#12374 Private Luther Cordin
7TH LEICESTERSHIRE REGIMENT
WHILE ARTHUR RANDALL FOUGHT FOR Trônes Wood throughout the night of the 13th, troops marked to take part in the offensive proper were preparing to deploy ready for zero hour. Among them were four battalions belonging to the Leicestershire Regiment, forming a brigade known as the Leicester Tigers. Rawlinson’s men were to be attacking on a front of 3½ miles and the battle was to be innovative. The Leicestershire battalions crept forward under cover of darkness for their night attack, a point that Rawlinson had fought hard for with Haig. Creeping out of the cover of Mametz Wood, the men formed up on lines of tape, having already quietly conquered some of the ground that would inevitably be showered with machine-gun fire when the battle began.
Waiting to begin the rush towards the enemy was a tall 23 year old named Luther Cordin. A miner from the village of Annesley Woodhouse, near Nottingham, he enlisted at Hucknall at the beginning of the war and was immediately routed into the Leicestershire Regiment, embarking for France at the end of July 1915. Facing roughly north-east towards Bazentin-le-Petit, Luther watched as shells continued to fall on the remains of the trees that masked the battered village. His battalion, the 7th, were on the left of the Leicester attack, committed to bursting uphill and taking the left side of Bazentin-le-Petit Wood.
‘At 3:20am the whole sky behind the waiting infantry … seemed to open with a great roar of flame.’ In order to maintain an element of surprise, British artillery and machine gunners had waited until five minutes before zero hour before unleashing an intense hurricane bombardment on the enemy positions ahead. Luther Cordin rushed forward with his battalion in the dark. In front of him the artillery laid down an elementary creeping barrage to protect the advancing troops. The British infantry was instructed to stay as close to its own moving curtain of shells as possible, which meant that projectiles were screaming down literally a few feet above their heads. The concept was incredibly dangerous and frightening but a most effective tactic. Firing a creeping barrage required excellent communication between guns and batteries, and detailed planning between artillery, infantry and aircraft to make sure they followed it at the right speed.
On either flank, the 7th Leicesters began to drop into the German front line but, in the centre, Luther and his company found themselves pinned down for nearly half an hour by vicious machine-gun fire. Troops on their right helped work down their flank and then they too were able to engulf the enemy. Men swept over the enemy trenches and began to surge for the German support line as planned. After initial resistance in the front trenches, and taken by surprise, the enemy retreated into Bazentin-le-Petit Wood and put up little resistance. In little over half an hour, the first two objectives of the 7th Leicesters had been seized.
Success had come at a cost. The Leicester Tigers had become confused and their leaders had taken heavy casualties. Only one officer of Luther Cordin’s company was still in action; the same was true of another and in a third every officer was dead, missing somewhere on the battlefield or in no shape to continue the fight. Nevertheless, at 4:25am survivors set out to capture the third objective. On one side this was straightforward enough but on the other the Leicesters came under fire from both a machine gun and snipers. Confusion reigned and in some cases the men pressed forward too far and came under the British barrage.
As the day continued, the 7th Leicesters were bombarded with shells from German howitzers, but up and down the line, the continuation of the main offensive on the Bazentin Ridge had been almost universally successful. With a combination of a night attack and a meticulous, relentless bombardment in the lead up to zero hour that had paved the way for the infantry, Trônes Wood had fallen along with almost the entire original German second system from Longueval to Bazentin-le-Petit. The 14th July was a well-planned triumph on a limited front, but in the grand scheme of things, these were objectives still outstanding from 1st July and had only come after nearly two weeks of resource-consuming minor attacks made up and down the line in less than ideal circumstances. There did now, however, appear to be hope for the Somme offensive.
The cost of progress along Bazentin Ridge was nearly 10,000 men. That night, back on the Leicester front, the various county battalions were attempting to sort themselves out after the confusion of the day’s fighting. It would be a lengthy process and keeping tabs on what had happened to a single individual could be impossible. Luther Cordin was reported wounded by 22nd July, probably because one or more witnesses furnished such information. In August the army decided to classify him as ‘missing’ because he had not been located at any casualty clearing station or hospital. Finally, at the end of September, the authorities decided that too much time had elapsed for him to emerge as a prisoner of war and the War Office vaguely determined that Luther Cordin had been killed in action at some point during the Battle of Bazentin Ridge and, for neatness, applied 14th July as his date of death. Luther’s body, if recovered, was never identified and he is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial, Pier & Face 2c/3a.
Men of the Leicester Tigers Brigade relax in the aftermath of the Battle of Bazentin Ridge. (Authors’ collection)