If Haig took the Intelligence material he received too much at face value, the soldiers in the field tended not to, believing that it was often false and occasionally absurdly esoteric. The corps Intelligence summary was nicknamed ‘Comic Cuts’, after a droll Victorian magazine, and the poet and writer 2nd Lt. Siegfried Sassoon, attached to the 1st Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, part of 22nd Brigade of the 7th Division, recalled how on 27 June 1916 the Intelligence summary reported that a large number of enemy batteries had been silenced by British batteries (which he could tell they had not been) and that ‘The anonymous humourist who compiled “Comic Cuts” was able to announce that the Russians had captured a redoubt and some heavy guns at Czartovijsk, which, he explained, was 44 miles (71 km) north-east of Luck.’37

By early April, British Intelligence knew that the Germans had four divisions in reserve behind their 6th Army, and by the end of May that this had increased to at least five because of British preparations at the Somme. After the Russians launched the Brusilov Offensive on 4 June and it became clear two weeks later how successful this attack had been, British Intelligence re-assessed the situation, based on agents’ reports in Belgium about German troop movements eastwards. On 16 June Haig wrote in his diary that there was ‘no doubt’ that the enemy was taking troops away from his front and sending them to Russia, hence the reappearance of cavalry in his tactical thinking.38 German records show that that there were ten divisions in the German reserve still on the Western Front on 1 July, of which six were facing the British sector and were in perfectly reasonable morale, while British Intelligence believed there were only three, of low morale.39 Charteris wrote to his wife on 30 June, the day before the attack, ‘We are fighting primarily to kill Germans and against their plans, [to] gain some valuable positions and generally prepare for the big offensive that must come sooner or later and if not this year then next.’40 When he published his book At GHQ,41 he altered the wording to read ‘fighting primarily to wear down the German Armies and the German nation… and generally to prepare for the great decisive offensive’.42 The veterans of the Somme were not told that all the bloodletting had been for such limited objectives as ‘to prepare for the great decisive offensive’; many of them believed this was to be the actual great offensive.

Although the precise date of the ‘Big Push’ was not known outside the General Staff until just beforehand, nor its exact location, it was known in every pub in Britain that there was going to be a major offensive that summer. ‘Everyone at home seemed to know that the long-planned offensive was due to “kick off” at the end of June’, Sassoon later wrote in his Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930). Sassoon won a Military Cross later in the battle, but by the time he wrote his memoirs he had become viscerally opposed to the war. (‘The safest thing to be said’, Sassoon wrote of medal-winners, ‘is that nobody knew how much a decoration was worth except the man who received it.’*3)

Sassoon’s memoirs are superb at recreating life in the trenches before and during the ‘Big Push’. He recalled ‘knocking my pipe out against one of the wooden props which held up the cramped little den, and staring irritably at my mud-encumbered boots, for I was always trying to keep squalor at bay, and the discomfort of feeling dirty and tickly all over was almost as bad as a bombardment.’43 He suffered from ‘trench mouth’ (acute necrotizing ulcerative gingivitis), whose symptoms were painful bleeding gums, and wrote of how ‘Trench life was an existence saturated by the external senses; and although our actions were domineered by military discipline, our animal instincts were always uppermost.’ As for his men, ‘I could never understand how they managed to keep as cheery as they did through such drudgery and discomfort, with nothing to look forward to but going over the top or being moved up to Flanders again.’44 Although officers on leave were warned not to speak about it and there was no mention of it in the newspapers, even Sassoon’s Aunt Evelyn, who lived in Kensington, London ‘was aware of the impending onslaught… No one had any idea what the Big Push would be like, except that it would be much bigger than anything which had happened before.’45 Sassoon and a friend, Captain Huxtable, ‘decided, between us, that the Push would finish the war by Christmas’.

On the way up to the front just before the assault, Sassoon noted how as a staff officer was coming in the other direction, ‘Larks were rejoicing aloft, and the usual symbolic scarlet poppies lolled over the sides of the communication trench; but he squeezed past us without so much as a nod, for the afternoon was too noisy to be idyllic, in spite of the larks and poppies which were so popular with war-correspondents.’ Sassoon asked his brother officer, Julian Dadd, ‘I suppose those brass-hats do know a hell of a lot about it, don’t they, Julian,’ only to receive the reply that they had not done so at Loos, but ‘They’ve got to learn their job as they go along, like the rest of us.’46

The Germans also knew perfectly well what was about to happen. The Württemberger 26th Reserve Division in the north of the sector had heard the din of supplies being delivered night after night, and their patrols had discovered saps—underground trenches dug directly towards enemy lines—within 90 yards (82 m) of their positions. The Germans also spotted preparations for the offensive through aerial reconnaissance as early as 7 April.47 They also noticed that the RFC was flying more reconnoitering sorties than hitherto. German Intelligence had learnt from London newspapers—which exercised an only haphazard self-censorship—that a meeting of owners and workers at munition factories had been told by a cabinet minister on 2 June that the Whitsun bank holiday weekend of 9 to 12 June would be postponed until the end of July.48 Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria, commander of the 6th Army, regarded this as ‘the surest proof that there will be a great British offensive in a few weeks.’49