Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Anthony Correia
November 10, 2013
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[The illustrations in this piece come from Joe Sacco’s The Great War: July 1, 1916: The First Day of the Battle of the Somme with
the kind permission of its publisher, W.W. Norton, and the slightly
adapted text, which also appears in that book, comes originally from
Adam Hochschild’s To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 and is used with the kind permission of its publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.]
In
a country that uses every possible occasion to celebrate its
“warriors,” many have forgotten that today’s holiday originally marked a
peace agreement. Veterans Day in the United States originally was
called Armistice Day and commemorated the ceasefire which, at 11 a.m. on
November 11, 1918, ended the First World War.
Up to that point,
it had been the most destructive war in history, with a total civilian
and military death toll of roughly 20 million. Millions more had been
wounded, many of them missing arms, legs, eyes, genitals; and because of
an Allied naval blockade of the Central Powers, millions more were near
starvation: the average German civilian lost 20% of his or her body
weight during the war.
A stunned world had never experienced
anything like this. In some countries for years afterward, on November
11th, traffic, assembly lines, even underground mining machinery came to
a halt at 11 a.m. for two minutes of silence, a silence often broken,
witnesses from the 1920s reported, by the sound of women sobbing.
Like
most wars, the war of 1914-1918 was begun with the expectation of quick
victory, created more problems than it solved, and was punctuated by
moments of tragic folly. As the years have passed, one point that has
come to symbolize the illusions, the destructiveness, the hubris, the
needless deaths of the entire war -- and of other wars since then -- has
been the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
The preparations
for that battle went on for months: generals and their staffs drew up
plans in their châteaux headquarters; horses, tractors, and sweating
soldiers maneuvered thousands of big 13-ton guns into position;
reconnaissance planes swooped above the German lines; endless trains of
horse-drawn supply wagons carried artillery shells and machine gun
ammunition up to the front; hundreds of thousands of soldiers from
across the British Empire, from the Orkney Islands to the Punjab, filled
frontline trenches, reserve trenches, and support bases in the rear.
All was in preparation for the grand attack that seemed certain to
change the course of the war. And then finally on the first day of July
1916, preceded by the most massive bombardment British artillery had
ever fired, the battle began.
You
can see the results of the battle’s first day in dozens of military
cemeteries spread out across this corner of France, but perhaps the most
striking is one of the smallest, on a hillside, screened by a grove of
trees. Each gravestone has a name, rank, and serial number; 162 have
crosses and one a Star of David. When known, a man’s age is engraved on
the stone as well: 19, 22, 23, 26, 21, 20, 34. Ten of the graves simply
say, “A Soldier of the Great War, Known unto God.”
Almost
all the dead are from Britain’s Devonshire Regiment, the date on their
gravestones July 1, 1916. Most were casualties of a single German
machine gun several hundred yards from this spot, and were buried here
in a section of the frontline trench they had climbed out of that
morning. Captain Duncan Martin, 30, a company commander and an artist in
civilian life, had made a clay model of the battlefield across which
the British planned to attack. He predicted the exact place at which he
and his men would come under fire from the machine gun as they emerged
onto an exposed hillside. He, too, is here, one of some 21,000 British
soldiers killed or fatally wounded on the day of greatest bloodshed in
the history of their country’s military, before or since.
Dreams of Swift Victory
In
almost every war, it seems, the next planned offensive is seen as the
big breakthrough, the smashing, decisive blow that will pave the way to
swift victory. Midway through the First World War, troops from both
sides had been bogged down for the better part of two years in lines of
trenches that ran across northern France and a corner of Belgium. Barbed
wire and the machine gun had made impossible the war of dramatic
advances and glorious cavalry charges that the generals on both sides
had dreamed of.
To end this frustrating stalemate, the British
army planned an enormous assault for a point near where the River Somme
meandered its slow and weed-filled way through French wheat and
sugar-beet fields. A torrent of supplies began pouring into the area to
equip the half million British Empire troops involved, of whom 120,000
would attack on the first day alone. This was to be the “Big Push,” a
concentration of manpower and artillery so massive and in such a small
space that the German defenses would burst open as if hit by
floodwaters.
After the overwhelmed Germans had been bayoneted in
their trenches, it would be a matter of what General Douglas Haig, the
British commander in chief, called “fighting the Enemy in the open,” and
so battalions were trained intensively in maneuvering across trenchless
meadows. Finally, of course, streaming through the gap in the lines
would come the cavalry, three divisions’ worth. After all, hadn’t
glorious charges by men on horseback been a decisive element in warfare
for millennia?
Troops unrolled 70,000 miles of telephone cable.
Thousands more unloaded and piled ammunition in huge dumps; stripped to
the waist and sweltering in the summer heat, they dug endlessly to
construct special roads to speed supplies to the front. Fifty-five miles
of new standard-gauge railway line were built. With as many British
soldiers crammed into the launching area as the population of a
good-sized city, new wells had to be drilled and dozens of miles of
water pipe laid. No detail was forgotten.
British
troops, the plan went, would move forward across no-man’s-land in
successive waves. Everything was precise: each wave would advance in a
continuous line 100 yards in front of the next, at a steady pace of 100
yards a minute. How were they to be safe from German machine gun fire?
Simple: the pre-attack artillery bombardment would destroy not just the
Germans’ barbed wire but the bunkers that sheltered their machine guns.
How could this not be when there was one artillery piece for every 17
yards of front line, all of which would rain a total of a million and a
half shells down on the German trenches? And if that weren’t enough,
once British troops climbed out of their trenches, a final “creeping
barrage” of bursting shells would precede them, a moving curtain of fire
riddling with shrapnel any surviving Germans who emerged from
underground shelters to try to fight.
The plan for the first day’s
attack on July 1, 1916, was 31 pages long and its map included the
British names with which the German trenches had already been
rechristened. Preparations this thorough were hard to conceal, and there
were occasional unnerving signs that the German troops knew almost as
much about them as the British. When one unit moved into position, it
found a sign held up from the German trenches: WELCOME TO THE 29TH
DIVISION.
Several weeks before the attack, 168 officers who were
graduates of Eton met for an Old Etonian dinner at the Hotel Godbert in
Amiens, a French city behind the lines. In Latin, they toasted their
alma mater -- “Floreat Etona!” -- and raised their voices in the school
song, “Carmen Etonense.” Enlisted men entertained themselves in other
ways. A haunting piece of documentary film footage from these months,
taken from a Red Cross barge moving down a canal behind the lines, shows
hundreds of Allied soldiers stripped completely bare, wading, bathing,
or sunning themselves on the canal bank, smiling and waving at the
camera. Without helmets and uniforms, it is impossible to tell their
nationality; their naked bodies mark them only as human beings.
Riding
a black horse and with his usual escort of lancers, General Haig
inspected his divisions as they rehearsed their attacks on practice
fields where white tapes on the ground stood for the German trenches. On
June 20th, the commander in chief wrote to his wife, “The situation is
becoming more favourable to us.” On June 22nd he added, “I feel that
every step in my plan has been taken with the Divine help.” On June
30th, as the great artillery barrage had been thundering for five days,
Haig wrote in his diary, “The men are in splendid spirits.... The wire
has never been so well cut, nor the Artillery preparation so thorough.”
For good measure, the British released clouds of deadly chlorine gas
toward the German lines.
As
it grew close to zero hour, 7:30 a.m. on July 1st, men detonated 10
enormous mines planted by British miners tunneling deep beneath the
German trenches. Near the village of La Boisselle, the crater from one
remains, a stark, gaping indentation in the surrounding farmland; even
partly filled in by a century of erosion, it is still 55 feet deep and
220 feet across.
When the artillery barrage reached its crescendo,
224,221 shells in the last sixty-five minutes, the rumble could be
heard as far away as Hampstead Heath in London. More shells were fired
by the British this week than they had used in the entire first 12
months of the war; some gunners bled from the ears after seven days of
nonstop firing. At a forest near Gommecourt, entire trees were uprooted
and tossed in the air by the shelling and the forest itself set on fire.
Soldiers
of the First Somerset Light Infantry sat on the parapet of their
trench, cheering at the tremendous explosions. Officers issued a strong
ration of rum to the men about to head into no-man’s-land. Captain W.P.
Nevill of the Eighth East Surrey Battalion gave each of his four
platoons a soccer ball and promised a prize to whichever one first
managed to kick a ball into the German trench. One platoon painted its
ball with the legend:
THE GREAT EUROPEAN CUP
THE FINAL
EAST SURREYS V. BAVARIANS
Throughout
the British Isles, millions of people knew a great attack was to begin.
“The hospital received orders to clear out all convalescents and
prepare for a great rush of wounded,” remembered the writer Vera
Brittain, working as a nurse’s aide in London. “We knew that already a
tremendous bombardment had begun, for we could feel the vibration of the
guns... Hour after hour, as the convalescents departed, we added to the
long rows of waiting beds, so sinister in their white, expectant
emptiness.”
“God, God, Where’s the Rest of the Boys?”
Haig
waited anxiously in his forward headquarters at the Château de
Beauquesne, 10 miles behind the battlefield. Then, after a full week of
continual fire, the British guns abruptly fell silent.
When
whistles blew at 7:30 a.m., the successive waves of troops began their
planned 100-yards-a-minute advance. Each man moved slowly under more
than 60 pounds of supplies -- 200 bullets, grenades, shovel, two days’
food and water, and more. But when those soldiers actually clambered up
the trench ladders and over the parapet, they quickly discovered
something appalling. The multiple belts of barbed wire in front of the
German trenches and the well-fortified machine gun emplacements were
still largely intact.
Officers looking through
binocular-periscopes had already suspected as much. Plans for any
attack, however, have tremendous momentum; rare is the commander willing
to recognize that something is awry. To call off an offensive requires
bravery, for the general who does so risks being thought a coward. Haig
was not such a man. Whistles blew, men cheered, Captain Nevill’s company
of East Surreys kicked off its four soccer balls. The soldiers hoped to
stay alive -- and sometimes for something more: troops of the First
Newfoundland Regiment knew that a prominent young society woman back
home had promised to marry the first man in the regiment to win the
Empire’s highest medal, the Victoria Cross.
The week-long
bombardment, it turned out, had been impressive mainly for its noise.
More than one out of four British shells were duds that buried
themselves in the earth, exploding, if at all, only when struck by some
unlucky French farmer’s plow years or decades later. Two-thirds of the
shells fired were shrapnel, virtually useless in destroying machine gun
emplacements made of steel and reinforced concrete or stone. Nor could
shrapnel shells, which scattered light steel balls, destroy the dense
belts of German barbed wire, many yards thick, unless they burst at just
the right height. But their fuses were wildly unreliable, and usually
they exploded only after they had already plummeted into the earth,
destroying little and embedding so much metal in the ground that
soldiers trying to navigate through darkness or smoke sometimes found
their compasses had ceased to work.
The remaining British shells
were high-explosive ones, which could indeed destroy a German machine
gun bunker, but only if they hit it with pinpoint accuracy. When guns
were firing from several miles away, this was almost impossible. German
machine gun teams had waited out the bombardment in dugouts as deep as
40 feet below the surface and supplied with electricity, water, and
ventilation. In one of the few places where British troops did reach the
German front line on July 1, they found the electric light in a dugout
still on.
Unaccountably, an underground mine had exploded beneath
the German lines 10 minutes before zero hour, a clear signal that the
attack was about to begin. Then, like a final warning, the remaining
mines went off at 7:28 a.m., followed by a two-minute wait to allow the
debris -- blown thousands of feet into the air -- to fall back to earth
before British troops climbed out of their trenches to advance. Those
two minutes gave German machine gunners time to run up the ladders and
stairways from their dugouts and man their fortified posts, of which
there were roughly a thousand in the sector of the line under attack.
During the two minutes, the British could hear bugles summoning German
riflemen and machine gunners to their positions.
“They came on at a
steady easy pace as if expecting to find nothing alive in our front
trenches,” recalled a German soldier of the British advance. “...When
the leading British line was within 100 yards, the rattle of [German]
machine guns and rifle fire broke out from along the whole line... Red
rockets sped up into the blue sky as a signal to the artillery, and
immediately afterwards a mass of shells from the German batteries in
[the] rear tore through the air and burst among the advancing lines.”
The
Germans, like the British, had plenty of artillery pieces; these were
under camouflage netting and had simply not been used during the
preceding weeks, so as not to reveal their positions to British
aircraft. Now they fired their deadly shrapnel, whose effects the
Germans could see: “All along the line men could be seen throwing their
arms into the air and collapsing never to move again. Badly wounded
rolled about in their agony... with... cries for help and the last
screams of death.”
Plans for the orderly march forward in line
abreast were quickly abandoned as men separated into small groups and
sought the shelter of hillocks and shell holes. But there was no
question of the hard-hit British troops turning back, for each battalion
had soldiers designated as “battle police,” herding any stragglers
forward. “When we got to the German wire I was absolutely amazed to see
it intact, after what we had been told,” remembered one British private.
“The colonel and I took cover behind a small bank but after a bit the
colonel raised himself on his hands and knees to see better. Immediately
he was hit on the forehead by a single bullet.”
Because the
artillery bombardment had destroyed so little of the barbed wire,
British soldiers had to bunch up to get through the few gaps they could
find -- making themselves an even more conspicuous target. Many soldiers
died when their clothing, especially the loose kilts of the Scotsmen,
caught on the wire. “Only three out of our company got past there,”
recalled a private of the Fourth Tyneside Scottish Battalion. “There was
my lieutenant, a sergeant and myself.... The officer said, ‘God, God,
where’s the rest of the boys?’”
The vaunted “creeping barrage”
crept forward according to the timetable -- and then continued to creep
off uselessly into the far distance long after British troops who were
supposed to be following behind its protective cover had been pinned
down by the tangles of uncut German wire. The cavalry waited behind the
British lines, but in vain. Some of those who had survived in
no-man’s-land tried, after dark, to crawl back to their own trenches,
but even then the continual traversing of German machine gun fire sent
up showers of sparks as bullets hit the British barbed wire.
Of
the 120,000 British troops who went into battle on July 1, 1916, more
than 57,000 were dead or wounded before the day was over -- nearly two
casualties for every yard of the front; 19,000 were killed, most of them
within the first disastrous hour, and some 2,000 more would die in aid
stations or hospitals later. There were an estimated 8,000 German
casualties. Because they led their troops out of the trenches, the toll
was heaviest among the officers who took part in the attack,
three-quarters of whom were killed or wounded. These included many who
had attended the Old Etonian dinner a few weeks before: more than 30
Eton men lost their lives on July 1st. Captain Nevill of the East
Surreys, who had distributed the soccer balls, was fatally shot through
the head in the first few minutes.
The First Newfoundland
Regiment, awaiting its Victoria Cross winner and the young woman who had
promised herself as his reward, was virtually wiped out. There were 752
men who climbed out of their trenches to advance toward the skeletal
ruins of an apple orchard covered by German machine gun fire; by the
day’s end 684 were dead, wounded, or missing, including every single
officer. The German troops the Newfoundlanders attacked did not suffer a
single casualty.
Attacking soldiers had been ordered not to tend
injured comrades, but to leave them for stretcher bearers who would
follow. The dead and wounded, however, included hundreds of stretcher
bearers themselves, and there were nowhere near enough men to carry the
critically injured to first aid posts in time.
Stretchers ran out; some
wounded were carried off two to a stretcher or on sheets of corrugated
iron whose edges ravaged the bearers’ fingers. Many wounded who lived
through the first day never made it off the battlefield. For weeks
afterward their fellow soldiers came upon them in shell holes, where
they had crawled for shelter, taken out their pocket Bibles, and wrapped
themselves in their waterproof groundsheets to die, in pain and alone.
In
other ways as well, the terrible day took its toll after the fact. One
battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel E.T.F. Sandys, having seen more
than 500 of his men killed or wounded during that day, wrote to a fellow
officer two months later, “I have never had a moment’s peace since July
1st.” Then, in a London hotel room, he shot himself.
A Quiet Trench
Engraved
on a stone plaque in the small cemetery holding the Devonshire
Regiment’s casualties from this day are the words survivors carved on a
wooden sign when they first buried their dead:
The Devonshires held this trench
The Devonshires hold it still
In
the cemetery’s visitors’ book, on a few pages the ink of the names and
remarks has been smeared by raindrops -- or was it tears? “Paid our
respects to 3 of our townsfolk.” “Sleep on, boys.” “Lest we forget.”
“Thanks, lads.” “Gt. Uncle thanks, rest in peace.”
Only one visitor strikes a different note: “Never again.”
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