target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">57 Rifleman Percy Jones of the Queen’s Westminster Rifles (waiting to attack at Gommecourt with 56th London Division) wrote: ‘I do not see how the stiffest bombardment is going to kill them all. Nor do I see how the whole of the enemy’s artillery is going to be silenced.’58
The strategic imperative which had taken the British to the Somme ensured that there could be no let-up despite the heavy casualties and disappointing gains of the first day. Rawlinson bewilderingly decided to jettison the normal military principle of reinforcing success in favour of consolidating the ground he had gained in the south – where the whole of the German first position on Montauban Ridge had been taken – and renewing his attack on untaken objectives further north. Haig overruled him, placed Gough in command of the northern sector of the battle, and told Rawlinson to press matters south of the Albert-Bapaume road. It took 4th Army a fortnight to secure positions from which it could assault the German second line on the Longueval-Bazentin Ridge, and the gruelling process involved a bitter battle for Mametz Wood in which 39th (Welsh) Division would be badly mauled.
Rawlinson’s next major attack was delivered under cover of darkness early on 14 July 1916. Crucially, the artillery density was far higher than on the first day of the battle – ‘two-thirds of the number of guns … would have to demolish only one-eighteenth of the length of trench’.59 Darkness limited, though because of ‘fixed lines’ did not wholly negate, the effect of the defenders’ machine guns, and the final five minutes of intense bombardment added psychological dislocation to the considerable physical destruction achieved over the previous three days. The attackers secured the ridge, although, crucially, they failed to take High Wood and Delville Wood, both of which sat like sponges on the crest and would enable the Germans to seep troops forward over the weeks that followed. The plan for cavalry exploitation did not work, less because of the cavalry’s inherent limitations than the familiar problem of initiating exploitation as soon as an opportunity was identified.
Fourth Army spent the next two months on Longueval Ridge, fighting what Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson rightly call ‘The Forgotten Battles’, a series of local offensives in which Rawlinson never brought his full weight to bear. It does not require hindsight to recognise this. Company Quartermaster Sergeant Scott Macfie of the King’s Liverpool Regiment told his brother that:
The want of preparation, the vague orders, the ignorance of the objective & geography, the absurd haste, and in general the horrid bungling were scandalous. After two years of war it seems that our higher commanders are still without common sense. In any well regulated organisation a divisional commander would be shot for incompetence – here another regiment is ordered to attempt the same task in the same maddening way.60
But however correct we may be to criticise an army commander who was all too evidently still learning his trade, to grasp the true texture of the Somme we must look at the Germans too. Their rigid insistence on regaining captured ground meant that British attacks were followed by German counterattacks, often as futile as they were costly. Artillery ammunition was now arriving in unprecedented quantities, and the British rarely expended less than a million rounds a week that summer, more than they had fired in the first six months of the war. In the week ending 20 August they fired no less than 1,372,000 shells, and the Germans, still locked in a death-grip at Verdun, were losing the artillery battle.61 Lieutenant Ernst Junger, who was to become not only Germany’s most highly-decorated officer but one of the conflict’s longest-lived survivors, recalled that his company was led forward by a guide who had ‘been through horror to the limit of despair’ and retained only ‘superhuman indifference’. Once on the battlefield, Junger saw how:
The sunken road now appeared as nothing but a series of enormous shell-holes filled with pieces of uniform, weapons and dead bodies. The ground all around, as far as the eye could see, was ploughed by shells. Among the living lay the dead. As we dug ourselves in we found them in layers stacked one on top of the other. One company after another has been shoved into the drum-fire and steadily annihilated.62
The Reserve Army made better, though costly, progress, and the capture of Pozières by the Australians on 7 August not only gave the British possession of the highest point of the battlefield, but established this battered and stinking village as a landmark in Australian history, scarcely less momentous, in its way, than Gallipoli. Here, as the inscription on the memorial on the hummocky and windswept site of Pozières Mill records, Australian dead were strewn more thickly than on any other battlefield of the war. And, though anglophone historians too often forget it, the French 6th Army, its contribution reduced but by no means removed by the continuing blood-letting at Verdun, made significant gains on the British right. Sadly, one of the consequences of the wholly logical policy of a firm boundary between British and French troops meant that neither participant in this quintessentially coalition battle fully recognised quite what the other was about. One French soldier wrote home that he had been on the Somme with the British: ‘c’est à dire without the British’.
There could be no denying that the battle was causing what Robertson reported to Haig as disquiet among ‘the powers that be’. In part it was the toll of casualties (some 82,000 for 4th Army alone that summer) and in part a dislocation of public expectation as the Big Push, from which so much had been expected, failed to deliver on its promises. Although the Germans had now definitively lost the initiative at Verdun, the French were anxious to recover the lost ground, and Joffre demanded the continuation of the attack on the Somme. And he went further. In June the Russians, as loyal to the alliance in 1916 as they had been two years before, had launched a sharp offensive of their own, named after its author, General Aleksey Brusilov. This had compelled the Germans to shift troops to support the stricken Austro-Hungarians, but if the Allies let up on the Somme Joffre feared that the Russians would be punished for their resolution.
Haig had few doubts about the need to continue. Charteris told him, not wholly over-optimistically, that the Germans were suffering appallingly. The weather would permit one last big effort, and Haig, aware since Christmas Day 1915 of the development of armoured fighting vehicles under the cover name of tanks, wrote in August that ‘I have been looking forward to obtaining decisive results from the use of these “Tanks” at an early date.’63 The question of whether Haig was right to compromise the security of tanks in order to use them on small numbers on the Somme that summer remains unresolved, but given the state of the battle, and the political and alliance pressures on him, it was certainly not unreasonable. Rawlinson, characteristically laying off his bets with fellow-Etonian Colonel Clive Wigram, the king’s assistant private secretary, admitted on 29 September that:
We are puzzling our heads as how to make best use of them and have not yet come to a decision. They are not going to take the British army straight to Berlin as some people imagine but if properly used and skilfully handled by the detachments who work them they may be very useful in taking trenches and strongpoints. Some people are rather too optimistic as to what these weapons will accomplish.64
On the morning of 15 September the British attacked on a broad front from the Bapaume road to their junction with the French, in what the Battles Nomenclature Committee, its logic not always clearly comprehensible to veterans, was later to call the Battle of Flers-Courcelette. There were forty-nine tanks available for the attack, and thirty-two actually went into action. By the end of the day the British had not only overrun the remaining German strongpoints on Longueval Ridge, but had taken a great bite out of the German third position on the slopes beyond it. It was certainly a telling blow, but fell far short of being decisive, and 4th Army alone had lost almost 30,000 men.
Amongst
