Tommy: The British Soldier on the Western Front. Richard Holmes
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 them was one of the prime minister’s sons, Lieutenant Raymond Asquith of the Grenadier Guards. He had met his father only a week before.
I was called up by the Brigadier and thought that I must have committed some ghastly military blunder (I was commanding the Company in Sloper’s absence) but was relieved to find that it was only a telegram from the corps saying ‘Lieut. Asquith will meet his father at cross roads K.6.d at 10.45 am.’ So I vaulted into the saddle and bumped off to Fricourt where I arrived at exactly the appointed time. I waited for an hour on a very muddy road congested with troops and surrounded by barking guns. Then 2 handsome motor cars from GHQ arrived, the PM in one of them with 2 staff officers, and in the other Bongie, Hankey, and one or two of those moth-eaten nondescripts who hang about the corridors of Downing Street in the twilight region between the civil and domestic service.
Hard hit during the Guards Division’s attack near Guillemont on the 15th, Raymond Asquith nonchalantly lit a cigarette so that his men would not be disheartened by seeing that he was badly hurt: he died on a stretcher. Arthur Henderson, secretary of the Labour Party and a member of Asquith’s Cabinet, had already lost a son on the Somme.
These politicians’ sons joined the growing toll of men from across the whole of British society. Lieutenant W. M. Booth of the West Yorkshires, a Yorkshire and England cricketer, had died on the first day of the battle; Lieutenant George Butterworth, composer of the lyrical The Banks of Green Willow, had been killed at Pozières on 5 August, and Lance Sergeant H. H. Monro of the Royal Fusiliers (better known as the writer Saki) was to be killed by a shell in November, his last words: ‘Put that bloody light out.’
Sergeant Will Streets of the York and Lancaster Regiment, a grammar-school boy who became a miner to support his family and went on to be a war poet of some distinction, died trying to rescue one of his men from No Man’s Land on 1 July. In Flat Iron Copse Cemetery, under the shadow of Mametz Wood, are three pairs of brothers: Privates Ernest and Henry Philby of the Middlesex Regiment; Lieutenants Arthur and Leonard Tregaskis; and Corporal T. and Lance Corporal H. Hardwidge, all of the Welch Regiment. Lieutenant Henry Webber of the South Lancashires, hit by shellfire on 18 July, was, at sixty-eight, the oldest British officer to die on the Western Front. He had three sons serving as captains, and would proudly salute them when they met. Sergeant G. and Corporal R. F. Lee, father and son, of the same battery of field artillery, were killed on the same day and lie in the same cemetery.
There is scarcely a village in Britain not marked by the Somme. John Masefield, who was there in 1916, caught its unutterable poignancy in a brief history written shortly after it was fought.
The field of Gommecourt is heaped with the bodies of Londoners; the London Scottish lie at the Sixteen Poplars; the Yorkshires are outside Serre; the Warwickshires lie in Serre itself; all the great hill of the Hawthorn Ridge is littered with Middlesex; the Irish are at Hamel, the Kents on the Schwaben, and the Wilts and Dorset on the Leipzig. Men of all the towns and counties of England, Wales and Scotland lie scattered among the slopes from Ovillers to Maricourt. English dead pave the road to La Boisselle, the Welsh and Scotch are in Mametz. In gullies and sheltered places, where wounded could be brought during the fighting, there are little towns of dead in all these places: ‘Jolly young Fusiliers, too good to die.’66
A church near my home in Hampshire contains a cross brought back from a Somme cemetery in 1925, with a nearby inscription commemorating Lieutenant Colonel the Hon. Guy Baring, MP for Winchester, killed commanding 1/Grenadier Guards on 15 September. It had been ‘placed in the church of his beloved childhood home by his mother, brothers and sister’. Guy Baring lies in the Citadel New Military Cemetery near Fricourt, not far from Captain A. K. S. Cuninghame of 2/Grenadier Guards, the last surviving officer of his battalion who had landed in France in August 1914, and Brigadier General L. M. Phillpotts, commander Royal Artillery of 24th Division.67 So much for senior officers being safe.
I point to this tiny tip of a massive iceberg because it is important to balance the undoubted achievements of the Somme against its cost. When the battle ended in mid-November the British had shoved the Germans almost back to Bapaume (which was to have been taken in the first week). The Allies had suffered 600,000 casualties, more than two-thirds of them British. They had inflicted what Sir James Edmonds, the British official historian, estimated as 660–680,000 casualties on the Germans. Accurate comparisons are impossible because German casualty figures did not include ‘wounded whose recovery was to be expected in a reasonable time’. Many historians argue that Edmonds’s estimate