Chapter II.

On January 15th they marched from Houtkerke, where they had lived for a fortnight in farm-billets, to similar accommodation at Wormhoudt. The Battalion remained in rest: ‘Company-drill, bayonet-fighting, route-marching, bomb-throwing, etc., have been carried out, and the men appear to have greatly benefited by the change’. On February 2nd came the move to Longeau, and the march through Amiens to Ailly, which preceded, as with other units of the Division, the tours in the trenches north of Authuille and the working-parties of March to May. Lt.-Col. (later, Brig.-General) E. G. St. Aubyn, D.S.O., at that time in Command of the Battalion, was allotted special duties at Corps Headquarters at the end of June, when Major J. Walker took Command. (Major E. P. Chambers had been attached since early in April as Claims Officer to the Division). The Birthday Honours included a D.S.O. for Major R. E. Sugden, two Distinguished Conduct Medals and a Military Medal. At 2 p.m. on the last day of June, the Battalion moved to Senlis, ‘to take part in operations.’

Every unit repeated the same experience: rest and recuperation in January from the severe strain of the trenches on the Yser; a move south-south-west early in February to the hilly country about Amiens; trench-work and trench-warfare in the valleys of the Somme and the Ancre; intensive training in offensive; elaborate, tireless fatigue-duty in all kinds of labour behind the line: railways, tramways, causeways, dressing stations, magazines, water-mains, communication-, assembly- and assault-trenches, mining operations, and so forth; often under enemy fire, with the weather ‘bad, on the whole,’ and ‘the local accommodation totally insufficient,[54]’ and, at last, at the end of June, on the agreed date, ‘to relieve the pressure on Verdun.’

II.—OPERATIONS ON THE SOMME

We are to remember in the first instance that the French and British objective was limited. In order to relieve the German pressure on Verdun, it was not necessary, however desirable it might be, to drive the enemy out of France and Belgium. Strictly speaking, he was never driven out; he begged an armistice for retirement; and, though his retreat became a rout, it falls into its place in the war-history, as Sir Douglas Haig indicated in his last Despatch, as the final stage of a gradual process, in which, compared with older battles, months and miles were consumed like hours and yards. A fairly clear perception of what was happening, albeit two years before the end, was present to the mind of the British Commander when he wrote his Second Despatch in December, 1916. There he represented the Battles of the Somme as a phase, or stage, in a longer battle, and the objects of the fighting on the Somme as subsidiary to the objects of the war. Accordingly, we are not to expect, as at home, and racked with acute anxiety, we were eager to expect at the time, that the German defeat on the Somme would be equivalent to an Allied victory in the war. Still less are we to repeat the practice, too common in 1916, of dividing the yards of Allied gains into the miles of territory in German occupation, in order to calculate a time-ratio from the quotient. Space and time were never measurable by one calculus. Even a surrender of space, as General Petain proved on the Meuse, and as Marshal Foch was to prove in 1918, might diminish instead of increasing the force of the enemy’s offensive. Always the war was greater than its battles, and always a chief object at every stage was to wear down the enemy’s resistance. Sir Douglas Haig, as we saw in the last chapter, was well aware that the Battles of the Somme had not broken the enemy’s strength, ‘nor is it yet possible to form an estimate of the time the war may last before the objects for which the Allies are fighting have been attained. But the Somme battle,’ he declared with conviction, ‘has placed beyond doubt the ability of the Allies to gain those objects.’ This, after all, was all that mattered, and we do well to see the view from Olympus before descending into the valley of the Somme.

It is the evening of June 30th, 1916. The diaries of units agree in their accounts of these crowded, fateful hours. The 1/7th West Yorkshires’ record says:

‘June 30th. Battalion marched to Aveluy Wood, _via_ Hedauville, Englebelmer and Martinsart, after dark. All transport moved to position south-east of Hedauville, between that village and Bouzincourt.

‘Not more than 25 Officers per Battalion were allowed to go into action; the remainder, with a certain number of Signallers, Lewis Gunners and Bombers went to Bouzincourt, ready to be called upon when wanted.

‘July 1st. Battalion received orders about 8 a.m. to move to assembly-trenches in Thiepval Wood, and all had arrived there by noon. There was a good deal of shelling of the assembly-trenches while we were getting into them, and a good many casualties were caused, especially among the Lewis gun teams.’

The 1/5th York and Lancasters state:

‘June 30th. 11 p.m. Battalion clear of Warloy on road to assembly-trenches.

‘July 1st. 3-45 a.m. Whole Battalion in assembly-trenches, Aveluy Wood.

—— 6-20 a.m. Intense bombardment commenced, and lasted for one hour.’

The 1/6th West Yorkshires write:

‘June 30th. Battalion marched to assembly-trenches in Aveluy Wood.

‘July 1st. 6-30 a.m. Heavy bombardment by our artillery of enemy trenches. Battalion moved across the River Ancre and took up a position in Thiepval Wood.’

The 1/4th West Ridings’ record runs:

‘Battalion moved from Senlis at 11-7 p.m. (30-6-16), marching to assembly-trenches in Aveluy Wood, arriving about 2 a.m. (1-7-16) under heavy shell-fire.’

We need not multiply this evidence. We should already be able to imagine the quick, dark scheme of concentration, so far as the 49th Division was concerned, in the first stage of the Allied programme for the relief of the pressure on Verdun.

At this point we may look at the map (page 92).

We spoke on a previous page[55] of the line drawn from Douai to Lens, working from east to west, on which a break-through by the French would have shaken the defences of Lille at the apex of a triangle formed with Lens and Douai at its bases. We are now to strike south of this line, and taking Douai as our apex to draw a second triangle with Arras and Bapaume at the lower angles (the further extension of this sketch is explained at page 124 below):

[Illustration]

For the great battle for Paris or the coast, the great German invasion of France, which was also an attack on British sea-power, has shifted its centre from Ypres; and, while the Crown Prince of Prussia is hammering at Verdun, as the eastern gate to Paris, the French and British Army Commanders in the north-west of France have resolved to try to advance (to push the Germans further back, that is to say), on, roughly, a north-easterly front, looking from Amiens through Albert to Bapaume. This, broadly, is the key to a situation, which we have been following in diminishing degrees from the big, strategic plans in high places to the disposition of units and individuals. We have watched the preparations for that advance: the movements of troops by rail and road; the eyes of the army in the air; the ears of the army underground; the elaborate collection of war-material; the construction of permanent ways, and so forth. We see now the relation in space of the campaign of 1916 to the campaign of 1915. The tidal wave has ebbed away from Ypres, and has surged more furiously against Verdun; we are to change our focus, accordingly, from the Yser Canal to the River Somme, and from the Channel ports to Paris; and in this sector, narrowing our survey, as the vast movement unfolds into details, we are most particularly concerned with the straight line, laid on a Roman road, which runs south-west from Bapaume to Albert. It is rather more westerly in direction, and about half the length of the road down to Bapaume from Douai. Travelling along its well-laid surface from north-east to south-west, we pass through Le Sars, Pozières and La Boisselle, the last a little to the left of the line. The nodal point, or meeting-place, or starting-place, is the town of Albert on the Ancre, ‘a small, straggling town built of red brick along a knot of cross-roads at a point where the swift chalk-river Ancre, hardly more than a brook, is bridged and so channelled that it can be used for power.’[56] Westward from Albert is Amiens; eastward we saw, Bapaume. Next, follow the chalk-stream of the Ancre, northward under Albert’s bridges, through its native banks and braes. For our range of vision is being contracted, and we are coming through Army Commanders’ plans to the men appointed to carry them out in their destined stations along the line. About two miles north of Albert on the west bank of the Ancre are the first trees of Aveluy Wood, where our assembly-trenches lay. Martinsart lies behind this Wood, Mesnil and Hamel are beyond it, Bouzincourt just below it to the rear. Opposite, on the east bank of the Ancre, about three miles to the north of Albert, lies the village of Authuille, north of which again is Thiepval Wood, looking backwards at Hamel and Mesnil on the safe, west side of the little river, and facing ‘the German line opposite the Authuille section,’ just as Colonel Rendall (and, doubtless, many others) had imagined the situation in that dress-rehearsal by Naours which we attended at the end of April. Thiepval village is on the German side of our front line.

[Illustration: THE SOMME FRONT. BRITISH.]

So we reach by gradual delimitation, by a _diminuendo_ process, as it were, the task allotted to Major-General Perceval, Commanding the 49th Division, on July 1st, 1916.[57] ‘Z’ day has arrived at last. The vast plans for the relief of Verdun are now about to be set in motion. Home Governments have expressed their approval, and have sent the munitions and the men. Due weight has been given to outside considerations in this war on many fronts: to the needs of Italy and Russia, the disappointment of Germany at sea, the inclination of the United States of America. From the dunes of Calais to the Picardy hills, north-west France has become an armed camp, with the ceaseless movement of the immense accumulation of animate and inanimate material which nearly two years’ experience has proved to be essential for modern warfare. All the while, as Sir Douglas Haig reminds us in his great Second Despatch, ‘the rôle of the other armies holding our defensive line ... was neither light nor unimportant. While required to give precedence in all respects to the Somme battle, they were responsible for the security of the line held by them and for keeping the enemy on their front constantly on the alert.’ Verily, a huge organization to be stated in terms of unit action and of the prowess of individual men. It was a long way from Sir Douglas Haig to Aveluy Wood: the 49th was only one of five Divisions (the 12th, 25th, 32nd, 36th and 49th), which composed the Xth Corps of the Fifth Army.

Our business lies between Authuille and Thiepval. We have fined down the vaster issues to the operations east of Authuille, where the British line bulged towards the Ancre in an ugly angle known as the Leipsic Salient. The fighting to which we now come is all round and about that Salient, between the point where the British front line crossed the River Ancre at Hamel to the point where it met the Albert-Bapaume road. If we realize that the object of this fighting was to straighten and push back that bulge, and so to contribute to the advance of the long Allied line on the Somme battlefield, we may return to the men who fought there in the early days of July, 1916. It is one thing to show on a map, on however large a scale, the increasing depth of the British front line at various dates after July 1st; it is another thing to visualize that line in the actual mud, trees, slopes, which composed it, and to recount the conditions day by day, under which it swayed forward and back, in front and beyond and across the magnificently fortified German trenches.

Take the 7th West Yorkshires, for example.

We left them at noon on July 1st in their assembly-trenches in Thiepval Wood. While the sun was still high in the heaven, about half-past five in the afternoon, Brigade orders (146th Infantry) arrived for the attack. The 5th and 6th Battalions of the Regiment were to go over the top in an attempt to capture Thiepval village, the 8th was detailed for support, and the 7th for reserve. Some hot hours of confused fighting ensued. The 7th Battalion was told off to man the original British front line trench, from the point where it touched the east bank of the Ancre to a point known as Hammerhead Gap, at the top of Thiepval Wood. This move was being completed with great difficulty, owing, mainly, to the congestion of the trenches by the wounded and stragglers of the 36th (Ulster) Division, when an Officer of that Division, Commanding the 9th Royal Irish Rifles, made an earnest request for help to reinforce his men in the German lines. Two Companies (C and D) of the 7th West Yorkshires made their way to these captured trenches, leaving A and B Companies to hold the British front and support lines. The fall of night brought no rest to this unit. The 36th Division became able to hold its own, and the half-Battalion from the 49th was ordered to withdraw. This order was not easy to carry out in the darkness, weariness and general _mêlée_, and about forty men of C Company found themselves stranded for the night (July 1st-2nd) in the disagreeable hospitality of the German line. They were well led by a non-commissioned Officer, Corporal (later, Sergeant) George Sanders, who was recommended for his valuable work and great personal bravery by the Officers of the Royal Irish Rifles. Later, Sanders received the supreme decoration of the Victoria Cross[58] for his gallant conduct in this action, and six of the brave men with him were awarded Military Medals. The whole Battalion was withdrawn to Aveluy Wood, and reached the assembly-trenches about 11 o’clock on the night of July 2nd; thirty-six hours, or a little less, after they had assembled on the 1st. They had lost 16 killed, 144 wounded and about 20 missing; they had gained a Victoria Cross, some experience, and—four days’ rest.

Take another unit of the 49th Division: the 5th Battalion of the York and Lancaster Regiment, in the 148th Infantry Brigade. We left them proceeding to Aveluy Wood just before midnight on June 30th. The first instalment of their story in the present action is to last almost exactly a week: from 1-30 p.m. on July 1st, when the Battalion moved out of the assembly-trenches, till 8-30 p.m. on July 8th, when they were relieved by the 7th West Ridings, and went into huts in Martinsart Wood. The story makes sad but gallant reading. They sustained in those seven days and nights a total of 307 casualties. Their Commanding Officer was wounded and missing, their Officer 2nd in Command was killed, another Officer had died of wounds, thirteen more were wounded or missing. In other Ranks, 56 were killed and three had died of wounds; 204 were wounded and 44 missing: a heavy toll to be extracted from one Battalion towards the relief of the pressure on Verdun.

The price was paid without reckoning the cost, and we shall not follow in detail the experiences of this unit during that week. They moved first to where the British front line touched the left bank of the Ancre. Major Shaw took A and B Companies to the north side of that line; Lt.-Col. Rendall, with C and D Companies was posted on the south side. Captain G. A. G. Hewitt at this juncture retired to hospital suffering from shock. The fighting went on from hour to hour with very varying fortune: at one time, there seemed a possibility of a successful assault on St. Pierre Divion, the next village north of the line; at other times, the utmost efforts were required to extricate the wounded. On July 5th, Aveluy Wood was shelled practically for the first time. High explosive, shrapnel and lachrymatory shells were employed, and found all the assembly-trenches; captured maps and prisoners’ information were no doubt responsible for this disaster. Early in the morning of the 6th, seven officers and eighty other ranks went out in two bombing parties to capture a front-line trench; no Officer and twenty-two other Ranks returned. It was in this action that Lt.-Col. Rendall, D.S.O., Commanding the Battalion, had to be left wounded in a German dug-out, and that Major Shaw, 2nd in Command, was killed. The failure was due to the good German sniping, too heavy bombs for effective throwing, and a communication-trench not deep enough to pass them through. It was stubborn fighting, we see, and very difficult progress was made. But one Division in one Corps of one Army was not the whole fighting force which the Allies brought to the Somme, and some relief may be found by looking through German eyes at the results on July 1st in another sector. We have already referred to the War Diary for this period of the 55th Reserve Infantry Regiment (the 2nd Guard Reserve Division), which was holding the German line in front of Gommecourt six or seven miles north of Hamel. Their experience is no doubt typical of the enemy’s sufferings all along the line. Thus we read of an intense bombardment, ‘overwhelming all the trenches, and sweeping away the wire’; of the ‘thick charging waves of English infantry’; of every round from the English guns pitching into the trench, ‘thus rendering its occupation even by detached posts impossible’; of telephonic communication destroyed by the bombardment, so that ‘Regimental Headquarters were without news of the progress of events’; of the English ‘excellent maps,’ and the ‘most disturbing effect’ of English aeroplanes: and, so reading, we begin to perceive another side to the picture. Such records of failure and disappointment, of forlorn hopes and forfeited successes, as occur in the journals of our own units are seen in a truer perspective when the long line of battle is displayed. Even the rain in which some wet Yorkshiremen spent a miserable night (July 7th) by the roadside fell impartially on the other side of the road, and was duly chronicled by dripping Germans; and, when we are told that C and D Companies of the 6th Battalion of the West Yorkshires, who ‘went over the parapet to the attack’ at 4 p.m. on July 1st, had to retire to their own trenches with their Signalling Officer (Lieut. Dodd) killed, their Commanding Officer (Lt.-Col. Wade) and two other Officers wounded, we take consolation from the entry which follows next in the same journal: ‘Enemy reported to be massing opposite our front for a counter-attack, which, however, did not develop.’ ‘Enemy’ did not have it his own way all the time.

Let us follow this unit a little further. During the first fortnight of July, step by step, and with many a step backward before two steps forward could be taken, German trenches in the Leipsic Salient had been occupied, and improved footholds had been won. Every effort was being made to consolidate and extend the new positions, and it happened on July 14th, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, that this Battalion (the 6th West Yorkshires) took over that portion from the 7th. The 7th had had a rough experience. In the early morning of July 13th they had been attacked by German bombers, who, according to Colonel Tetley’s testimony, evinced ‘great bravery and disregard of danger.’ At one time they rushed a British trench, ‘but were bombed out by 2/Lieut. F. J. Baldwin and men of A Company.... Practically all our bombers were casualties.’ The Battalion lost 15 killed and 92 wounded in this exploit, but Major-General Perceval assured them that their ‘stubborn fighting had materially assisted in the success of the larger operation on the British front,’ and Lieut. Baldwin was awarded the Military Cross and two N.C.O.’s the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

The night of the 14th-15th was fairly quiet. Both sides were attending to their wounded. But early in the morning of July 15th, when the 6th Battalion had relieved the 7th, the Germans returned to the attack, and this attempt, very pluckily repulsed, is memorable for the use of a weapon, new in the experience of the defenders, and hardly less horrible in its first effect than the surprise of poison-gas at Ypres. We have the advantage of a graphic description of the three hours’ fighting on that morning from the pen of Lieut. Meekosha, V.C., who took part in it as a non-commissioned Officer.[59] He writes:

‘About 3-30 a.m. the Germans launched their dastardly attack with liquid fire, the only warning we received being the terrifying shrieks of those unfortunate sentries who came into contact with the flame. Then came a hail of hand grenades, a few of the Boches coming as far as our own parapet, hoping to find our men demoralized. For their pains they were each presented with at least one well-aimed bullet. Our men then lined the parapet with as much speed and ammunition as possible, and let the Hun have it for all they were worth. Another party of Boches, well stacked with bombs, had already stormed one of our saps, which had been blocked about half way. Our Battalion bombers were at once called out to deal with this party, and, fighting their way foot by foot, cleared every living Boche from the sap, a fact which reflected no little credit on our men, being, as they were, at a disadvantage from the very beginning. Our Stokes Mortar Battery was then set to work on the German front line, and to see old Fritz jump on to his own parapet, run a few yards as hard as he could go, and then into his own trench again (provided that he did not get a bullet in the attempt, our machine-guns and rifles being on the look out for opportunities) was the best amusement I had had for weeks. This went on for about three hours, during which time the work of our Officers and N.C.O.’s was cut out in stopping our men from rushing headlong into the Hun trenches in their eagerness to kill as many Boches as possible in as little time as possible. Unfortunately, a few of the good men lost their lives during this fighting, but we had the satisfaction of knowing that, for every one lost, the Hun lost at least four.

‘Thus ended our first experience under liquid fire.

‘After this, our boys set to and cooked for themselves the breakfast they so richly deserved.’

It was after this fashion that the pressure on Verdun was relieved. Sir Douglas Haig is quite clear on this point. He admitted that, ‘north of the valley of the Ancre, on the left flank of our attack, our initial successes were not sustained’; that ‘the enemy’s continued resistance at Thiepval and Beaumont Hamel (29th Division) made it impossible to forward reinforcements and ammunition, and, in spite of their gallant efforts, our troops were forced to withdraw’; and that ‘the subsidiary attack at Gommecourt also forced its way into the enemy’s positions; but there met with such vigorous opposition that ... our troops were withdrawn’[60]. These were the first day’s experiences. The succeeding days, as we have seen, brought certain adjustments for the better, even in the difficult region where General Perceval’s gallant troops had to fight their troublesome way up slopes of mud from the valley of the Ancre to the deeply fortified positions which the Germans held with machine-guns, rifles and liquid flame. But they did not bring conspicuous success. They were not expected to bring it, as a fact. As we have looked at the fighting at close quarters, so we are to look at the results through Command spectacles. The Battle of the Somme was not won, nor was it intended to be won, between Thiepval village and Authuille, where the Leipsic Salient bulged inwards. ‘The British main front of attack,’ we are told in the same Despatch, ‘extended from Maricourt on our right, round the Salient at Fricourt, to the Ancre in front of St. Pierre Divion’; that is, from the bank of the River Somme to the Albert-Bapaume road and north of it. But ‘to assist this main attack by holding the enemy’s reserves and occupying his Artillery’ (not, note, by capturing his defences), ‘the enemy’s trenches north of the Ancre, as far as Serre inclusive, were to be assaulted simultaneously’; and, further north, ‘a subsidiary attack’ was to be made at Gommecourt. So clear did this distinction become in the early stages of the battle, and so plain was the dividing line between the holding and the pushing forces, that Sir Douglas Haig decided to separate the Commands: ‘In order that General Sir Henry Rawlinson might be left free to concentrate his attention on the portion of the front where the attack was to be pushed home, I also decided to place the operations against the front, La Boisselle to Serre, under the command of General Sir Hubert de la P. Gough.... My instructions to Sir Hubert Gough were that his Army was to maintain a steady pressure on the front from La Boisselle to the Serre Road, and to act as a pivot, on which our line could swing as our attacks on his right made progress towards the north.’ Moreover, ‘our attacks on his right’ (Sir Henry Rawlinson’s on Sir Hubert Gough’s) must be associated, in a larger survey, with the simultaneous French attacks under their own Command. Accordingly, it is wholly just to say that the containing action of the 49th Division, when the first impetus of the units had been checked, developed exactly according to plan, in a military phrase rendered famous by another Army. Up to July 7th, the enemy’s forces north of La Boisselle ‘were kept constantly engaged, and our holding in the Leipsic Salient was gradually increased’; and, after July 7th, as the Commander-in-Chief wrote, ‘the enemy in and about Ovillers had been pressed relentlessly, and gradually driven back by incessant bombing attacks and local assaults,[61]’ among which, one among many, may be mentioned a very gallant night attack by the 8th West Yorks. Thus, Sir Douglas Haig’s view from Olympus informs the Battalion records, and we shall see in the further course of the Somme battle how fully his instructions were observed till the time came to swing round on Sir Hubert Gough’s pivot.