burning hot and swimming in oil, they traversed to and fro along the enemy’s ranks unceasingly; one machine gun alone fired 12,500 rounds that afternoon. The effect was devastating. The enemy could be seen literally falling in hundreds, but they continued their march in good order and without interruption. The extended lines of men began to get confused by this terrific punishment, but they went doggedly on, some even reaching the wire entanglement in front of the reserve line, which their artillery had scarcely touched. Confronted by this impenetrable obstacle, the survivors turned and began to retire.51
A subsequent attack was described by Captain W. L. Weetman, one of the few surviving officers of 8/Sherwood Foresters, in a letter to his former commanding officer.
We got across the open to attack a well-known spot [the Hohenzollern Redoubt] which you probably know of, though I think I had better leave it nameless … Of course they heard us coming and we soon knew it.
Young Goze was the first down, a nasty one I’m afraid. Then Strachan disappeared along the trench and I fear was killed. Young Hanford fell, I don’t know when but was killed at once and I saw his body later on after it was light … Becher was outside before the attack directing us with a flashlight and got a bullet in the thigh – explosive – and lay out for nearly 2 days. Before we had finished Ashwell and Vann got nasty ones through the shoulder, and that left only the CO and myself …
About half an hour before the relief was finished our dear Colonel was killed instantly by a sniper, whilst trying to locate Becher’s body, as we then thought he had been killed. It was the last straw and I took on the remnants to Rescue Trenches and then broke down. I thank God I was spared, but it is awful to think of all those brave fellows who have gone.52
Loos cost the British more than 43,000 men, including three major generals and the only son of the poet and writer Rudyard Kipling. It was the end for Sir John French. Haig ensured that the papers on his handling of the reserves were circulated in London, and French’s political support, waning since the spring, at last collapsed. He left France on 18 December, resentful and embittered, returning home to a peerage (he quipped bitterly that he might take his title from the town of St-Omer, which had housed his headquarters, and be Lord Sent Homer) and the post of commander in chief of home forces. Haig replaced him, and General Sir William Robertson, French’s chief of staff since early 1915, became chief of the imperial general staff in London, where he staunchly supported Haig’s insistency on the primacy of the Western Front. Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, previously assistant to the CIGS, replaced him at Haig’s headquarters.
The failure of the September offensive did not deter Jofffe, and Haig inherited the requirement for another Allied offensive. This time it was to take a new form, elaborated at a meeting at Chantilly on 14 February 1916. Instead of the familiar two-pronged attack, with an Anglo-French jab in Artois in the north and a French thrust in Champagne in the south, the two armies were to attack side by side on the River Somme. The British took over the front from Arras to Maricourt, just north of the Somme, in early 1916, forming a 4th Army, commanded by the happy Rawlinson, in order to do so. Haig was especially anxious to relieve French troops because, on 21 February, the Germans had begun their attack on the French fortress of Verdun. Although it is impossible to be sure of the motivation of General Erich von Falkenhayn, who had taken over from the exhausted Moltke as chief of the general staff in the autumn of 1914, it is likely that the traditional view remains correct: he was attacking at Verdun not in the hope of making territorial gain, but with the deliberate intention of provoking an attritional battle which would ‘bleed the French army white’. Haig had never had any realistic alternative to the place of that summer’s Allied offensive: and now, with the attack on Verdun, he was to be constrained in time too.
In April general headquarters was moved south from St-Omer to Montreuil, better placed to watch over the extended British front, and on 26 May Haig entertained Joffre in his (remarkably modest) quarters in the nearby Château de Beaurepaire. All too well aware that many of his New Army troops, upon whom the battle would largely depend, were not yet fully trained, Haig suggested that he might not be able to attack till August. Joffre exploded that there would be no French army left by then. Haig soothed the old gentleman with some 1840 brandy, but it is clear that he fully understood the coalition dimension of the battle: on 10 June he told Kiggell that ‘the object of our attack is to relieve pressure on Verdun’.53
We have already seen how soldiers’ spirits lifted when they left Flanders for the wider horizons of the Somme, and Rawlinson’s reaction was no exception. ‘It is capital country in which to undertake an offensive when we get a sufficiency of artillery,’ he recorded in his diary, ‘for the observation is excellent and with plenty of guns and ammunition we ought to be able to avoid the heavy losses which the infantry have always suffered on previous occasions.’54 The same rolling landscape that so cheered men moving to the Somme provided the Germans with admirable ground for defence, and Rawlinson faced two well-prepared lines, with a third in the early stages of construction. The front line, with the Roman road from Albert to Bapaume slashing obliquely across it, incorporated fortified villages like Serre, Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, and Fricourt, and the pattern of spurs and re-entrants provided admirable fields of fire.
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.’55
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.’56
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
