It looked as if the Germans had begun a counterbombardment on part of the British front line.
The staff officers glanced at their watches, and at half-past seven precisely there came a lull. It lasted for a second or two, and then the guns continued their tale. But the range had been lengthened everywhere, and from a bombardment the fire had become a barrage. For, on a twenty-five mile front, the Allied infantry had gone over the parapets.
CHAPTER II.
THE FIRST STAGE.
The point of view of the hill-top was not that of the men in the front trenches. The crossing of the parapets is the supreme moment in modern war. What has been the limit suddenly becomes the starting point. The troops are outside defences, moving across the open to investigate the unknown. It is the culmination of months of training for officers and men, and the least sensitive feels the drama of the crisis. Most of the British troops engaged had twenty months before been employed in peaceable civilian trades. In their ranks were every class and condition— miners from north England, factory hands from the industrial centres, clerks and shop-boys, ploughmen and shepherds, Saxon and Celt, college graduates and dock labourers, men who in the wild places of the earth had often faced danger, and men whose chief adventure had been a Sunday bicycle ride. Nerves may be attuned to the normal risks of trench warfare and yet shrink from the desperate hazard of a charge into the enemy’s line.
But to one who visited the front before the attack the most vivid impression was that of quiet cheerfulness. These soldiers of Britain were like Cromwell’s Ironsides, they “knew what they fought for and loved what they knew.” There were no shirkers and few who wished themselves elsewhere. One man’s imagination might be more active than another’s, but the will to fight, and to fight desperately, was universal. With the happy gift of the British soldier they had turned the ghastly business of war into something homely and familiar. They found humour in danger and discomfort, and declined to regard the wildest crisis as wholly divorced from their normal life. Accordingly they took everything as part of the day’s work, and awaited the supreme moment without heroics and without tremor, confident in themselves, confident in their guns, and confident in the triumph of their cause. There was no savage lust of battle, but that far more formidable thing—a resolution which needed no rhetoric to support it. Norfolk’s words were true of every man of them:
“As gentle and as jocund as to jest
Go I to fight. Truth hath a quiet breast.”
A letter written before the action by a young officer gives noble expression to this joyful resolution. He fell in the first day’s battle and the letter was posted after his death:—
“I am writing this letter to you just before going into action to-morrow morning about dawn.
“I am about to take part in the biggest battle that has yet been fought in France, and one which ought to help to end the war very quickly.
“I never felt more confident or cheerful in my life before, and would not miss the attack for anything on earth. The men are in splendid form, and every officer and man is more happy and cheerful than I have ever seen them. I have just been playing a rag game of football in which the umpire had a revolver and a whistle.
“My idea in writing this letter is in case I am one of the ‘costs,’ and get killed. I do not expect to be, but such things have happened, and are always possible.
“It is impossible to fear death out here when one is no longer an individual, but a member of a regiment and of an army. To be killed means nothing to me, and it is only you who suffer for it; you really pay the cost.
“I have been looking at the stars, and thinking what an immense distance they are away. What an insignificant thing the loss of, say, 40 years of life is compared with them! It seems scarcely worth talking about.
“Well, good-bye, you darlings. Try not to worry about it, and remember that we shall meet again really quite soon.
“This letter is going to be posted if . . . Lots of love. From your loving son,
“Qui procul hinc
Ante diem periit,
Sed miles, sed pro Patria.”
The British aim in this, the opening stage of the battle, was the German first position. The attached map shows its general line. In the section of assault, running from north to south, it covered Gommecourt, passed east of Hebuterne, followed the high ground in front of Serre and Beaumont Hamel, and crossed the Ancre a little to the north-west of Thiepval. It ran in front of Thiepval, which was very strongly fortified, east of Authuille, and just covered the hamlets of Ovillers and La Boisselle. There it ran about a mile and a quarter east of Albert. It then passed south round the woodland village of Fricourt, where it turned at right angles to the east, covering Mametz and Montauban. Half-way between Maricourt and Hardecourt it turned south again, covered Curlu, crossed the Somme at the wide marsh near the place called Vaux, covered Frise and Dompierre and Soye-court, and passed just east of Lihons, where it left the sector with which we are now concerned. The position was held by the right wing of the 2nd Army (formerly von Buelow’s, but now under von Below, a brother of the General commanding on the extreme left in Poland), and the troops in line opposite the British on July 1st were principally the 14th Reserve Corps, made up of Baden, Wurtemberg and Bavarian divisions.
GOMMECOURT TO THIEPVAL.
It is clear that the Germans expected the attack of the Allies and had made a fairly accurate guess as to its terrain. They assumed that the area would be from Arras to Albert. In all that area they were ready with a full concentration of men and guns. South of Albert they were less prepared, and south of the Somme they were caught napping. The history of the first day is therefore the story of two separate actions in the north and south, in the first of which the Allies failed and in the second of which they brilliantly succeeded. By the evening the first action had definitely closed, and the weight of the Allies was flung wholly into the second. That is almost inevitable in an attack on a very broad front. Some part will be found tougher than the rest, and that part having been tried will be relinquished; but it is the stubbornness of the knot and the failure to take it which are the price of success elsewhere. Let us first tell the tale of the desperate struggle between Gommecourt and Thiepval.
The divisions in action there were mainly from the New Army, though there were two of the old regulars, which had won fame both in Flanders and Gallipoli. They had to face a chain of fortified villages—Gommecourt, Serre, Beaumont Hamel, and Thiepval—and enemy positions which were generally on higher and better ground. The Ancre cut the line in two, with steep slopes rising from the valley bottom. Each village had been so fortified as to be almost impregnable, with a maze of catacombs, often two storeys deep, where whole battalions could take refuge, underground passages from the firing line to sheltered places in the rear, and pits into which machine guns could be lowered during a bombardment. On the plateau behind, with excellent direct observation, the Germans had their guns massed.
It was this direct observation and the deep shelters for machine-guns which were the undoing of the British attack from Gommecourt to Thiepval, As our bombardment grew more intense on the morning of July 1st, so did the enemy’s. Before our men could go over the parapets the Germans had plastered our front trenches with high explosives and in many places blotted them out. All along our line, fifty yards before
