The Field Marshal was in London when the Battle of the Somme started. He had arrived home, shivering and exhausted, and been promptly packed off to bed by his wife.
‘You old fool,’ she chided him gently. ‘You ought to know you’re too old to go gallivanting round the trenches.’ She kissed his forehead as he looked up at her, his thin peaked nose over the sheets, his white hair in wisps round his head. ‘All the same,’ she added, ‘I’m proud of you.’
His recovery took longer than he expected but he was on his feet and back to normal by the end of June, thankful that he hadn’t dropped dead in France and given the army the trouble of carting him home. Besides, he found he was surprisingly involved in what was going on and was constantly in demand on committees in London, giving decisions on all sorts of things from new equipment, remounts, Dominion troops, trench raids, courts martial for desertion or cowardice, even aircraft.
When the Somme barrage started, there were people who swore it was possible to hear it across the Channel. The Field Marshal doubted it but, knowing its size, he thought he might well be wrong. The first intimation of the attack came within hours with press posters on the streets. GREAT BRITISH OFFENSIVE BEGINS, they said and snippets of news made great play with the names of villages that had been captured. GREAT BRITISH VICTORY appeared the next day. NEW ARMY ADVANCES MILES INTO GERMAN LINE. On July 7th, the British were reported to be starting a new offensive and it seemed to the Field Marshal that, despite misgivings, the men in France had been right and they had smashed the door wide open.
But then he noticed that many of the names seemed to be familiar and, obtaining a Michelin map of the Somme, he studied it in his hotel room so that the great British offensive was brought into perspective. As far as he could make out, what had happened had been mere nibbles at the German line at the south end of the front, with no gains whatsoever in the north.
He telephoned his puzzled wife that he had business at the House of Commons and was likely to be delayed in London, and told the hotel porter to call him a cab. His work had taken him often to Westminster so that he was well known there and he was greeted in the corridors by the Attorney-General. He looked grave.
‘Winston’s on his high horse about the offensive,’ he admitted. ‘He doesn’t see it quite in the way the newspapers do. Not that he can do much at the moment. He’s not a member of the government, just an unemployed lieutenant-colonel. But he promises me a memorandum for the Cabinet. Lloyd George isn’t going to be pleased.’
Lloyd George saw the Field Marshal in his office, sending out his secretary and shutting the door firmly.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘I think you were right to suspect,’ the old man said.
‘You must be the only senior soldier who does,’ the Welshman growled. ‘Have you seen the convoys of wounded? They started on the 4th, and they’ve continued without stop ever since. They’re immense. You can ignore the ones you see about the streets. Everybody’s buying them beer and cigarettes, but they’re the men with the neat bandages on their heads and arms. They aren’t the ones maimed by explosions or gashed by shell splinters. Those people in France must be curbed. If I were Prime Minister I’d make sure they were curbed.’
‘Will you be Prime Minister?’
‘Before long.’ There was no doubt in the politician’s voice. ‘Then we shall have to see. We can’t have them wasting the manpower of the country in this profligate fashion.’
Worried by the Welshman’s disclosures, the Field Marshal headed for the War Office. It was a warm day and he decided to walk. His old enemy, John Bull, was still pushing out its scurrilous and totally ill-founded stories, he noticed, and the newspapers were suggesting that the Germans had been so hard hit they were even opening their gaols to recruit the criminals for the army.
To the Field Marshal, experienced in war, it seemed the newspapers were completely misjudging the situation. They were living through a time of historical intensity as great as the Franco-Prussian War or the American Civil War but they knew nothing of the foulness of trench life and tried to create the impression that the battle was little more than a rather rough sporting event in which a few people occasionally got hurt. Most people in London were still more concerned with the possibility of being hit by a bomb dropped by a zeppelin and by the fact that the Defence of the Realm Act restricted their drinking.
Feeling he needed to know more, he went to see Ellesmere at the War Office, but Ellesmere had vanished and he sought an interview instead with Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff.
Not unnaturally, Robertson was busy and he kept the old man waiting. When they met he was wary.
‘Ellesmere felt he had to go to France,’ he pointed out. ‘He was given a Division.’
‘Then you’d better tell me, Wullie,’ the old man said. ‘How are things going on the Somme?’
‘Things are moving forward.’
‘As they should?’
Robertson regarded him warily. ‘There have been setbacks, of course,’ he replied guardedly. ‘There always are, as you know as well as anybody, sir.’
The old man regarded the CIGS carefully. They had met in the Chitral campaign and he had a liking for the blunt Scot who constantly dropped his aitches but had worked his way up from the ranks to his present position by sheer intelligence and hard work.
‘Don’t humbug me, Wullie,’ he said. ‘What are they up to in France? Intelligence seems to be pushing out stories of a great victory but I was there not long ago and I know where they were aiming. They don’t seem to have got there.’
Robertson looked worried and gnawed his moustache. ‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘They ’aven’t. I might as well be frank with you, though, of course, it ’as to be kept to ourselves. It seems to have been a proper shambles.’
‘What happened?’
‘No gain at all in the north. Fricourt was a failure. The Irish smashed through four sets of trenches near Thiepval but they were isolated and had to come back. The Newfoundlanders were wiped out at Hamel and the South Wales Borderers at Beaumont. The Durhams were smashed at Ovillers, the Green Howards at Fricourt, and the Yorks and Lancs at Serre. All those fine fellers. Whole battalions, thousands of fine men, swept away.’
‘What about the casualties?’
‘First reports showed ’em to be small. Fifteen thousand. That sort of figure. Now they think they’ll be more in the region of sixty thousand.’
‘Sixty thousand? That means twenty thousand dead!’
‘In one day,’ Robertson growled. ‘The first day. In the first hour or two, if we ’ave to be honest.’
There was a long silence then the Field Marshal rose. ‘Thank you, Wullie,’ he said. ‘Thank you for being honest. I probably shan’t be seeing you again. I think in future I’ll stay by my own fireside.’
As he left the War Office, the old man’s feet were dragging a little. He obtained a taxi with difficulty and directed it to his hotel. By the time he reached his room, his mind seemed numb and he felt as if his cold was coming back again.
Not wishing to alarm his wife, he wrote her a note to say he’d been detained again. Sixty thousand casualties! The figure hammered at his brain like a gong. Sixty thousand! It didn’t seem possible! All those splendid young men! All those high hopes!
Going to bed, he pulled the blanket over his head and lay still, wondering if his son could possibly still be alive.
The 19th Lancers had not even been in action. The expected cavalry breakthrough had never materialised and the horsemen had been used for nothing else but to clear the dead.
The corpses filled every ditch and covered every verge, some of them kneeling, their hands groping out as if still reaching for their weapons, some with arms lifted as if playing the violin, some with one leg raised as though shot in the act of running forward. Still others, caught by blast, were mere shapeless sacks moulded only by the clothes that contained them.
In a back area facing Trônes Wood, Dabney brooded on the tragedy. Just behind where he waited with his men, the horses in a restless line, was the grey-and-red ruin of a village, nothing but charred ribs and broken walls blasted by counter fire. The street was empty apart from one or two animals and their riders who had been edged into it by the crush. Shutters hung limply, and doors and windows gaped in despair over the brick-strewn sidewalk. Letters and photographs were scattered everywhere, trampled by muddy boots, and mattresses lay in the roadway, bloodstained from the bodies that had rested on them after the attack a fortnight before. In one or two houses out of reach of shell splinters, ruined beds had been shoved aside and graves had been dug and crosses erected, the caps of the dead askew on them, and here and there were carcasses of horses, lying in clotted heaps.
By this time, the forward area of the Somme was like a moonscape, pitted with shell craters and the wreckage of the battle. Some of the dead horses had obviously kicked their team-mates to ribbons in their attempts to get free. Others, dusty and forlorn-looking, lay with their legs starkly in the air among the smashed wagons and limbers and the incredibly broken guns which showed where the German artillery had done its deadly work.
July 1st had been the disaster Dabney had prophesied. And, sickened by the bodies that lay in every grotesque attitude, their uniforms filthy with mud or stiff with blood, their horses nervous at the smell of death and the unceasing chatter of musketry, they had cleared the field with what compassion they could muster, their minds numbed by the horrors, Dabney at least convinced that their role in war was ended.
But, now, after a fortnight of bloody fighting in which futile attacks had been launched one after another to try to gain some narrow strip of blood-soaked ground so that the public at home could be given the victory they’d been promised, something new had been tried, and plans had been made for a night attack without a preliminary barrage to warn the enemy. Twenty-two thousand men had been assembled after dark in No Man’s Land without the enemy suspecting and they had got through the wire without a shot being fired. Five miles of the German second line had been taken and the cavalry had finally been ordered to stand by. After the humiliation of the first days, there was a feeling that this time something might really happen because, on the left of the attack, open country – that open country the army had been seeking ever since the autumn of 1914 – lay tantalisingly before them at last.
A staff officer appeared and spoke to Johnson, warning him he was due to move off at once. ‘German resistance’s beginning to disintegrate,’ he said. ‘Rawlinson wants the cavalry to push forward.’
There was an excited stirring. In front of him Dabney could see the high ground lifting away to the sky, and he glanced back at the restless lines of horses and the men standing in groups, dragging at cigarettes, their faces bleak with anticipation. But there seemed to be some confusion over the orders and Johnson was growing more impatient by the minute.
‘Cavalry action should be left to the men on the spot,’ he fumed.
Storming off to see the brigadier in command, he returned livid with rage. ‘The bloody fool’s gone off to some infantry headquarters to find out what’s going on, and he’s sent his liaison officers all over the blasted countryside to see what’s happening, so that now nobody knows anything.’
He had barely spoken when a message came for the move forward to begin. But the Secunderabad Brigade of Indian cavalry was still without its commanding officer and the two British regiments, the 7th Dragoon Guards and the 19th Lancers, had been told not to move without him.
‘For God’s sake!’ Johnson fumed. ‘We’ve already been waiting for hours! Those bloody Wogs were never any damn good at anything except polo, tent-pegging and pigsticking!’
In the end, they began to move forward without the Indians, clattering out of the village and on to a plank bridge over a trench filled with the detritus of battle. They were held up again on the edge of a shattered wood where the Germans had been dropping shells since the battle had started fourteen days before. By this time it was a mass of shell holes, with every tree broken off at the top or bottom to add to the impenetrable tangle that sliced the sun into broken dusty beams.
Nearby, the mainstream of the battle traffic passed, artillerymen sitting stiffly on tired mounts in front of long steel guns, weary infantrymen trudging along in little groups, out of step, heads heavy under helmets. Mounted officers dozed on jaded horses, nodding forward over the saddle horn, their sleeping men drooping over gun limbers, fast asleep even while hanging on. The chink of equipment and the tap of a bayonet against a petrol tin half-full of water seemed the only sound about them over the shuffle of boots.
There were a few jeers at the cavalry that served only to make Johnson more livid, but eventually, the Indians appeared, their dark faces shadowed under their helmets, and as the order came to move forward, the columns cantered ahead. But as the tarmacadamed road was left behind, they found themselves struggling in the shell-pitted, churned-up land near the original front line. Horses slithered and stumbled in the increasingly deep mud and one or two went down, horse and man rising covered with grey sludge.
As they stopped once more, the guns seemed to have grown quieter and they could hear only sporadic firing on the flanks. But no orders came and nobody seemed to have thought of food for them, so that the horses began to stamp and whinny with impatience.
The brigadier had detached several squadrons to gallop round the wood to prevent German reinforcements approaching, while other squadrons were ordered to dismount and push forward on foot from the north. The reserve squadrons were ordered forward again and as afternoon gave way to a pale sun-washed evening they found themselves on the slopes leading towards High Wood, two squadrons of the 19th, two of the 7th Dragoon Guards and two of the Deccan Horse, with Johnson in command as senior colonel.
As they thudded along the valley, ahead of them lay barley fields and the rich beauty of undamaged countryside. A field of corn sloped upwards on their right, and at the other end they could see spiked-helmeted German officers moving about. For a moment, as the six squadrons edged forward, clattering and clinking, the horses whinnying excitedly, there still seemed a little glory left in the war.
Then a machine gun opened up on them and several horses went down. At the edge of the wood, a few shells dropped close, to empty a few more saddles. Galloping along the line of men as they became unsteady under the shelling, Dabney’s voice and example restored a drift to the rear. His eyes were everywhere, looking for chin straps not in place and rifles not jammed home in the bucket, as he always did, and they began to think that if he had time to think about such things it couldn’t be as bad as it seemed.
As they reached the corn, German outposts rose to meet them. They were trying to mount a machine gun and, immediately, realising it demanded instant action, Dabney waved his squadron forward without waiting for orders. A German officer swung to meet him as he thundered up, raising a hand with a revolver in it to point it at Dabney. The shot went past his ear then the German staggered back, clutching at his head as Dabney’s sabre crashed down on his helmet and sent him rolling under the flying hooves. As the rest of the Germans turned to run, they were speared by a group of Deccan Horse which had come up alongside.
‘Hold those men, Goff!’ Johnson came galloping up as they drew rein, angry that Dabney had moved without orders. ‘Keep them steady, damn it! We don’t want them out of hand.’
Dabney gave him a cold look, knowing perfectly well his men had been well under control, but Johnson wheeled his horse and, as they regained their place in the line, he took a position just in front, followed by his orderly and his trumpeter. It seemed an unbelievable sight, with the corn and the luxuriant green of the wood as a backcloth. But there were more Germans with machine guns waiting along the edge of the wood in a position to enfilade them. Johnson seemed blind to the danger and, feeling it his duty to point them out, Dabney edged his horse forward.
Johnson waved him away. ‘We’ve been ordered to take the wood,’ he said. ‘It’s our duty to take it, machine guns or no machine guns. Dammit, so far we’ve hardly been touched by the battle! This is a splendid moment and we mustn’t fail.’
He seemed elated by the thought of action and quite unable to appreciate the danger in his eagerness. As the trumpets sounded, Dabney glanced at his men. Ellis Ackroyd’s face was set and grim, but, as they began to move forward at a trot, the surge and excitement of the action gripped him, too.
As they swung into the corn, moving from column into line, the machine guns started to chatter. Immediately, the magnificent vision of a mounted action crumbled into slaughter as horse after horse went down, flung to the ground like rabbits at a farm shoot. Johnson was waving his sword, urging them forward, and his trumpeter had his head back, his trumpet in the air, sounding the Charge. But the machine guns swept across and the call ended in a despairing bray as the trumpeter’s horse went down. Johnson was just turning as the bullets caught him. His head was back and his mouth open, and Dabney saw his chest and throat flower red. The raised sword fell from his hand and, after a few more strides by his mount, he drooped in the saddle and slid to the ground.
More and more horses were going down, squealing and neighing in pain. Riderless chargers were facing in every direction and as Dabney’s own mount went down, he lay for a moment in the corn, dazed. Recovering his senses and rising to his feet, he began to shout, his sword in the air, trying to rally his men, but Johnson had led them into a perfect ambush, and it was impossible to make himself heard above the din. A horse crashed to the ground alongside him, frothing blood, its eyes glazing even as it stopped rolling. Its rider scrambled to his feet and stood alongside Dabney, responding instinctively to discipline. Almost immediately, however, he was hit in the face and staggered back, tripping over the neck of his own dead horse to sit down beyond it and flop over, flat on his back, his spurred boots in the air.
There seemed to be no one else near Dabney and he began to run bent double to where he could see a grey horse standing trembling in the waist-high corn, its Indian rider dead alongside it. Stumbling over the body, he reached the horse and swung himself into the saddle, only to realise that the grey had been hit, too. As it moved away, its breath came in spasmodic wheezes, and its legs were already unsteady.
The following squadrons had caught up with the first line now, and were thrown into confusion by the struggling horses and men and, as the grey finally crashed to the ground, Dabney found himself sprawling again. Struggling to his feet just as a group of Indian soldiers galloped towards him, he had to dive for safety behind the body of the horse and one of the Indians actually hurdled them in a perfect jump to pelt him with flying clods of muddy earth.
The advance had lasted a mere two or three minutes and now the flailing maelstrom of men and horses was shredding itself out into a general movement to the rear. Forced along with it, Dabney found himself alongside Ellis Ackroyd whose face was covered with blood and grey with pain.
‘Get up behind, sir,’ he yelled.
As Dabney swung himself up, horses were still falling, the unseated riders rolling and dodging until knocked senseless by flying hooves. One of the Indians crossing Ackroyd’s front was hit by a machine gun burst and bounced from the saddle in front of them, all scattered brains and smashed teeth. Another horse barged against them, its rider dragged along screaming, one foot still in the stirrup, then Dabney became aware that Ackroyd’s mount was faltering, too, and, even as he wondered what to do, it went down on its knees and he and Ackroyd were flung over its head into the trampled corn.
For a while Dabney lay still, dazed, as the field emptied of living men. All round him, wounded horses were screaming and there were moans from the dying and cries of anger and disgust from the running survivors. Dragging himself to his feet, he moved to where Ellis Ackroyd lay. His eyes were open but he seemed unable to speak, and, quite unaware of the machine guns that were still chattering by the wood, Dabney managed to drag him over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and began to stumble back down the slope. Johnson’s charge had been an utter failure.
The shattered squadrons were regrouping behind the trees further along the valley, wounded men stumbling in, clinging to the stirrup of any man who still had a horse. The slope above them was scattered with dead and dying, half hidden by the corn which was now trampled to a bloody mash. A wounded horse was lying on the ground, its hooves skittering against a patch of stony ground until its rider drew his rifle from the bucket on the saddle and put a bullet through its head.
As Dabney lowered Ackroyd to the ground, a trooper of the 19th, his face bloody but still mounted, approached, leading a limping horse.
‘’Ere y’are, sir,’ he said. ‘Better ’ave this one. It don’t seem to belong to nobody.’ He looked at the shattered squadrons and the panting, dazed men, then back at Dabney. ‘For God’s sake, sir,’ he said, ‘what the ’ell did we want to go and do a soft-brained thing like that for?’