#8967 Private Alfred Spooner
2ND WORCESTERSHIRE REGIMENT
WINTER HAD ARRIVED ON THE SOMME. ‘The battlefield, under torrents of rain, had already assumed that forlorn and desolate appearance which ever after remained, burnt in upon one’s brain – a vision of living torture.’ The havoc wrought by duelling artillery pieces and endless lines of infantry, and all who supported them, had devastated the entire region:
Every village wrested from the enemy since the 1st July was now but a mass of tumbled or tottering masonry, each day and night witnessing further ruination; every road had been wrecked by mines or was pock marked by shell holes; every wood had been so torn, disfigured and disintegrated that wood was but a misnomer.
It did not end there. ‘Farms, quarries, windmills, had gone the way of the villages and the woods – wrecked and ruined by the awful holocaust of high explosive and shrapnel.’ Then there was the smell of the battlefield. ‘The very earth stank of gas and was discoloured by the fumes from the bursting of gas shells.’ Thousands upon thousands of overlapping shell holes were brimming with filthy water:
… putrid from the dead bodies of friend or foe to whom no burial had been given. The fetid stench from the rotting carcasses of horses, or the poor remains of Briton or German torn from their hastily dug graves by shellfire and tossed here and there to await the mercy of fresh internment, filled the nostrils as one passed to or from the front line.
But as November dawned on the Somme, conditions had not reached their worst. The mud on the battlefield now became an enemy in itself, sucking men to their deaths. ‘The full horrors … had not been experienced; towards the end of October the mud in many places was only some two feet in depth.’ Those conditions, however turgid, were to deteriorate further before the battle came to an end:
Men and horses and mules had not been yet drowned in mud and shell holes as some were later; and troops coming out of the line still had the appearance of soldiers, not erstwhile Robinson Crusoes, who, burrowing the earth, had become sodden through and covered in mud from tip to toe.
Ensconced in abject misery with thousands of others on the battlefield was 21-year-old Alfred Spooner, an enameller from Aston, Birmingham. Alfred had been a territorial since leaving school. Mobilised as soon as war broke out, he had served at the front since December 1914.
Towards the end of October, Alfred and his battalion were in a muddy camp behind Flers, sending out working parties carrying material for the Royal Engineers from Trônes Wood to forward dumps in the rain, or cutting wood for the sappers to use. As they struggled to drain and improve their camp and get clean after a day’s labour, the men were given rations of rum to ease their plight. On the 30th the Worcesters’ commanding officer went up and reconnoitred the front lines and, as darkness fell, Alfred and the rest of the battalion embarked on a torrid relief past the ruins of Ginchy, dragging themselves through the mud. They were finally in place the following morning at 2am. Exhausted on arrival, 31st October was reasonably quiet in terms of enemy activity, but Alfred and his cohorts found themselves sitting in trenches only 4ft deep and full almost to the brim with water. Carrying up rations and supplies to the front companies was nigh on impossible.
But it was not just with mere survival that the likes of Alfred were concerned on the Somme at the beginning of November. Despite the miserable conditions, those in command were still hell bent on taking more favourable positions for future large-scale operations, including the troublesome knot of trenches to the east of Lesboeufs. At 5:45am two Scottish battalions attacked. Some of the men got into Boritska Trench but they were forced out. To their right, Alfred’s battalion was ordered to make its own assault on a trench named Hazy. Dutifully men began moving up to their assembly positions. Some of them were forced to lie out in the open as they awaited zero hour, 3:30pm. Punctually, the 2nd Worcesters went forward with the Glasgow Highlanders and attempted to link up with French troops, who were in Boritska Trench just along the way. ‘Up to the waist in slime’ they were shelled before they even got under way. ‘The gunfire had beaten the ground to a pulp’ and though their objectives were termed as ’trenches’ they were in reality little more than irregular lines of shell holes that had been linked together, ‘more or less connected, but extremely difficult to locate and to observe’.
Any kind of physical exertion was exhausting in the swamp-like conditions. ‘Never had the battalion struggled through a worse morass. The laden soldiers sank up to their knees in the mud, hauling each other out with the utmost difficulty and in many cases losing their boots and putties.’ Alfred Spooner battled on with the rest of the Worcester men. ‘Slowly the attacking line waded forward up the slight slope.’ As soon as they reached the crest of the little rise that hid the enemy from view they were showered with a hail of bullets from Hazy Trench in front of them, from another German position on their left flank and from the cemetery on the crest of the ridge beyond. Under such determined machine-gun fire the attack could not gain ground. Officers and men fell on every side. When darkness came, the survivors could do nothing more than wade back to their original line. Alfred was not among them. In all his battalion had suffered some eighty casualties. After his death, Alfred’s father would serve in the newly formed Tank Corps. Unsurprisingly, given the conditions, Alfred Spooner’s body, if recovered, was never identified. The 21 year old is commemorated on the Thiepval Memorial, Pier & Face 5a/6c.