#G/16741 Private Harold Lamb
9TH ROYAL FUSILIERS
IT WAS PERHAPS NATURAL FOR 18-year-old Harold Lamb to enlist in a cavalry regiment. Born in the village of Hasfield, an idyllic, rural part of Gloucestershire, he worked as a groom. However, having spent several months in the 3rd Hussars, in the middle of 1915 an appeal was made for men to join the 9th Royal Fusiliers, a London infantry regiment. In what must have been a severe culture shock for this country boy, Harold joined a battalion built around worldly young men from the capital that had been established in Hounslow.
On 2nd July Harold went into trenches to relieve shattered troops from the 8th Division who had been largely wiped out by machine-gun fire while attacking the village of Ovillers on the previous day. Signs of the attack’s failure were everywhere. Hundreds of bodies lay strewn about, and there were men on stretchers awaiting treatment. One Fusilier ascended a small hill on his way up to the battlefield and saw lumps strewn across the landscape. He thought that they were bombs but, as the Royal Fusiliers approached, they transpired to be severed heads. He made a quick exit.
Harold helped to hold the front and collected the wounded and, apart from the British bombardment, it was quiet for several days until they were relieved again. Respite was to be unexpectedly short-lived. Sent back into the line, Harold discovered that the battalion was to attack Ovillers in one of several smaller assaults due to take place on 7th July, aimed at securing advantageous positions before the main offensive was resumed.
The first attempt on Ovillers was to be made at 8am, approaching from the south. Less than twenty-four hours after his death, William Henderson’s battalion was among those that made it to the German front line but were stopped by machine-gun fire. Slightly later, Harold Lamb attacked from the west. Hundreds of men were never to make it out of the assembly trenches. The Germans laid down a fierce barrage on the battalions waiting to attack. The 9th Royal Fusiliers suffered more than 200 casualties because for several hours they had to sit and stomach every shell the Germans could throw at them without abandoning their position.
At 8:30am, though, their attack commenced as planned, each man laden with ammunition and carrying twenty grenades in a sandbag – about 40lb in weight. This was nothing like their training, months of bayoneting harmless objects and scouring mock battlefields that contained neither bursting shells nor barbed wire. Heavy rain had commenced along with a stiff breeze and Harold battled through deep, sticky mud laden down with his ammunition and equipment, bombs and extra small arms ammunition. Every other man was also lugging a shovel or a pick.
The battalion walked into a storm of machine-gun fire. One company was decimated by it along with more men sent after them. The remaining two platoons behind were ordered to remain in the trench as it was seen to be useless to send them to the same fate. Two more groups on the left of the attack were greatly weakened but managed to fight their way into the German trenches. Communications were problematic. One poor officer dragged wireless equipment all the way into the German lines only to find out it was broken. All the messenger pigeons had been shot, or else the men carrying them. And not until the evening did supporting troops manage to get across with a large supply of bombs. Machine guns played on them as they advanced, ‘like spraying us with a hose’. Two machine guns were put out of action and fifty prisoners were captured despite the fact that the Royal Fusiliers could not get reinforcements or ammunition to those in front past the German barrage that pinned them back. Continual bombing attacks were then beaten off.
Ovillers Military Cemetery. (Andrew Holmes)
That night Harold Lamb’s battalion was relieved and marched back to Albert in tatters. His body had to be left on the battlefield. When names were called only some 180 men answered. Ovillers would not fall for a few more days. The only consolation for all of those lives lost was that the attack on the village on 7th July had brought the British line forward to a better starting point for a further advance. The 12th (Eastern) Division, to which Harold’s battalion of Fusiliers belonged, despite not taking part on the opening day, had suffered 189 officer casualties and the loss of more than 5,000 men by the time it was relieved. One man who had been sent back with the transport watched the stragglers emerge: ‘Blimey I could have cried, when I seen the few that were there; it had rained, they was wet and tired … so and so, where’s so and so?’
In the aftermath of the battle, Harold’s mother received a somewhat vague letter from a captain after he failed to reappear and it was assumed that he had been killed on 7th July. ‘I am told that your son was always a credit to his platoon and company and he will be missed.’ Somewhat distant, this young man was writing dozens of these letters to grieving relatives about men he didn’t necessarily know at all. Just 20 when he died, Harold lay where he fell to the west of Ovillers. He was later recovered from the battlefield and he was laid to rest at Ovillers Military Cemetery, plot IX.K.4.