THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME has come to typify most graphically the awful carnage of the First World War. Yet the beauty of the Somme's rolling downlands belies the history it has now almost hidden, principally the terrible casualties suffered on the first day, 1st July 1916. The weather conditions were perfect for the attack that morning. Early mists gave way to blazing summer sunshine, but at the end of the first day's battle, some 20,000 British troops were dead and 40,000 wounded.
The aim of the Big Push, as the attack became known, was decisively to breach the German defences. British troops would storm the enemy's trenches in the first of a series of prolonged strikes that would shove the Germans out of northern France and onwards, back towards the Rhine. The troops chosen to make this attack were overwhelmingly the young men who had joined up in the wave of enthusiasm which followed Kitchener's appeal in August 1914. Most had been training for over a year, although a few had seen action the previous summer at the Battle of Loos. However, for almost every one, this would be the first occasion when they would go over the top in a general attack.
The preparations were seemingly meticulous. As ten new Army divisions made their way to the Somme battlefront, a devastating seven-day bombardment would begin, smashing the enemy trenches and cutting the barbed wire in front. The popular belief was that the shelling would be so overwhelming that there would not be a rat alive in the German lines when British troops went over the top at 7.30 in the morning.
As if the eager British troops required any further help – or reassurance – five huge mines, dug beneath strongpoints in the German line, would be blown, not only killing those in nearby trenches, but so demoralising anyone left alive that British troops could simply enter the trenches and round them up. Such was the confidence of the British High Command, that British troops would be ordered to walk towards the enemy lines, not run.
This order was one of the major reasons why so many died, for British troops were to find not only that much of the German wire was left uncut, but that the trenches behind, while superficially damaged, still supported the majority of German troops, who had simply taken refuge below in dugouts forty feet underground.
On the lifting of the barrage that morning, the German machine gunners were able to climb into the trenches and open up with a withering fire, mowing down the British troops as they made slow progress across No Man's Land. It has been estimated that the ratio of British to German casualties was in the region of 12:1.
Although the Battle of the Somme is remembered for its tragic first day, it was a battle that was to last some four-and-a-half months. After the initial shock of widespread failure along three-quarters of the front line, the High Command began a series of further attacks that would continue throughout the rest of the summer and autumn. The results were generally mixed, although the Germans were gradually pushed back, field by field, wood by wood.
In September, in a further attempt to break open the front line, the British launched their new secret weapon, the tank, with strategically limited but visually stunning results. One small village after another fell to the Allied forces, but by winter the offensive ground to a halt.
The last attacks were made in early and mid November, when the notable village of Beaumont Hamel fell, in truth notable only for the reason that it had been a first day objective all those months before.
Tom Dewing was haunted by the visions of destruction he witnessed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. As a signaller manning an observation post behind No Man's Land, he watched as his brigade launched its ill-fated attack. In the confusion of the fight, Tom little realised he had a bird's-eye view of what was to become the worst day in history for the British Army. Tom, a quiet but immensely personable man, lived alone in his well-kept home in Saffron Walden. Aged 102, he recalled with emotion the day when any remaining innocence about war was lost.
We had no doubt, we were all convinced that this was the push, the big push that was to end the war. We quite thought that when the attack came, we should just go through their lines but it didn't work out that way. The bombardment started all at once and we certainly were very impressed; the thunder of the guns was terrific. It went on and on, gradually increasing in volume. You could, if you were practised, pick out the field guns from the heavy artillery but I should say it was thunder, thunder, thunder. We got so used to it we really didn't take a great deal of notice.
On 30th June we were sent to Smiths Redoubt which was dug into the side of a hill looking towards our brigade's objectives, the village of Fricourt and, beyond, Contalmaison. A camouflaged curtain was pulled in front of our position so the Germans would not see us, and equipment was set up to send and receive messages.
I remember the La Boisselle mine going up, one of several mines blown under the German lines to help the attack that day. We had been told beforehand it was going up and there was a terrific explosion. I don't remember what it looked like, but I do remember there was a vast hole, a vast crater after the explosion and I know that it was several seconds before we felt the explosion, the whole ground heaved and shook.
In the first place there was a certain amount of mist and then when you add to that the enormous amount of smoke from the barrage, a great deal was hidden, so for a time we didn't see anything. Then when the mist and smoke cleared, we were able to see the infantry going forward in open formation as if on parade ground. We could see a group going forward and lying down, another group following, but there was so much smoke and disruption I can picture little bits but only certain little bits. In many cases the men didn't get very far, they were just wiped out. One of the officers in our dugout had a telescope and some field glasses which he allowed us to use from time to time, and looking into the crater we could sometimes see a German getting up, raising his rifle and firing. Those on our left had been stopped from the start, as soon as they got out of the trenches they were mown down by machine gun fire. For a long time we knew nothing and then presently a heliograph flashed our call sign, ZJA. We were delighted. Evidently some of our troops had got to their objective of Contalmaison. We waited, but no further message was sent. The Germans had spotted the signal and had turned their machine guns onto them. It was the last we heard.
We didn't realise what had happened until afterwards. We didn't realise until the next church parade. At Brigade Headquarters we had regular church parades and on this occasion, instead of the troops coming along as they usually did, there was just a handful out of each battalion. We felt sick.
The colonels were sitting in front of what was left of their men, sobbing. The service was taken by Padre Black and how he managed to take that service I don't know. His text was “I will restore unto you the years that the locusts have eaten”. There were so few, so few men left. How can you describe a mere handful of men where you used to see about a battalion? I know that church parade was a very, very emotional time. Did I shed any tears? Probably, probably and often since.
Eighty-three years after receiving the last rites in the aftermath of the Battle of the Somme, Frederick Francis was still awaiting the final roll call. Remarkably fit and aged 105, Fred had outlived the medical orderly and the priest who gave him twenty minutes to live, and every comrade in his unit, the 11th Border (the Lonsdale) Regiment. He continued to bear the scars he received soon after going over the top, and owned a jam jar containing the metal taken from his body on 1st July 1916, a day which remained vivid in his mind.
“On the 1st of July the Lonsdale Battalion was slaughtered, wiped out. On the 1st of July the Lonsdale Battalion ceased to exist. The remnants were posted to the 12th Battalion, some of them back to Carlisle, but the Lonsdale Battalion, as a Battalion, finished that day in 1916, and I am one of the only survivors.”
The officers and NCOs, such as myself, had seen a model of the terrain we would attack, and we did actually think we had nothing to do but walk over. For six days before we went, we'd assembled all the artillery we could get and pounded and pounded the Germans' line. But the Germans had deep dugouts and just kept a lookout and of course when we went over they were sitting waiting.
We had heard of the Leipzig Redoubt, we knew it was a real hot spot, but we were determined to break the line. After all the training and practising digging dugouts and one damn thing after another, we were going into the real thing. Funny, in Carlisle, camped on the racecourse, we were all afraid that the war would be over before we got out. In barracks, the lads had been full of themselves, I'm a bomber, I'm a machine gunner, and all of this, but by God they were silent when we got out to France.
We sheltered in Authuille wood all night on 30th June, including my company, B Company, 7th Platoon. There was a lot of foliage and the German shells were not getting down. Most of the men were dozing or asleep when a shell came over, and two of my section woke up shaking and I thought “Oh my God, two with shellshock already”. I couldn't take them into battle so I sent them out of the line. At zero hour, we filed out of the wood to find the Germans waiting for us. The 15th, 16th and 17th Highland Light Infantry had already gone over to bleed the enemy, you might call it, and we were going to follow to relieve them and take our objective, Mouquet Farm, which we were supposed to take by 11 o'clock. As we filed out, the colonel, Colonel Matchell, patted me on the back and said “The best of luck, son”. Before the battle he had said that if we met with stiff opposition he would come and lead the men himself. We met with stiff opposition so he came out. Bullet in the head. Finish.
The Germans just mowed us down like grass in a hay field, enfilading fire, not just from the front. We only had about three hundred yards to cross, but truthfully my thoughts were “I wonder how long it will be before I get hit”. Anyone who was not hit that day must have had angels on their back. I'd only gone a little way, stepping over the barbed wire, when I got a bullet through my water bottle, and through my hip and I dropped on my face. I put my steel helmet on the back of my head and I could hear the shrapnel dropping all round. I went to crawl under our own barbed wire but the shelling was terrible and I was being buffeted about like a piece of paper on a windy day. I hate to think about it. It was hellish there, the barbs on the wire would stick into your clothes. I just said to myself “This is the last of the Battalion, there'll be no Battalion left after this”, and there wasn't, they were lying dead and wounded all over.
It wasn't so much the hot summer's day as the blood I had lost that made me thirsty, and when I could stand the thirst no longer I started to crawl about as best I could, dragging my wounded foot. I'd lost so much blood and I had no water in my bottle, so I crawled until I fell into a shell hole at the bottom of which was our Sergeant Major. I'd known him, in civvie life he was a well-known cyclist in Carlisle. Now he was lying dead, so I said to myself “You won't need your water bottle, I'll take it”. So I took it and to my amazement and disgust it was full of rum and it made me violently sick and I seemed to lose consciousness altogether.
I lay out there all through the day and night, but I never remember hearing anybody else. I seemed to be a lone bird. I lay there and kept shouting “Will anybody come and get me in?” and a voice said “If I volunteer to come out can you climb on my shoulder?” I said “I'm sorry but I can't, my foot's hanging off and my left shoulder is all shattered with shrapnel.” I could feel the blood on my shoulder. “I'll try and get somebody to come out with me and get you onto my back,” he said. I then heard “We're coming now” and I saw a stretcher thrown over the parapet. They rushed out and put me onto the stretcher before lifting me over the parapet and into the trench, the Germans turning their machine guns onto us all the while but luckily they didn't hit us.
They lowered me in our own front trench and our medical officer got a big bottle of iodine and wherever he saw blood he poured it all over me and then he said “Take him out of the wood and hand him over to the RAMC”. They took me to the edge of the wood and they told the RAMC to come and get me but they said “No, bring him a bit further”, they were thinking about their own skins.
I was taken back to this aid post, a tent, where we were lying around in a ring, wounded Germans as well, and the medical orderlies kept walking round and saying “Ah, he won't live much longer”. I can see them now, stealing my watch, a government watch, sychronised for the attack. Very feebly I put my hand up to say “Look, it's a Government watch”, but he just pushed my hand aside. The RAMC had a reputation for pinching anything they could and they were going around assessing who wouldn't live, “He won't live long...and he won't live long”, nicking our things. RAMC, Rob All My Comrades, and that was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
I was sent down the line on an Ambulance Train, lying in a luggage rack. I kept trying to ease myself up as I was in terrible pain and kept hitting my head on the top of the coach. I eventually arrived at a Base Hospital where two Sisters came and got some scissors and just cut my uniform off and they could see my wounds, my shoulder, my stomach, my bladder, my foot hanging off.
I had no expectation of living, but every morning a voice used to say, “The following are for Blighty today” and they would call the names out, but never mine. I asked a nurse to ask the voice to come and see me and I recognised him as a man from my home town, Carlisle, Fred Stubbs. “Well,” I said, “why don't you call my name out for Blighty?” He said I was too badly wounded, I was a cot case, and that I would not be safe in a Hospital Ship, but I insisted and insisted. Eventually they sent me back to England, Sheffield, where the first thing they said was “We're going to send for your mother”. I was wounded from head to foot and said “No, I don't want my mother to see me like this”. The Bishop of Sheffield was in the hospital and when he saw me I heard him say to a nurse, “Wheel him down into the corner and draw the curtains, I'll go and put my regalia on and come back and give him the last rites. Then you can lay him down and he'll be dead in twenty minutes”. I heard him say that and I thought “Aye, that's what you think”.
I had two surgeons for the top half of me and two for the bottom half. The bullet wound was the most serious. Going through my water bottle, the bullet had lost its point and had been turned into a dum dum. They told me the bullet was 3cm deep and clinging onto the wall of my bladder, although it didn't pierce the bladder otherwise I would have been incontinent. I also had a blood clot in my right leg where my foot was hanging off and they were going to amputate. Luckily the clot moved. And here I am today, as fit as a fiddle.
It was a year before they'd got me patched up at Sheffield enough so that I could go home. I'd only been at home a day when the recruiting officer came down and he asked me would I like to do something for the war effort. I sarcastically said he must be joking, I'd only just come home and he said, “Well, we need everybody for the war effort”. I asked him what I could do.
Full of patriotism, sixteen-year-old Tommy Gay enlisted on a whim while crossing Tower Bridge on his way to work in 1914. Choosing to join his uncle's regiment, then in barracks in Scotland, Tommy enjoyed the train ride north from his home in Peckham, the beginning of what he felt sure would be a great adventure. After training for the best part of a year, he was sent to France at the start of 1916 to join the 2nd Royal Scots Fusiliers, only to find that his was one of the few regular units chosen to attack on the 1st July alongside the new Kitchener battalions. Undaunted, he left the trenches in what was to be one of the only successful attacks of that otherwise disastrous day.
We'd had a tot of rum that morning, on 1st July, to help liven us up. They'd give you a good old dose, knowing what you had to do, because a man with his booze, he don't care what he does, it makes you feel like you could fight anything. We knew what we were doing because we'd trained hard for the Big Push in the months before, going over mock battlefields, that sort of thing. I mean, we had landed in France six months before, and this was our first big attack.
Before the attack, we were given a sheet of tin to put between the straps on the back of our pack. One side was painted white and the other was shiny. If it was sunny, we was to turn the tin plate with the shiny side upwards, but if it was a dull morning we put the painted side up so the artillery half a mile back could see us and fire over our heads.
We were attacking a village called Montauban which had been shelled for more than a week by our guns. I'd been made a lance corporal in the few months I'd been there, because my uncle saw to it that I'd done everything as it should be done, that I was properly trained. So, of course, I was one of the first to get up and over the top in my Regiment “Come on, boys, here we go” and we went forward with fixed bayonets. It was brilliant sunshine.
We were not in the front line for the attack but were held back to support the men of the Manchester Regiment, and so we didn't go forward until about 9 o'clock. There was a lot of firing going on, rifle fire and a lot of sniping. The bullets actually whizzed by my ears at one point, you know, ping, ping, ping. I thought how marvellous that they've missed me, I couldn't understand it. We just had to get along up a small slope. A few men had been hit and you'd hear a man saying “Oh, give us a fag”, but that's the most you could hear, but we weren't long before we got on the German lines, because No Man's Land was no distance at all. The village was further back and when we got there it was just a lot of rubble, flattened by our artillery. The Germans had mostly gone, they'd pulled well back and only left a bit of resistance. Later, when it was quiet, we were able to have a look around and we saw marvellous German dugouts, with three flights of stairs, forty feet deep with beds at the bottom.
In the evening, I was detailed to bury some of the dead. There were a lot of bodies around and we had to gather them in, take their identification discs off and just put three or four men into a shell hole and cover them over a bit with a few shovels of dirt. We'd been very happy with our success, but burying those men, that was a terrible thing that was, but there you are, you had to do it.
As no German was supposed to have survived the bombardment of the enemy trenches, the British troops who went over the top on 1st July 1916 were told to walk. Most, like 101-year-old Arthur Wagstaff, believed the attack would be literally a walk-over, but as he left the trenches, Arthur saw the bodies of two inseparable brothers lying on the parapet, and realised the hell he was about to meet.
We were sent up to the reserve line and put into dugouts and instructed as to how we were to act the next day. We were told that we should go up to the front line and into deep dugouts just for the night, so that at the right time we would be called out to go forward. “First thing in the morning the whistles will blow and then you jump up into the trench and then over the top and attack the German front line, but remember, you must remember do not run, you must walk.” Previously, in attacks, the fellows would jump over the top and run like hell into the German lines, but in spite of that we were told not to run, “You'll run into your own bombardment, just walk”. We realised they had dugouts just as we had, and they would be called up as soon as they saw that our attack would be made. But of course our bombardment would be knocking out those Germans in the front line, so hopefully when we got there, there wouldn't be many left.
We had joined the army willingly and we knew that we would have to go forward to kill the Germans and in the process, of course, we stood a rough chance of being killed ourselves. Duty, that was the key word. It was my duty to do this and I must take my chance like everyone else.
I expected to be wounded, but even so I had a terrible awakening because as I left the dugout I saw those who had gone ahead killed and wounded. I saw two of our chaps – they were brothers – lying dead in our own trench, killed before they had even got going. I remember, too, our own Company Sergeant Major sitting on the front of the trench and shouting “Forward, forward. Over the top, boys, over the top, over the top” and then “but don't run, don't run.” So that's the way we went.
It was hot, the bombardment so bad, terrific noise of course, the rattle of machine guns, what I would call total gunfire. There were shells going over the back of us, German shells going over, and I suppose our artillery was still firing on the German lines. We looked along the line and we realised there were very few of us left. Some were left in the trench, dead, some were dead on the way over. We got halfway there and three or four of us dropped into a large shell hole. Looking about, we could see that most of our chaps had been killed while a few were still walking across.
There were four companies to a battalion and our company was on its own. There were two or three companies left or right of us, but we couldn't see how they were doing except that there seemed to be very few about, very few making the attack. It was a disaster, really. We had been there a short time when a Captain of the 11th Londons fell in on top of us and he said “Who are you?” We said “4th City of London” and he said “Well, stay here. My company is over in the German lines – they've either been killed, wounded or taken prisoner”. So it was our order from the Captain to stay there until we were recalled at night.
There was a lull later, quite a bit of a lull because our artillery realised that some of our chaps were over in the German lines and it would be wrong to fire on the German trenches now, but of course there was plenty of German–held territory behind the front line which they could fire their guns onto.
That night we were ordered back into our own front line. We dropped into our trenches and then we were instructed to go down the communication trench to a tiny village, I forget the name of it now. I was worried because my brother was in the 11th Londons, in the company this Captain was speaking about, and on the way back down the communication trench I saw one of their men, a friend of my brother's. I asked him how my brother was and he said, “Oh, he was taken away wounded last night. He has been sitting in an ambulance in a village behind the line”. So he'd never been in the attack at all! We sat and talked about it of course, three or four of us, thankful that we had survived. We missed our friends, so many friends were missing, killed or wounded, but I was alive. All right, tomorrow there would be another battle and again I would run the risk of being killed or wounded, and of course in the end, at the finish of the Somme battle, I was wounded.
Perhaps some of our generals had made mistakes, I don't know. It's just the luck of war – there have to be winners, there have to be losers.
After the disaster on 1st July, the Somme battle settled down to a long series of attritional attacks that gradually pushed the Germans back towards the town of Bapaume. On 15th September, however, the British High Command introduced a secret weapon to the fray – the tank. With supporting infantry attacks, this new weapon would break the stalemate, starting with the small village of Flers. George Louth was one of those who went into action that day.
We were in the front line waiting to go over the top in the morning and I was talking with one of the lads I had originally joined up with, Stokes, he was called. He was just finishing his stint of two hours on guard, standing on the firestep. It was getting dusk and he got down for a kip in this little place he'd cut into the side of the trench. Now I began to talk to another bloke when all of a sudden this shell dropped in the trench, right in this funk hole. It blew Stokes to pieces, there was no flesh on him at all, he was just bones, while the man facing me had his right arm blown off, or nearly off, it was just hanging by a thread. The man said to me, “George, my arm is gone, isn't it, can you see anything?” I said “God, Arthur, you'd better go on down to the Aid Post right away.” So he went down and I never saw him again. He had shielded me from the blast and I was uninjured. I was left alone in that part of the trench, about to go over the top in the morning.
The bombardment began and went on for hours on end and it was deafening. I was in the trench with a cigarette, my last cigarette, in my fingers and I was shaking like a leaf, I don't mind telling you. It was the worst part, waiting to go, like facing the hangman, I would guess. Just before we attacked there was a strange noise, I didn't know what it was but I could hear it; it turned out to be a tank, the first attack the tanks had ever made.
At half past seven, the whistle sounded and we had to go. At that moment I lost all feeling, I wasn't nervous at all. We got over and laid down. I looked down our trench and I could see mates lying where they had dropped, dead on the trench floor. I thought to myself, they must have been there before. It seemed, I don't know, it seemed funny to me at the time, that they were all down there and I thought they were killed some time before, a few days or a few weeks ago, but they were killed there and then, a few minutes ago. I got up and ran forward, but I could hear the whistle of the bullets going so I lay down again and aimed my gun towards the firing line some thirty yards away. A group of Germans suddenly appeared up on top of the trench, they were brave, you have to admit that, to stand up and be fired at. Anyway, I started firing, then I saw two Germans throw their guns down and run down towards our lines, then down our communication trench. After a short while it went quiet, so I got up and looked around but everyone was missing. I looked towards the German line again and I saw a line of German helmets on the skyline. I thought to myself, “Christ, they're coming towards me,” but they weren't, they were going away.
I began walking and I went into Delville Wood. It was all quiet, nobody at all. All dead, both sides of me. Six or seven men ran up and an officer came running out from somewhere waving his revolver and he said, “Lads, this way. I'll shoot the first bastard that goes the other way.” I tried to catch up with them but I lost them, so I went out of the wood and started walking across the fields and on the way I saw this tank. I looked at it but I didn't take much notice of it. Whether it had broken down I don't know but I couldn't see anybody. I walked on into the village of Flers, but as I approached a fork in the road I saw a rat run down one side of the road, as big as a Jack Russell. I decided that I wasn't going to go down there. Instead I walked down the other fork, but as I went forward I began to feel apprehensive, so I turned back. Where I had seen the rat, I met up with six or seven men coming up and they joined me in a trench, and we stopped there the rest of the day until we were relieved.
Archie Richards has a claim to fame: he served in one of the first tanks to go into action. The date was 15th September 1916, and the lumbering machines attacked at a racy three miles an hour. Inside, the crews fainted and were sick as the heat and smell of diesel oil took their toll. Most tanks broke down or were ditched, yet when Archie's tank was finally knocked out, it was one of only a couple to reach the objective – the tiny village of Flers. Eighty years later, Archie was to be found living quietly with his daughter and son–in-law near Maidenhead. His abiding passion was the garden, which he tended with all the care and attention he once lavished on the 6lb gun which armed his tank. He died in February 1998 aged 101.
We were lined up and they said “Here you are, here's the tanks and you people are going to crew them”. We didn't know what they were at first. “Well, what's this, they've got tracks and guns pointing out. They must have an engine so they must crawl around.” That was how we sized them up. We had been at Bisley, training on Hotchkiss machine guns, when we had been sent to Thetford to this new secret weapon, what I called at the time “armoured crawlers”. When we got inside and saw the armaments we said, “Well, this is really it”, we were very impressed. Eight men were picked out for each crew, a Second Lieutenant was in charge of the tank and each had an experienced driver. I was made a 6lb gunner, and we trained every day for about three or four months, getting acquainted with the tank and our guns. We did no physical training, we lived a totally different life from the rest of the army. I didn't even learn to fire a rifle.
Everything was secret for the trip to France. As we left the station, the tanks were covered with hessian, each side, so people couldn't see anything and the tanks were put on flat cars and covered up, as we boarded the train. We were sorted out, and off we went from Southampton, the tanks going separately from us.
In France, we were taken up by train towards Amiens, where we started to move up towards the line, always travelling in the dark, so many hours at night, pulling under trees in the daytime. It took us two or three days to get up, through Albert, to the line, where we put the noses of our tanks under a steep embankment for shelter from the shells. It was while we were waiting to go into action on the Somme that Jerry started to shell the ground behind the embankment, where the artillery was. The gunners had come up for the attack and they had had to wait, same as we had to wait, for the order to move up. The shells were going over the top of us and dropping amongst the tethered horses, killing and wounding any number. We all carried hand guns, and an officer came to me and said, “Richards, let's go out and see what we can do about these horses”. It was a terrible sight, horses with their legs off, squirming and screaming, so we had to put them out of their misery. I remember that quite vividly. It was my first taste of carnage.
On 15th September, all hell broke loose. At about six o'clock in the morning, our barrage opened up, you couldn't hear yourself speak, shells flying everywhere, and the Germans were retaliating. We were scared, really scared, but we just resigned ourselves to putting up with it. We had orders to move out down to a village and on to the first main road, a hard cobble road. The Germans had not shelled it because they had brought up supplies on it previously, and we did not want to shell it now because we were using it for the same reason, so the road had remained quite sound, just a shell hole here and there. We attacked Delville and High Woods, two German strongpoints, then we pushed on to our objective, the village of Flers.
Inside the tank, the atmosphere was sickening. When you are in action and all the traps are down, the fumes are hardly bearable. There is a thick haze of petrol and gas fumes and the cordite fumes, oh terrible, terrible, I think we had to have breathing apparatus, I can't quite remember. It was hot, I mean September was hot that year, very hot and with the engine running it was incredibly stuffy, it was a wonder anyone could live in it. The engine was in the centre of the tank and there was a little passage to step around it, but we were very cramped, and you had to watch your head. The noise was deafening, with our guns going, the German guns firing and the engine running, we had to make predetermined signals with our hands and fingers. It was impossible to speak to anybody. I had a good stomach, but others were sick, spewing up all over the place and passing out. You can imagine what it was like, eight men cooped up in a tank with no air for five hours or more, the smell was awful.
Your nerves get worn, the noise and everything, it gradually gets to you. If you're a nervous person or if your nerves are in any way bad, then it's going to affect you. We had two men in the tank in the attack on Flers and their nerves gave out and they went funny in the head. They had a kind of glazed look in their eyes; the smells were affecting their minds, they didn't know what they were doing and they were unsteady on their feet. It was hard. We were all on the verge of collapsing sometimes, your eyesight could be upset by the fumes and we all went a bit fuzzy in the head, your mind didn't seem quite as clear as it would be if you were outside.
Our officer sat at the front with the driver and signalled what he wanted, and the tank would swing round to face the target. The tank would turn on its own in a wide circle, but with the two gear changers you could turn the tank in its own length. The engine was quite powerful and vibrated the machine somewhat, but it was the movement that was worst, up and down, this way and that. I had a job sometimes to set on my target, to shoot. I'd just get set on the target and ready to fire and bang, the tank would lurch somewhere, throw me right off. When the tank was going over shell holes, holes fifteen feet deep, it used to get on the edge and drop, drop right in, the nose would go right down. It would shake us up, of course, a sudden drop was sickening. You had to hold on or be thrown forwards. We were full of bruises.
My gun sight could traverse about half the tank's width and with a telescopic sight on the gun, I could look at the target. Each gunner had a loader, well, the gear changers were the loaders, they did two jobs, gear changed and loaded the shells which were in cases on the inside of the tank. All the loader had to do was draw the shell out of a case and shove it in the bore, tap me on the shoulder and I was ready to fire. I would fire direct at the target, like shooting a rifle, and very accurate it was, too. I could reckon to hit a target ten feet square at 1,000 yards if the conditions were right.
The targets were the trenches, anywhere we thought there'd be machine gun posts. The Germans would have strong points every so often, and in between it'd be manned by infantry, but the strong points had two or three machine guns. The Germans turned these guns on us, particularly on the trap doors, and the bullets smacked against the tank, causing the metal to splinter inside. Tiny flakes would fly about and cut you all over; our faces often bled so we wore goggles to stop ourselves being blinded.
All feelings of humanity leave you when you're in action, when you're firing. You say to yourself, “It's either him or me, so I've got to get in first.” You've got no feelings of humanity then; afterwards, perhaps, but at the time, no, I'm killing and if I don't kill them they'll kill me and I didn't want to die just then, I was too young. You get into a situation like that, that you can't back out of, and you've got to put up with it, you don't give up, you say “To heck with it”, and go forward.
There was no choice but to drive over the dead, lying about, you couldn't pick your way through. If they fell in your way you had to go over them, we never deviated the tanks for anything, only for action, no, no obstacles deviated the tanks. Going into action, the infantry kept tucked in, clustered behind our tanks for a bit of shelter, then as soon as we took a trench they took over, going along the line ferreting the Germans out. I only saw Germans when we got right on the trench, with our guns laid on each side. They had never seen anything like it before and when they saw we were armed with small guns and machine guns, they gave up straight away. We hardly had time to get on top of their trench before they were out with their arms up. A few of their machine gunners had got away and we could see them silhouetted against the sky with the machine guns on their shoulders, going like hell back to the third lines.
We had entered the village, on the main Flers road, when a shell dropped just in front of our tank and smashed one of our tracks, so we were out of action, that was our lot. We had carried on two men short, but now we got them out of the tank and splashed some water on them and with the fresh air they recovered quickly. Our officer got us together and said, “Now look, it's not wise for me to keep all the crew up here in danger, you can't do any good. I need a couple of you to volunteer to stay with the tank until the engineers come up in the morning to fix the tank and get it out of range.” Two of us volunteered. We were right in the middle of the village and there was a house, just a pile of rubble, but there was a hole going down into the cellar so we agreed it was safer down there than in the tank, which would remain a target for the German artillery. There were two wicker chairs down there, so we sat and waited until it was dark. Jerry began shelling the village again and one landed right on the rubble. Choking dust flew everywhere. I'd been smoking, and the cigarette was cut right off in my fingers and my front teeth knocked out, the other man wasn't injured, but we hopped back into the tank to spend the rest of the night.
They all praised us after we came out of the action. We did a job that the infantry had been trying to do for months and lost thousands trying, and we did it in an hour. There was a pride of something well done and a great thing achieved. We thought it was a privilege to be under cover with half-inch metal plating, for when the infantry came face to face with a machine gun then there was no chance at all. Then there were other times when the fumes were bad and we used to say, “Oh, I wish I was outside”, but we couldn't have it both ways. We had other things to put up with, but we had cover from machine gun bullets.
In action, our officer would make his own decision as to when our action could be broken off. He'd say, “That's it, we've done enough, we'll turn and go back.” As soon as we were out of action, we could open the tank traps, oh you would never believe the relief. You took long breaths of lovely fresh air again, you gulped it in. Freedom – freedom all round. Freedom of limbs, freedom of arms, freedom of breath, freedom of mind, freedom of everything.
You lost friends, we saw other tanks burnt out, but it didn't affect you at the time, you were so full up emotionally. Afterwards, yes, after it was all over you felt the loss, when they ought to be in camp and they weren't. You looked around and you'd see all the vacant places and you talked to your mates who were alive, saying poor old so and so had it and poor old so and so, he's gone. I think being cooped up in a small area brought us closer. We were together all day long, all night long. When you are out of action, you're working on the tanks so you're closely associated all the time and when you're in action, it's closer than ever, like brothers. Our officer used to treat us as a friend, talking to us like he would talk to his own ranks. He would call me Arch, he used all our Christian names. I'm sure he thought we might all go up together so we'll be pally, we'll be pally to the end. Of course when we were out, that would be a different story, he would have to change his attitude. He had to carry his rank then. Would we die for one another? Now that's saying something. I can't vouch for that, I can't say, probably, probably we would.
I thought that if my number was up it's up, it'll come, and I resigned myself. For that reason I could sleep well, and all round my nerves seemed pretty good at that time. We were still on the Somme when for some reason I had to go up into the front line trenches. To this day I don't know why, but I was sheltering with some infantrymen in a hole dug in the side of the trench. The Germans were shelling unmercifully, every size of shell you could mention was dropping all around. Every time a big shell crashed down, I cringed up, I felt terrible in myself, cowering, which I had never done before. I was shellshocked at that time, oh yes, there was no doubt about that – I was shellshocked. I wasn't in my right senses, I shook, my hands shook, I shook all over. And the infantrymen were looking at me as if to say “What's wrong with him?” They didn't seem to take any notice of being shelled, I seemed to be the only one affected. Every time Jerry shelled nearby, I hid, I covered myself, hoping, hoping he wouldn't drop one right on the shelter. I remember thinking, “Have I survived the tanks to get killed like this?” Then I would say to myself “No, my luck'll hold out, I'll be all right, yeah.”
I spoke to the other men. “I've come from a different regiment, I'm not in the infantry. You are here under shellfire all day and all night for weeks, I'm not, the only time I'm under fire is when I'm in action.” I mean, when we were in action all thoughts of fear or anything else goes. I had to justify myself, I felt after I'd gone they'd think I was a coward or something like that, see, so I explained I wasn't used to living under shellfire like that. Shellshock is really fright, fright that can't be coped with.
I couldn't believe what had happened to me at the time. I thought my nerves would carry me, but no, the shelling broke my nerve. Later, when the shells stopped, the fright and the shock seemed to go and next day I was ordinary, just like before, only the memories, only the memory of it.
The tanks did not bring the hoped-for break-through, and the Battle of the Somme petered out in November when the last tactical attacks were made. Beaumont Hamel, a heavily defended village, was finally seized by the 51st Highland Division, in a daring attack on 13th November. Norman Collins was one of the officers who took part.
I had been commissioned into the Seaforth Highlanders from Lichfield Cadet Corps and when I was nineteen, was posted to France to the 51st Highland Division, a division held back for battles. That might sound silly, but some regiments did a lot of work in the trenches but did not take part in great battles. The Highland Division – the Gordons, Black Watch, Seaforths, Camerons – were trained for special attacks, all trained together behind the lines and then when we were ready we entered the trenches and were told the order of battle.
I went to France in 1916 and took part in an attack at a place called Beaumont Hamel, a village on the Somme battlefield. This village had been an objective on 1st July but the attack had failed and so four months later we were sent forward to take it. It was a cold November morning, foggy. The night before, my batman came to see me and asked if I could provide him with the means of buying a small bottle of whiskey – quite illegal of course, but I gave him the money to do it. He would be going over the top with me and he was likely to be killed, as I thought I would be. I thought my chances of coming back were very small, but it doesn't deter you because you have no choice, no alternative. We were told that we would go over the top at six o'clock, so our watches were synchronised and we waited for the creeping barrage which was to cover our advance.
You're looking at your watch to see the hour, and then you're looking in front to see when the barrage will open, and then you look and see that your men – the men you're standing to go over the top with – are equipped and ready to go, and that nobody's turned around and gone back. Then you encourage them, right and left, to go with you, all go together and you keep looking as they drop occasionally.
The guns opened up simultaneously and the Germans were taken entirely by surprise. The main German defensive position was known as Y Ravine, a place with deep dugouts, and the Germans had to get their machine guns up to defend themselves as we moved forward under a canopy of steel. I suppose I might have blown a whistle but it didn't mean anything, I went out and saw men dropping right and left, I've a vision of a Gordon Highlander pitching forward with his rifle onto his hands and knees, stone dead, his kilt raised showing his backside. You're working in a very small area, the rest of the Front is nothing. You quickly look to see if a man who has dropped is dead or not or if there was anything you could do for him, but you hadn't time to stop, so you sort of shepherded the men over. You are very aware of the example you are setting the men; if they saw you funking it – showing fear – they wouldn't think much of you. They looked to me for encouragement, and you made jokes if you could, you made little jokes. I remember once in an attack, a Captain Harris waved for me to come on and I ran forward and flopped on the ground beside him. We were being heavily shelled at the time and I did a very silly thing. I took my tin helmet and I rolled it like Charlie Chaplin used to do with his bowler hat, and put it back on again. That's the way I reported for duty, little jokes like that.
We took the German front line with very few losses, although farther back the Germans managed to get their machine guns up and they opened fire on the second wave. You couldn't avoid the bullets or the shells, it was sheer chance. When machine guns are firing, it's like a solid wall of lead. You can smell the gunpowder, well, I suppose nitrates, the high explosives, you could smell the high explosives. I had a .45 revolver and Mills bombs, so I was not defenceless, and I fought when the opportunity came. My role was to get into Y Ravine and throw Mills bombs down into the dugouts where the Germans were, I suppose killing quite a number. You throw the bombs down and say “Share that amongst you”, that's what you said as a rule and all the time I've no doubt whatever that I was as frightened as anything and hoping, a faint hope, that I would survive.
After any battle, you always had men lying out in No Man's Land probably with their testicles blown off and crying in agony and lying out there all night long in the dark, in the rain. You couldn't get them in and in any case they would never have survived. But you had a choice. They could die in agony or you could shoot them. You were shown how to do the thing very cleanly, you put your .45 revolver muzzle against the back of his head and pulled the trigger and immediately the whole of the front skull came away and exposed the brain, just blown off. A lead bullet hit the inside of the skull, and they were dead instantly. There was no pain about it, but I can honestly say this, that I never had the courage – because that's what it took – I never had the courage myself to shoot a wounded soldier. I carried out the operation many times afterwards on animals. I could kill a pet dog far better than a vet could, but I was never able to shoot a wounded soldier. I probably should have. I had an officer friend, Murray Dickson, quite a close friend, and he was wounded in the stomach. He was in great agony from what I was told. The kindest thing would have been to have shot him on the battlefield. Instead of that, they took him back to hospital and he died six days later. It's a tremendous thing to shoot a friend, even though he's in agony, and I just didn't have the courage to do it. Most of them died overnight but of course they didn't thank you for it, I'm sure.