A hundred years ago on the Western Front. On 30th June 1916, professional soldiers were lining up to go into battle alongside miners, farmers, labourers, clerks, accountants; men drawn from every walk of life. They assembled in lines with boys who had only just walked from their schools into the army. Gathered from the length and breadth of Britain, and her dominions, tens of thousands were assembled in Picardy to embark upon the most ambitious offensive the British Army had ever undertaken.
The year 1915 had not been a good one. British attacks in France and Belgium had been, for the most part, bloody failures. At the end of the year the BEF underwent a change of command and Douglas Haig was placed in charge. It was not only on his front that things looked bleak. In the East the Central Powers had shoved back the Russians in force. Italy was struggling against the Austro-Hungarian army in alpine terrain. Bulgaria had entered the war on the side of Germany and Serbia was in utter turmoil. Evacuation was about to prove the humiliating culmination to the campaign in the Dardanelles, Kut was under siege in Mesopotamia after any initial success had come to nothing and British East Africa was also under threat.
It was clear that the Allies, in their many different theatres of war, needed to organise and mount a coherent, joint attack against Germany and her allies. By mid-February it had been agreed that a combined offensive would proceed round about the beginning of July and would be the main attempt at defeating the enemy on the Western Front in 1916. Before this, the British would extend their line south, taking over more territory from the French.
But all Allied planning was thrown into disarray at the end of February when the Germans began their own brutal offensive against the French at Verdun. By the 26th the situation had been acknowledged as potentially catastrophic. They begged their allies on all fronts to keep the enemy busy to prevent as many German troops as possible from being fed into the battle and asked the British to make diversionary attacks elsewhere along the lines to take German focus away from Verdun. Casualties grew towards a quarter of a million. Justifiably, although they still planned to co-operate, the summer offensive had taken a step backwards in terms of where the French would be able to deploy their resources in the summer of 1916.
Thus the British Army, by circumstance, had now assumed the greater part of the responsibility for the offensive campaign on the Western Front. It was feared that the most that could be expected of the French, was that if a breakthrough was made they would try and help exploit it. At the end of May there was even a concern that the British Army might have to attack without any contribution from France at all, so badly had Verdun consumed their ally’s resources. The summer battle was now ostensibly going to be fought to take pressure off the French.
The official history postured that the reason the French, who were ever-convinced that the British were not contributing their fair share, suggested the Somme right next to Haig’s front was that it meant his force would be bound to take part in it. Until 1916 it had been a quiet sector. In terms of fighting, nothing of great significance had taken place since the French and Germans began digging in in 1914. Joffre could argue that the terrain was advantageous, but unlike, say, Neuve Chapelle, which ultimately had the strategic prize of Lille behind it; there was nothing of consequence by comparison on the Somme, no gain beyond the German line that would cause the enemy to collapse.
The enemy had also, by now, had plenty of time to fortify their positions in the area. They had an extensive front-line system of trenches. Anywhere between 1–3 miles behind that, the Kaiser’s men had also constructed a second system. In what was to prove a significant move during the summer, villages along their defensive lines had been extensively fortified. The nature of the chalky soil underfoot had enabled the Germans to dig strong, safe dugouts deep underground to protect them from attack, which would never be possible further north, where the wet, low lying terrain of Flanders sometimes meant that the opposing armies had to build defences upwards in some spots to keep from sinking into the mud.
An immense amount of preparation was necessary to ready the area for battle. The Somme itself flows in a westerly direction between Peronne and Amiens and carves a valley into the rolling plains of Northern France. Bordered by marshy ground and meadows, on the northern banks, where the French lines came to an end, the terrain was punctuated by smaller valleys. In the more northerly part of what would become the 1916 battlefield, the River Ancre bisected the British part of the line and flowed through Albert, a hub of military activity. Although the French sector to the south was flat, the ground undulated on the British side, rising up to a 300ft high ridge that ran from Guillemont, through Longueval, Bazentin-le-Petit, Pozières and on to Thiepval. A number of large woods in the area were about to become haunting to those thrown into them and, although there were but a few isolated farms there were, however, a number of large villages, the occupation of which the enemy had turned to their full advantage.
At the beginning of 1916 the British Expeditionary Force had in the region of a million men on the Western Front. Many had been freed up by the end of the Gallipoli campaign, more of Kitchener’s New Army men were to arrive in the months leading up to the battle along with volunteers from Britain’s various dominions. The Fourth Army officially came into being under the command of General Henry Rawlinson in March 1916 when he took over more than 20 miles of front and absorbed the troops already in place. The bulk of responsibility for the summer campaign on the Somme would rest on his shoulders.
Many of his troops had never seen offensive action and any experience that men had was of holding trenches, if they had spent any time in France and Flanders at all. Additionally, although Haig’s troops outnumbered the Germans, for the amount of divisions that were present, they were actually about 75,000 men short of what those should have comprised. A lot of the men had had less than the six months’ training they should have ideally had. One division’s artillery only had three days’ practice before leaving for France.
Generals Rawlinson (right) and Haig (left) on the Somme in 1916. (Authors’ collection)
Shell bursts during artillery efforts at wire cutting. (Authors’ collection)
The Somme was rural. A main road ran through Amiens and Albert, up towards what would be the front lines, but other thoroughfares, if they yet existed, were thoroughly unsuitable for the amount of traffic that they would need to sustain. Railway lines were sparse and there were no causeways or bridges over the rivers. Roads and railways needed to be built, water supplies created, ammunition and equipment brought in, accommodation constructed and trenches dug. All the while, while this exhausting programme was carried out, as much concealment as possible needed to be sought, so that the attack would retain at least an element of surprise. One division alone in the build-up to July dug both assembly and communication trenches, emplacements for mortars and also helped to construct a water supply. It dug trenches for communication cables, laid the cables, helped to build twenty-eight bridges for the artillery and seventy-two emplacements for gas cylinders, and then carried up 671 of said heavy cylinders. All this labour was carried out before the division even began to factor in its rotating duty to man the lines or train for the upcoming offensive.
Britain’s artillerymen were no less busy either. By the end of June 1916, some 3,000 field guns and heavier pieces had deployed along the intended battlefront on the Somme, along with nearly 1,500 trench mortars. The preliminary bombardment began on the 24th. More than a million rounds were fired, attempting to destroy German resistance and flatten all that may lay in the path of the artillery when zero hour came.
By 30th June the scene had been set for the British Army to attempt to make a decisive breakthrough in the German line in three enthusiastically planned stages, with the hope that during one of them the enemy’s line would cave and Haig could have the cavalry sent through the breach to wreak decisive havoc upon the Kaiser’s men. There would even be a diversionary attack to the north at Gommecourt made by another force. After a flurry of panic in mid-June over the French situation at Verdun, they had confirmed that they would fight on either side of the river, ‘with [their] eye firmly on supporting the British offensive’.
Preparations had not been ideal; it seemed that even Haig himself was wavering in confidence with regard to the overall plan, but after delays caused by rain that waterlogged trenches and guns, it finally fell that the Battle of the Somme was to begin on 1st July 1916. The casualties accumulating on both sides of the lines would be devastating. By the end of the year hundreds of thousands of men would have been wounded, would have vanished on the field of battle or would have paid for this ambitious enterprise with their lives. Drawn not only from the length and breadth of Britain and France, combatants fought and died on the Somme from all corners of the globe, whether due to imperial allegiance or chance. In this book, we have tried to introduce a cross section of them, telling the story of the battle through the eyes of one individual who died on each day. For the next 141 days, the peace of Picardy was to be shattered as the Allies attempted to win the war by the year’s end.