘most emphatic’ he had the resources; he was ‘quite confident’ of success; he thought he had enough ammunition to put infantrymen in the German trenches and keep them there. Monro said he was satisfied the attack should go in. Monro and Haking said the troops’ morale would suffer if the attack was called off. Butler agreed it could go ahead.
Then heavy rain began to fall, which meant the artillerymen had difficulty registering on their targets. Butler now returned to Monro’s headquarters. He said that Monro had the power to postpone or cancel the attack, either because of the bad weather or indeed for any other reason. A political game seemed to be going on. GHQ didn’t really think the attack a good idea, but it wanted Monro to say so.
Early on the morning of the 17th, the day set down for the assault, a heavy mist lay over the front. Haking wrote to Monro that, with reluctance, he would have to postpone the attack. Did Monro wish him to carry it out the following day? ‘It is important with these new troops that this information should be given to me as early as possible, so that I can issue such instructions as will minimise any loss of moral [sic] owing to postponement.’
This was nonsense, although Haking probably believed it. The men of the Australian and British divisions were tired out from carrying ammunition and ladders along narrow and wet communication trenches; they were pleased to hear of the postponement. They had been worried about the haste with which the operation was being rushed forward. Haking was out of touch. A few days earlier he had discovered that some of the gunners in the heavy batteries had never fired in France before.
Monro’s attitude now changed. He refused Haking permission to attack on the following day. Monro told Haig he wanted to postpone the attack. Back came this dispatch from GHQ:
The Commander-in-Chief wishes the special operation mentioned in the above letter to be carried out as soon as possible, weather permitting, provided always that General Sir Charles Monro is satisfied that the conditions are favourable, and that the resources at his disposal, including ammunition, are adequate both for the preparation and the execution of the enterprise.
The generals were playing with words. Haig, as the British official historian put it, ‘did nothing to relieve the 1st Army commander of his responsibility’. Yet he left him with an escape: Monro could call it off if he thought his resources inadequate. We really don’t know what was happening here, although we know army and corps commanders didn’t like to be thought timid. Monro didn’t take the escape route offered. The attack was on for the 19th. The artillery bombardment would begin at 11 am; the infantry would go over at 6 pm, three hours before dusk.