#S/11390 Lance Corporal John MacDonald
7TH SEAFORTH HIGHLANDERS
LE SARS HAD BEEN CAPTURED on 7th October, three days after Robert Graham’s death. Rawlinson’s men were one small step closer to Bapaume, further down the main road to the north-east. But the weather was becoming even worse now; damp, cold and wet threatening to take all of the impetus out of the British advance. The 9th (Scottish) Division arrived in the area and took up a position north of Eaucourt l’Abbaye and to the East of Le Sars. Almost three months had elapsed since their hideous experiences inside Delville Wood in mid-July and the Scotsmen and their South African contingent returned to the fighting on the Somme in the autumn to find that the Germans in front of them had now been pushed back to a fourth set of defences.
Among their number was a 22 year old from Partick named John MacDonald. Educated at Thornwood Public School on the west side of Glasgow, John had worked for optical engineers Barr & Stroud until his enlistment at the end of 1915. The scene in front of him on the Somme was one of total devastation, a ‘vast waste of wilderness created by three months of savage warfare. Its general colour scheme was a dull uniform grey which changed to a dingy yellow when the sun shone.’ There were no landmarks, no features to break the grey monotony:
Here and there a body arrested attention by the peculiar contortion of its attitude and served as a landmark to guide runners on their way. The air was rank with the odour of death. To eye, ear and nose the whole place was repellent …
The whole area was blanketed in debris from the fighting, ‘but worst of all from Mametz Wood to the front line were scattered corpses and a heavy, fetid odour pervaded the atmosphere’. There was simply not the manpower available to concentrate on clearing them away. Even inside Mametz Wood, which had been in British hands for months now, there were still both British and German bodies everywhere:
The entire area was intersected by rutted roads, which even in fine weather could barely stand the stupendous amount of traffic that passed over them in a never ending stream.
Men not manning the trenches worked daily to repair them, ‘but all the labour served only to keep them passably decent, and when the weather broke down, almost superhuman efforts were required to keep them from collapsing altogether’.
Nonetheless, despite the conditions, the undermanned state of battalions and the men and material being expended for limited gains, it was still believed at this point, with fair weather and tenacity perhaps, that before winter came Rawlinson’s Fourth Army could get beyond Warlencourt and Le Sars and take Bapaume to establish themselves upon advantageous ground. Now that Le Sars had fallen, as was the nature of the fighting on the Somme, attention was drawn to the next stubborn obstacle that lay in the path of the British Army. In this case, it was the Butte de Warlencourt, an ancient burial mound which was a pile of chalk some 50ft high alongside the straight road running to Bapaume that had been skinned of all vegetation by shelling. Protected by a network of trenches, it was rife with dugouts and tunnels sheltering the enemy, while they enjoyed a clear view all the way back across the barren countryside to Flers in one direction and up to Bapaume in the other.
On 12th October John MacDonald and his battalion were sent into action to try to storm the Butte, first taking possession of Snag Trench, which lay in their path, before they reached the Butte itself. John and his fellow Highlanders had suffered machine-gun fire as soon as they left the trenches, and although another battalion was sent forward to reinforce them, their advance was minimal. Under cover of darkness they dug in, confused, with South African troops on their left.
The resumption of the attack would again see the Scottish division heading for Snag Trench and the Butte beyond. The 7th Seaforth Highlanders were relieved on 13th October, but would be coming back up before the assault began. In the meantime, they pooled their resources to form companies of as few as thirty men. There was gruesome work for John and his comrades to do. They formed burial parties, and went up to find any lingering wounded in the area. There was also the rather morbid job of removing valuable greatcoats and other material from fallen men out in the open who no longer had use for it. All the while, they had to operate under enemy shellfire and wade through clay-like mud. The preliminary bombardment was already under way, with intense bursts of fire and a fierce response being belted out by the enemy guns opposite. As work continued on 17th October, John was killed just hours before his battalion marched up to prepare for its advance the following day. It was customary for an officer to write to the man’s family, but by this point on the Somme, battalions had been decimated, filled with drafts and then torn apart again so that often men barely knew each other. ‘I did not know him very well,’ a young subaltern wrote to John’s parents, ‘but he was without doubt very popular with his companions.’ John MacDonald’s body, if recovered, was never identified and he is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial, Pier & Face 15c.