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  On their left the 46th Division stood in front of the village of Fonquevillers whose tongue-twisting proper name was seldom used by any soldier below the rank of full general. From the Brigadier downwards it was universally known as ‘Funky Villas’. Between the two villages and the two Divisions, the woodland of Gommecourt Park stuck its impertinent snout towards the British lines in a salient that formed the westernmost point of the whole of the German trenchline in France. The German trenches followed its angular outline and swept back along both sides of the country road that once led from Puisieux to the village of Gommecourt and on to Fonquevillers. Now the road itself was part of the formidable complex of trenches that stretched southwards and swung over the downs of the Somme facing the Fourth Army. The Gommecourt sector, on the Third Army Front, was immediately adjacent to the left flank of the Fourth.

  In front of the 56th Division a shallow valley separated the British trenches from the German line. It was across this valley that the new trench had to be dug, so far out in No Man’s Land that it would be within spitting distance of the German front line. It was to be dug by one brigade over only two nights and Arthur Agius, acting under the Brigade-Major, was in charge of the operation.

  Captain A. J. Agius, MC, 3rd Btn., Royal Fusiliers, City of London Regiment, 56th Division

  Our lines were about eight hundred yards from the Germans. We didn’t know we were going to be selected for an attack, but we were told we were to go out and build a complete new trench system, four hundred yards in front and four hundred yards nearer the Germans, which sounded absolute madness. So, I went out with our Brigade-Major one night from a forward sap and we went on for a quarter of a mile, just the two of us, with a soldier carrying a sandbag full of chalk. After taking various measurements and compass directions, we dumped all this chalk and made a cairn of

  it. (It was chalk country, so it wouldn’t be noticed.) We covered the German side with grass so that they shouldn’t see the cairn and then we had to work to our left until we came to a road that ran out of our lines. The landmark there was a hawthorn bush that was in full blossom (this was the middle of May) and that made a very convenient point for a marker. It took some doing to lay out a complete front line with traverses and so on. But, in the hours of darkness, we marked all this out with string and pegs and then the next night we set off to do the actual digging.

  I went out, almost as soon as it got dark, with a small covering party, a subaltern and about ten men, to lie out in front in case we were rushed by a German patrol. We taped the whole of this thing out and, as soon as we’d finished running the white tape across it, marking all the traverses and every inch of the line, and every angle and turn, the troops filed in and started to dig like billy-o. We had more than five hundred men out there and we dug that whole length of trench in two nights. What a job that was! Of course the Germans knew that something was up. So the second night they pounded us like mad with shellfire and we lost quite a few men. But we got it finished.

  It was the Army’s intention that the enemy should see that ‘something was up’. It was doing its best to convince the Germans that ‘something was up’ along the whole of the Third Army Front from Gommecourt to Arras. If the Germans could be seduced into the belief that the Big Push was to take place here rather than on the Fourth Army Front on the Somme, then the troops there might be attacking with an element of surprise which could make all the difference. At the very least, the enemy might be misled into believing that the attack would take place on a wider front than was intended and would therefore maintain strong reserves of artillery and infantry opposite the Third Army, rather than sending them south to form part of the unpleasant welcome committee that all too clearly awaited the Fourth Army on the Somme.

  The Third Army co-operated enthusiastically in the deception. Its artillery bombarded the enemy lines and cut the barbed wire in front of their trenches as effectively as if they really were about to storm across. Night after night, the infantry raided and patrolled and pushed its line forward as if preparing for a jump-off. They dug complexes of dummy assembly trenches behind the lines. They were only eighteen inches deep, but they looked authentic enough from the air, and some divisions even embellished the illusion by manning them with a phantom army represented by ragged sandbags fluttering on man-sized sticks. After dark, each night, all up and down the sector, convoys of army limbers, piled high with rattling cargoes of empty biscuit tins, clattered about in phantom convoys to simulate intense activity on the roads behind the lines.

  At a meeting of corps commanders just two days before the battle, General Snow had the satisfaction of telling the Commander-in-Chief, ‘They know we’re coming all right!’ And Sir Douglas Haig was able to reward him in return with the latest information, gleaned by Intelligence. The Germans had stiffened their Gommecourt front with a whole extra division and its artillery.

  The bluff had worked. But, unlike the two Divisions to the north of them, the 46th and 56th ranged in V-shaped formation in front of Gommecourt, were not entirely bluffing. So far as the Germans were concerned, they were indeed ‘coming’. At the moment of the attack by the Fourth Army on their right, they too were to attack the Germans on either side of Gommecourt.

  It had been Haig’s own idea, and he had arrived at it after careful consideration. Any attack which would divert the attention of the Germans away from the Somme was desirable. But an attack at Gommecourt, just two miles north of the limit of the Big Push, would have one insuperable advantage. It would protect the 8th Corps. More particularly, it would protect the 31st Division on the extreme left flank not only of the 8th Corps but of the whole battle line. And, in Haig’s opinion, the 31st Division badly needed some protection.

  Most of the men in the 31st Division were hardly aware that they were in the Fourth Army, never mind the 8th Corps. It was doubtful if many of them could have reeled off the number of his brigade without hesitation. They seldom even referred to their battalions by their official titles. A man of the 13th or the 14th Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment preferred to think of himself as being one of the 1st or the 2nd Barnsley Pals. A man of the 12th Battalion regarded himself as one of the ‘Sheffield Pals’, while a soldier of any one of the four battalions which made up the 92nd Brigade would claim to belong to ‘The Hull Mob’. Even within his own battalion a man’s interest seldom extended beyond the limits of his own company. In many cases, it was pretty well confined to his own platoon of twenty or so, because, in the Pals Battalions, the real pals, often from a single village, a single street, a single factory or sports club, stuck together. In all of Kitchener’s Army there was hardly a group of more happy-go-lucky amateur soldiers than the Pals and luck, so far, had been on their side. While the majority of the New Army had been enduring the chill and discomfort of winter on the Western Front, the Pals had been wintering in Egypt and had only been brought back to France late in the spring. Most of them had ‘souvenirs’, including ‘lucky scarabs’, acquired at swindling expense in some Alexandria bazaar, carried in hopeful optimism that their luck would continue.

  The Commander-in-Chief was not quite so optimistic about the prospects of the men as the men were themselves. In the months before the offensive, like grand-masters hunched over an imaginary chessboard that stretched across the fields of France and Belgium, the High Command had moved and rearranged the component parts of divisions, of brigades, and even of battalions, so that almost every Regular division now contained an element of Kitchener’s Army, and almost every division of the New Army contained a stiffening quota of experienced troops.

  In the case of the 31st Division, a scant three months had not been long enough in which to switch them around. It had hardly been long enough to exchange their pith helmets and khaki drill for tin hats and warm clothing, to school them in the routine of the trenches and to take them through rehearsals of their part in the battle. But, with careful deliberation, the Army deployed its forces so that the Pals should not be overtaxed. Th
eir task was simple. At the northern extremity of the line, all that the Pals were expected to do was to advance a thousand yards, capture Serre, and throw an encircling arm round the northern flank of the front that ran southwards over fifteen straggling miles. They would stand on this position so that, as the Army pursued its inevitable breakthrough, the whole glorious advance could pivot on this point and swing outwards from it towards the open country. The Pals were to oil the hinge that would open the door to Bapaume, to the French frontier, and, eventually, to Berlin itself.

  It should be a piece of cake. On their left they would be protected by a smokescreen, rolling thick across two miles, and, beyond that, by the attack at Gommecourt.1

  On the right the Regular 4th Division, as tried and tested as any troops could be, would carry the Pals forward by their very momentum. And, beyond them both, the 29th Division, which had proved itself at Gallipoli, could certainly be depended on. It was true that the 4th and 29th Divisions faced the strongpoint of Beaumont Hamel, but the Staff had made provision to trump that particular ace in the Germans’ hand.

  Beaumont Hamel lay at the foot of a dip in the cleft of a narrow valley, protected at its back by one arm of the deep Y-shaped ravine that ran towards the British line and then swung parallel to it. It was a natural feature, which provided shelter for men and guns alike. Immediately in front, the village was protected by rising ground which ran away to the north towards Serre and it was on this elevation, to the left of Beaumont Hamel and some two hundred yards in front of it, that the Germans had built the massive Hawthorn Redoubt, standing sentinel on the breast of the hill and pushing towards the British lines a mere two hundred yards away on the downward slope. Here, concealed by a sunken track, the British had driven long galleries through the chalky ridge and planted a mine, big enough and powerful enough to blow the Hawthorn Redoubt sky-high and breach the defences of Beaumont Hamel.

  But Beaumont Hamel was not the only visible strongpoint on the German line. To the north there was Serre itself and, between it and Beaumont Hamel, another fort on the Redan Ridge. To the south, beyond the River Ancre, the ruins of Thiepval village stood high above the valley and the shoulders of the ridge on either side of it were armoured with defensive works. To the left, the labyrinths of the Schwaben Redoubt and Goat Redoubt were scribbled across the slope of the ridge, facing Beaumont Hamel and Beaucourt across the river. To the right of Thiepval, the complex of trenches they called the Wunderwerk dominated the summit of the ridge and beyond it, the maze of the Leipzig Redoubt thrust like an obstinate jaw towards the British line above Authuille. There it turned to swing over to the twin villages of Ovillers and la Boisselle across the valley beyond. And, around la Boisselle – like Ovillers, a strongpoint in itself – another network of complex defence systems glared, balefully protective, in full view of the British line. Then, to the right, was the great bulging salient where the fortified village of Fricourt was enclosed by the German line as it changed direction and swivelled briefly on an eastward route in front of Mametz and Montauban before turning southwards at the River Somme, where the British Army stood side by side with the French.

  Even without positive knowledge of the extent of the German diggings and the concealed fortifications and defences, it was perfectly clear that there were some hard nuts to crack and that, if the advance was to go fast and far in the first vital hours, special attention would have to be given to the problems they presented.

  Groaning under the weight of some million pounds of explosive, which had to be carried to the sap-heads over long weary miles by a thousand weary working parties, the infantry did not always bless the solicitous preparations which their Staff were making on their behalf.

  Just how to tackle the strongpoints that spiked the German line was a tactical headache, to which the Army had devoted considerable thought and the Fourth Army had issued its own thoughts on the subject in mid-May. But, as they were very well aware and as General Kiggell had stated quite categorically in his memorandum from GHQ, It must be remembered that officers and troops generally do not now possess that military knowledge arising from a long and high state of training, which enables them to act promptly on sound lines in unexpected situations. They have become accustomed to deliberate action based on precise and detailed orders…

  Such ‘precise and detailed orders’ it was the business of the Army to supply. It was unfortunate that there was not sufficient time to plant mines under all or nearly all the most strongly defended sections of the German Front but there was no help for it. The mine at Beaumont Hamel was well under way and would be ready in good time. A pair of mines on either side of la Boisselle would shake the German garrison to bits along with its defensive outposts. Mines on a smaller scale would give them a nasty surprise at Fricourt and, although the troops would not be attacking the Fricourt Salient directly, would keep them on the qui vive while they swept past it on either side and ‘pinched it out’, while two others, judiciously placed under their line south of Montauban should assist the troops forward in fine style. As for Thiepval, the effect of the explosions on either side of its high fastness, at Beaumont Hamel and at la Boisselle, should be sufficient to rattle the Germans – or, at least, so it was hoped. And, in any event, the whole series of explosions were a mere refinement, extra insurance, the final ounce of thrust that would catapult the troops through and beyond the German line.

  The citadels of intricate entrenchments, the battered villages they defended, the deep palisades of barbed wire that lay in front of them, would all long since have been shattered to atoms by the thundering British bombardment, so heavy, so fierce and so continuous that not a man nor a brick could hope to escape destruction.

  The barrage opened up on 24 June. It was Midsummer’s Day.

  Chapter 5

  From Frise on the French Front to Arras on the left of the Third Army, the guns opened on the forty-mile front in the full-throated knowledge that ammunition had been dumped in unprecedented quantities behind the batteries. That Sunday morning, 25 June, with a light easterly breeze blowing from the front, they could be heard quite plainly at Montreuil, set high on its fortress hill more than seventy miles away near the coast. At nine o’clock precisely, General Sir Douglas Haig and two ADCs stepped from the front door of the Château of Beaurepaire, mounted their perfectly groomed horses and turned their heads towards Montreuil four kilometres away. It was a pleasant ride along the narrow country road, through the lush greenery of early summer, to the foot of the steep cobbled hill and on up through the encircling ramparts into the town. Centuries earlier, the massive walls had been built to keep the marauding English at bay. From this vantage point, a hundred years before, Napoleon had looked covetously across the English Channel. Now the ramparts were guarding the security of the very people the French had gone to so much trouble to keep out and it was the French themselves who were the interlopers. The whole town had been taken over as the General Headquarters of the British Army and even the three thousand civilians who remained in Montreuil required the authority of the British to pass in or out of it. The civilians were outnumbered, two to one, by the military – almost all of them immaculate staff-officers, whose red hatbands had earned them the troops’ nickname of ‘geraniums’.

  The nerve-centre of GHQ was in the Ecole Militaire in a narrow street a few yards away from the eastern ramparts. So many high-ranking officers passed so often through its exclusive archway, that the presentation of ‘military compliments’ had to be drastically revised. A mere colonel who, anywhere else, might have expected a full salute, was accorded no more than a token slap on a rifle butt, and generals were so thick on the ground that those who went regularly to and fro only expected to be greeted as befitted their rank once a day. Even the Commander-in-Chief, a stickler for military etiquette, issued orders that he should receive a full salute only on his first appearance – but woe betide the sentry who failed to turn out the guard to receive him. Although the guardroom was only a few yards down the passage
leading to the inner courtyard, this was no easy task.

  General Haig was in the habit of taking the longer but more pleasant route around the ramparts and, after the briefest of moments when he was just visible through a gap in the buildings, he appeared, only thirty yards away, already turning the head of his charger towards the Ecole Militaire, expecting to be received by an immaculately turned-out guard and full military honours. Under these circumstances, the turning out of the guard was easier to expect than to achieve. After one unfortunate occurrence, when General Haig had caught them unawares, breathless, hastily buckling on belts and fastening buttons, and had insisted that they should do it all over again, the military mind had turned from consideration of weightier problems to contrive a solution which would satisfy both military etiquette and the Commander-in-Chief. It took the form of an electric bell, placed high on the wall at exactly the right height to be pressed by the tip of the sentry’s rifle as he caught his first fleeting glimpse of General Haig’s approach. There had been no further complaints.