Cpl. Sidney appleyard was born in may 1894 in Shoe Lane in the city of London, the son of a publisher and the second of three brothers. A quantity surveyor before volunteering on the outbreak of war aged twenty, he was initially rejected as unfit by the navy because his chest measurement was too small. In November 1915 the pressing need for volunteers meant that he managed to join the Territorial 9th London Regiment (Queen Victoria’s Rifles), with which he commenced training in Hyde Park without a uniform and carrying a dummy rifle.3 He certainly considered himself totally unqualified to fight when he and his battalion was shipped over to Flanders in May 1915.

‘On the very long route marches we had to sing to keep our spirits up,’ he recorded in his diary, ‘and our platoon poet, Bill Bright, kept us going with some of his verse, such as:

I’m a bomber, I’m a bomber

Wearing a grenade,

The Army’s got me where it wants,

I’m very much afraid.

When decent jobs are going

I never get a chance,

Which shows what bloody fools we were

To volunteer for France.4

As well as long route marches, Appleyard recalled how ‘We had continuous practice throwing live bombs and had demonstrations of liquid fire which the Germans were now using. This was a very terrible and frightening affair but if one kept low in the trench it was quite harmless.’5

Sidney Appleyard’s diary reminds us how ludicrously overconfident the High Command was when it came to the damage that the artillery would wreak on the German lines before the attack. ‘We were informed by all officers from the Colonel downwards’, he wrote,

that after our tremendous artillery bombardment there would be very few Germans left to show fight, and they all fully expected us to carry the lines with very little resistance. Everybody was quite convinced by this time that this attack was really coming off, and was not going to fall through as similar affairs had in the past. So we all decided to make the most of our few days which remained and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. The distant rumble of artillery was distinctly heard during these days, and we heard very fine reports of the damage caused by our shells.6 *1

It was taken for granted throughout the General Staff that the artillery bombardment preliminary to the offensive would destroy the enemy’s trenches, smash in his dugouts, cut through his barbed wire and prevent him replacing it, knock out machine gun emplacements and observation posts, and make life in the communication trenches, batteries, billets and support roads behind the lines completely intolerable. As Brig. Edmonds, the official historian of the battle for the Committee of Imperial Defence, was to put it:

It was not expected that there would be effective gunfire or that his reserves would be able to come up… But in every attack thus far, the Germans had produced some surprise, and at the Somme it was to be deep mined dugouts, with sometimes two storeys below ground,*2 sheltering machine guns and their crews from harm during the bombardment. The garrisons of the first position remained below ground, close packed, uncomfortable, short of food, depressed, but still alive and ready on their officers’ orders, when the barrage lifted, to issue forth with morale unbroken; if there were neither parapets nor trenches, then to man with machine guns and rifles any shell-hole that came handy.7

This was what happened throughout the northern and central sector, with catastrophic results for the British assault.

In preparation for the ‘Big Push’, Gen. Sir Douglas Haig turned the entire Somme sector into a massive military encampment and supply dump. By 1 July 1916 the BEF numbered 660,000 effectives, increased from 450,000 at the start of the year.8 Haig needed 400,000 men for the offensive as well as 100,000 horses, both as cavalry and to carry equipment. Horses were vital to the war effort for bringing up stores and supplies; 8 million served in the British army in the First World War, of which 1 million died. The offensive required an enormous logistical operation, such as the laying of 7,000 miles (11,265 km) of signal cables buried 7 feet (2.1 m) deep, so that German shelling could not sever it. Road and rail transportation had to be built from scratch or improved and extended. (The troops resented the navvies who built the railway tracks but went nowhere near the front line and earned more than the infantryman’s shilling—5p—a day.)

Fuel, food and water, arms and ammunition of all kinds—the British army fired an average of a million shells a week throughout the battle—medical supplies, postal services, trench and dugout construction, equine forage: these were just the bare basic requirements for maintaining an army in the field, let alone preparing it for easily the greatest offensive operation in the history of the British army.9 In the final few weeks before the ‘Big Push’, airfields were prepared for the RFC, leave was cancelled, field gun ammunition was taken well forward and buried deep underground, the men were ordered to do constant bayonet practice, and graves were dug (though in the event nothing like enough). New helmets were issued, flat basins of khaki-painted manganese steel that were said to be capable of deflecting shrapnel, but which unlike the German helmets failed to protect the ears. Pigeons were issued to send messages back from captured trenches; imitation snipers’ heads were set up to draw German fire; roads were screened with camouflage netting to hide them from enemy air reconnaissance.

‘Dumps as big as small towns grew up almost overnight prepared to issue anything,’ wrote John Harris in Covenant with Death, ‘periscopes, grenades, compasses, rations, mortar bombs,smoke helmets, tools.’10 These camouflage-covered dumps seemed to expand all over the forward area. An order for Very lights or Stokes bombs would bring men to a store packed with rough wooden boxes full of lethal weaponry. Casualty clearing stations and advanced field dressing stations were erected, and gas cylinders weighing 180 lbs (81.5 kg) were carried forward on poles by two men each, who had to wear gas masks in case of leakages. Cart-loads of empty biscuit tins were meanwhile driven up and down behind the lines to drown the noise of work parties excavating mines, saps and jumping-off trenches. Huge barbed wire compounds of several acres each were also constructed for the thousands of prisoners who were expected to be captured. ‘Great preparations have been made for the offensive,’ Gunner Gwilym Ewart Davies of the Royal Artillery, who only landed at Rouen on 13 June and had not yet been issued with a steel helmet, noted in his diary eight days later: ‘Signs directing the way to different hospitals are nailed up in the trenches… Trolleys specially reserved for the wounded are to be found on the railway lines… Our airmen brought down two German observation balloons today. They set them ablaze by dropping bombs on them.’11