Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front

The chalk enabled the Germans to construct deep dugouts, some more than 30 feet deep and effectively impervious to destruction by all but the heaviest guns. These were no surprise to the British, who had already captured one near Touvent Farm, in the north of the attack sector. Rawlinson and his chief of staff devised a plan of attack based on the methodical reduction of strongpoints by artillery and the step-by-step advance of infantry; but this ‘bite and hold’ project did not please Haig, who wanted something bolder, ‘with the chance of breaking the German line’. There is, though, evidence that Haig did not see a breakthrough as the battle’s most likely option. His head of intelligence, Brigadier General John Charteris, wrote in spring that: ‘DH looks on it as a “wearing-out” battle, with just the off-chance that it might wear the Germans right out. But this is impossible.’

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The eventual plan of attack was a compromise. It embodied a week’s bombardment which saw Rawlinson’s gunners firing a million and a half shells, the explosion of mines beneath selected points of the German line, and a massed assault by 4th Army’s infantry behind a creeping barrage. Two divisions of General Sir Edmund Allenby’s 3rd Army were to attack at Gommecourt, just beyond Rawlinson’s northern boundary, to distract German attention from the main effort. Finally, Lieutenant General Sir Hubert Gough’s Reserve Army (renamed 5th Army towards the battle’s end) was on hand to push through the gap. On 22 June, with his artillery bracing itself to unleash the heaviest bombardment thus far delivered by British gunners, Rawlinson warned his corps commanders: ‘I had better make it quite clear that it may not be possible to break the enemy’s line and push the cavalry through in the first rush.’

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Much of what went wrong on that bright, bloody morning of 1 July 1916, the British army’s most costly day, with 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of them killed and 2,152 missing, was determined before the first shot was fired. Rawlinson’s initial deductions were correct, though even his ‘bite-and-hold’ scheme would have been costly. But a methodical bombardment which forfeited surprise and yet failed to deal adequately with the German front line, and scarcely at all with the second, out of range to Rawlinson’s field artillery in its initial gun-lines, meshed unhappily with Haig’s insistence on the need for rapid exploitation. Rawlinson’s artillery density, with one field gun to every 21 yards of trench and a heavy gun for every 57, was less than had been achieved at Neuve Chapelle. And although a recent historian has described subsequent criticism of the plan as ‘hindsight, untroubled by any understanding of the realities of the time’, it did not require lofty strategic vision to suspect that the artillery would not do all that was expected of it.

(#litres_trial_promo) Rifleman Percy Jones of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles (waiting to attack at Gommecourt with 56th London Division) wrote: ‘I do not see how the stiffest bombardment is going to kill them all. Nor do I see how the whole of the enemy’s artillery is going to be silenced.’

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The strategic imperative which had taken the British to the Somme ensured that there could be no let-up despite the heavy casualties and disappointing gains of the first day. Rawlinson bewilderingly decided to jettison the normal military principle of reinforcing success in favour of consolidating the ground he had gained in the south – where the whole of the German first position on Montauban Ridge had been taken – and renewing his attack on untaken objectives further north. Haig overruled him, placed Gough in command of the northern sector of the battle, and told Rawlinson to press matters south of the Albert-Bapaume road. It took 4th Army a fortnight to secure positions from which it could assault the German second line on the Longueval-Bazentin Ridge, and the gruelling process involved a bitter battle for Mametz Wood in which 39th (Welsh) Division would be badly mauled.

Rawlinson’s next major attack was delivered under cover of darkness early on 14 July 1916. Crucially, the artillery density was far higher than on the first day of the battle – ‘two-thirds of the number of guns … would have to demolish only one-eighteenth of the length of trench’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Darkness limited, though because of ‘fixed lines’ did not wholly negate, the effect of the defenders’ machine guns, and the final five minutes of intense bombardment added psychological dislocation to the considerable physical destruction achieved over the previous three days. The attackers secured the ridge, although, crucially, they failed to take High Wood and Delville Wood, both of which sat like sponges on the crest and would enable the Germans to seep troops forward over the weeks that followed. The plan for cavalry exploitation did not work, less because of the cavalry’s inherent limitations than the familiar problem of initiating exploitation as soon as an opportunity was identified.

Fourth Army spent the next two months on Longueval Ridge, fighting what Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson rightly call ‘The Forgotten Battles’, a series of local offensives in which Rawlinson never brought his full weight to bear. It does not require hindsight to recognise this. Company Quartermaster Sergeant Scott Macfie of the King’s Liverpool Regiment told his brother that:

The want of preparation, the vague orders, the ignorance of the objective & geography, the absurd haste, and in general the horrid bungling were scandalous. After two years of war it seems that our higher commanders are still without common sense. In any well regulated organisation a divisional commander would be shot for incompetence – here another regiment is ordered to attempt the same task in the same maddening way.

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But however correct we may be to criticise an army commander who was all too evidently still learning his trade, to grasp the true texture of the Somme we must look at the Germans too. Their rigid insistence on regaining captured ground meant that British attacks were followed by German counterattacks, often as futile as they were costly. Artillery ammunition was now arriving in unprecedented quantities, and the British rarely expended less than a million rounds a week that summer, more than they had fired in the first six months of the war. In the week ending 20 August they fired no less than 1,372,000 shells, and the Germans, still locked in a death-grip at Verdun, were losing the artillery battle.

(#litres_trial_promo) Lieutenant Ernst Junger, who was to become not only Germany’s most highly-decorated officer but one of the conflict’s longest-lived survivors, recalled that his company was led forward by a guide who had ‘been through horror to the limit of despair’ and retained only ‘superhuman indifference’. Once on the battlefield, Junger saw how:

The sunken road now appeared as nothing but a series of enormous shell-holes filled with pieces of uniform, weapons and dead bodies. The ground all around, as far as the eye could see, was ploughed by shells. Among the living lay the dead. As we dug ourselves in we found them in layers stacked one on top of the other. One company after another has been shoved into the drum-fire and steadily annihilated.

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The Reserve Army made better, though costly, progress, and the capture of Pozières by the Australians on 7 August not only gave the British possession of the highest point of the battlefield, but established this battered and stinking village as a landmark in Australian history, scarcely less momentous, in its way, than Gallipoli. Here, as the inscription on the memorial on the hummocky and windswept site of Pozières Mill records, Australian dead were strewn more thickly than on any other battlefield of the war. And, though anglophone historians too often forget it, the French 6th Army, its contribution reduced but by no means removed by the continuing blood-letting at Verdun, made significant gains on the British right. Sadly, one of the consequences of the wholly logical policy of a firm boundary between British and French troops meant that neither participant in this quintessentially coalition battle fully recognised quite what the other was about. One French soldier wrote home that he had been on the Somme with the British: ‘c’est à dire without the British’.

There could be no denying that the battle was causing what Robertson reported to Haig as disquiet among ‘the powers that be’. In part it was the toll of casualties (some 82,000 for 4th Army alone that summer) and in part a dislocation of public expectation as the Big Push, from which so much had been expected, failed to deliver on its promises. Although the Germans had now definitively lost the initiative at Verdun, the French were anxious to recover the lost ground, and Joffre demanded the continuation of the attack on the Somme. And he went further. In June the Russians, as loyal to the alliance in 1916 as they had been two years before, had launched a sharp offensive of their own, named after its author, General Aleksey Brusilov. This had compelled the Germans to shift troops to support the stricken Austro-Hungarians, but if the Allies let up on the Somme Joffre feared that the Russians would be punished for their resolution.

Haig had few doubts about the need to continue. Charteris told him, not wholly over-optimistically, that the Germans were suffering appallingly. The weather would permit one last big effort, and Haig, aware since Christmas Day 1915 of the development of armoured fighting vehicles under the cover name of tanks, wrote in August that ‘I have been looking forward to obtaining decisive results from the use of these “Tanks” at an early date.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The question of whether Haig was right to compromise the security of tanks in order to use them on small numbers on the Somme that summer remains unresolved, but given the state of the battle, and the political and alliance pressures on him, it was certainly not unreasonable. Rawlinson, characteristically laying off his bets with fellow-Etonian Colonel Clive Wigram, the king’s assistant private secretary, admitted on 29 September that:

We are puzzling our heads as how to make best use of them and have not yet come to a decision. They are not going to take the British army straight to Berlin as some people imagine but if properly used and skilfully handled by the detachments who work them they may be very useful in taking trenches and strongpoints. Some people are rather too optimistic as to what these weapons will accomplish.

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On the morning of 15 September the British attacked on a broad front from the Bapaume road to their junction with the French, in what the Battles Nomenclature Committee, its logic not always clearly comprehensible to veterans, was later to call the Battle of Flers-Courcelette. There were forty-nine tanks available for the attack, and thirty-two actually went into action. By the end of the day the British had not only overrun the remaining German strongpoints on Longueval Ridge, but had taken a great bite out of the German third position on the slopes beyond it. It was certainly a telling blow, but fell far short of being decisive, and 4th Army alone had lost almost 30,000 men.

Amongst them was one of the prime minister’s sons, Lieutenant Raymond Asquith of the Grenadier Guards. He had met his father only a week before.

I was called up by the Brigadier and thought that I must have committed some ghastly military blunder (I was commanding the Company in Sloper’s absence) but was relieved to find that it was only a telegram from the corps saying ‘Lieut. Asquith will meet his father at cross roads K.6.d at 10.45 am.’ So I vaulted into the saddle and bumped off to Fricourt where I arrived at exactly the appointed time. I waited for an hour on a very muddy road congested with troops and surrounded by barking guns. Then 2 handsome motor cars from GHQ arrived, the PM in one of them with 2 staff officers, and in the other Bongie, Hankey, and one or two of those moth-eaten nondescripts who hang about the corridors of Downing Street in the twilight region between the civil and domestic service.

Hard hit during the Guards Division’s attack near Guillemont on the 15th, Raymond Asquith nonchalantly lit a cigarette so that his men would not be disheartened by seeing that he was badly hurt: he died on a stretcher. Arthur Henderson, secretary of the Labour Party and a member of Asquith’s Cabinet, had already lost a son on the Somme.

These politicians’ sons joined the growing toll of men from across the whole of British society. Lieutenant W. M. Booth of the West Yorkshires, a Yorkshire and England cricketer, had died on the first day of the battle; Lieutenant George Butterworth, composer of the lyrical The Banks of Green Willow, had been killed at Pozières on 5 August, and Lance Sergeant H. H. Monro of the Royal Fusiliers (better known as the writer Saki) was to be killed by a shell in November, his last words: ‘Put that bloody light out.’

Sergeant Will Streets of the York and Lancaster Regiment, a grammar-school boy who became a miner to support his family and went on to be a war poet of some distinction, died trying to rescue one of his men from No Man’s Land on 1 July. In Flat Iron Copse Cemetery, under the shadow of Mametz Wood, are three pairs of brothers: Privates Ernest and Henry Philby of the Middlesex Regiment; Lieutenants Arthur and Leonard Tregaskis; and Corporal T. and Lance Corporal H. Hardwidge, all of the Welch Regiment. Lieutenant Henry Webber of the South Lancashires, hit by shellfire on 18 July, was, at sixty-eight, the oldest British officer to die on the Western Front. He had three sons serving as captains, and would proudly salute them when they met. Sergeant G. and Corporal R. F. Lee, father and son, of the same battery of field artillery, were killed on the same day and lie in the same cemetery.

There is scarcely a village in Britain not marked by the Somme. John Masefield, who was there in 1916, caught its unutterable poignancy in a brief history written shortly after it was fought.

The field of Gommecourt is heaped with the bodies of Londoners; the London Scottish lie at the Sixteen Poplars; the Yorkshires are outside Serre; the Warwickshires lie in Serre itself; all the great hill of the Hawthorn Ridge is littered with Middlesex; the Irish are at Hamel, the Kents on the Schwaben, and the Wilts and Dorset on the Leipzig. Men of all the towns and counties of England, Wales and Scotland lie scattered among the slopes from Ovillers to Maricourt. English dead pave the road to La Boisselle, the Welsh and Scotch are in Mametz. In gullies and sheltered places, where wounded could be brought during the fighting, there are little towns of dead in all these places: ‘Jolly young Fusiliers, too good to die.’

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A church near my home in Hampshire contains a cross brought back from a Somme cemetery in 1925, with a nearby inscription commemorating Lieutenant Colonel the Hon. Guy Baring, MP for Winchester, killed commanding 1/Grenadier Guards on 15 September. It had been ‘placed in the church of his beloved childhood home by his mother, brothers and sister’. Guy Baring lies in the Citadel New Military Cemetery near Fricourt, not far from Captain A. K. S. Cuninghame of 2/Grenadier Guards, the last surviving officer of his battalion who had landed in France in August 1914, and Brigadier General L. M. Phillpotts, commander Royal Artillery of 24th Division.

(#litres_trial_promo) So much for senior officers being safe.

I point to this tiny tip of a massive iceberg because it is important to balance the undoubted achievements of the Somme against its cost. When the battle ended in mid-November the British had shoved the Germans almost back to Bapaume (which was to have been taken in the first week). The Allies had suffered 600,000 casualties, more than two-thirds of them British. They had inflicted what Sir James Edmonds, the British official historian, estimated as 660–680,000 casualties on the Germans. Accurate comparisons are impossible because German casualty figures did not include ‘wounded whose recovery was to be expected in a reasonable time’. Many historians argue that Edmonds’s estimate for this proportion unreasonably inflated the German total, and they are probably right.

(#litres_trial_promo) Even so, it is hard to estimate German casualties at very much lower than 600,000, and Captain von Hertig declared that: ‘The Somme was the muddy grave of the German field army and of the faith in the infallibility of the German leadership …’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Charles Carrington, who saw the battle’s rough edge as an infantry platoon commander, was sure that:

The Somme raised the morale of the British Army. Although we did not win a decisive victory, there was what matters most, a definite and growing sense of superiority over the enemy, man for man … We were quite sure we had got the Germans beat: next spring we would deliver the knock-out blow.

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Paddy Griffith is right to maintain that the Somme ‘taught the BEF many lessons and transformed it from a largely inexperienced mass army into a largely experienced one’.

(#litres_trial_promo) A mass of official tactical pamphlets appeared in its wake, providing army schools in France and Britain with the basis for their teaching and supplying individual officers and NCOs with more reliable material for private study than some earlier privately-produced material. New weapons and equipment arrived and were mastered. David Jones, in his wonderful prose-poem In Parenthesis, declared:

The period of the individual rifle-man, of the old sweat of the Boer campaign, the ‘Bairnsfather’ war, seemed to terminate with the Somme battle. There were, of course, glimpses of it long after – all through in fact – but it never seemed quite the same.

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The Somme is a watershed in the history of the British army in the war. It was a strategic necessity, fought to meet a coalition requirement, and was an Allied victory on points. Some veterans never found its price worth paying. R. H. Tawney, a future professor of economic history serving, entirely characteristically, as a sergeant in a New Army battalion of the Manchester Regiment, wrote, while recovering from his wounds in England:

You speak lightly, you assume that we shall speak lightly, of things, emotions, states of mind, human relationships and affairs, which are to us solemn or terrible. You seem ashamed, as if they were a kind of weakness, of the ideas which have sent us to France, and for which thousands of sons and lovers have died. You calculate the profit to be derived from ‘War after the War’, as though the unspeakable agonies of the Somme were an item in a commercial proposition.

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It confronts the historian with an unavoidable clash between head and heart: the only honest conclusion is to acknowledge the validity of both these irreconcilable imperatives.

The Allied plan for 1917 was sketched out at another conference at Chantilly on 15 November 1916. It was resolved that Germany still remained the main enemy. When Romania, badly misjudging the equipoise of fortune, joined the Allies that summer she had been roundly defeated by a German army commanded by none other than Falkenhayn, dismissed as chief of the general staff in the wake of failure at Verdun. He had been replaced by the old but wily Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, closely assisted by Lieutenant General Erich von Ludendorff. The Allies proposed to maintain ‘general offensive action’ in 1917, and to elaborate detailed schemes later. By the time these plans were produced, however, there had been a far-reaching change in personalities. Asquith was replaced as prime minister by Lloyd George in early December 1916, and at the month’s end Joffre was succeeded by General Robert Nivelle, who had masterminded French recovery of Fort Douaumont at the close of the Verdun fighting.

These two changes were to have a significant impact on the British armies in France. It was already clear that Haig and Lloyd George did not get on. Haig had already told his wife that ‘I have no great opinion of L. G. as a man or a leader,’ and Lloyd George later declared that Haig was ‘brilliant – to the top of his army boots’. John Charteris recognised that the two were fundamentally incompatible.

D. H. dislikes him. They have nothing in common. D. H. always refuses to be drawn into any side-issues in conversation, apart from his own work. Lloyd George seemed to think this meant distrust of him. It is not so much distrust of him personally as of politicians as a class.