The terrible winter
Pompey Elliott came to the Somme with the 5th Division. He had just returned from leave in Britain, where he had visited relatives and bought himself a new uniform, which was pointless. Elliott always looked a shambles; the look came naturally to him. Once he had been arrested in London for impersonating an officer.
The other two brigades of the 5th Division went into the frontline. Elliott’s 15th Brigade stayed three miles back in reserve. Elliott walked to the front and floundered around in the mud. For his next trip there Elliott rode Darkie, his black gelding. The return journey took six hours. ‘My poor old horse was quite knocked up floundering through shell holes up to the knees in mud and water. Once he fell with me and I thought I’d never get him up again for the mud was like glue and he simply couldn’t lift himself at all.’
Two days later Elliott’s brigade took over a section of the front in drenching rain. This time they, and the other Australian divisions following, would be under Rawlinson rather than Gough. The trenches were wretched, Elliott wrote, full of mud that lapped over one’s boots. There were no sanitary arrangements. Dead Englishmen lay everywhere.
Sergeant Jimmy Downing, from Elliott’s brigade, trudged to the front through High Wood, which had been as much a hellhole as Pozières. He saw a Scot and a German lying beside the communications trench, each impaled on the other’s bayonet. At the firing line Downing found himself buried to the waist in slush. Rain, and the odd German shell, fell from a grey sky.
The dead lay everywhere. The deeper one dug, the more bodies one exhumed. Hands and faces protruded from the slimy, toppling walls of trenches. Knees, shoulders and buttocks poked from the foul morass, as many as the pebbles of a brook. Here had been a heavy slaughter of English lads four days before … There were also German dead, but it was hard to tell them from the rest, for khaki is grey when soaked and muddy. Our clothes, our very underclothing, were ponderous with the weight of half an inch of mud on the outer surface, and nearly as much on the inner. Casualties were heavy in the sixty hours we were in that place … There was no hot food and no prospect of it. We drank shell hole water, as it was too cold for the corpses to rot …
Elliott set up his headquarters in a German dugout and sniffled with a cold. He would visit the frontline before breakfast and return soaked through, then go to bed until his clothes dried in front of a fire. He didn’t see how men could be asked to attack in this: they couldn’t even walk. Nor could they stay in the frontline for long. Elliott’s men were soon pulled out. In came the 7th Brigade of the 2nd Division, commanded by John Paton.
Downing said some of the 5th Division men took twenty-four hours to cover the three miles to the back area. ‘There was a foot of slush on the changing surface of the clay. The sound of the wrenching of our boots from its grip was like the tearing of sheets of cloth.’ Feet swelled and some turned black with trench foot. Downing and his mates rested for a few days, cleaned themselves as best they could, then returned to the front.
These men had voted on conscription a fortnight earlier. Elliott knew many had voted ‘No’ and understood why. They didn’t want to force others into such ‘dreadful suffering’. Now Elliott discovered the homeland had voted against conscription. ‘I cannot understand it,’ he wrote. ‘I suppose it was the Catholics that were against England as usual, together with all the cold-footers and wasters … I hope we will never hear anything again about the loyalty of the Irish. They are a lovely lot.’
THE 1ST AUSTRALIAN Division came into the line on the right of the 5th on October 30. Two companies and three bombing parties from the 1st were to attack a sharp salient in the German lines. Machine guns were to be set up to cover the attacking Australians. Owen Howell-Price, the twenty-six-year-old commander of the 3rd Battalion, came up to supervise the placement of the guns in the parapet and fell, shot in the head. He was too straight-backed and serious to be popular – he perhaps felt he needed to prove something to older men – but none questioned his courage.
Howell-Price died from his wound. One account has him dying instantly on the parapet, shot in the brain. A Red Cross report has him lingering for more than a day and quotes the officer commanding the 36th Casualty Clearing Station.
He came in suffering from a bad gunshot wound in the neck. He was unconscious most of the time that he was here and he died 24 hours after admission. Mr Dexter the Sen. Chaplain for the Australian forces happened to be in the same unit and did all he could for him as he was an old friend. He thought he recognised him once and just pressed his hand, but Col. Price never spoke I think …
Owen’s brother, Philip, a captain, was leading one of the attacking companies. The mud was so deep that Philip’s men could not keep up with the creeping barrage. On reaching the German wire they were met with grenades and rifle fire. ‘This,’ Howell-Price wrote, ‘was the turning point … our men hesitated and were lost.’ Some ran back to the Australian lines. Howell-Price tried a second attack. This failed too. The rest of the night was spent bringing in wounded. Casualties ran to 208.
This was on November 5. The bigger Australian attack that day was to be against a German salient called the Maze by Paton’s 2nd Brigade. One battalion became lost in the dark and reached the front only minutes before the assault was to begin. Some of these men were so tired from floundering in the mud that they sat down and wept. The front trench had become too deep because of the need to toss mud over the parapet. Hundreds of scaling ladders were sent up so that the Australians could actually get out of their trenches. The ladders arrived late. Horses were taken from the field ambulances to drag the ladders up on sleds. This wore out the horses, which should have been available to bring out the wounded.
John Paton, the brigade commander, was wounded as he stood on the parapet trying to reorganise his battalions. A gale blew at sixty miles an hour. Then there was a mix-up about the creeping barrage. The infantrymen were supposed to hop over at 9.10 am, giving them three minutes to reach the barrage. Then the guns would lift their fire fifty yards every minute, leading the men up to the German line. Someone made an error in writing the orders: the infantrymen were told to hop over at 9.13.
They were thus too far behind the barrage. They saw Germans climbing out on to the parapet to fire their Mausers. Captain John Nix, the Townsville journalist, was soon hit. He, like Owen Howell-Price, had been heroic at Pozières, where he had been shot through the hand. Now he lay dead in the mud. Some Australians made the German front trench. Their rifles were clogged with mud and wouldn’t fire, so they tossed bombs and, when these ran out, picked up German stick grenades and threw them. By nightfall it was apparent that only a handful of Australians were still in the German lines. The position was lost a few days later. There had thus been no gain from the attack – and 819 casualties.
Rawlinson ordered the attack to be repeated but November 7 produced half-an-inch of rain and another gale. The new attack was postponed to the 9th and then the 14th. All the time the battlefield became more of a bog.
BEAN WROTE THAT the interlude between the first attack and the second, on November 14, was ‘the most trying period ever experienced by the AIF on any front’.
Here were the Australians, about four miles past Pozières, in a valley beyond the ridge that ran through Pozières, High Wood, Delville Wood and Ginchy. They were within sight of Bapaume, which was supposed to have been taken a few days after the Somme battle opened on July 1. Behind them, for seven or eight miles, lay the ruins of Thiepval, La Boisselle, Contalmaison, Pozières, Longueval, Delville Wood, High Wood, Ginchy, Flers and Gueudecourt. Behind them lay a sea of craters that had ruined the natural drainage of the downland and roads that had been washed away. If civilisation were to be defined as a town that still had houses standing, the nearest civilisation was at Albert, nine miles back. Anyone who was with the British or Australian troops, standing knee-deep in slush and shivering in their mud-caked greatcoats, knew that the Somme battle could go no further.
Seven or eight miles would be the extent of the gain, seven or eight miles that a French farm worker once might have walked in an easy afternoon. Soldiers now took a day to walk the two miles from Delville Wood to the front. The Germans had fought with a stubbornness that was astonishing, but they had not stopped Haig; the weather had.
In some places, the German and British troops walked about their parapets in sight of one another. Both sides were more interested in draining their trenches than in shooting each other. Haig, Rawlinson and Gough had no notion of what the front was like, which is why, for a few days more, they persisted with their fantasies. The ground was so soft that high-explosive shells speared deep into the bog before exploding. They splattered the landscape with slurry but produced no dust cloud to screen the infantry. The Australians gave up using the communications trenches to approach the front. They dragged themselves along sled tracks. Sleds now brought up the supplies and took out the wounded and ill. The wounded lay out in the weather for up to twelve hours without blankets. Sometimes three horses were needed to drag out one man. Men pulled out of the sucking clay often left their boots and trousers behind. Rescuers of an officer accidentally broke his back.
Troops stayed in the frontline for just forty-eight hours at a time. They tried to escape the weather by cutting nooks in the trench walls but these soon caved in because of the seepage. No open fires were allowed and there was hardly any kerosene for primuses. Even in the back areas there was hardly any firewood. The only commodity that occasionally arrived hot was tea. This came in fuel tins and smelled so strongly of petrol that men said that after drinking it they feared to light a cigarette.
Disease broke out. Some men suffered shivering fits. Others collapsed from exhaustion. Trench foot became endemic. The 4th Army staff issued a memorandum saying the disease was ‘merely a matter of discipline’ and listing ways of preventing it. Another staff officer’s delusion: there was no way feet could be kept dry.
AUSTRALIANS FROM THE 2nd Division went for the trenches around the Maze again on November 14. Some had fought in the previous attack. A senior officer said they looked ‘pretty cheap’. Three battalions went over at 6.45 am. The battalion on the right broke into the German lines but was thrown out. It was ordered to attack again. Most of the centre battalion also failed. It too was ordered back. The battalion on the left took the German line. The Germans had left just about everything except themselves behind. The Australians fought with German Mausers, which allowed them to give their .303 rifle ammunition to their Lewis gunners, drank cold German coffee, warmed it with German alcohol, and hung on through the first night, thanks mainly to the firepower of their Lewis guns. The Germans counter-attacked on the afternoon of the 16th. The Australians fired two red rockets and one white – the SOS signal. It wasn’t picked up in the Australian line. Two officers fell shot. The Australians lost heart and broke back towards their lines. The trench was lost, which meant the attack had failed everywhere and the 2nd Division had lost another 901 men.
The morale of the Australians was as low as it had been in the war. Bean said it was almost unknown for Australians to desert to the enemy, but in this winter there were ‘one or two’ cases of young Australians walking over to the German lines.
IN MILITARY TERMS the battle of the Somme was over, pulled up by wind and rain after going several weeks longer than it should have. In another sense the battle refuses to go away. You are reminded of this whenever you walk into a cemetery on the Somme and read an entry in the registry. The grandchildren, the words tell you, have brought the great-grandchildren to see his grave, the man they never saw, the man who, high on idealism, volunteered with his pals and chums and died on the chalk downs in 1916, an innocent abroad. There may be a photograph of him, enclosed in clear plastic and wrapped lightly around his headstone, or a wreath bought locally, or just a poppy. The Somme lives on because of the scale of the casualties and what these did to families and towns across the British empire.
Disputes still go on about estimates of casualties. We know with some certainty that the British and dominion casualties were about 420,000 and the French around 200,000. German casualties are harder to estimate. Edmonds, the British official historian, put them as high as 660,000 to 680,000. Others thought they were around 400,000. Lloyd George and Churchill contended after the war that British casualties were up to twice as heavy as those of the Germans. The German official history ventured 500,000 casualties, but the Germans didn’t count wounded who were likely to recover ‘within a reasonable time’.
Was it worth it? Haig was trying for a breakthrough on July 1 and September 15. In between those dates, and after September 15, he was trying to wear out the German army. In truth Haig’s battle was about improvisation: it started as one thing and became another, and afterwards Haig’s defenders said it was always about the second thing. Their hero was not trying to be Napoleon at Austerlitz but Ulysses S. Grant in Virginia. It was all about attrition, they insisted.
Haig could not have stopped, even if he had wanted to. He had to keep faith with the French. And he did relieve the pressure on Verdun and sap the spirit of the Kaiser’s army, though not as much as he thought. The people in Britain and Australia were told of a procession of successes. Victories always look grander when presented on small-scale maps that make the six miles from Albert to Courcelette look like sixty. But that’s what the Somme was: a succession of minor and grinding victories that forced the Germans off the ridges of their choice. The cost of them: that is the matter for judgement.
The Somme will always be an emotional argument. Some of the best spirits of a generation, hundreds of men like Raymond Asquith and Alec Raws, died on that soft downland. The New Army, raised on love of country, was offered up in sacrifice there. Much of the hope and optimism of the British people died there. After the Somme the war was less of a crusade and more of a burden. The battle had been very much like Haig himself. There was nothing particularly clever about it. It was about duty and sacrifice and holding one’s nerve, about doing the same thing every day until, eventually, the other side gave way. It was about character rather than inspiration.
The battle also offered hints of how, one day, the trench stalemate might be broken. The Lewis gun had been important throughout. The tank had been launched as a weapon. Much more important were the lessons about artillery. When the guns were dispersed widely, as on the first day, most of the infantry failed. If, however, the fire was concentrated on a narrower front and the shells were mostly high explosive, the infantry could succeed. As the Somme battle went on the creeping barrage became more common. This forced the Germans to remain underground until the foot soldiers were just about upon them. High-explosive shells and a creeping barrage: these were ways the stalemate might be broken. The Somme also made the gunners think more about counter-battery fire. It was not enough to hit the enemy’s front trenches; a way had to be found to hit their artillery pieces miles behind the lines, so as to give the advancing infantry extra protection. Aerial spotting was useful here – indeed this, rather than engaging in dogfights – was the main job of the Royal Flying Corps, but better methods were being investigated, such as measuring the distance of a German gun by tracking its sound with a microphone. Haig had not discovered as much as he might have about artillery: it was a foreign language and he learned only enough to get by. Others had learned a great deal.
HAIG ARRIVED AT Chantilly, the home of the French Derby, on November 15, a fine clear morning that reflected his mood. Also present were Joffre, Robertson and delegates from the armies of Belgium, Italy, Russia, Rumania, Serbia and Japan. At the same time the political representatives of the allies, including Asquith and Lloyd George, were meeting twenty-five miles away in Paris.
The Chantilly conference decided that the allies would resume offensives in the first fortnight of February, 1917. The generals and the politicians then came together. Here it became obvious that Lloyd George, the ‘easterner’, was at odds with Haig and Joffre on strategy. Lloyd George truly did think the war could be won from the east; he didn’t believe in, nor like, Haig; and he was appalled by the Somme casualties and didn’t want them repeated in 1917. Lloyd George wrote that he left the conference feeling that ‘nothing more would be done except to repeat the old fatuous tactics of hammering away with human flesh and sinews at the strongest fortresses of the enemy’.
A little over a fortnight later Haig received a letter from Robertson: ‘We are in a great political muddle here, and goodness knows what will happen. The P.M. has not kept his team in hand. They have now revolted.’
Next day, December 6, Haig received a telegram from the War Office: ‘Asquith resigned. Bonar Law [the Conservative leader] trying to form Government.’
Then another arrived: ‘Bonar Law failed to form Government. Lloyd George, Asquith and Balfour are to form National Government.’
Haig had other things on his mind.
This morning the A.G. brought me Court Martial proceedings on an officer charged with desertion and sentenced by the Court to be shot. After careful consideration, I confirmed the proceedings. This is the first sentence of death on an officer to be put into execution since I became C. in C. Such a crime is more serious in the case of an officer than of a man, and also it is highly important that all ranks should realise that the law is the same for an officer as a private.
UNLIKE AUSTRALIA’S LABOR Party, Herbert Asquith was not a casualty of the Somme, although he would have been less vulnerable if the campaign had gone better. Asquith was a victim of the way he was. Like Lloyd George, he was a self-made man, a brilliant student at Oxford and a successful barrister. By the time of the Somme he had been prime minister for almost nine years, and mostly he had been a good one, limiting the powers of the House of Lords, introducing old-age pensions, health and unemployment insurance and more progressive income taxes. As the years passed he took on the air of the distant statesman. He could be leaden and indecisive; this was obvious during the crises over Gallipoli in 1915, which, along with the munitions scandal in France, eventually forced him to form a coalition government with the Conservatives.
What had become clear was that Asquith, now sixty-four and ten years older than Lloyd George, was not made to be a wartime leader. Unlike Lloyd George (and Churchill in a later war), he could not find the words and the music. People expect theatre from their leaders in wartime: it diverts them from looking too hard at facts and makes sacrifice seem more bearable. All along Asquith had been too bland, while Lloyd George hummed with passion and mesmerised his audiences. Asquith admitted privately that it was not his way ‘to carry round the fiery cross’.
Asquith’s removal was a very British coup, complete with meddling press proprietors (notably Northcliffe and the future Lord Beaverbrook), planted news stories, clandestine meetings at the Hyde Park Hotel, whispers and arched eyebrows at dinner parties and lunches at country houses, exchanges of polite letters, hints of resignation, treachery dressed up as high-mindedness and high-mindedness mistaken for treachery. Lloyd George had not set out to topple Asquith as prime minister; he simply sought to put himself in charge of the war effort, which, some would say, was the same thing. Lloyd George wanted to chair a committee, with perhaps three to five members and independent of the Cabinet, to control the day-to-day conduct of the war.
Bonar Law and the Conservatives liked the idea. Asquith felt he was being made an ‘irresponsible spectator’, and he was. Lloyd George resigned, then Asquith. Bonar Law let it be known he didn’t want the prime ministership. Lloyd George said he didn’t want it either; all he wanted was to run the War Council and ‘get rid of the Asquith incubus’. The King eventually asked Lloyd George to form a government.
Lord Derby became War Minister. He was in thrall to Haig and Robertson.
MONASH’S 3RD DIVISION had finally left for France after training for four months on Salisbury Plain. The troops took over muddy trenches in Flanders as France slipped into its coldest winter for decades. Monash, ever practical, had bought a pair of chamois underpants in London. He had also been working on his fifty-one-year-old body. He landed on Gallipoli with the figure of a middle-aged businessman in good flesh. Now, by dieting and exercise, he had shed forty-two pounds and trimmed his waistline by seven-and-a-half inches. The loss of weight left him with more lines on his face, an almost leathery look.
He had trained his division with a thoroughness that marked him as different from Birdwood and Godley and indeed most of the generals on the western front. He believed in preparation. On Salisbury Plain he gave three talks to his senior officers. He stressed that officers had to be loyal to each other. A senior officer needed to know he would receive the loyalty of his juniors even if they thought what he was doing was wrong. ‘That is the only kind of loyalty that is worth a damn, or counts at all.’ Officers should not be overwhelmed by death and bloodshed. ‘You must get yourselves into a callous state of mind. A commander who worries is not worth a damn … Hypnotise yourself into a state of complete indifference as to losses … you have got to carry on.’ Monash was neither cold nor callous. He simply knew what had to be done in war.
George V came to inspect the division, riding a black Australian waler he had bought in India. Monash was susceptible to flattery and in awe of the mighty. He wrote an effusive letter home. He had spent two-and-a-half hours with the King, who was ‘chatty and breezy and merry all the time’. The King said he didn’t think he had inspected a finer division. ‘Splendid, splendid!’ he said. The Australians cheered the King on his way to the railway station and raised their hats aloft on bayonets. The King dismounted at the station, gave his horse a lump of sugar and told Monash: ‘Don’t forget to come and see me.’ Rain pelted down on Monash as he rode back to camp. He didn’t mind. He knew he had made an impression.
Monash set up his headquarters in France in a château at Steenwerck with electric light and hot water. He had control of five miles of front and a back area that included the ruined town of Armentières. The country was so waterlogged that neither side could have attacked, even if they had wanted to. Monash came down with chilblains.
Haig arrived to inspect the division in pouring rain. The possibility is that the King had told him about Monash. Haig, Monash wrote, looked grey and old. ‘On parting he put his arm around my shoulder (as I rode beside him) and with much feeling and warmth he said: “You have a very fine division. I wish you all sorts of good luck, old man.”’ Haig wrote in his diary: ‘The men looked splendid and marched past in excellent style. M. Gen. Monash seems a clever Australian of Jewish type. I believe an Auctioneer in civil life.’ (Haig had confused him with Arthur Currie, the Canadian general.)
The Australians from the other four divisions were still down on the Somme. They thought the 3rd Division had been pampered. One day it might actually do some fighting. They referred to Monash’s men as ‘the Neutrals’ or ‘the Deep Thinkers’. They were cold but they had not lost their wit.
GENERAL ROBERT NIVELLE, now commanding the French forces at Verdun, the other charnel house of 1916, had in October retaken Fort Douaumont. The attack was well thought out. Nivelle dropped a tremendous barrage on and around the fort. The Germans fled to shell holes outside. The attack was on a narrow front, but it was a victory, and these were rare enough, and because it was at Verdun it had symbolism as well. Nivelle was the coming man and he now began selling something the politicians found irresistible. He said he had discovered the secret. He knew how to break the trench stalemate.
In mid-December he took over from Joffre as the French commander-in-chief. Joffre had been tough and unflappable and now he was made Marshal of France, the first since 1870, as compensation for being bundled off to an advisory job that didn’t matter. He looked grandfatherly. Nivelle, charming and eloquent, had charisma and freshness. He was sixty-one and looked younger.
Nivelle’s plan was essentially about repeating the Fort Douaumont tactics on a big scale. There would be a massive artillery bombardment, as at the fort, except this one might be on a front of twenty miles. This would cause rupture [his word]. The infantry would then go forward behind a creeping barrage, smashing through three lines of German defences in one rush that might last forty-eight hours. The infantry would use violence and brutality – as though these things were new – and quickly break through into open country. There would be no attrition, no wearing out. From this distance it is easy to spot flaws in Nivelle’s scheme. It is also possible to understand why he charmed the politicians. He was offering hope and Joffre and Haig were offering attrition.
ONE MILLION GERMAN soldiers were dead by the end of 1916. Over their bodies the Kaiser had extended his empire to take in Polish Russia, most of Belgium, much of northern France, Serbia and, most recently, Rumania. Holding on to these gains would mean more Verduns, more Sommes. The complete victories laid out in the Schlieffen Plan were no longer possible. The battle of Jutland meant the blockade of Germany would continue. Civilian life in Germany had become miserable. Malnutrition was common. Austria-Hungary was suffering worse and had been a weak ally, forever in need of stiffening up. Franz Josef, the emperor, had died late in 1916. Karl I, his successor, was looking for a negotiated peace.
Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, had been thinking about the same thing. He had been trying privately to persuade Woodrow Wilson, the United States President, to negotiate a peace. Bethmann worried that if the war went on, Hindenburg and Ludendorff would opt for unrestricted submarine warfare to try to make Britain and France suffer as Germany was. This, Bethmann felt, would bring the United States into the war.
In mid-December he spoke about a negotiated peace in the Reichstag, Germany’s farcical nod towards democracy. President Wilson asked each side what terms they would settle on. Germany offered no concessions. The allies demanded that Germany and Austria-Hungary give up all their conquests, and a little more as well. And they were unhappy with Wilson’s holier-than-thou tone, which came naturally to him. Didn’t he realise the Germans were the aggressors, criminals who threatened liberal democracy? Neither side was ready for peace talks. The war would get worse.
Ludendorff was now urging unrestricted submarine warfare to hurt Britain, which still had a huge army of conscripts to put into the war. Bethmann felt he had some say in this since submarine warfare bore on foreign policy, but the Reichstag now passed a motion that defined his place. The Chancellor, the motion said, was responsible to the Reichstag for political decisions relating to the war. But in making decisions he must rely on the view of the Supreme Command. The Reichstag would support a ‘ruthless’ submarine campaign if the military wanted it. Hindenburg and Ludendorff were running the country.
Their submarine campaign was scheduled to start on February 1,1917. Neutral countries would be told the day before that all ships travelling to or from Britain and France would be sunk on sight. Hindenburg and Ludendorff also told the Kaiser that Bethmann had to go. He had too many qualms.
CYRIL LAWRENCE, NOW a lieutenant in the engineers of the 1st Australian Division, told his mother that the first thing he heard on Christmas Day was a driver swearing at his horse. The horses were up to their bellies in frozen mud and their long coats were a mass of congealed mud. Lawrence washed and shaved in water from a shell hole and sat down to a Christmas lunch of soup, asparagus with melted butter, roast beef, roast chicken, onions and carrots, then plum pudding and custard with rum sauce – ‘a splendiferous affair’. The officers even managed to find a tablecloth.
Soon after Lawrence learned that his father had died. He wrote to his sister that he had become ‘sort of reconciled’ to death. The previous day he had seen two men carrying a stretcher. The figure on it was completely covered by a blanket.
The bearers were snorting and blowing, in mud up to their knees.
‘Heavy going, isn’t it,’ Lawrence said.
‘Oh, no, sir,’ one of them said, ‘only ’alf of ’im ’ere. A shell copped him and bust ’im and now ’es lost half hisself. Anyhow, we couldn’t find the rest of ’im so we brought this bit in.’