For the soldiers on both sides on the Western Front, the remainder of 1916 was dominated by the fighting that continued to rage in Picardy until early winter. Always it was the British or the French who were attacking; always the Germans defending, clinging desperately to each position. There was never a repeat of the massive assault of 1 July; instead, a series of attacks on a smaller scale, but all marked by the same ferocity. The whole later became popularly known as the Battle of the Somme, although it was never officially recognized under that name. After the war, each phase of the battle was given a separate title, that of 1 July becoming part of the First Battle of Albert.
Nearly every British division in France took its turn on the Somme; many attacked twice, some three times. Steadily, the Army of 1916 melted away.
On 21 July, Lieut Henry Webber’s battalion, the 7th South Lancs, which had just missed being thrown into the battle on the afternoon of the first day, moved up to relieve a battalion in the front line near Mametz Wood. That night, Henry Webber took up supplies as usual with the battalion transport. Leaving his men to unload the horses, Webber went over to where the c.o. was talking with a group of officers. Into this routine, peaceful, evening scene, there suddenly dropped a single, heavy German shell. When the smoke and dust had cleared, it was found that twelve men and three horses had been hit. Henry Webber lay unconscious, badly wounded in the head. He and the other wounded were rushed to a Dressing Station, but for Webber it was too late. He never recovered consciousness and died that night.
The news of the death of this sixty-eight-year-old warrior was noted in high places. His family received special messages of sympathy from the King and Queen and from the Army Council – unusual tributes to a dead lieutenant of infantry. Webber’s devotion to duty was further honoured when he was mentioned in the c.-in-c.’s Despatches.Webber’s wife never recovered from the shock of his death and died two years later but, ironically, his three soldier sons all survived the war. It is probable that Henry Webber was the oldest member of the B.E.F. to be killed in action during the war.*
The day after Henry Webber’s death, the Army of 1916 suffered another notable casualty. Maj.-Gen. Ingouville-Williams, commander of the 34th Division, had always been ready to share the dangers of his men and had cared so much for them that he had gone out into No Man’s Land like a common stretcher-bearer, searching for wounded after the battle on 1 July. Like Henry Webber, he too went up to Mametz Wood and was hit by a shell and, like Webber, ‘Inky Bill’ died.
As the battle continued, the casualties inexorably mounted. Even the highest families in the land were not spared. In September the prime minister, Mr Asquith, visited the Somme and met his two sons who were serving there. Within a fortnight one of them, Raymond, a Grenadier Guards officer, was dead.
Another to die was a Maj. W. Congreve, son of the corps commander who had captured Montauban on 1 July. Maj. Congreve was killed while serving in a division in his father’s corps. He was awarded a posthumous V.C, a medal also held by his father.
All through the summer and autumn the battle raged. The weather grew wet and cold; the attacks floundered in the Somme mud. The enthusiasm and high hopes with which the soldiers had greeted the opening of the battle began to fade. Towards the end, when an attack by a tired 30th Division had failed, a member of one of its battalions was court-martialled for cowardice. The man was only a recently arrived reinforcement but had not been able to explain how he had got lost during the attack. He was found guilty. The battalion was paraded; the accused man was brought forward and the sentence announced: execution by firing squad. His comrades were quite convinced that, after the abortive attack, someone in authority had decided to make an example of one man and that this poor wretch had been chosen as an example to the others.
Paddy Kennedy and five other privates had already been given a day’s rations and sent to a remote village; they were to be the firing party. That night the condemned man and his escort of military policemen joined them. The officer in charge encouraged the prisoner to get drunk, the usual procedure; but the drink was refused. Early next morning, the firing party went out to a nearby quarry. Kennedy and the others had their rifles taken away and later returned, loaded: one with a blank round, the others with live ones. No one knew who had the blank round.
The condemned man refused to walk out to the quarry and had to be dragged there. He was then tied to a chair, blindfolded and a white handkerchief pinned over his heart. The officer gave the firing party their instructions: ‘Aim straight. I don’t want to have to finish him off.’
After the crash of the volley, the prisoner was found to be alive, although badly hurt. Kennedy and the others watched, sickened, as the officer drew his revolver, put it to the man’s head and pulled the trigger. Military justice, 1916 style, had been done.
On 14 November the battle ended. No one could ever agree on the final casualty figures, but it is certain that in the 140 days that the battle had lasted Britain’s share was over 400,000. For this loss, Haig’s troops had advanced exactly six miles and were still four miles short of Bapaume, which the cavalry had hoped to take in the opening attack.
The total casualties on the Somme were over 1,300,000, divided almost equally between the Germans and the Allies. Conceived as the ‘Big Push’ that might end the war, it had turned into a ghastly battle of attrition.
What of the mood of the people at home while the Battle of the Somme was being fought? Although the casualty lists continued to cause individual grief, comprehensive totals were not published and the country as a whole was content to read the optimistic official reports of the battle and assume that their men were winning a series of great victories. Perhaps inspired by the battle, a young composer, Haydn Wood, was writing a haunting, sentimental song – ‘Roses of Picardy’. By the end of the year it was a hit song.
Fortunately, there exists an interesting guide to the civilians’ thoughts at this time. In October there was a by-election in the constituency of North Ayrshire. There were only two candidates. One, a clergyman, the Rev. Chelmers, was standing as a Peace Candidate. The other was Lieut-Gen. Hunter-Weston, whose VIII Corps had suffered so disastrously on 1 July. He had been given leave from France and stood as a Unionist. The general received 7,419 votes; the peace-seeking clergyman only 1,300.
For one soldier, 1917 opened well. On 3 January, Gen. Sir Douglas Haig was promoted to the rank of field-marshal, the highest in the army. Haig and the other military leaders were pleased to see the New Year. After its disappointing predecessor, they were confident that 1917 was to be the Allies’ year of victory.
The first actions of the year were political rather than military. Germany made fresh efforts to secure peace and throughout January diplomatic notes passed among the capitals of Europe but, again, nothing came of the peace moves. In desperation the Germans turned to unrestricted submarine warfare, hoping to starve Britain out. Instead, the submarines helped to bring the United States into the war, on the side of the Allies, in April.
‘I was pleased when I heard that the Americans were on our side. We seemed to have borne the brunt of the fighting for so long and I felt the Americans were similar people to us and would be steadier than some of our other allies’ (L/Cpl H. Hickman, 1/8th Sherwood Foresters)* But it would be nearly a year before American troops were ready to fight in France.
In the meantime, those who remained of the 1916 men had to get on with the war. They were the ‘old hands’ now, the experienced men who would teach the conscripts the art of war. Philip Howe and Bill Soar had recovered from their wounds and returned to their own battalions, but for many the war was over. Charles Matthews spent eight miserable months in military hospitals; his knee was still ‘the size of a football’ and he could not walk at all. Eventually, he was offered a medical discharge and went home, thinking he was crippled for life at the age of twenty. Fortunately for Matthews, a civilian doctor became interested in his injury and sent him to the Great Portland Street Hospital, where a specialist found that his knee-cap was broken into five pieces. An operation was performed and Matthews walked out a month later. He was to have a stiff leg for the rest of his life, but he was able to resume work before the post-war rush for jobs began. It was six months after he had been injured before Matthews discovered that he had been crushed by debris from a British mine. He had always assumed that the debris came from a mine exploded by the Germans, to hinder the British attack.
There were many like Matthews. He had served only a few months in France, been wounded in his first battle and, with a typical Blighty wound, had escaped the long years of the war. Matthews realized he had been lucky and the men in France thought the same. ‘Many went over the top on 1 July 1916 after a week or so in France, were wounded and went home as heroes. Perhaps they were, but what about those few of us who served all through!’ (Cpl J. T. Brewer, 1/6th Gloucesters)
Before the Battle of the Somme had finished, the Germans had started to construct a new defensive system, over ten miles behind the front line, and work continued on it all through the winter. Then, in February 1917, the Germans did something that the British and French generals would never have done. They withdrew to this new line and voluntarily gave up nearly 1,000 square miles of territory, ten times more than the Allies had captured in 1916. When the British and French troops reached this new line, they found a perfectly sited defensive system waiting for them, as strong as the one they had so painfully forced the previous year. They would have to start all over again.
When the Germans retreated from Gommecourt, Bill Soar and other men who had taken part in the attack on 1 July were asked to help with the identification of the corpses which still littered the old No Man’s Land. The bodies of twenty Nottingham men were taken from the German barbed wire and more were found in nearby shell holes. They were decomposing after being in the open for eight months and, when they were moved, flesh fell away from the bones. Despite this, many were identified; one captain from the distinctive boots he had always worn. Another body found was that of Capt. J. L. Green, the Medical Officer of the Derby battalion who had been awarded a posthumous V.C.; his body too was identified from the clothing. Bill Soar found the body of his best friend. This unpleasant work made Soar and many of the others sick but they were still pleased to have been able to give their dead comrades a proper burial.
Later that year Bill Soar was in Nottingham, on leave, and happened to meet the mother of one of the men he had identified. She had always refused to believe that her son was dead, even when notified that his body had been found. Soar was forced to tell her that he had personally recovered and identified his body. She died within a month.
All through 1917 the battles of attrition continued. The British, at Arras, and the French launched massive offensives in April; both ended with little gain but heavy losses. There were no more French attacks that year. Their soldiers had mutinied; they were prepared to defend their trenches but refused to take part in any more futile attacks. Once more, the British had to keep attacking to help the French. Their summer offensive opened well, with the capture of Messines Ridge, but soon degenerated into the mud and misery of Passchendaele.
The last attack, in November at Cambrai, started brilliantly with a successful tank attack by the British but, when the Germans counter-attacked, all the early gains were lost.
Reginald Bastard, Percy Chappell, Philip Howe and Paddy Kennedy all took part in the big battles of 1917. Bill Soar did not, however; the North Midland Division was still regarded with disapproval after its disappointing performance at Gommecourt and remained as a line-holder.
Reginald Bastard was wounded at Messines and had to return to England. In doing so, he lost his temporary rank and became, once again, a major. When he recovered he was sent to a Senior Officers’ School at Aldershot to instruct future battalion commanders. It was an excellent place to spend the winter.
The cat, Nigger, which Paddy Kennedy had taken from the German dug-out at Montauban, left France in the summer of 1917 with a young soldier who took it home on leave, hidden under his jacket. He left the cat with his parents in Rochdale, where it settled well and survived the soldier, who was killed at Passchendaele soon after his leave.
For the Newfoundlanders, 1917 was a mixed year. At Arras, they suffered terrible casualties again, in another badly planned attack, but, after Cambrai, the king honoured them with the ‘Royal’ prefix. This was the only occasion that a unit was so honoured during the First World War, although many received the title afterwards.
Two more of the 1916 generals left France during the year. Gen. Allenby had directed the costly Battle of Arras and, soon afterwards, he was ordered to hand over the Third Army and was sent to command the British Forces in Egypt and Palestine. This move was regarded by some as a relegation, punishment for his poor showing at Gommecourt in 1916 and at Arras. However, Allenby did very well in the Middle East and finished the war with a higher reputation than any of the generals he left behind in France. But a month after Allenby left France, his only son was killed in action in Belgium.
Then, at the close of the year, the C.I.G.S. again requested the recall of the sixty-five-year-old Quartermaster General, Lieut-Gen. Maxwell. Again Haig tried to keep Maxwell, but this time London insisted and Maxwell went home and retired from active duty.
By the end of 1917, those of the 1916 men who were left were tired beyond description, and morale, at this time, was probably lower than at any other period in the war. Many of the men had been at the Front for up to two years with hardly a break; there was no system of relief for the battle-weary. Those who had been wounded were sent back to the trenches time and time again and, after each big battle, fewer and fewer of their friends remained. After the hell of Passchendaele and the disappointment of Cambrai they began to think that the war would never end; that they were doomed to fight on until they were all dead. Their ideals and patriotism had long since departed.
The infantryman’s devotion to his immediate comrades and his inborm sense of duty helped to keep him going, but he became very bitter about that part of the army not in the trenches and about all civilians. The longing for an honourable release, in the form of a Blighty wound, was almost universal.
Most men stood by their duty; a few did not. Self-inflicted wounds, almost unheard of in the early days, became a great problem. Men tried all the old dodges such as chewing cordite or sleeping in wet towels to induce sickness, and being gassed almost became a court-martial offence. Successful desertion was difficult to achieve; the penalty for being caught could be death by firing squad.*
It would be unwise to generalize too much on this theme; there were wide differences between individual units. Possibly the Regular and early Territorial battalions kept going better than those which were without a tradition of discipline and lacked the nucleus of pre-war men who were prepared to accept more readily the casualties and appalling living conditions.
It is certain, however, that officers in general did not become as depressed as did the other ranks. Compared with their men, officers were in greater danger of being killed or wounded but, against this, the privileges of rank could be immense in those things which mattered to front-line soldiers. Leave, pay and decorations were received in direct proportion to the rank held, with the private soldier being worse off in all respects. The officers had the best and often the only dug-outs in the trenches, and did not have to undergo the trials of the exhausting carrying parties and labouring duties which faced the men as soon as they came out for a ‘rest’.
Those officers whose nerve gave way were somehow got rid of, to the rear or to England, but, for the private soldier, ‘battle fatigue’ was rarely recognized as a disease and men who suffered in this way were condemned to a private hell in the trenches until they became a casualty, or cracked and committed an offence which sometimes led to a firing squad. A few could not face the future at all and took their own lives. One must feel pity for those desperate men who, in the solitude of a trench bay, ended their troubles in this way. No figures for such deaths will ever be available; suicides were usually posted as Killed in Action.
‘Towards the end of the war, we were so fed up we wouldn’t even sing “God Save the King” on church parade. Never mind the bloody King we used to say, he was safe enough; it should have been God save us. But we worshipped the Prince of Wales.’ (Pte J. A. Hooper, 7th Green Howards)
‘By the end of 1917 we didn’t care who won as long as we could get the war over.’ (Cpl L. Jessop, 1st London Rifle Brigade)
There were many like Pte Hooper and Cpl Jessop but, although the B.E.F. contained thousands of cynics and war-weary men, the character of the British soldier and the discipline of the army were such that no battalion of the B.E.F. ever deserted its trenches or failed to obey an order to go over the top. The only mutiny, and that was short-lived, was at one of the base camps and was a protest against the bullying methods of instructors who had rarely served at the Front.
The heavy casualties of 1917 had left the B.E.F. in France considerably under strength. Although there were large numbers of men under arms in England, the government refused to send these out to replenish the depleted battalions. No one had the courage to dismiss Haig; instead, the War Cabinet sought to prevent him launching new offensives in 1918 by keeping him short of men.
In an attempt to overcome this shortage, the B.E.F. introduced a reorganization that was to have a lasting effect. In February and March 1918 a total of 153 battalions were disbanded or merged and, from that time, divisions were reduced to only nine battalions of infantry. The men released by this move were used to restore the strength of the remaining battalions. Introduced as an expedient, the nine-battalion division still remains as the standard British infantry unit.
As the Regular battalions were all spared, the greatest cuts were in the New Army. Many of the proud and eager battalions which had been raised in 1914 and had fought so bravely on the Somme passed quietly from the scene, their short lives over.
The first attack of 1918 was made by the Germans. On a foggy morning late in March, they launched a massive offensive against the southern part of the B.E.F.’s front. Using a short but very heavy artillery barrage, followed by infiltrating tactics against the under-strength British divisions, the Germans did what no other army on the Western Front had been able to do since 1914 – they broke through the opposing lines. For ten days they advanced, at the farthest point for thirty-five miles; the ground between Albert and Bapaume, over which the British had struggled for more than four months in 1916, was recaptured by the Germans in one day.
Bill Soar’s battalion, the 1/7th Sherwood Foresters, had been transferred to another division in the recent reorganization and he was in the front line on the first day of the German offensive. For hours, massed ranks of Germans assaulted their position and Soar, for the first time in the war, was able to shoot many of them, until a German bullet hit him in the neck. Before he could be evacuated their position was overrun and virtually the whole battalion killed or captured. Soar’s wound was not treated for three days, but he survived this, and an operation performed without anaesthetic, to spend the remainder of the war in Germany.
Philip Howe, still in the 10th West Yorks and now a captain, had to retreat over the old Somme battlefield. At one stage, whilst in charge of a small rearguard, he found that the Germans were all around him. Neither side opened fire but the Germans called on him to surrender. Howe shouted back ‘No!’ and, surprisingly, the Germans did not shoot but allowed Howe and his men to go. Both sides were sick of killing.
A few days later, from a position just outside Albert, Howe watched hordes of Germans enter the town; he was surprised when they did not reappear for two days. The Germans were exhausted and had also found a large store of drink.
Albert turned out to be the limit of the German advance at this point. They switched their efforts to fresh places and, for the next two months, continued their attacks. Casualties on both sides were enormous and this period saw the end of most of the 1916 veterans who were still at the Front.
The 2nd Lincolns were involved in the fighting and their c.o. was wounded, so Reginald Bastard was recalled to France and, within a few days, he was in command of his old battalion again. After further heavy fighting the Lincolns were taken out of the line, filled up with raw recruits and sent with several other weak battalions to hold a quiet part of the French Army’s front on the Aisne. Here they were to rest and take the opportunity to absorb the new men.
Unfortunately the Germans had chosen just this place for their next offensive. After a sudden, intense bombardment, the Germans attacked. In a few hours the British positions were overwhelmed. Only two officers and thirty men escaped from the Lincolns. Reginald Bastard was not among them. He was a prisoner.
When Hubert Gough had taken over part of the Fourth Army in the evening of 1 July 1916, his command, which became the Fifth Army, did well for many months, but his hard-driving methods at Passchendaele in 1917 earned for him a reputation as a ‘butcher’. In 1918, it was Gough’s Fifth Army which had taken the hardest blows in the German March offensive and had been forced to give much ground, the worst offence a British general could commit. Gough was dismissed and left France in disgrace. His Fifth Army was disbanded. Many thought that he was being unjustly treated and had been made a scapegoat by those who had kept the B.E.F. so short of men.
All was quiet in France during midsummer while the two sides recovered. The British units were completely exhausted and many had almost ceased to exist. The 30th Division, which had gained such a high reputation on the Somme, had been used over and over again since then and had fallen so low in numbers that the whole division was temporarily disbanded; an unusual occurrence. When the 3rd Manchester Pals were broken up and the men sent to other divisions, Paddy Kennedy found that he and three others were the only men left in the fighting part of the battalion from the original members who had joined in 1914. This was the cost of being part of a ‘stormer’ division.
One night Capt. Philip Howe was out on a routine patrol in No Man’s Land when he was fired at by a machine-gun. He escaped by jumping into a shell hole but impaled himself on a bayonet that was sticking up there. Although this was quite accidental, Howe was very worried that he would be charged with having a self-inflicted wound and it was several hours before he came in. His explanation was accepted and he went home to an English hospital, but it is a sad comment on the prevailing state of nerves and low morale that a company commander and a holder of the Military Cross should have feared being accused of wounding himself in order to get away from the Front.
All the time that the Germans had been attacking in the spring and early summer, Haig had been trying to build up a reserve, hoping to be able to launch his own attacks when the Germans had worn themselves out. It was August before he was ready for his first effort and, in three respects, it was 1916 over again: the sector chosen was the Somme, the attack was made by a new Fourth Army and the army commander was, again, Henry Rawlinson.* But here the similarity with 1916 ended for, this time, Rawlinson’s attack was a brilliant success. This opened the way for a series of further successes, but the divisions which gained these victories contained few survivors from the Army of 1916. It is to be hoped that Rawlinson will be remembered by history as much for his 1918 victories as for the reverse of 1 July 1916.
By November the Germans were beaten and sued for peace, this time on the Allies’ terms. An armistice was signed and, at 11 A.M. on 11 November, all fighting on the Western Front ceased.
Of our ten men of 1916, only two remained at the front. Paddy Kennedy had refused all offers of promotion and remained a private to the end. In three years he had had only fourteen days of home leave and had fought in nearly every big battle after the Somme. He had been awarded the Military Medal and been mentioned in Despatches three times. It was a fine record of service but, when the fighting stopped, he was utterly worn out and a sick man.
Percy Chappell was a major and second-in-command of a New Army battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry. He was one of the very few men to have gone out with the B.E.F. in 1914 and remain right to the end. He had served the whole war in France and had suffered nothing worse than a bout of the Spanish Influenza which swept Europe in 1918.
Three more of the men were in Germany as prisoners. Reginald Bastard was in an officers’ camp but the other two had been put to work by the Germans, Albert McMillan in a coal mine and Bill Soar repairing railway engines at a Krupps factory in Essen.
Philip Howe was at home recuperating from his third wound of the war but was still in the army. Charles Matthews was a civilian and had a permanent limp to remind him of the British mine at Kasino Point which had hurt him so badly on 1 July.
To Billy McFadzean, Dick King and Henry Webber, the end of the war meant nothing. Their bodies, buried on the Somme, were with those of the 725,557 British servicemen who had died on the Western Front.*
‘Il ne subsiste alors que le nom, la gloire et les ruines.’ So reads a plaque in the Hôtel de Ville at Albert describing the appearance of the town at the Armistice.
When the war ended, Albert, the surrounding villages and the once pleasant countryside were a completely devastated wasteland. This part of the Somme region had been fought over four times. Not a house remained intact and most of the inhabitants had left.
When Albert fell to the Germans in March 1918, the British were determined that their enemies should not use the tower of the basilica for artillery observers as they themselves had used it for So many months earlier in the war, and British heavy guns were turned onto it. The tower was destroyed and the golden Virgin finally fell into the square below. It has been estimated that the church had been struck by some 2,000 shells since 1914. The statue was lost; rumour had it that the Germans took it away for its scrap metal value. The soldiers’ legend that the fighting would end only when the Virgin fell had been true, for within a few months the war was over.
The devastation was so complete that, at first, the French Government planned to make the whole area into a national forest, without attempting to rebuild the villages or reclaim the land, but gradually, the former inhabitants started to return. Slowly the area returned to life. Working from old plans found at Amiens, the new villages and even most of the individual houses were built on the exact sites of their predecessors. Special labour units were sent to clear the land and fill in the old trench systems. It was feared that the numerous tunnels and dug-outs might attract bandits, so orders were issued that all the entrances to these were to be blocked. In course of time, most collapsed.
The mayor of Mametz returned to his village, found the garden of his old house and dug up a supply of wine he had buried there in 1914. It was in perfect condition. The troops of the 7th Division who captured Mametz in the broiling heat of 1 July might have made short work of this wine if they had known of its existence.
Salvage contractors were allotted particular areas of the old battlefield and could claim all war material found in their area. Many thousands of tons of dud shells and other metal were removed in this way. At ploughing time it was a common sight to see women and children with baskets, searching for the millions of shrapnel balls to be found in the fields.
In 1927 work started on a new basilica at Albert, on the site of the one that had been so familiar to the British soldiers. The son of the original architect was found and, from his old plans, an exact replica of the former church was built. By 1929 the work was finished and, once again, a golden Virgin and her Child looked out over the Somme.
The difficult process of recovery was made easier by the help given by British cities and towns. In the decade following the war, it became the custom for British communities which had lost many men at a particular place to ‘adopt’ the nearest French town or village. In this way, Serre was adopted by Sheffield, whose City Battalion had fought its first and greatest battle there. Montauban was linked with the Kentish town of Maidstone; when the Manchester Pals captured the village on 1 July, it had been the 7th Royal West Kents of the 18th Division who had come up and fought alongside them there.
The North Midland Division had held trenches facing Gommecourt for nearly a year; while it did so its base had been in the ruined village of Foncquevillers (Fonky Bleeding Villas to the soldiers). Gommecourt was adopted by Wolverhampton, in memory of the South Staffords who fell there on 1 July and Foncquevillers by Derby, for the shelter its ruins had given to the Sherwood Foresters.*
Probably the most lasting memorials to the great battle of 1 July will be the beautiful military cemeteries established by the Imperial War Graves Commission after the war.†
When the cemeteries came to be given permanent names, the Commission retained, where possible, those that the soldiers had used. Thus, there is Blighty Valley and Railway Hollow, sheltered spots just behind the old British lines; Bapaume Post, by an old kilometre stone on the main road out of Albert, and Dantzig Alley, a German trench near Mametz.*
Others were named after the battalions who had buried their men in their own burial ground. That of the 11th Border became the Lonsdale Cemetery, although others are buried there, among them Sgt Turnbull, the Glasgow Commercials V.C. The trench grave used by the 8th and 9th Devons, in Mansel Copse, became the Devonshire Cemetery. Nearby is the Gordon Cemetery, which contains the bodies of ninety-nine men from the 2nd Gordon Highlanders who were buried in one of the trenches from which they attacked.
A large battlefield cemetery was established in the old No Man’s Land between Thiepval Wood and the Schwaben Redoubt, and in it were buried many of the Ulstermen who attacked there on 1 July. The army had named this the Connaught Cemetery, either after the Duke of Connaught, the reigning king’s uncle, or after the Southern Irish province of Connaught. One wonders why it was not named the Ulster Cemetery.
In all the Somme battlefield was searched at least six times for lost bodies and isolated graves. The graves of the dead of 1 July can now be found in some fifty cemeteries on and around the old battlefield.
The War Graves Commission worked hard in the postwar years to transform the old burial grounds of the Somme into beautiful, permanent cemeteries. Most of the work was done by British ex-soldiers, many of whom married local girls and settled permanently in Albert and the villages.
For those thousands of men who have no known grave, the Commission erected special memorials. One of these was built on the site of the château that had stood on Thiepval Spur, an appropriate place, since the German machine-gun posts there had inflicted grievous loss on 1 July and for many weeks following. The maze of trenches and underground tunnels caused great difficulty to the builders, but eventually a huge red brick and stone monument on sixteen massive pillars was completed. On these pillars were carved the names of the 73,412 men who were killed on the Somme and Ancre up to February 1918 and have no known grave. Most of these are from the 1916 battles. The Thiepval Memorial was opened in 1932 by the Prince of Wales, who had been such a friend to the front-line soldiers in the war years.
Some regiments or communities built their own private memorials. The Newfoundland Government purchased forty acres of the ground, near Beaumont Hamel, over which its men had attacked with such disastrous results on 1 July and made a memorial park there. The original trenches and barbed wire were preserved for the future interest of visitors and a bronze caribou, commemorating the battalion, was unveiled by Field-Marshal Haig. Sheffield erected a memorial to its City Battalion on the edge of Serre and a fine stone seat, commemorating the attack of the Tyneside Irish and Tyneside Scottish, was built on the main road at La Boisselle. On the old German front line, near the Schwaben Redoubt, the people of Ulster built a memorial tower in honour of their division’s exploits there.
If the post-war years had been kind to the Somme, they were not so to the soldiers who were trying to settle down to civilian life, back at home. Even before most of them had left the army, there had been a General Election at which Lloyd George had promised them ‘a land fit for heroes’. It was a phrase he was soon to regret.
At first, there was plenty of work, of a kind, for the returning soldiers. Those firms which had promised to keep jobs open for their workers who went off to war in 1914 did what they could, but were not always able to keep their promises. No one had known that the war was going to last for over four years. The ex-soldiers found the best jobs held by men who had never been to the war. They often had to take orders from men who had spent the past four years in what the soldiers called ‘funk holes’. Before long, however, an economic depression settled on the country. It brought mass unemployment, short-time working, low wages and years of human misery. The men who had served in the trenches felt, especially after Lloyd George’s promise, that they had been betrayed.
‘I signed on for twelve months at the Labour Exchange. They used to call us the 29th Division because we got 29s. a week.’ (L/Cpl C. O. Law, 89th Brigade Machine Gun Company)
‘One universal question which I have never seen answered: two or three million pounds a day for the 1914–18 war, yet no monies were forthcoming to put industry on its feet on our return from that war. Many’s the time I’ve gone to bed, after a day of “tramp, tramp” looking for work, on a cup of cocoa and a pennyworth of chips between us; I would lay puzzling why, why, after all we had gone through in the service of our country, we have to suffer such poverty, willing to work at anything but no work to be had. I only had two Christmases at work between 1919 and 1939.’ (Pte C. A. Turner, 97th Brigade Machine Gun Company)
‘When I was out of work, I had to go before a Means Test Panel. There was a very fat lady on the Panel, cuddling a Pekinese on her lap. She said, “We’ve all got to pull our belts in a hole or two these days”. I was fed up and told her, “Your words belie your appearance. That bloody dog’s had more to eat today than I’ve had.” There was a lot of argument and it ended in a row. My chair went over; papers and ink-wells went flying and the dog was yapping and squealing. I was charged with common assault and got three months in Wormwood Scrubs.’ (Pte G. Kidd, 9th Devons)
Some of the hardest hit were the coal-miners. Many had been prisoners of war and had worked in the German mines, where they were much impressed by the superior working conditions: ‘It was 1945 before our pits became as safe and efficient as the German pits were in 1918.’ (Pte T. Easton, 2nd Tyneside Scottish) Conditions and pay in British mines were very poor. In 1926, the coal-owners tried to cut pay even further. The whole industry went on strike, with the slogan ‘Not a penny off the pay. Not a minute on the day.’
‘Of course, I have been angry and bitter concerning the betrayal of promises made to the men of the 1914–18 War, “A land fit for heroes” etcetera. Many of my miner friends suffered long periods of unemployment and poverty. The greatest of all indignities was to watch their children having to line up at soup kitchens.’ (L/Cpl W. J. Evans, 8th K.O.Y.L.I.)
The biggest sufferers were the war-disabled; there were thousands of these with little chance of getting work, striving to exist on pensions that were often mere pittances. ‘Although I have survived to reach the ripe old age of seventy-five, I look back, not with pride, but with disgust at the treatment meted out to the disabled ex-servicemen of my generation.’ (Pte F. P. Weston, 7th Buffs)
‘More than anything I hated to see war-crippled men standing in the gutter selling matches. We had been promised a land fit for heroes; it took a hero to live in it. I’d never fight for my country again.’ (Pte F. W. A. Turner, 11th Sherwood Foresters)
In Ireland there were political as well as economic difficulties. The men of the Ulster Division had done more than kill Germans when they stormed the Schwaben Redoubt on 1 July. ‘The Ulster Division has lost more than half the men who attacked and, in doing so, has sacrificed itself for the Empire which has treated them none too well. The much derided Ulster Volunteer Force has won a name which equals any in History. Their devotion, which no doubt has helped the advance elsewhere, deserves the gratitude of the British Empire. It is due to the memory of these brave heroes that their beloved Province shall be fairly treated.’ (Maj. W. Spender, 36th (Ulster) Division H.Q.)* This is part of a letter, written after the battle, by the man who was later to be the Head of Northern Ireland’s Civil Service. When the majority of Ireland became the Free State in 1921, most of Ulster was not forced into the unwanted union with the Catholic South. The sacrifice by the men of the Ulster Division in the war, especially on 1 July, was a factor influencing the granting of this controversial concession, just as Maj. Spender had hoped it would be. Even then, three Ulster counties, Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan, counties which had sent their own battalions to fight at Thiepval, became part of Eire, and Protestant ex-soldiers there found themselves unwilling members of a mainly Catholic country.
There was, for many years, a suspicion among a few people in Ulster that, because of its association with the illegal Ulster Volunteer Force, the Ulster Division was given the task of attacking the strongest part of the German line, at Thiepval, and the time of the attack deliberately revealed to the enemy in the hope that the Force would be wiped out, thus obviating the necessity for dealing with it after the war. It is an interesting theory, but not supported by fact. Religion and politics continue to be troublesome subjects in Northern Ireland and the Ulster Volunteer Force is still in being over half a century later.
Those of our ten 1916 soldiers who had survived the war appear to have coped with the problems of peace better than many of their comrades.
Reginald Bastard retired from the army in 1920. He had served for exactly twenty years and through two wars. He married the widow of another 2nd Lincolns officer and settled down to farm his estate at Kitley, near Plymouth. He died in 1960 at the age of seventy-nine.
After the war, Percy Chappell served again with the Somerset Light Infantry and then on intelligence duties in Ireland, and was awarded the M.B.E. for his work there, but by 1925 he was tired of army life and he retired with the rank of major.
Philip Howe was demobilized and returned to a law practice in Sheffield. In 1939, he went back into the army and served for five years as adjutant to the Army School of Physical Training in Aldershot. He described this as ‘the best adjutant’s job in the British Army’.
When Charles Matthews was discharged as disabled there was a fear that prohibition might be imposed in Britain and he was advised not to return to his old office job in the brewery at Northampton. He made a change and went into banking, a career which he followed for forty years.
Albert McMillan, who had spent over two years as a prisoner of war, was refused his old railway job back because he had joined up without permission. He wrote to one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, who had served on a committee sending parcels to prisoners, and he was soon given employment as a parcels porter at King’s Cross Station.
Bill Soar, too, came home from a prisoner-of-war camp. Although he was now a grown man, he completed his apprenticeship and, probably because of this, never had difficulty in getting work. For many years he was a joiner with Nottingham Corporation working on the maintenance of the city’s schools. Unfortunately he died just before this book was published.
The poor health in which Paddy Kennedy found himself at the end of the war improved and he was able to resume his old office job in Manchester. Several times in the 1920s he visited the family in Rochdale to see the cat, Nigger, that he had taken at Montauban on 1 July. Few Rochdale people knew of this strange link between their town and the Battle of the Somme.*
The generals, too, had to face the post-war years.
Although Douglas Haig had brought the war to a successful conclusion, the heavy losses had tarnished his reputation and he was offered no worthwhile occupation after the war. He accepted this snub with dignity and spent his time co-ordinating the work of the various ex-servicemen’s organizations. This reached its culmination when most of them combined to form the British Legion. Every Remembrance Day poppy sold by the Legion still bears Haig’s name.
Henry Rawlinson and Edmund Allenby were both appointed to high positions: Rawlinson as c.-in-c. in India and Allenby as High Commissioner for Egypt. Hubert Gough, relieved of his command in 1918, was given nothing.
In 1919, some of the war generals were rewarded with titles and large sums of money from public funds. Of those who were on the Somme on 1 July, Haig received an earldom and £100,000, Allenby a viscountcy and £50,000, and Rawlinson and Horne became barons and were awarded ,§630,000 each. Again, Gough was passed over and received nothing.
At the same time, the king approved the award of campaign medals, hitherto only awarded to servicemen, to the two wartime prime ministers, Asquith and Lloyd George. These acts, especially the granting of such huge sums of money to the generals, were not well received by the men who had endured the horrors of war for Is. a day and were now, as often as not, unemployed or underpaid.
One by one, the generals died, often unloved and un-mourned by the men they had led in war. Rawlinson went first, in 1925, while still in India; Haig in 1928; Allenby in 1936.
In the same year, 1936, an unusual thing happened. It was recognized that Gough had been treated shabbily in 1918 and the immediate post-war years. Now he was created a Knight Grand Cross of the Bath as a public act of reparation for the injustices he had undergone. Gough survived all his contemporaries. The general who had been called, in turn, ‘Thruster’, ‘Butcher’ and ‘Scapegoat’ lived until 1963 when he died quietly at the ripe age of ninety-two.
The Somme was touched only very lightly by the Second World War. Twice, in 1940 and in 1944, mechanized armies swept over it in a few hours and war damage was, fortunately, very light. Most of the British gardeners had to leave when the Germans came and their cemeteries were abandoned. One gardener who did remain, a Mr Ben Leech, who had taken part in the capture of Montauban on 1 July with the Manchester Pals, was given permission by the local German commander to continue his work in one of the Serre cemeteries. Mr Leech joined the local Resistance group and, during the next four years, helped twenty-seven Allied airmen to escape after they had been shot down over the Somme. Mr Leech hid these airmen in the cemetery tool shed, and German soldiers often wandered around the cemetery, unaware that the escapers were only a few yards away.*
When the gardeners returned after the war, their beloved cemeteries presented a sorry sight. The fine lawns and flowers had grown wild and some of the trees had been cut down for fuel; it took over ten years of hard work to bring them back to their former glory.
The Somme, today, does not present the bustling scene of the 1920s.† From quiet Albert, the Virgin looks out over a landscape which, to the casual eye, shows no sign of what it suffered in 1916. Only the more diligent searcher will find signs that one of Western Europe’s biggest battles was fought here.
The shattered woods have now completely re-grown but, between the trees, there is no level ground. The overlapping shell craters of 1916 may be grassed over, but are easily recognizable for what they are. In some of the woods, the lines of old trenches can be followed easily, bay by bay, but with the quiet, the grass and the mature trees, it is difficult to imagine the hell that these woods were in 1916.
Outside the woods, the fields have been ploughed and sown every year since the battle. The plough still brings up shells and, after heavy rain, unemployed still search for shrapnel balls, but otherwise there are few signs of the war, although if one can get a distant view of bare land, especially after the winter frosts, the distinct white lines in the earth show where the old trenches had been dug into the chalk beneath. But there is danger too; foolish Frenchmen are occasionally killed, trying to hammer off the valuable brass nose-caps of live shells. There are many of these, mostly British, evidence of the high proportion of duds in their artillery ammunition of 1916.
Sometimes, the remains of one of the many bodies that were never properly buried is found. The War Graves Commission only accepts the body if it is satisfied that it belonged to a British serviceman, but up to ten are recovered in this way on the Somme each year. If they can be identified, and this is sometimes possible, any relatives that can be found are informed.
There are other reminders of the battle, for the bigger mine craters were never filled in. Seven of these remain, great yawning holes in the ground, silent reminders of the violence that erupted on that sunny Saturday morning.
There are few visitors to the Somme now. Although Albert is as near to London as is York, Liverpool or Exeter, it is not on the popular holiday routes to the South. The more isolated cemeteries sometimes do not see an English visitor in a whole year. It does not matter to the gardeners, they keep them just as beautiful as the more popular ones.
The survivors of the Army of 1916 are growing old, but a few still make the journey to Albert, year after year. ‘I first went back to the Somme on a motor-bike in 1935. I have been back twelve times since then and I intend to keep going as long as I can; I try to be there on 1 July. I go out and, at 7.30 A.M., I stand at the exact spot where we went over the top in 1916.’ (Pte H. C. Bloor, Accrington Pals)
Even if the visitors stop coming, the cemeteries will always remain, for its Charter charges the War Graves Commission to maintain these ‘in perpetuity’.
It is easy to read that 20,000 men were killed in one day, but only when one sees the cemeteries on the old battlefield with their rows and rows of white headstones does the figure begin to mean anything. It is a hard heart that is not moved by the beauty of these cemeteries and the sadness of the graves. ‘Oh, the heartache, seeing all those thousands upon thousands of graves of young men in their prime, my eldest brother among them, who had come all the way from Australia. For what? Can anyone give the answer?’ (Pte G. B. Gledhill, 1/5th West Yorks)
They will always be there, the men who fought and died on 1 July – Billy McFadzean and the other five dead v.c.’s; the gallant Brig.-Gen. Prowse; the thirty-one dead battalion c.o.’s; the company commanders – Maj. Gaffikin, the Orangeman, Capt. Nevill of the footballs and Capt. Martin, who knew where he would die; the subalterns – Sir Harry Mac-Naghten, the boy-baronet, William Hodgson, the poet, George Arthur, the unrecognized hero of Gommecourt; Matt Hamilton, the brave young sergeant-major.
Then there are the private soldiers, the Dick Kings, the unknown, humble men, who never had the chance to become famous. They died in their thousands, these fine men of 1916. They died for love of their country and a shilling a day.
The soldiers of 1916 were not supermen; they did not belong to a special generation. They were merely ordinary Britons, who believed that they had to fight to save their country. It turned out that theirs was to be an unlucky and ill-used generation. What do they think now, the men who survived the war and then fifty years of normal life? Their answers vary. The officer will give a different view from the private soldier; the extrovert from the sensitive man.
‘My strongest recollection: all those grand looking cavalrymen, ready mounted to follow the breakthrough. What a hope!’ (Pte E. T. Radband, 1/5th West Yorks)
‘I made up my mind that, if ever I got out of it alive, there wasn’t enough gold in the Bank of England to get me back again.’ (L/Cpl J. A. Henderson, Belfast Young Citizens)
‘One’s revulsion to the ghastly horrors of war was submerged in the belief that this war was to end all wars and Utopia would arise. What an illusion!’ (Cpl J. H. Tansley, 9th Yorks and Lanes)
‘July 1st 1916 was the most interesting day of my life.’ (Lieut P. Howe, M.C, 10th West Yorks)
‘It was pure bloody murder. Douglas Haig should have been hung, drawn and quartered for what he did on the Somme. The cream of British manhood was shattered in less than six hours.’ (Pte P. Smith, 1st Border)
‘Even so, war is a daft game. Some say that they enjoyed every moment. Their comrades don’t believe them.’ (Sgt C. E. Linford, 466th Field Company R.E.)
‘I might add that five minutes after the attack started, if the British public could have seen the wounded struggling to get out of the line, the war would have possibly been stopped by public opinion.’ (Pte J. F. Pout, 55th Field Ambulance)
‘I cursed, and still do, the generals who caused us to suffer such torture, living in filth, eating filth, and then, death or injury just to boost their ego.’ (Pte W. H. Haigh, 1/5th Yorks and Lanes)
‘From that moment all my religion died. All my teaching and beliefs in God had left me, never to return.’ (Pte C. Bartram, 94th Trench Mortar Battery)
‘We had “Gott mit uns” (“God with us”) on our belt buckles, but we still lost the war.’ (Gefreiter Hugo van Egeren, 55th Reserve Regiment)
‘As I was one of the lucky ones, I still say I am glad I was there.’ (L/Cpl C. F. T. Townsend, 12th Middlesex)