SOMME Read online

  During the morning French soldiers had marched into the village, and a sentry posted on the outskirts, despite all Madame Vaquette’s pleading, barred the way to the ridge above. Shots had been heard. Late in the afternoon a French sergeant came into the courtyard and knocked at the farmhouse door. He found it difficult to blurt out his story. They had come out of the wood, he said, early in the morning. They were looking for Germans, expecting to see them any minute; they heard the sound of hammering and, across the field, near the place where the four roads met, they could just distinguish through the mist the figure of a man in grey clothes erecting a barricade. They had taken him for a German, fired a volley and retreated into the wood. The soldier began to cry. It was only now that they understood that they had killed a Frenchman and by now it was too late. The advance guard of the Germans had already moved forward to take up a defensive position on the ridge. A few yards beyond the line they had chosen, the body of Boromée Vaquette lay hidden in the long grass. There was no sign of the cows.

  The Germans had occupied Thiepval village and spread purposefully across the hills on either side. That night their senior officers slept in Thiepval Château and their troops were digging trenches on the crest of the Thiepval Ridge.

  Madame Rose Glavieux (née Vaquette)

  It was a week before they could bring back the body of my father because nobody dared to approach. Then one evening a French officer came to see my mother and he said, ‘Madame Vaquette, we must do something for you.’ The French soldiers were very upset. The officer said, ‘We know the place. We can show it to you, and tonight we can bring him back.’ It was a very quiet night and it was dark, with no moon. My mother went with my eldest sister and the soldiers showed them the place. They had to go on stockinged feet, to make no noise, right up almost to the German trench to find my father’s body. The soldiers carried him back to the house and next day they carried him to the church and the priest said a mass. There were not many there, just the people from the village and a few of the soldiers. After the mass, we followed the coffin to the cemetery and buried my father in the family grave. It was nine days since he had been killed.1

  During that nine days the fighting had trickled to the north and Germans, French and British had begun to dig themselves in.

  When the British had taken over this sector of the line, at the urgent request of the French in the late summer of 1915, it had been easy to sneer at their Ally for ‘lacking the offensive spirit’. No one, least of all the French, denied that the Somme had been a ‘cushy’ front, that laissez faire had been the order of the day. It was true that there had been occasional duels between the guns, that the Château of Thiepval was distinctly knocked about, and, with its eyeless windows gazing gauntly westwards from the German front line, it had long ceased to be regarded as a desirable billet for German officers. It was true that there had been intermittent skirmishing, and that German engineers and French alike had developed a predilection for burrowing under the lines of their opposite numbers and springing mines beneath their trenches. But these were mere token gestures compared to the battles which all through 1915 had raged to the north and to the east. On the Somme neither side had had any particular reason to stir things up. There was no particular objective and, short of a major offensive which neither side was in a position to undertake, nothing to be gained by local attacks. In the light of the casualties which both sides had suffered elsewhere, the philosophy of live and let live’ seemed, on the Somme Front, to be very much to the point.

  The French Army was stretched to its limit. Four hundred and seventy-five miles of trenchline stretched from the Belgian coast, sweeping across the face of France to the very doorstep of Switzerland. Until the autumn of 1915, the French were grimly holding on to four hundred miles of its length, while the British Expeditionary Force faced the enemy along a mere seventy miles of the front. Certainly the British had not been idle. They had held the Germans at bay at Ypres, they had fought the enemy at Neuve Chapelle, they had stood alongside the French on the Marne, on the Aisne, at Loos, but it was not enough. It was not nearly enough. The British must shoulder more of the burden – and, for a start, they must take over more of the line. So the British Army came to the Somme, took over the French Front where it faced the arc of the German line from Hébuterne to Thiepval, on the Ancre, from Thiepval to the banks of the River Somme itself.

  Unlike the French, fighting on their native soil and pledged to give up their lives rather than to concede a single centimetre to the invader; unlike the British, equally committed to kicking the enemy off the face of France, the Germans had positioned their line with care. Here giving up a stretch of lowlying ground, there withdrawing from a steep river valley, they had backed off to build a line that hugged the high spurs and contours of the chalky downland, so that every slope, every natural ravine, each natural declivity, every wood and hilltop could be turned to maximum advantage for observation, for concealment, for defence. Now a complex of trenches marched from horizon to horizon in two distinct, conspicuous lines, as if a giant chalky finger had zig-zagged across the landscape. As the Germans were well aware, the observers of the Royal Flying Corps, buzzing in inquisitive sorties up and down the front, had charted every twist and turn of the German front line and every undulating stretch of their second line, bristling no less distinctly two miles behind it. But the tell-tale chalk of the subsoil, that blazoned their position to the skies, held deeper secrets. It was easily worked and, with characteristic thoroughness and considerable engineering skill, the Germans had tunnelled beneath their trenches and carved out a network of galleries and shelters, so deep and so secure that nothing short of an earthquake could have dislodged them. By the summer of 1916, every hilltop was a redoubt, every wood an arsenal, every farm a stronghold, every village a fortress.

  Chapter 2

  If the German Command had been able to choose a single stretch of their five-hundred-mile front on which to beat off an Allied offensive, they would have chosen to meet it on the Somme where their line was virtually impregnable. Intelligence reports left them in no doubt that an offensive was in the offing, and it was perfectly evident that, from the Allied point of view, the British would be bound to attack somewhere along their front, in order to relieve the pressure on the hard-pressed French Army, whose strength was fast ebbing away in a river of blood at Verdun, where they had lost two hundred thousand men since the Germans had launched their own offensive in February. But, had it been suggested that the long-expected attack would take place here on the Somme Front where the two armies met, where, consequently, the Allies’ line was at its most confused and vulnerable, had there been a hint that it would be a joint operation and that the undermanned demoralized French would attack alongside the British in a major offensive, there was hardly an officer on the German Staff who would not have vented his disbelief in a hearty belly-laugh at the very idea.

  The British Staff did not contemplate the prospect with amusement. The battlefield was not of their choosing; it had been chosen by the French, but, for political reasons and the wish to demonstrate goodwill in practical terms, there had been no choice but to acquiesce. When the idea of a joint offensive had first been agreed on at the Chantilly Conference in January, it had been conceived largely as a French affair. If the French Army attacked on a grand scale south of the River Somme, then the British on their left would support them by mounting a series of local attacks north of the Somme and astride the Ancre. But that was before Verdun. As the French strength diminished, as they threw more and more men and guns and munitions eastwards into the white heat of the melting-pot of Verdun, so the strength of the British Army in France was increasing with every raw battalion of Kitchener’s Army that crossed the Channel and with every troopship that sailed into Marseilles bearing the gallant survivors of the sad adventure at Gallipoli. As the balance of manpower gradually shifted, and the plans for the offensive evolved and took shape, it became more and more obvious that the weight of the joint
offensive must shift too and that the burden of the attack must now fall on the British Army, with the support of a few French Divisions on it’s right on a much truncated front.1 This would unavoidably force the main thrust of the push against the bastion of the German line on the uplands of the Somme.

  The plan did not appeal to Sir Douglas Haig. He had already set in motion the preliminaries for an offensive in the north and had not entirely given up hope that he might be in a position to launch it later in the summer. Strategically, there was more to be gained. A purely British attack in the north would be equally effective in taking the heat off Verdun and, he believed, would stand a real chance of breaking through the German line.2

  But on his appointment as Commander-in-Chief in December 1915, Haig had been categorically informed that ‘the closest co-operation between the French and the British as a united Army must be the governing policy’. When the French had pressed their case for a joint campaign at the Chantilly Conference, it was just five weeks since Haig had been entrusted with the Command of the British Army in France, and, with the words of the Supreme War Council still ringing in his ears, he was in no position to disagree. Nevertheless, he had his doubts about what, if any, strategic advantage was to be gained by such a battle. More to the point, he had strong doubts about the ability of his Army to fight it.

  Kitchener’s Army did not share the pessimism of its Commander-in-Chief. Its members were rather more inclined to have a good opinion of themselves. They were mildly tolerant of the French whose ways they found strange but attractive, and not entirely intolerant of the Germans, referred to familiarly as Fritz, with whom, in the discomfort of their opposing trenches, they felt a certain fellow-feeling. Officially, fraternization had been severely frowned upon since the spontaneous Christmas Truce of 1914 but, in between bouts of belligerence, there was nothing to prevent bored Tommies and the equally bored soldiers of the German infantry across the way from entertaining each other with an exchange of badinage and, occasionally, with an impromptu concert. On the whole, the Germans were more musical than the British, although their taste tended towards the sentimental. In the damp darkness of quiet nights in the trenches, undisturbed by gunfire or the flash of Very lights, it was the soulful strains of Die Wacht am Rhein or In der Heimat… which were most often to be heard drifting across from the German side of No Man’s Land.

  Apart from the occasional outburst, the British Tommies were not much given to singing in the trenches. In their opinion there was not much to sing about. There was the drudgery of working parties, the long boredom of sentry duty and, week after week, month upon month, the tedious routine of living in muddy ditches, enlivened by the excitement of occasional raids and forays, but more often chastised by punishing shellfire and inevitable casualties. It all added up to something to be endured rather than to sing about, and the Tommies reserved their vocal efforts to while away the tedium of long miles on the march or, when they happened to be on rest, for jolly evenings in one of the estaminets that were to be found in every village behind the front. After several months of active service – albeit static warfare – the songs they sang had altered somewhat in character from the jolly ditties that had lightened the leaden hours of route-marching around the English countryside a year before. Where are our uniforms? Far far away… they had warbled then in their impatience to get to the front. Now that they had attained that ambition and the long-awaited uniforms had already turned shabby in the rigours of trench warfare, the same melody served very well for a more realistic chorus.1

  There is a sausage gun

  Over the way.

  Fired by a bloody Hun

  Three times a day.

  You should see the Tommies run

  When they hear that sausage gun

  Fired by a bloody Hun

  Three times a day.

  The lyrics were a trifle inglorious, but very much to the point, for, if Kitchener’s Army had not yet proved itself in a major battle, it had been well and truly ‘blooded’ in the trenches. There was hardly a man in the ranks who did not consider himself to be a seasoned warrior and as good as the next man. Some battalions of the Regular Army were aghast at the cheek of it. Even the illustrious Guards were not exempt. One scruffy service battalion of the East Surreys, passing a contingent of the Grenadier Guards drawn up in a village square, had the temerity to bellow in unison the traditional army taunt that dated from 1743, ‘Where were You at Dettingen?’ It took all the discipline of the Guards’ professional training to prevent them from breaking rank and sorting the East Surreys out.

  ‘Service’ battalions of the Worcestershire Regiment as a matter of course threw themselves into a fracas, military or otherwise, with full-throated yells of ‘GHELUVELT’. They themselves had still been mastering the art of shouldering broomsticks in October 1914 when the regular soldiers of their ‘parent’ battalion were holding off the Germans on the lawns of Gheluvelt Château in the First Battle of Ypres, but this minor circumstance did not abash them. They were ‘Worcesters’ and that was that. If anything, they considered it something of a distinction to be ‘Worcesters’ of Kitchener’s Army.

  This opinion was not infrequently shared by commanding officers of the various Kitchener’s Battalions which, by this time, were wearing the insignia of every regiment in the British Army with the exception of those in the exclusive Division of Guards. Until the early part of 1916, many battalion commanders and most brigadiers were ‘Dugouts’ – Officers of the Reserve who had been winkled out of well-earned retirement to take command of the burgeoning force of assorted civilians who had answered Lord Kitchener’s call to arms. In many cases, in the time that had elapsed since those elderly gentlemen had first looked with dismay on the disordered ranks of boyish enthusiasts placed so abruptly under their command, they had developed a strangely paternal attitude towards their men, quite foreign to the general benevolence they had previously entertained towards the troops they had commanded long years ago in peacetime. Indeed, in the necessarily limited Establishment of the small professional Army, very few officers among the Dugouts had ever commanded a battalion before. Senior officers who had earned their colonelcies in peacetime were promptly given brigades; others, who had gone into respectable retirement with the rank of major, were promoted to colonel and put in command of a battalion of the New Army.

  For more than a year now, the sole concern of such a colonel had been for ‘his’ battalion. Day in, day out, and for the best part of every night, he had toiled over every detail of the Herculean task of transforming his force of assorted civilians into troops of the British Army. With assiduous vigilance, he had watched his men progress from their first flat-footed attempts at drill to their final inspection, often by the King himself. He had despaired, or exulted, over their performance on the rifle range, the sports field, the parade ground. He had pondered pleas for compassionate leave, he had promoted the worthy, delivered judgement on defaulters. He had worked out dozens of different training programmes, written scores of reports, preached discipline to the men and the responsibilities of command to young officers and NCOs. He had, almost single-handedly, turned his men into soldiers. Finally, he had brought them to France with a sense of pride which stemmed less from self-congratulation than from recognition of the calibre of the men themselves.

  They looked good on the march. They were taller and stronger, on the whole, than the undernourished recruits who had been driven by unemployment or poverty into the ranks of the pre-war Army. The standard of education and intelligence in both officers and men was high. They were enthusiastic, they were cheerful, and they had buckled down admirably to learning the unfamiliar trade of soldiering. They were the pick of the bunch. No matter how much of a martinet their ‘Old Man’ was held to be in the opinion of a Kitchener’s Battalion, there was hardly a colonel who was not secretly convinced that his battalion was second to none.

  Trevor Ternan, who had retired as a brigadier-general seven years before the war, went further t
han that. In his opinion, all four battalions under his command combined to form the finest brigade in the whole of Kitchener’s Army and, such was his conviction, that he was determined to bring it to the notice of Lord Kitchener himself.

  The 102nd Brigade formed part of the 34th Division. It was better known as the Tyneside Scottish and the paragons who made up its ranks were mainly pitmen and ‘Geordies’ to a man. The four battalions had been raised by the patriotic efforts of the Tyneside Scottish Committee who, until they had been taken over by the War Office and co-opted into the Army, had contributed every penny for their soldiers’ keep, their equipment, their training and their comfort. The men of one battalion had started their military career by bivouacking in the ballroom of Tilley’s Assembly Rooms, marching out every day to drill on the Town Moor and returning to hearty meals supplied by a local caterer, and the let-down of their subsequent passage through a succession of leaky tents and draughty huts had been eased by a flow of ‘comforts’ which had generously redoubled now that they were actually in France and fighting in the trenches.

  Best of all the benefits of local munificence were the pipe-bands. Each battalion had its own, and the equipment, the pipes themselves and the pipers’ outfits (which alone had cost more than thirty pounds apiece) had been generously paid for by the open-handed Tynesiders at home. The pipers were the real thing, specially recruited on the basis of their musicianship, even though a blind eye had to be turned to certain army regulations which dealt with such niggling inconveniences as the army age limit. It was obvious to all that Pipe-Sergeant Barton must be well over forty, for the family had joined up en masse, and three of Barton’s sons were also serving in the bands of the Tyneside Scottish Brigade. Nothing exceeded the delight of the French peasants and their children than when the Tyneside Scottish Brigade swung through a village with a pipe-band blowing lustily at the head of each battalion. Nothing exceeded the pride of their Brigadier as he watched them march past.