INTO THE BLOODBATH OF THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME OF 90 YEARS AGO

Daily Mail

Monday July 3-2006

Part 1

SATURDAY was the 90^th 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

TRIBUTE

To the thousands

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

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 al 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 fro 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.

British 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

Elections in the British One Party State

If you vote Conservative, Labour, Lib-Dem, UKIP or the BNP, you'll be voting for the EU dictatorship. All five party leaderships are EU controlled. That's why your vote doesn't make a difference - all these five parties have the same policies: the EU's policies.

The 17 most senior politicians in the Conservative, Lib Dem and Labour parties, including Ken Clarke, Francis Maude, Cameron, William Hague, George Osborne, Nick Clegg, Brown, David and Ed Milliband, Ed Balls, Peter Mandleson are Bilderbergers, the 140 strong band of ultra senior Freemasons who are bribed by the EU to build the EU dictatorship.

No Bilderberger, Freemason or Common Purpose graduate should ever be allowed to hold public office.

UKIP and the BNP are honey traps to neutralise activists: UKIP is riddled with Freemasons and Common Purpose like a cancer, and the BNP controlled by the Edgar Griffin (father) and son Nick Freemasonry family. The 350,000 freemasons and the 40,000 strong Common Purpose Organisation are the (mostly unknowing) foot soldiers of the EU in Britain. (Which makes the BNP the easiest party to clean up - get rid of the Griffins, and put in a real anti-EU leadership.)

For more details go to :http://eutruth.org.uk

IF YOU ARE A MEMBER OF

UKIP

OR

INTEND TO JOIN THEM TAKE NOTE OF THE MESSAGE ABOVE

THE EDP HAS BEEN CRITICAL OF THE MANAGEMENT AND LEADERSHIP OF THE UKIP FOR SOME TIME NOW AS IS SHOWN IN A NUMBER OF BULLETINS OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS WHERE WE HAVE CRITICISED THEIR LACK LUSTRE PERFORMANCE AS THEY FAILED TO MOTIVATE THEIR MEMBERSHIP TO A MORE DETERMINED CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE CAMPAIGN WHICH WOULD HAVE MADE THE GOVERNMENTS TREMBLE BUT THEY HAD NO WORRY BECAUSE THEY HAD THEIR OWN PERSONS IN CHARGE AT THE TOP OF THE ORGANISATION. THIS FIGHTING SPIRIT HAS BEEN LACKING AND WE CAN CONFIRM THIS OURSELVES BECAUSE WE HAVE BEEN OUTSIDE PARLIAMENT WHEN A MARCH WAS CANCELLED - AND WATCH THE FARCE WHEN CANDLES WERE HELD AND THOUSANDS OF LETTERS SENT TO MPS WHO KNEW WHERE TO DISPOSES OF THEM -AND ALL TO NO AVAIL. IF YOU ARE A MEMBER OF UKIP YOU HAVE BEEN BETRAYED BY YOUR OWN LEADERSHIP SOME APPEAR ON THE ALEX JONES SHOW WHICH HAS BEEN UNDER CLOSE SPOTLIGHT RECENTLY AS BEING CLOSE TO AN ISRAELI SECURITY FIRM DETAILS ON OUR WEBSITE . IRONICALLY IT WAS A CHANCE LOOK ON THE INTERNET A FEW YEARS AGO TO COME UPON THAT SITE WHICH OPENED OUR MIND TO THE ILLUMINATI. THOUGH WE HAVE SOME DETAILS OF THE BILDERBERGERS ON OUR SITE A NUMBER OF YEARS AGO WE FAILED TO DO MORE RESEARCH- WE ALL HAVE TO LEARN. THE FAILURE OF UKIP WE HAVE SUSPECTED FOR MANY YEARS THAT MANY AT THE TOP OF THEIR ORGANISATION MIGHT BE UNDERCOVER MEMBERS OF THE ILLUMINATI. IT IS A FAVOURITE TRICK OF THEIRS TO SUPPORT ANY PARTY OR ORGANISATION AT THE OUTSET WHATEVER ITS POLICY AS IT ALLOWS THEM TO PUT THEIR OWN PEOPLE IN TO CONTROL ITS POLICES AS THEY BEHIND THE SCENES SUPPLY THE VITAL FINANCIAL SUPPORT.

Our intention is not to benefit from this disaster as since the 1999 European Election we have NOT! accepted a DONATION! from ANYONE! and we closed membership also because we did not wish to split the vote for UKIP but have stated in the past that we would contest another election if it was ever necessary to enter into the affray again and with the reputation of UKIP under scrutiny we will keep our options OPEN! As we mentioned some time ago we have been almost two decades on the campaign trail to free our once FREE INDEPENDENT NATION STATE of ENGLAND from the SATANIC EU and those who have for centuries have planned for an EVIL ONE-WORLD CORPORATION/GOVERNMENT and EXTERMINATE! at least 5 BILLION of the WORLD'S POPULATION and therefore if we are right about those mentioned above they are not only TRAITORS to their COUNTRY but also a THREAT to WORLD PEACE. However, of late, matters have NOT! been going well for the ILLUMINATI as you will observe BELOW.

WHAT A WAY TO WIN A WAR

BENJAMIN FULFORD

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[WORKS]

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PATRIOT or TRAITOR to HIS COUNTRY

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THIS YOU MUST SEE IT CONCERNS

YOUR

PLANET!

AND

YOU!

NO NEED TO PANIC!

'Others shall sing the song,

Others shall right the wrong,-

Finish what I begin,

All all I fail of win.

Hail to the coming singers!

Hail to the brave light-bringers!

Forward I reach and above

All that they sing and dare.

The airs of heaven blow o'er me;

A glory shines before me

Of what mankind shall be'-

Pure, generous, brave and free,

I feel the earth move sunward,

I join the great march onward,

And take, by faith, while living,

My freehold of thanksgiving.-

WHITTIER

MAY-2012

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