CHAPTER FOUR
THE BIG PUSH
Before the Germans attacked Verdun in February, the big allied push in the West for 1916 had been planned for the area of the Somme, on a fresh battlefield at the junction between the main French and British contingents. In the original plan the French were to have had almost twice as many troops in line as the untested British New Armies; but in the event the insatiable demands of Verdun meant they would have only about half as many. The battle of Verdun seriously reduced the French contingent that could fight on the Somme, and so it placed a proportionally heavier responsibility on the British. Equally, Haig was placed under repeated French pressure to bring forward the starting date of his attack. He had originally intended to begin the battle in mid-August, but was eventually persuaded to go in late June, with the week-long preliminary bombardment actually starting on the 24th. Technically speaking, this was the real ‘first day of the Somme’, although in popular usage that title has always been given to 1 July, the day when the infantry finally went over the top. At least the infrastructure of the offensive had been intensively prepared over the course of several months, with a much bigger build-up of troops and supplies than the BEF had previously dreamed of. By this time allied air superiority was massive, as was the sheer weight of artillery ammunition ready to be fired. Unfortunately, however, the scale of these enormouspreparations completely ruled out any possibility of surprise. The Germans knew exactly where the big push would be launched, and they were more than ready to receive it.
For the British army, 1 July turned out to be the very worst day in its whole history, since it suffered some 58,000 casualties of which about 19,000 were dead.1 The figure 58,000 represented almost a fifth of the total strength of the pre-war regular army (and incidentally no less than half of the army in 2007), although it should also be said that on 1 July 1916 it represented only something between 1 and 2 per cent of the mobilized total of British Empire forces worldwide. But whatever statistics one compares it with, the total was nevertheless horrific, and arguably doubly so when contrasted with the French loss of just 8,000 total casualties on the same day for a considerably greater gain in captured ground. Their Sixth Army reached the gates of Péronne within the next two weeks, and by October their methodical ‘bite and hold’ attacks were still allowing them to capture more real estate than their more numerous British allies. The experience of Verdun had clearly taught the French some vital tactical tricks that the British had not yet come to understand, so they might have been forgiven for repeating their commentary on their allies of the Light Brigade at Balaklava in the Crimean War – ‘It is magnificent: but it is not war.’
The problem was not so much that the British had failed to keep abreast of the latest tactical theories but that, for want of practical experience, they had failed to translate them into effective action at the lowest levels. All but two of the British infantry divisions that attacked on 1 July were part of General Henry Rawlinson's Fourth Army, which had received a comprehensive and sensible tactical briefing manual in May, known as ‘the Red Book’. However, the Red Book crucially failed to establish the detailed arrangements needed to co-ordinate artillery with infantry, and in particular exactly how much ‘destruction’ could realistically be expected from the preliminary bombardment.
On 1 July the general assumption was that the British artillery would have physically destroyed the Germans' front line by the bombardment, after which the infantry would simply walk across no man's land to occupy their wrecked trenches. There were, however, a number of problems with this expectation. The first was that in the hangover from the shell shortage of 1915 there was still too little HE shell, although there was now plenty of shrapnel. Shrapnel was designed to explode in the air and scatter the ground with steel balls each about half an inch in diameter. This was ideal for hitting men in the open, but it was not good for cutting wire entanglements and hopeless for destroying fortifications. HE was much better against fortifications, if it was available, but still not very good against wire. In 1916 the British fuses detonated only after the shell had buried itself in the ground, which limited the horizontal blast needed to disrupt entanglements. It would be only halfway through 1917 that a new fuse (Type 106) was produced which detonated immediately upon impact with the earth, making for a much superior weapon against wire. On 1 July on the Somme, however, a significant proportion of the German wire that should have been cut by the artillery was not cut.
The lack of sufficient HE shell on the Somme also meant that even after a week's bombardment the front two lines of German trenches were far from totally destroyed. The ratio of British guns per mile of front remained less than it had been at Neuve Chapelle fifteen months earlier, especially since there were now two lines of enemy fortifications to be destroyed, rather than just one, and the attack frontage was now some eighteen miles, rather than just two. Thus the expectation that the attacker's artillery could physically annihilate the defending enemy turned out to be sadly misplaced. It was an expectation upon which the whole plan had rested, and so the first lesson of 1 July was that fire for ‘destructive’ effect could not work unless a very great deal more artillery could be provided than was actually the case. What was really needed, although it was not fully understood on this day, was fire for ‘neutralizing’ effect, or in other words some form of creeping barrage.
The creeping barrage was a system by which a line of shells was fired to explode about 50 yards in front of attacking infantry as they advanced, so that any defending enemy ahead of them would be ‘neutralized’ – that is, they would want to keep their heads down and thus be unable to fire their weapons before the moment when they were overrun by troops with rifles, bombs and bayonets. Every few minutes the line of shells would be aimed a little further forward, typically advancing by 100 yards every four minutes, although the exact rate could be altered to suit local conditions. On the first day of the Somme this technique was still very much in its infancy, and its potential was not yet properly understood, although that would change dramatically on the ‘second day’ (or at least by 14 July) and thereafter. By 1917 the whole art and science of the creeping barrage would be developed to a massive degree, with some examples having not just one or two lines of advancing shells, but as many as eight, reaching as far as 2,000 yards ahead of the attacking infantry, to ensure the maximum suppression of the defence. The mixture would also often be thickened up with mortars and massed machine gun fire, and increasingly with HE and then smoke shells, rather than merely shrapnel, as stocks gradually became available. Thus a ‘creeping barrage’ in mid-1917 would become a far more potent weapon of neutralization than anything seen a year earlier.
On 1 July 1916 the three divisions of XIII Corps on the extreme right wing of the British attack – and nearest to the battle-experienced French – did use creeping barrages. They made reasonable headway as a result, albeit still falling far short of the wilder expectations of the high command. But the remaining divisions further to the north did not use creepers, and so they were mostly shot down before they had advanced very far from their starting trenches. Whenever there was empty time between the ending of the preliminary bombardment (including the detonation of mines) and the start of the infantry attack, the defending German machine gunners would almost always be able to emerge from their bunkers, man their guns and open a blistering fire against anyone they found in front of them. This usually created mass slaughter, especially where the lack of a creeping barrage coincided with uncut German wire and naive or at least inexperienced attacking troops.
The tragedy seemed to be multiplied by the uniquely local nature of some of the volunteer battalions that made up Kitchener's New Armies. When the Accrington Pals were mown down at Serre, or the 36th Ulster Division at the Schwaben redoubt, it was not just a military unit that was destroyed, but the manhood of a whole tight- knit urban community. These troops were ‘pals’ in more than name, since they had all volunteered at the same time and the same place, and sometimes all from the same trades. Their murderous introduction to modern battle set up many local reverberations that can still be felt even today.
No one could hide the fact that 1 July was a disaster of epic proportions for the British, and in subsequent years it has gone far to confirm the widespread belief that all the generals of the Great War were butchers and bunglers. This impression would soon be reinforced when Haig attempted to follow through the infantry attack with a pre-programmed ‘cavalry breakthrough’ which, in the event, achieved nothing of the sort. From today's perspective it is easy to mock the whole idea of using cavalry on any modern battlefield, just as it is easy to sneer at some of the generals as hopelessly ‘horsey’ characters who derived their ideas from the nineteenth century, if not the eighteenth. This would be unfair: Haig, for example, was a leading advocate of all types of new technology, ranging from the motor car before the war to the Royal Flying Corps in 1915 and the tank in 1916. Nor was it necessarily stupid to think in terms of cavalry for exploiting a breakthrough. It could, after all, move considerably faster than men on foot, and it could keep on moving for far longer than any of the tanks that would be developed during the war. It would remain at the heart of any planning for a ‘Corps de Chasse’ to break through to the green fields on the far side of the slugging infantry battle. This was certainly the case in the early stages of the Somme battle, and would be again at Arras and Cambrai in 1917. Indeed, it almost worked on all three occasions. For example, some of the infantry who witnessed the attempted cavalry breakthrough towards High Wood on 14 July were convinced that there had been a genuine gap in the enemy lines that could have been exploited. However, as so often in this war, the tactical signalling from front to rear of the battlefield was defective which meant that too little cavalry arrived too late, and with inadequate higher command and control.
THE LONG HAUL
Despite the failure of the Corps de Chasse on 14 July, it was on that day that the British began to get their act together and make some genuine progress. A night attack with full use of creeping barrages ensured the capture of Bazentin and Longueval, although this in turn triggered a ferocious series of German counter-attacks. The fighting then continued at exceptionally high intensity, with much butchery and bungling on both sides. In particular the British high command often insisted on making attacks on too short a frontage and with inadequate time for planning, let alone rehearsals. On both counts this was running against good tactical practice, and it created repeated defeats as well as thousands of unnecessary casualties. On the German side there was no less profligacy with men's lives, as their system of automatic counter-attacks on every occasion locked them into ever mounting attrition. The British would gradually become expert in predicting these counter-attacks very accurately, and in arranging crushing artillery bombardments against them.
Both literally and metaphorically the Somme battlefield may be seen as a hill up which the British had to climb. Many of the original front-line trenches were on relatively low-lying ground, overlooked and dominated by German positions further to the east, especially at High Wood and Delville Wood. Haig and Rawlinson had hoped to capture these gentle hills in the first two days of the battle, so that General Hubert Gough's mobile Corps de Chasse, which would later be designated the Fifth Army, could immediately break through to Bapaume and beyond. In the event, however, it took many weeks of the most gruelling fighting even to reach the crestline. The battle ebbed and flowed over those key features, with huge heartbreak and many tens of thousands of casualties along the way. It was only in the big push of 15 September (officially known as the battle of Flers- Courcelette) that the allies were finally able to start downhill on the far side, some two and a half months later than they had originally hoped.
Apart from anything else, the battle of Flers-Courcelette was memorable because it saw the first use of tanks in combat. During 1915 they had been very much in the prototype and development phase, and in the first half of 1916 they were still suffering ‘teething troubles’ and difficulties in production. Thus on 15 September only forty-nine could be put in the field, and of these only thirteen actually managed to get into action. It has to be said that they did not do particularly well. The tactics designed for them demanded gaps to be left in the creeping barrage, which immediately caused great problems for their supporting infantry. They did nevertheless succeed in capturing the village of Flers, which made an iconic moment for the press, although even then they overshot and found that the infantry could not keep up with them. Haig, and everyone else who was militarily involved, recognized that a great deal of further work needed to be done, not only mechanically on the tanks themselves, but also intellectually on their tactics. However, he had full confidence that all this would happen in the fullness of time, so he immediately placed an order for a further 1,000 of the futuristic machines.2
Nor were tanks the only improvement in tactics for the offensive, since by this time the British were well on the way to perfecting their creeping barrages, as well as many aspects of infantry fighting. For example, with their Lewis guns they had taken the lead in the deployment of light machine guns that could be carried relatively easily within every platoon. Their Stokes mortar was also the international leader in its class. Hard-won combat experience was slowly percolating through every level of command, with tangibly improved technique as the long-awaited result. Nevertheless, the second half of the Somme battle lasted until 18 November, and still there was no breakthrough. This is the part of the battle that has often been forgotten. It was a time when forward progress was generally little better than it had been before, and the Germans continued to build new rearward lines of trenches until, at the end of the battle, they had completed no fewer than seven. It was also a time when the weather deteriorated until the battlefield eventually became a quagmire in which any sort of movement was extremely difficult. The mud and high water table at Ypres in late 1917 has become notorious in the popular imagination, but it is less well known that something similar had already happened a year earlier on the Somme. The sunny and well-drained chalk battlefield of July had turned into a morass of glutinous goo by November. Eventually the battle had to be closed down simply because it was no longer possible to move forward the munitions needed to keep it going. There would thus be no breakthrough in 1916 although the prospect of one always continued to tantalize tacticians.
Meanwhile the ‘grinding down’ of the German army continued inexorably until it finally suffered almost two-thirds of a million casualties, or nearly twice as many as at Verdun.3 This made a profound impression upon the German troops, who were forced to retreat from one trench line to another, week by week and month by month. They also saw allied aircraft flying freely overhead, photographing every position and calling down increasingly accurate artillery fire, whereas the Luftwaffe was rarely able to penetrate behind allied lines. The Germans gradually began to lose the assumption of ultimate victory that had so powerfully buoyed up their morale during the first half of the war.4
Particularly shocking was the sheer weight of impersonal shelling that was now being concentrated against them. In his memoirs, the remarkable infantry subaltern Ernst Jiinger repeatedly emphasized ‘the overwhelming effects of the war of material. We had to adapt ourselves to an entirely new phase of war.’5 He went on, ‘after the battle of the Somme the war had its own peculiar impress that distinguished it from all other wars. After this battle the German soldier wore the steel helmet, and in his features there were chiselled the lines of an energy stretched to the utmost pitch.’6‘Chivalry here took a final farewell. It had to yield to the heightened intensity of war, just as all fine and personal feeling has to yield when machinery gets the upper hand.’7
Admittedly, the allies lost about the same total of killed and wounded as their opponents. A third of them were French, making almost as great a loss as they had suffered at Verdun itself, which went far towards sapping their morale for 1917.8 In the case of the British, the battle of the Somme represented their first truly serious ‘butcher's bill’ so far in the war. In one perspective this meant it could be psychologically supported more easily, because it had not been preceded by almost two years of intense attrition, as had been the case for the French. Yet on the other hand, the sheer shock, novelty and scale of the losses struck a major blow to confidence, both throughout the army and among the wider public.
In all armies the uncritical optimism of August 1914 was visibly melting away, as the full horror of der Millionenkrieg in the industrial age gradually sank into the minds of all participants. The personal letters and diaries of soldiers became ever more bitter and disillusioned, especially if the authors had witnessed the chaos of 1915, which had been considerably less focused or purposeful than the tactics seen at either Verdun or the Somme by the end of 1916. It is noticeable that, at least in the British case, a considerable majority of the poets and autobiographers whose work subsequently rose to prominence had already been in the trenches during 1915. It was that particular generation that had gone to war with the highest hopes, and which therefore sank to the lowest depths when the horrific realities became impossibly overwhelming.
The Roman poet Virgil (70–19 BC) began his great work The Aeneid with the immortal phrase ‘Arms and the man I sing’ (Arma virumque cano), and warfare has often been the theme of great literature ever since. Rarely, however, has a group of writers made a more powerful impact with their poems and memoirs on this subject than the British authors who served in the trenches during the Great War. Germany had her Erich Maria Remarque, whose Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) was first published in 1929.9 France had her Henri Barbusse with Le Feu.10The USA had such figures as John Dos Passos, who first came to prominence with Three Soldiers in 1921, and Ernest Hemingway with A Farewell to Arms in 1929. Yet it is surely the British writers who have dominated this particular genre from the late 1920s, when their work first began to be known, right through to the present day. The power of their writings lies in a compelling combination of intimate human observations, bitterness against the high command, and generosity in mourning – all often informed by the classical literature that was so central to the educational system of their age. As an example, Wilfred Owen's acid question, ‘What passing bells for those who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns’,11 evokes the quiet eighteenth- century English country churchyard of Gray's Elegy, at the same time as it reminds us of the mass slaughter and unacceptable, unavoidable, deadly impersonality of the Western Front. Owen was an officer who grieved for his men and was incandescently angry at the treatment they were receiving, but who also had the ability to place it all in the context of the English literary canon.12
The all-professional British army of the nineteenth century had been notably remote from civilian society, and especially from the middle classes. It had numbered only around a third of a million men, whereas in the Great War this state of affairs changed dramatically and radically. Over six million men suddenly came under arms, which meant that many sections of society that had never previously been exposed to military life found themselves living in trenches ‘up to their eyes in muck and bullets’. This was a traumatic experience that came as a great shock not only to the individuals concerned, but especially to the civilians at home who had never previously had the horrors of military life explained to them by ‘their own kind’. A central element in the exquisite poignancy of British war poetry was that it was written by gentle men from educated backgrounds. Whether they were officers or other ranks, middle-class or working- class, the whole business of soldiering and warfare was essentially repugnant to them. Almost all of them had volunteered to fight, and some of them, such as Siegfried Sassoon, even made very good soldiers. However, none of that made them love the war that they actually found on the Western Front. It turned out to be so very different from what anyone had expected that they reacted to it with anger, incomprehension and, often, deep depression.
In 1914 it had been some of the highest commanders who had suffered the most significant nervous breakdowns, but by late 1916 the phenomenon had become widespread among officers and men at every level. ‘Shell shock’, which had been predicted theoretically ever since the original invention of High Explosives, now became an everyday occurrence. Far too often its existence was denied and even mistaken for ‘cowardice’, which could lead to fatal results for sufferers, who found themselves facing a court martial.13 We must remember that the whole science of psychiatry was still very much in its infancy. The modern understanding of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was still a long way in the future. Nevertheless, the novel and unrelenting horrors of the great trench war, and their effect on the minds of soldiers, were starting to be seen as a factor of military importance in a way that had never previously been the case.