SOMME
PENGUIN BOOKS
SOMME
Over the past twenty years Lyn Macdonald has established a reputation as a popular author and historian of the First World War. Her books are They Called It Passchendaele, an account of the Passchendaele campaign in 1917; The Roses of No Man’s Land, a chronicle of the war from the neglected viewpoint of the casualties and the medical teams who struggled to save them; Somme, a history of the legendary and horrifying battle that has haunted the minds of succeeding generations; 1914: The Days of Hope, a vivid account of the first months of the war and winner of the 1987 Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; 1914–1918: Voices and Images of the Great War, an illuminating account of the many different aspects of the war; and 1915: The Death of Innocence, a brilliant evocation of the year that saw the terrible losses of Aubers Ridge, Loos, Neuve Chapelle, Ypres and Gallipoli. Her most recent book is To the Last Man: Spring 1918, the story of the massive German offensive that broke the British line and almost broke the British Army. All are based on the accounts of eyewitnesses and survivors, and cast a unique light on the First World War. All are published in Penguin.
Lyn Macdonald is married and lives in London.
LYN MACDONALD
SOMME
PENGUIN BOOKS
This book is dedicated to a single soldier
of Kitchener’s Army.
His name is Legion.
And he asked him, What is thy name? And he
answered, saying My name is Legion:
for we are many.
St Mark v, 9
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published by Michael Joseph Ltd 1983
Published in Penguin Books 1993
20
Copyright © Lyn Macdonald, 1983
All rights reserved
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-193169-2
Contents
List of illustrations
Author’s Foreword and Acknowledgements
Part 1
Lads, You’re Wanted!
Part 2
The Big Push
Part 3
‘High Wood to Waterlot Farm…’
Part 4
The Mouth of Hell
Part 5
Friends Are Good on the Day of Battle
Bibliography
Author’s Note
Index
List of Illustrations
Valley in front of Beaumont Hamel from which British troops attacked on the First of July
German line on the Thiepval plateau
Fields between Hébuterne village and Gommecourt where the Territorials of the 56th Division were decimated
British jumping-off line where the boys of the Pals Battalions waited to attack the German line
Beaumont Hamel Valley from the Hawthorn Redoubt
British and German front-line trenches in front of Thiepval village
British and German lines seen from the German trenchline in front of Thiepval Château
The present-day view to the right of old Thiepval village shot from the Thiepval Memorial
Rose Vaquette pointing to the spot where her father was shot on 27th September 1914
The old well of Thiepval still looks out across No Man’s Land
Ruins of Thiepval Château in 1915
Heap of stones which today is all that remains of Thiepval Château
Present-day Thiepval village
German trench in the Ovillers defences
Albert–Bapaume road showing magnitude of German defences
German line to the left of la Boisselle
Grave of Boromée Vaquette in Authuille village cemetery
Grave of Clem Cunnington in Ovillers Military Cemetery
Reg Parker with two comrades of the Sheffield Pals
Reg Parker’s brother, Willie
Still-visible trenchlines to the left of Contalmaison attacked alone by the 13th Rifle Brigade on the evening of 10th July
Road from la Boisselle to Contalmaison
Traces of the line that formed the Fricourt Salient
Contalmaison Château in 1917
Entrance to a dugout near Contalmaison
Reserve trenches on the Somme
The ground attacked on 14th and 15th July, with the two stumbling blocks of High Wood and Delville Wood
German communication trench to the right of Crucifix Corner where Fred Beadle lost his way
Remains of the windmill which concealed a deep dugout
From the windmill above Crucifix Corner, Bazentin, looking across to Longueval and Delville Wood
Part of letter from Ethel Bath
Reginald Bath
Bill Turner and Maggie Gaffney
Jack Beament of the Church Lads Brigade
Some of the Church Lads of the 16th Battalion, King’s Royal Rifle Corps
Death Valley and Caterpillar Wood and valley
Looking across to Longueval and Delville Wood from the corner of Trones Wood on the road to Guillemont
German dugout and gallery at Guillemont
Remains of a machine-gun post in the Triangle
Panorama of the Ancre valley and the Thiepval Ridge
First message transmitted by the 1st Anzac Wireless section
Statue of Sir Douglas Haig at Montreuil-sur-Mer
View of the land beyond Ginchy and Guillemont, the scene of the September fighting
Formidable defences of the German second line at Ginchy
Ginchy, Autumn 1982, still yielding its annual harvest of shells
Where the Switch Line ran
The site of the Triangle and the Quadrilateral from the Guards Memorial on Ginchy Ridge
Christchurch Boys’ High School Cricket team in 1908; four of the eleven were killed fighting with the New Zealanders
The menacing Quadrilateral which blocked the advance from Guillemont
The invitation to Arthur Agius’s wedding
The Butte de Warlencourt and the land beyond le Sars where the fighting came to a standstill at the end of the Battle of the Somme in November 1916
The valley behind Beaumont Hamel and the slopes to the right above it where the boys of the Glasgow Tramways Battalion were cut off
The British and German lines on either side of the present-day Newfoundland Park
The valley behind Beaumont Hamel with the Thiepval Ridge to the east
The ‘fortress’ village of Beaumont Hamel sheltered in the cleft of its valley
Station Road, running from Beaumont Hamel village to Beaucourt station, which was the ‘Green Line’ captured by the Royal Naval Division
The Order issued from GHQ on the eve of the First of July
A single pane of stained glass depicting the head of the Virgin Mary, all that remains of the old Beaumont Hamel village
Photograph found on a dead German soldier
The letter Captain Agius received from Harold Scarlett’s widow, Florence
Popular postcard, ‘Fond Love to my Dear Boy’
Joe Hoyles, Fred Lyons and Sid Birkett on the day they joined up Len Lovell
George Roy Bealing, MM
Tom Easton in 1914
Maps
The Line from Gommecourt to Thiepval
The Line from Thiepval to Montauban
The Attack at Contalmaison on 10th July
The Ground Attacked on 14th/15th July
The Battle of Guillemont and Ginchy
The General Attack on 15th September
The October Fighting
The Line at the End of the Fighting in November
Author’s Foreword and Acknowledgements
If this book had a sub-title it might appropriately be Whatever happened to Kitchener’s Army? The Somme happened to it. When the Battle of the Somme finished Kitchener’s Army was all but finished, too. It seemed at the time that the country would never get over it – and it never has.
In one sense Kitchener’s Army was hardly an army at all. Before it was formed in August 1914, the British Army had been a small, tight-knit force of highly-trained professionals (as it is again today) equally skilled in dealing with the impertinent skirmishes in foreign parts which, since the death of Napoleon, had passed as wars, and with the rebellions and insurrections in various parts of the Empire it garrisoned and policed. To the domestic population of Great Britain in those days before instant communication and responsible journalism unrolled international events before the daily judgement of the domestic scene, wars and disturbances alike were remote affairs. Most people were complacent, confident, proud enough of their disciplined and structured society to be content to leave power to the politicians, morality to the churchmen, administration to the Establishment and fighting to the Army.
Nineteen-sixteen was to change all that, although the murmur of the first tentative questioning was drowned by the clamour of the war itself, and the first tremor in the rock-like foundations of British society was masked by the monstrous vibrations of the fighting. A decade was to pass before the murmur grew to a growl and half a century before the tremor was perceived as the first wave of a full-sized earthquake.
From the turbulent present it is seductive to look back on those days before the Great War as on a halcyon age. With the benefit of hindsight and the cultivation of the habit of criticism, it is tempting to condemn those whose duty it was to conduct the war and even to marvel at the attitude of those who saw it as their duty to fight it. The very horror of their experience has given birth to a widely held emotional view of the war in which every Tommy wears a halo and every officer above the rank of captain a pair of horns.
Perhaps it is logical, in the spirit of our times, that some of us should think like that. But it is equally logical that, in every echelon of their society, the Great War generation should have been impelled to act as they did. They were not endowed with the gift of foreseeing the future. It is doubtful, even if they had been, if they would have acted differently, for they were as much the children of their time as we are of ours.
I am constantly amazed by the passion of controversy and argument which discussion of the war can still arouse after the passage of seventy years. It is not my intention to enter the lists. This book does not set out to draw political conclusions and, although it is the story of a battle, it is more concerned with the experience of war than with the war itself. The whole nation experienced that war just as, three generations on, the nation is still experiencing its repercussions.
There was hardly a household in the land, there was no trade, occupation, profession or community, which was not represented in the thousands of innocent enthusiasts who made up the ranks of Kitchener’s Army before the Battle of the Somme. By the end of the War there was hardly a family in the land which, in its inner or outer circle, had not suffered bereavement and hardly a young man who was lucky enough to return who would not be affected to the end of his life by his experience of that War to end Wars, and who would not see the world through new eyes because of it.
Most of them survived long enough to see ideals they had nurtured at its outset turn sour in its aftermath. Some survive still, but the voices, like the old soldiers themselves, are rapidly fading away. Soon all that will be left to tell us something of what it was all like in 1914 will be their sepia images in old photographs, grinning in self-conscious khaki, as the mouthless crowds cheer and the silent bands play and the flags fly frozen in the air. When the last of them has gone, a great silence will fall. I hope that these histories of their war will at least continue to transmit the echo.
My first thanks must go to the many old soldiers who with courtesy, patience, kindness and infinite enthusiasm have spent hours talking about the war, who have generously lent me precious souvenirs, books, letters, diaries, photographs, and who (often handicapped by ill-health or disability) have gone to the trouble of writing lengthy accounts of their experiences. Those who have contributed directly to this particular book are listed at the back with my special thanks, but in ten years of research and writing about the Great War I have ‘on my books’, so to speak, almost 3,000 men and women who served in it. Although it would be impossible to quote them all I owe all of them a debt of gratitude for a plethora of stories, of viewpoints, of first-hand details which have added to my own knowledge and have helped me to learn, to understand and to ‘tell it like it was’ for them, within a broader context than perhaps these very young people understood themselves at the time. They have done more than that. They have enabled me to build up a considerable collection of oral and written history, documents and ephemera. From a practical point of view a mere fraction can be utilized in the books I write, but, in its natural home in the care of the Imperial War Museum, the collection will, I know, be of value and importance long after we have all ‘faded away’.
Ironically, the larger such a mass of material becomes the more difficult it becomes to make use of it unless one is gifted with a computer-like memory. Few working authors (and none whose field is military history!) can rise to the dizzy heights of owning a computer, but my life has been eased and my efficiency increased a hundredfold through the hard work and enthusiasm of members of the (1981) Sixth Form of the Harvey Grammar School, Folkestone, who, with zeal and breath-taking attention to detail, undertook the mammoth task of cataloguing, collating, indexing and cross-indexing some four million words of written and recorded material and then claimed to have enjoyed doing it! I hope they did, and I am very grateful to them, and, in particular, to John Botting and Bill Westall, the two schoolmasters who not only organized the project, guided the boys through it and made themselves responsible for much irreplaceable material, but through their teaching imbued the boys with the enthusiasm and interest which led them to undertake the task in the first place.
I first heard of the Harvey Grammar School one soggy morning on the Somme through a chance meeting with Neill Page, Paul Iverson and Simon Marshall who had just finished A-levels and, inspired by school trips organized by Messrs. Botting and Westall, were making the most of their spare time on a camping holiday exploring the Somme for themselves. Since then Neill and Paul, in particular, have become valuable lieutenants on research trips to the battlefields and in return for sleeping space on the floor, a few beers and a square meal or two, have enthusiastically undertaken all the difficult jobs from patiently teaching me how to read a compass properly to identifying obscure trenches, plotting gun-positions, crawling through tunnels (which they had found in the first place) and digging the car out when it got bogged down on rough tracks where no car should reasonably be expected to go.
I never cease to be amazed at the generosity and willingness of people who volunteer to help. It is
obvious that I could never undertake such a mammoth task of research unaided and equally obvious that, so far as the collection of first-hand information is concerned, it is not so much the eleventh hour as two minutes to midnight. Since the publication of They Called it Passchendaele, the first of my books on the Great War, I have had amazing luck to acquire a corps of helpers who, between them, have enabled me to enlarge the scope of my work to a degree which would otherwise have been impossible for one person to cover. Some have come through chance meetings in France; many are readers, quite unknown to me, who have volunteered information or introductions to old soldiers; others I have met on the Battlefield Tours I occasionally accompany as guest-lecturer. A good number of them have proved to be first-rate interviewers. Some have made a hobby (valuable to me) of scouring the yellowed files of their local newspapers in search of information about local battalions. Others, like Mollie Jewsbury and Helen McClure, have undertaken the tedious but infinitely worthwhile chore of transforming long and often indecipherable diaries and journals into clean typescript. I am immensely grateful to these ladies, as well as to the people throughout the country who have given much of their time to tracing and talking to old soldiers who would otherwise be out of my reach. Frank Hobson in the Northeast, Robert Trafford in the West Country, Alastair McNeilage in East Anglia, Barbara Taylor in Nottingham, Albert Texeira de Mattos and Yves de Kok in Belgium, Elizabeth Ogilvie in New Zealand, Vivien Riches in Australia, and Don Dean, Chris Sheeran, Stan Taylor, Ken Handley, Graham Winton, Hugh Williams, Ken Smallwood and Graham Maddocks.
Of the ‘old firm’ – the original team who have been helping since the beginning of this project ten years ago – my thanks are yet again due to Guy Francis, to John Woodroff, who checked units, dates and actions against official records with his customary meticulous care, and to my BBC colleague, Ritchie Cogan, for his support and interest both in this country and on forays to the battlefields and particularly for his expert assistance with the illustrations, competently photographed by John Daniel who, like me, will not forget the hair-raising experience of getting the aerial shots from a one-engined aircraft flown by a co-operative but insouciant pilot! It was the way he kept smiling when the engine cut out that made us glad to regain terra firma!