#PO/16735 Private Harold Haines
2ND ROYAL MARINE LIGHT INFANTRY
BACK WITH THE RESERVE ARMY, which was about to be redesignated the Fifth, General Gough was waiting for a break in the weather that would finally allow him to make a much anticipated attempt, a large-scale effort on either side of the Ancre, where progress had been either well behind the gains made by Rawlinson’s men to the south, if not non-existent since 1st July. Originally slated for 23rd October, it was clear this timescale was a fantasy once autumn weather intervened and turned the Somme battlefield into a morass.
And so the men waited it out in abject misery while preparations continued. These included the introduction of yet more troops on to the Somme to bolster Gough’s chance of success, and north of the Ancre was a unique division that had yet to do battle on the Western Front. On the outbreak of war, in excess of 20,000 reservists were available to report for duty with the Royal Navy. They provided much more manpower than was required and so it was decided by the Admiralty that some of this excess would be siphoned off and used to create a land force. These men were divided into two brigades of four battalions, which would be named after famous naval heroes: Nelson, Drake, Hood and the like. The War Office was stretched to breaking point already so the Royal Naval Division, as it would be called, would be administered by the Admiralty and overseen by the First Sea Lord, Winston Churchill.
At the beginning of October 1914, with the BEF still to complete its journey north from where it had settled on the Aisne, this mostly untrained, incomplete contingent of men was launched into Belgium to help the tiny native army cling to Antwerp and prevent the Germans from crashing towards the Channel coast. Unsurprisingly, the venture did not end well. Huge numbers of men became prisoners of war. There was public outcry when the wasteful losses at Antwerp became known. Following their Belgian nightmare, the RND needed to replace Hawke, Benbow and Collingwood battalions almost in their entirety as they were sitting in neutral Dutch captivity. Churchill stood behind them and wrote to the division:
The Belgian people will never forget that the men of the Royal Navy and Royal Marines were with them in their darkest hour of misery, as, please God, they may also be with them when Belgium is restored to her own by the Armies of the Allies.
Although much reformatting had since been done, the last of the three brigades making up the Royal Naval Division at its conception consisted of the Royal Marine Light Infantry, at the time the only regular soldiers present. One of these was a 23 year old who had left his landlocked home near Warminster in Wiltshire and his job as a mason’s labourer to enlist in Southampton at the beginning of 1913. Harold Haines, an only child, had been raised by his mother alone. She worked as a laundress to support them after falling pregnant in her early 20s. Until April 1915, Harold was stationed ashore, at Kingstown to the south of Dublin. With a new campaign in the east looming, he was then sent to join the Portsmouth Battalion, as it was then known, in time to embark for Gallipoli the following month. In its entire lifetime, the Royal Naval Division would only be in one place together while it was being shot at. Gallipoli was to be its first proper campaign. Harold arrived during a lull in the fighting, but was destined to see plenty of action as well as enduring the misery of life in the Dardanelles for the duration of that offensive. Battalions of the Royal Naval Division arrived just after the original landings and their commanding officer was one of the last to step off the peninsula.
Harold Haines’ division arrived on the Western Front and concentrated near Abbeville in May 1916 to take in stores and equipment. Here they were fully equipped for the first time, so haphazard had their formation and the cramped conditions at Gallipoli been. They had never seen the likes of a Lewis gun or a Stokes mortar among their ranks. As yet they did not even have machine-gun companies. By July the naval men had reached the area between Lens and Vimy Ridge for preliminary tours of the trenches. The conditions they were about to experience were completely new to them and they took full advantage of schools and courses that had been established.
Harold and his comrades scoffed at first at how flimsily the trenches seemed to be laid out; they never would have got away with that at Gallipoli. But they had a lot to learn about the Western Front. Men in trenches were not the last line of defence in France and Belgium, nor the first on the wide expanse that was defended in comparatively great depth when measured against their own experience in the Dardanelles. They also found there was a lot more work to do on a daily basis in terms of labour. Meanwhile ‘the orgy of instruction’ continued as the authorities attempted to pump them full of all the information that had been gleaned from two years in France and Belgium. When the Naval Division left the Vimy sector it was to move at almost full strength for the first time. It was given three weeks’ rest to the rear before it was sent to participate in the Battle of the Somme.
Harold Haines joined Gough’s army at the beginning of October and his battalion was put into the line in between Serre and Beaumont Hamel, where it began rotating in and out of the Hamel sector. ‘The trenches had been planned by a short-sighted fool and destroyed by a watchful enemy,’ observed one naval man:
There were virtually no dugouts; the communication trenches, which ran across a conspicuous ridge, were under constant and aimed fire; in the firing and support lines men could only stand and freeze in the mud; there was no room to walk or lie down, and digging, in the face of the enemy, was nearly impossible.
Nonetheless, assembly trenches needed to be fashioned on the slopes leading down to the valley of the Ancre. Raids and patrols to gather information were also stepped up, ‘the men finding these operations tiresome in the muddy and often foggy conditions’.
Their plight was barely improved when Harold and his companions were relieved and sent back to Englebelmer, west of Thiepval:
When battalions were out of the line their lot was no better … for they would go back no further than Mesnil or Englebelmer, from where they would go up nightly to the trenches, engaged in the most exhausting working parties.
By the time the likes of the Royal Marines got around to making an attack, it was questionable as to whether or not they would be in a fit state to fight anybody:
To get around a battalion front at this time was hours’ walk, with mud often above the knees. Yet in these trenches half the battalions detailed for the intended assault had to live, while the other half had to carry up them and across them stores and ammunition for the innumerable dumps which would feed the advancing line of battle.
The fact that a day of attack kept being set and then revoked on account of the weather made their situation even more dire:
The constant issue and re-issue of battle equipment and stores added to the confusion. These stores had to be counted in and counted out, carried up and counted down, till men would have volunteered, almost, to go out unarmed, if they could be spared the perpetual juggling with bombs and sandbags, and flares and wire-cutters and compasses …
Since 20th October Harold’s battalion had been furnishing working parties out of Englebelmer. They went out every day and dug, carried and watched aircraft duelling above them. As the month wore on the conditions had become so bad that it was forcing those in command to scale down the scope of their intended operations either side of the Ancre. On the 28th, Haig stopped by to inspect Harold and his comrades as they were forced to shift their bivouacs to a drier spot; the men turned out in sections so that he could get a look at them. Then the working parties resumed. On 30th October, 23-year-old Harold Haines was killed as his battalion continued to battle the weather rather than the enemy, before he got the chance to participate in an assault on the Western Front. He was laid to rest at Hamel Military Cemetery, plot II.C.28.