INTO
THE BLOODBATH OF THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME OF 90 YEARS AGO
*
Daily Mail
Monday July 3-2006
Part 1
SATURDAY was the 90th
anniversary of the start of the Battle of the Somme, a conflict that has come
to symbolise the terrible savagery of World War 1
Twenty thousand British
troops perished on the first day of fighting; by the end of the offensive, a
total of over a million lives had been lost.
What follows is an extract
from a classic memoir of the battle, originally published in 1933.
Written by
Sidney Rogerson,
a 22-year-old officer
in the
West
Yorkshire Regiment
-it offers a compelling
snapshot of the battles last terrible stages.
Sidney
Rogerson died in 1968.
TERRIFYINGLY VIVID
DEEPLY HUMANE
In
TRIBUTE
To the
thousands
of
BRITISH
TROOPS
slaughtered in the
BATTLE of
the SOMME
-which began
90 YEARS AGO
-we print a classic
-soldier’s memoir
-that captures
THE SHEER HORROR
of
TRENCH
WARFARE
[R. I. P]
*
[Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) soldier and poet of the
Great War.
‘What
passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle. Can patter out their hasty orisons.’
*
Rupert
Brook
(1887-1915) Soldier and poet of the Great War.
[Blow
out, you bugles, over the rich Dead! There’s none of these so lonely and poor
of old. But dying has made us rarer
gifts than gold. These laid the world away; poured out the red. Sweet wine of
youth; gave up the years to be. Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene. That
men call age; and those who would have been. Their sons, they gave, their
immortality. (The Dead)]
*
THE night was cold.
There had been snow during the day, and at dusk the wind had risen. Just
to complicate matters, the camp warden had caught my batman looting the old
German dugouts for firewood, so we had been forced to fill our brazier with
ration coal. The result was that the tent that served as B Company’s officers’
mess was filled with a maximum of smoke for a minimum of warmth.
With soot-blackened faces
and aching lungs, we lay in our flea-bags and smoked, and cursed, and sipped
whiskey and water out of tin cups, and discussed the latest rumours - wonderful
rumours that we were to entrain for Italy, for Salonika, for any other front
than the SOMME.
It was the evening of
November 7, 1916, when the Somme offensive was four months old and spluttering
out in a sea of mud. We were six miles behind the front line at Citadel Camp, a
dreary collection of bell-tents pitched insecurely on the hillside near the
now-destroyed village of Fricourt.
My brother officers and I
were all lucky to be possessors of a sense of humour which persisted in rising
equally above the various forms of boredom which beset us in this war, and the
many manifestations of ‘frightfulness’ which the enemy and our own commanders
visited upon us.
Still, though we could laugh
heartily at ourselves as a party of blackamoors, covered in coal dust, we were
tired, lie the majority of the battalion- mentally rather than physically, for
our physical condition was splendid.
This was the regiment’s
second experience of what the Germans called
Das Blutbad
-
the bloodbath.
Some of us remembered that
sunny last evening in JUNE [1916], when we had assembled with such high
hopes in the trenches, the day before the Somme offensive began. How we had
jested and joked, even collecting pieces of chalk wherewith to label as our
trophies the guns we were sure of taking!
Some of us too, remembered the next night, when with every
officer but one a casualty, and our dead hanging thick on the German wire, we
had been
withdrawn,
sweating and shaking and shattered. It had
taken
us three months to recover from that blow.
Like other
regiments that suffered heavily on that terrible first day we had been sent
away to rest. But this was ‘rest’ in the official sense- that is, not rest at
all.
Instead of being
moved to decent trenches, we had been sent a few miles north to he putrid
boneyard of Vermelles where the
Battle of Loos
-had been fought and lost
the previous year.
The FRONT here was a maze of
trenches old and new, German, French and British. Trenches blown in and disused
or derelict:
British trenches, which had once been German; trenches
ending 20 yards from the enemy line- all reeking of
DEATH and STAGNATION.
Men vomited over the task of building new trenches, for
bodies were unearthed at every yard. The deepening of the front line turned a German
officer out of the mud at our very feet. Further digging led into an overgrown
trench full of French skeletons from
1914
Most pitiful, an attempt to straighten a piece of trench
broke into an old dugout where sat huddled three Scottish officers, their faces
mercifully shrouded by the grey flannel of the gasmasks they had donned before
death came upon them.
In some places the trench parapet was built up with
corpses thinly hidden by rotting sandbags, whence at night the rats fled
squeaking from their ghoulish repasts. And each day the toll of lives grew
greater.
BBritish
and German lines were only a few yards apart in some places, so that hand
grenades could easily be lobbed into them; sometimes they actually ran into one
another, separated only by a trench ‘stop’ of sandbags and barbed wire.
Yet for all
their closeness, the two sides were often out of sight of each other, since the
continual explosion of counter-mine and mine had reared great mounds of earth
in
No-Man’s -Land.
The craters were
hotly debated territory; the scene at night of bloody silent struggles with
knife and trench club; watched over during daylight by anxious sentries, who
peered at each other through tiny periscopes clipped on to bayonet blades.
To the terror of
the mine from beneath was added the hail of missiles from above, ranging from
small hand and rifle grenades, each capable of wiping out a sentry post,
through a variety of trench-mortar bombs of medium calibre up to the enormous
‘minenwerfer’
Standing over
3ft 6ins in height and filled with nearly 200lbs of high explosive, these had a
more demoralising effect than any other single form of enemy action.
There was no
sound of distant discharge to give warning of their coming. Ears had to be
sharp to hear the whistle blown by the German gunners before they fired their
mortars.
Eyes had to e
fixed in the air to watch for the shape which would soar ponderously upward,
turn slowly over n its downward flight like a tumbler pigeon, and with a
woof! woof! woof!
-burst with a shattering
crash, sending long, jagged strips of metal whirring savagely for yards and
rendering into tiny fragments everything around.
The
very leisureliness of their descent was demoralising. The
immense clamour of the explosion was demoralising.
But
most demoralising was
the damage they cold do. Men do not easily or son throw off the shock of seeing
all that could be found of four of their comrades carried down for burial in
one ground sheet.
It was in such
an atmosphere of putrefaction, amid the continual nerve-racking strain of
‘Minewerfers’
of raid and counter -raid, counter-mine, and mine that we had
‘rested’
through the warm autumn months of 1916.
Then, as the
leaves fell and the weather began to break, the order had come for us to return
to the Somme.
Anxiously. the
men asked:
‘Are there any
minny woofers where we’re going?’ They were relieved to get the answer, ‘No’
But since then,
we had done one attack, at a loss of
six officers and
213 other ranks
out of a total of
437
-who had ‘gone
over the top’, had taught us the existence of a new terror:
SOMME mud.
It is not
strange, therefore, that we were eagerly discussing the rumours of a move to
Italy - conjuring up warm visions of some cushy line of trench under the blue
Alpine skies, were
‘mnenwerfers’
mustard gas
mines
-and mud were
unknown.
A place where a
man could expel the shell-fumes from his lungs and fill them with the sweet air
of the countryside; where he could rest his tired eyes with the sight of
something green after the drab monotony of a battlefield, where the constant
churning of shells, wheels and feet had robbed even freshly turned earth
of its
distinctive colour. A place, in fact,
where warfare was still something of the gentlemen’s business we somehow
imagined it ought to be.
A rap on the
tent canvas and the announcement of
‘Battalion Orders sir’
-brought us back
to reality with a bump.
‘The Battalion
will relieve the
2rd Devon
Regiment
-in the front
line on the night of
November 10-11….
Each of us
received the news in his own way. Mac, a lean, youthful Irishman, with an air
of ‘I told you so’; George, a stolid cheerful Yorkshire man, with an adequate
Yorkshire curse; and I, as I thought befitting a company commander with a great
show of enforced cheerfulness.
* *
Led by a guide from the
Devons, we set off in the
pre-dawn gloom to reach the front line. It lay over a low ridge, the guide told
us, and had been dug only last night after being captured from the Germans.
‘It’s not easy to find in
the darkness,’ he went on in his soft West Country dialect. ‘You follow this
track till you come to a dead Boche. Here he be, zur!’
He pointed to a
sprawling body wearing the uniform, I noticed, of the Minenewerfer Corps. On
the Somme, such corpses served for signposts.
‘Then you have
to look for a white tape- here, zur- and he leads you right up to the FRONT
LINE.’
We crossed a low
valley where the shell-ploughed ground was carpeted with dead, the British khaki
outnumbering the enemy’s field-grey by three to one. There must have been two or three hundred bodies lying in an area
of a few hundred yards.
Eventually, I
slithered into a shallow trench halfway up the ridge that had been established
as a company headquarters by the simple expedient of roofing it with two stretchers.
Tea was being made for breakfast, and I accepted an offer of
welcome
refreshment. No sooner had I taken the first gulp than I turned away retching.
It tasted vilely of petrol.
For miles there was
no water either fit or safe to drink, and all supplies had to be carried up to
the front in petrol tins, a system which was all right only so long as the tins
had been burnt out to remove the fumes.
When they had
not, as all too often happened, every mouthful of food and drink was nausea.
It was only with the greatest of
difficulty that men could be restrained from using water from shell-holes to
make their tea, although this was expressly forbidden, as none knew what horrors
lay hidden under the turbid water.
After a brief conversation
with my opposite number in the Devons, I climbed back out of the trench
to have a look around. The sun was now up sand the front was strangely peaceful,
save for the occasional whip-crack of an enemy sniper.
To anyone not there to see
it for himself it is difficult to give a picture of the Somme battlefield. Try to imagine a countryside resembling the
Sussex Downs, with
comfortable little villages nestling round their churches
in the folds of the hills.
Then batter it, day and night, until almost every landmark
has been obliterated. Strip it of every vestige of green. Denude it of every
wood, copse, church and village Pound it with shell-fire until it is a vast
putty-coloured wilderness, showing
white scars here and there where deeper explosions have
penetrated the chalk.
All around you is
spaciousness, but there is nothing to see, just mile upon mile of emptiness,
with never a house or a tree or a hedge to break the absolute monotony of tint
and feature, All was drab and formless, as one imagines the Earth must have
been before the appearance of LIFE.
And the mud, I had not gone
20 yards from the trench that morning before I was engulfed by it- mud like
none I had ever encountered before. It was like walking through caramel.
At every step the foot stuck fast and was wrenched out
only by a determined effort, bringing away with it several pounds of earth till
the legs ached in every muscle.
As I would discover in the
coming days no one could struggle through that mud for more than a few yards without
rest. Terrible in its clinging consistency,
it was arbiter of destiny, the supreme enemy paralysing and mocking English and
German alike’
[The term ‘you made your bed
now you must lie in it’, comes to mind. What a HELL it must have been for the
human beings on both sides of the FRONT?]
One of the war’s greatest
tragedies was that the High Command so seldom saw for themselves the state of
the battle zone. What could the men at
GCHQ, who ordered the terrible attacks on the SOMME, know of the mud from their
maps?
If they had known, they
could never have brought themselves to believe that human flesh and blood could
so often succeed in carrying out orders which should never have been issued.
I struggled on to inspect
the front-line trench, just over the ridge. The impression let on my mind was
that we were as much at the mercy of the elements as of the enemy
The trench was utterly rudimentary
established by linking up shell-hole to shell-hole. It was nowhere more than
3ft deep, less than 2ft wide at the bottom, and there were no shelters or
dug-outs of any kind, not even a hole to crawl into.
Our men slept as they sat,
in positions reminiscent of prehistoric burial. The one latrine was a hole dug
into the wall of the support trench.
There was as much work to be done to make the place habitable as
defendable.
I waded back to the
headquarters trench where I was provided with an aerial thrill as two German
aeroplanes flew over at great height, ‘Archie’- the anti-aircraft guns-got onto
them at once and surprisingly enough scored a direct hit with the fourth or
fifth shell.
There was a little puff of
orange smoke with its black cross came fluttering down like a wounded butterfly.
We applauded such accurate shooting wit never a thought for the pilot so
suddenly hurled to death.
Our own men accomplished the
hazardous passage to the front with two casualties, but one of these was our
acting Company Sergeant Major Chamberlain.
He had been trudging along
in line behind Mac when the latter, when was wearing a light -coloured leather
jerkin stepped aside to turn it inside out so as to minimise ant risk of
detection by the enemy.
No sooner had he done so
than a random ‘whizz-bang’ thudded into the ground on the very spot where h had
stood up, exploding into mud with a smothered burst. Chamberlain rose bodily,
then fell back dead, killed by concussion.
It says much for Mac that,
despite his own wonderful escape, he had taken the papers from the body and moved
the line off again before the last man had time to close up and learn the
meaning of the temporary stoppage.
Not until 11 pm
were all the men in position.
Worn
out after being ‘on the go’ continuously for 16 hours, I longed for rest, but
the priority was to deepen our shallow trenches and turn them into something approaching
a defensive system.
*
[Red lips are not so red.
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead. Kindness of wooed and wooer. Seems
shame to their love pure’
Wilfred Owen. (Greater Love)]
* *
End of Part 1
[Part 2 of extracts
from the under-mentioned book to follow- but in the meantime why not read the
full story of those taking part -see below]
* * *
EXTRACTED from Twelve Days
on the Somme, by Sidney Rogerson, published by Greenhill Books at
£19.99.
TO ORDER a copy at £15.99
(plus 1.95 p&p),
TELEPHONE 0870 161 0870
[Font altered-bolding
& underlining used-comments in brackets]
JULY/06