SOMME Page 2

  Richard Dunning (who purchased the mine-crater at la Boisselle rather than see it filled in and built on) has given help which I much appreciate, as has Tom Gudmestad in the USA.

  The Commonwealth War Graves Commission has, as always, dealt with enquiries in Britain and in France with unfailing courtesy and efficiency and I am particularly grateful to Stuart Campbell at its Headquarters at Maidenhead and to Steve Grady and his staff in Arras.

  I must also record my thanks to Eyre Methuen Limited for allowing me to use extracts from The Private Papers of Douglas Haig.

  Colin Butler deserves a paragraph to himself. I met him in Ypres three years ago and since then he has travelled more miles, conducted more interviews and done more work than anyone else, with the possible exception of myself – although I wouldn’t be too sure! His energy is boundless, his enthusiasm inexhaustible and his contribution has been immense. In trying to thank him, words fail me. All I can say is that he never does. He even co-opted the services of his long-suffering wife, Wendy, who collated the information on the 13th Service Battalion, The Rifle Brigade, from a multitude of disparate sources and she combined this time-consuming job with having a baby at the same time!

  Of my friends ‘on location’ in France, where most of this book has been researched and written, I must thank Serge and Jeannine Mills, who have not only provided a roof over my head, cosseted, fed, watered and warmed me over two Somme winters and inclement springs, regardless of muddy boots, dripping anoraks and trench maps spread out across half their premises, but have introduced me to many valuable contacts on the Somme and have also indulged me with many hours of relaxing conviviality, hospitality, conversation and friendship. Neither they, nor my other friends in Authuille who have made me feel ‘one of the family’ (Monsieur Oscar, Mario, Danielle, Roger, Madame Rose, to name but a few) will ever know how much that meant at the end of a long day’s slog at the typewriter or out on the ground.

  But my unfailing support has been my assistant Alma Woodroff, who has had less than most of us of the interest involved in tramping the Somme or of meeting old soldiers. But, in a sense, she knows them better than any of us, for it is she who transcribes the hundreds of hours of recordings, organizes the research, keeps tabs on everything and keeps everyone in order. Somehow she also managed, uncomplainingly, to fit in the typing of the draft and the manuscript of this book, deciphering the indecipherable, making sense of the unintelligible and, best of all, still came up laughing at the jokes. After three books on the war, if anyone has earned a campaign medal, she has.

  My husband, Ian Ross, loathes publicity but I hope he will indulge my feeling that, after ten years of re-fighting the Great War, I owe him my formal thanks for allowing a third of his house to be taken over as archive-cum-office, for putting up with my frequent absences, for his disinterested advice and invaluable judgement, and for only very occasionally complaining of shell-shock.

  LYN MACDONALD

  LONDON AND AUTHUILLE. JANUARY 1983.

  Part 1

  Lads, You’re Wanted!

  ‘Lads, you’re wanted! Over there,’

  Shiver in the morning dew,

  More poor devils like yourselves

  Waiting to be killed by you.

  E. A. MACKINTOSH

  Chapter 1

  It was the Romans who first built the long straight road thrusting out from Amiens through Albert to Bapaume, swinging north to Arras and westward to the coast. Now the autoroute speeds down from Calais, swirls into a tangle of highways round Loos and Lens, swoops past the Vimy Ridge and round Arras, vibrating under the wheels of fast cars and Euro-lorries streaming south to Paris and beyond.

  In summer, when the stream of traffic swells to a river, the Euro-driver, keeping an ill-humoured eye on his wing-mirror, is moved a dozen times an hour to curse certain motor cars, half-blinded by their right-hand drives, in their wavering attempts to overtake his juggernaut, and shrugs with Gallic resignation as the British registration plates squeeze by.

  Past Arras, for the first time since leaving Calais, a driver can relax. The confusion of signboards disappears; the road runs straight; the landscape opens out into a sweep of downs and valleys and, on rising ground to the west, a scattering of copses and villages with the distant spires of country churches, half-hidden by clumps of trees. Curious, map-reading passengers can easily identify them – Gueudecourt, Flers, Lesboeufs, Morval, Combles – and may observe, with idle interest, that the river, soon to be bridged, is the River Somme. But they would have to be quick with the Michelin.

  At motorway speed it takes, at most, twelve minutes to cover the twenty-five kilometres from the exit at Bapaume to the exit at Estrées. Between them, the highway, with singular precision, swings across the eastern limits of the battlefield of the Somme. The village of Estrées, at the end of the line attacked by the French Army, was the first and most southerly objective on the first day of the Battle. The British objective was the small town of Bapaume. In five months of almost continuous fighting, they struggled towards it through the summer and autumn of 1916. A hundred and fifty thousand men died. In the end, when the Battle itself died out in the November chill and the slough in front of Gueudecourt, Flers, Lesboeufs, Morval, Combles, they had not quite managed to get there.

  *

  Later, when it was long over, everyone remembered the bird-song. Doves, cooing beneath the eaves of a shell-racked barn; the faint chirrup of a lark that still, astoundingly, wheeled in the clear sky, far beyond the reach of shot or shrapnel; the song of a nightingale when the guns fell briefly silent and, in the beginning, the endless cawing of rooks in the high trees along the springtime roads of Picardy as the soldiers marched along them in an endless khaki tide.

  They were marching towards the Battle of the Somme. But that name, with its tragic connotations destined to ring hollow down the years, had not yet been coined. The soldiers preparing for the fight called it the Big Push. Very few of them were soldiers at all. They were shop assistants, clerks, artisans, aristocrats, butchers, errand boys, farmers, schoolmasters, miners, grocers, sheep-shearers, bankers – but they were united by a simple resolve to put the Germans in their place once and for all. That place, in the universal opinion of the British Tommies, was well below the salt in a world where few would have disputed the right of Great Britain, attended by her Empire, to occupy the head of the table.

  Pouring into the Somme, marching to and from the training grounds, moving wholesale from billets in one indistinguishable French village only to tramp in apparently aimless circles to another, the infantry were glad, on the whole, to be on the move. They had been at the front for many months; they had held the trenches, graduating from quiet to ‘lively’ stretches of the line; they had become hardened to discomfort and cautiously blasé under shellfire. A few of the earlier arrivals had taken part in the Battles of Loos and Festubert, and lively spirits, handy with a knobkerry, had developed a penchant for prowling round No Man’s Land and paying rowdy surprise visits to the enemy’s trenches, but not one man in five hundred had ever been ‘over the top’ in a major battle. Until now, by exercising a reasonable degree of caution, the majority of Kitchener’s Army had run a slightly greater risk of dying from boredom in the trenches than from the attentions of the enemy. Their philosophy was summed up by the phrase that had become a universal motto, If you can’t take a joke you shouldn’t have joined! They were half a million strong, volunteers to a man and, although there was a leavening of professional soldiers in their ranks, hardly anyone among them had been in khaki for more than twenty-three months. By the early summer of 1916, on the eve of the biggest battle of the war, they were, at best, half trained, and this unpleasant but inescapable truth was at the forefront of the minds of the professional army commanders throughout the long months of planning the battle. It was in their disquiet that the first seeds of the tragedy took root.

  The Army had undeniably done its best, but the tide of patriotic enthusiasm which had swept a hundred
thousand would-be soldiers into its ranks in the first ten days of the war had completely swamped its resources. At the beginning of August 1914, it had been a small, tight-knit professional force. By the end of the same month it had swelled, willy-nilly, into a vast amorphous mass of men and boys, united only by boundless enthusiasm at the prospect of being turned into soldiers. The problem was how to set about it. The Regular Army was occupied elsewhere and, by the beginning of September, Commanding Officers of Regimental Depots in Britain were turning grey under the strain of handling a strength that had catapulted from a disciplined body of one or, at most, two reserve battalions, to ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen ‘Service’ battalions of raw recruits, enlisted for the duration of the war, and whose only resemblance to ‘battalions’ as the Army knew them, was that they consisted of a thousand or so men apiece – all of them devoid of the slightest military skill, but asking nothing more than to be sent to France without delay. In desperation they closed recruiting lists, canvassed the ragged ranks of would-be soldiers for any who had at least seen service in the Boys’ Brigade or as Boy Scouts, slapped corporals’ stripes on the sleeves of their civilian suits, handed them over to bemused drill-sergeants and turned to the War Office with imperative demands for advice, for ration money, for equipment and, above all, for instructors. The replies, when they came, generally consisted of little more than terse orders to ‘Carry On’.

  The War Office had problems of its own. It was being besieged from all quarters, not only from the hard-pressed commands of its ballooning Army, wobbling under the weight of its unwieldy expansion, but from a hundred other directions where private enterprise had raised what amounted to a series of private armies.

  In the first enthusiastic weeks of war it seemed that every county, town and borough all over the British Isles, each anxious to have at least one battalion of its own, had set itself up as a recruiting agency. As fast as young men poured into Town Halls to enlist, money poured in from the local citizenry to maintain them. Within days, and in numbers that those concerned with the administration of the Army preferred not to contemplate, they were happily encamped on Wimbledon Common, in Bellevue Park, on the Ayrshire coast and on private estates, village greens and local parks across the length and breadth of the country. There was no hope of Khaki as yet but, tweed-capped and flannel-trousered though they were, the new recruits basked in the glow of local admiration, and drilled as enthusiastically as though their broom handles were rifles in response to the tentative suggestions of young officers whose commissions, at present, emanated from the local Mayor, rather than from the King, and whose superior knowledge was cribbed shakily from some well-thumbed army manual dating from the Boer War.

  Where are our uniforms?

  Far far away

  When will our rifles come?

  P’raps p’raps some day…

  It was the first parody of a war whose parodies were to become immortal.

  All officers of the Reserve, many of them verging on the antediluvian, had been called up and, unless actually confined to wheelchairs, had answered the call. An appeal had gone out for ‘old sweats’ who had served in the Boer War or even in the Sudan to come forward to help with the training. It was necessarily sketchy and not entirely relevant to the circumstances of modern warfare. In the summer and autumn of 1915, when certain battalions of the New Army started arriving at the front, it was not unknown for Divisional Headquarters to receive reports that were couched in terminology strangely inappropriate to the European landscape. The old soldiers, who had initiated the New Army into the military arts, and whose last experience of soldiering had been a dozen years earlier in South Africa, were accustomed to referring to ‘plains’ and ‘kopjes’ and their pupils, assuming this to be standard military practice, had naturally followed suit. A year later, their error having been pointed out by a score of apoplectic brigadiers, they now knew better.

  There was small resemblance between the arid veldt of South Africa and the dulcet countryside of Picardy. The River Somme ambled towards Amiens, coiling in long, lazy loops through a marshy valley, joined by a score of minor tributaries that turned it, here and there, into a waterscape of straggling streams and islands. Just behind Corbie it met the Ancre, flowing down through Albert from the northeast, where the British Army stood astride the river, on the edge of high chalk downs where the German Army was entrenched.

  On 1 July the British had been in position for a bare ten months. But the enemy had been there for almost two years. The Germans had come to the Somme early on an autumn morning. It was 27 September 1914, and, in the tiny hamlet of Authuille, tucked under the high bluff of the Thiepval Ridge, not a man, woman or child would ever forget the date.

  Swelling out of the valley carved by the River Ancre more than a hundred feet below, the crest of the Thiepval Ridge was deceptively gentle. A plateau rather than a summit, with broad shoulders that breasted the horizon as they ran down to Grandcourt, away on the left and reached towards Aveluy, away on the right. Both villages stood on the banks of the River Ancre and its gentle course, its wooded valleys, the high hills above, had made it a favourite place with holidaymakers who preferred green tranquillity to the elegant bustle of seaside resorts. In the summers before the war they came from as far away as Paris, to swim or fish in the river, to walk and ride in the hills, to climb the winding road to Thiepval village on the summit of the ridge, to admire the view and to take afternoon tea, in the English-style, enjoying the delicious cakes for which the pâtisserie in Thiepval was justly renowned.

  Thiepval was a seigniorial village, not much changed from feudal times. It had a few shops, a café or two, a sizeable church and sixty odd houses occupied by the farmworkers who worked the fertile lands around. But what caught the eye from miles away was the Château. Large and imposing, it had stood for three centuries in front of the village, dominating the ridge on the foremost edge of the plateau, a landscape of formal gardens stretching from its elegant stone terrace to the verge of its private wood that ran down the lower slopes to the river valley. It commanded a magnificent view.

  Strolling on the terrace of an evening, the old Count, Monsieur de Bréda, could almost have exchanged a nod with his neighbour, who owned a château nearly as grand diagonally across the way on the Mesnil Ridge above the dark mass of Aveluy Wood. Ahead, half concealed by the trees of the Count’s own valley, Hamel village straggled up the opposite slope and, away on his right, where the long saddle of the Mesnil Ridge ran into the cleft of a narrow valley, the spire of Beaumont Church could just be seen above it. By strolling no more than a hundred yards from his domain, past the village and up the gradual rise of the hilltop, he could survey miles of lush farmland rolling up towards Pozières; away on the low ground to the right, if he could not actually see the town of Albert, set low in the fold of the valley four miles away, he might easily have caught a glimpse of its famous landmark, when a ray of the setting sun lingered briefly on the gilded Virgin towering above the roof of its cathedral. In structure, in outlook, in situation, the Château of Thiepval occupied a position that was second to none.

  The de Brédas owned the Thiepval Ridge, with all its farms and villages, and the only thing that had disturbed the satisfaction of the Count, as he surveyed the rolling hectares of his property, was that there was no heir to succeed to it.

  The de Brédas were old and childless. Earlier in the year the Count had died and been laid to rest in the vault of the family sepulchre among his more prolific ancestors whose ancient coffins, it was rumoured by the villagers, contained not merely their earthly remains but all their costly jewels. Now the Comtesse de Bréda had gone too. The local servants had been paid off and Madame de Bréda, with her chauffeur and her maid, had swept through Authuille in the new motor car that had been her husband’s pride and joy, making for Amiens and the safety of her sister’s house. The Château was empty and its long windows, accustomed to throw back the rays of the evening sun as it drifted down behind the Mesnil Ridge, stoo
d blank and shuttered. The villagers, who had seen the Comtesse depart, deduced that the war was approaching too close for comfort.

  It was just thirty-five days since the first shots had been fired and fired far to the north, over the Belgian frontier at Mons. It was almost beyond belief that in one short month the Germans could have swept through France, pushing the French and their British ally in front of them, to the very gates of Paris, that three great battles could have been fought and that, even now, the enemy was pouring apparently limitless forces across the captured plains of the north, as he raced towards the sea. In the past few days, rumour had moved faster than events, in a situation so fluid that the newspapers could hardly keep up with it. The Voix du Nord was printing little more than ringing calls to arms and patriotic rhetoric, but word of mouth had it that, three days ago, shooting had been heard at Chaulnes and that, only yesterday, the Germans were in Maricourt, not seven kilometres away from the village of Authuille.

  On the morning of the 27th the village and the ridge above were wrapped in a thick September mist. Boromée Vaquette milked his six cows as usual and, as usual by seven o’clock, he was driving them out of his farmyard and up the steep path to their pasture on the ridge above. It was not much of a pasture – less than half a hectare and, each day, Vaquette set the cows to graze in a different corner and put up a moveable fence of chains and pickets to prevent them from wandering. It took him twenty minutes to move the stakes, to hammer them into the ground with a heavy mallet, another five minutes to encourage the cows into the enclosure and ten more to walk back down the road to the farm and his morning bowl of coffee.

  That morning he never returned. By seven the children were up and dressed. By half-past seven the younger ones had set off for school, the eldest Vaquette girl was skimming the cream from the milk pans, the coffee pot simmered on the kitchen stove, Madame Vaquette was feeding the hens. By eight o’clock she was mildly concerned; by nine she was anxious; by ten it was all round the village that Boromée Vaquette had disappeared; by lunchtime Madame Vaquette was frantic.