Captain Oswald Brooke Webb
11TH ROYAL IRISH RIFLES
ALSO TOWARD THE NORTHERN END of battlefield at the beginning of July was the 36th (Ulster) Division. The Derrys, the Donegals, Fermanaghs and the like were organised on community lines to the extreme: colleagues, friends and neighbours ready to fight side by side. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) had some 80,000 members aged 17–65 when the war broke out and many, if eligible, enlisted to go to war. Among their number was a 36 year old who brought his experience as a company commander with the UVF when he joined the 11th Royal Irish Rifles. From Randalstown, County Antrim, Oswald Webb came from a family prominent in the local community. The Webbs owned the highly renowned Old Bleach Linen Co. which provided cloth for royal palaces and luxury liners, as well as other prominent clients.
Captain Oswald Webb. (Private collection)
Married with one son, Oswald had been a director of the company since leaving Rossall School. As the local minister wrote:
He was an outstanding member of our community, and he took a leading part in all the activities of this place. He gave his wholehearted assistance to everything he thought would promote the happiness and welfare of our people. Whether it was sports – and he himself excelled … Boy Scouts, Catch-my-Pal, Ulster Volunteers, he threw himself into everything he took up with the greatest ardour and thoroughness.
Oswald took his duties with the UVF particularly seriously, giving up every evening in the week to address or attend various meetings both at home and further afield, or helping to drill the companies.
When war commenced, it was thought the Webb family should lead by example and that one of the family should go. Oswald’s elder sibling, Hubert, had a number of children and was the managing director at Old Bleach, so it was decided Oswald would be the one to fight.
He told his relatives that the men of the town and surrounding countryside could not be expected to volunteer unless a member of the firm led the way and he said he felt he was the one to go, and there can be no doubt at all that it was his example which induced so many of our men to follow his inspiring lead. He was able to inspire his men with the most entire confidence in himself and trust in his judgment, so that they would gladly follow him anywhere. As a partner in the firm, he was greatly beloved and thoroughly trusted by all the workers.
The opening throes of the Battle of the Somme had been the costliest effort ever made by the British Army. Some 57,000 men had become casualties, 19,000 were dead. A large proportion of the other 38,000 were wounded, and at the close of the initial advance lay scattered all over the battlefield and to the rear requiring medical attention.
The Ulster Division had been another of Kitchener’s formations allotted a formidable task on the opening day of the battle. Thiepval was one of the bigger communities that lay along the front line and comprised precious high ground overlooking the battlefield and the River Ancre. Yet another village fortress, it was surrounded by marshy ground and the Ulstermen had had to build causeways out of sandbags filled with chalk to get around. Alongside no-man’s-land was Thiepval Wood. It had been dubbed Porcupine Wood by the men. ‘The trees were so stripped of foliage and lopped into distorted shapes by enemy gunfire that their bare limbs stood up like quills of the fretful porcupine.’ On 1st July the 11th Royal Irish Rifles were ordered to emerge from it and attack near the Schwaben Redoubt, a German strong point to the north of Thiepval.
Captain Webb had thrown himself into recruiting for his battalion and nearly two companies, one of which he had been given command of, had been recruited from Oswald’s family’s own workforce at Old Bleach. At 7:15am they left their assembly trenches together to take up attack positions. There was heavy shelling all the way and entire platoons were ‘practically annihilated on the way up’. The 11th Royal Irish Rifles burst forth with shouts of ‘No Surrender!’ As a division, the Ulstermen penetrated part of the front line near Thiepval, but their objectives were far too ambitious and, as the day progressed, German machine-gun and shellfire increased on both flanks. Only 322 men and half the officers were left to be inspected when they got out of the battle. This left several hundred unaccounted for.
Shortly before the 11th Royal Irish Rifles prepared to go ‘over the top’, a shell burst over the assembly trenches, wounding Oswald Webb. He never advanced towards the Germans and, with a stomach injury, began a painful journey towards medical assistance. The scene behind the battle on 1st July was horrific. On all the routes back and in all the trenches the wounded lay in their hundreds alongside the broken bodies of those who had fallen. The road to Martinsart was packed solid with men struggling away from Thiepval seeking help and with ambulances trying to get back with those such as Oswald, who were in a more severe condition. One sunken road on the way to Hamel became known as Bloody Road on account of the corpses piled up along it on 1st July.
One artilleryman with the Ulster Division was horrified by the suffering that he saw:
Patrick Webb. (Private collection)
It was a terrible sight to see the wounded coming down in hundreds … in … wagons, motor lorries, or anything they could get. Those that could possibly crawl at all had to get from the trenches to the dressing station, which was about three miles, as best they could. Each time we were coming back from the guns with empty ammunition wagons, we packed as many wounded on as we could, as we passed the dressing station on our way back, but a lot of them were too badly wounded to stand the jolting of the wagon, and preferred to go on their own.
Oswald Webb’s route took him via an aid post, most likely either one in Thiepval Wood or at Authuille, then on to Martinsart, where his stretcher could be put into a motor ambulance to travel to the dressing station at Forceville. Shortly after 8:30am a runner had arrived there to say there were 300–400 men lying on the battlefield requiring assistance. The staff at Forceville were so disbelieving of these numbers that they telephoned a command post to confirm them. Frantically, they braced themselves and sent a motorcycle rider off to secure additional morphia to help treat their patients. Six stretcher parties left to bring in as many men as they could.
As the men arrived, the doctor tried to look over each one, setting the dead to one side and checking the others. Those deemed to be hopeless cases were sent to a tent where the only prescriptions were morphia and cigarettes to make them comfortable. Men were assigned to see to them on that basis. ‘It was a terrible thing to light a cigarette for a soldier and see him die before he finished it. All we did was re-dress a wound if he needed it and if somebody needed a bit of tidying up we did that as well.’
For those such as Oswald with a better prognosis, the only operations generally done at Forceville were the removal of a leg or an arm or the stitching up of wounds. He would require more delicate attention and so his journey ended further to the rear at a casualty clearing station, south-west of the battle raging on at Warloy where they specialised in head and abdominal wounds.
An officer there who knew him wrote to his brother:
I saw him when he was brought into hospital, and thought he looked pretty bad, but he was quite conscious, and not suffering any pain. I was talking to him for a few minutes and he told me he got hit before he got past our wire. He was very pleased with the way his men went forward, and seemed quite cheerful.
Nonetheless, Oswald’s wounds were severe. The battlefield was cleared away; identity tags removed from the dead and the bodies sorted, stacked in dugouts and then buried. He passed away on 3rd July at Warloy, as exhausted doctors and nurses continued to try to treat the never-ending procession of wounded without falling asleep where they stood.
Ulster was in mourning after the division’s initial exploits on the Somme. At Randalstown there was a memorial service two weeks after the attack on Thiepval for Oswald and the men who had gone to fight with him; seventeen of those who had died side by side were from the same district. Oswald had kept a pocketbook on him at the front listing each of his men and keeping a note of their progress in the war. Now dozens of them were lost alongside him in Northern France. In his last letter to his wife, Kathleen, he had made sure she would look in on them, ‘if anything befell him … and so far as she could to minister to their needs’.
Patrick Webb was 12 when his father died. Oswald had written him a letter from Martinsart as he waited to go into battle on 30th June. ‘My Dear Patrick,’ he began, ‘Just a line to let you know I am alright … I hope you are getting on well at school – I will have some good souvenirs with me next time I go home.’ His last words were simple: ‘Write good long letters to your mother, your ever loving father.’ Captain Webb was laid to rest at Warloy-Baillon Communal Cemetery Extension, plot III.B.2.