Unknown Writer From UK
Apart from the cemeteries and memorials, to the trained eye there is little sign of where the front lines were. Occasionally though a shallow depression, a crater that has remained unfilled, fragments of metal, shrapnel or pieces of barbed wire are still reminders. Scenes that to this day remain vivid to the veterans who were there.
“It was just hell on earth, the guns never stopped, shells never stopped. There wasn’t a flat bit of earth anywhere. Nothing but brown earth, shell holes and death. The noise of the shells on both sides coming over 24 hours a day. You could hear the wounded crying for help.”
The Germans occupied all the higher ground along the front lines and were extremely well dug in, protected by row after row of barbed wire. They just waited for the allied attack. On the first day alone, July 1st, 1916, there were 57,000 casualties and about 22,000 killed.
David Watson, now of Perthshire, Scotland, was in one of the early onslaughts with the Royal Scots, standing in a cornfield and looking up to where the Germans had been in high woodland, and he recalled what he had done two minutes before the attack.
“I started to say a small prayer and in the middle of it I stopped and said to myself, this is all wrong, the man I’m going over to kill could be a German protestant and he could be doing the same thing now and I said “no more” and just got over the wall and carried on. It was all flat but as soon as we got over the ridge, we were all caught. That whole wood was lined with machine guns from one end to the other. Our accompaniment was over 230 strong and only 11 privates survived. It was ridiculous, they’d just been thrown in.”
Over the following days and weeks, the casualties piled up. With the dead and wounded lying in no- man’s land, conditions were appalling.
George Worsley who’s now living in Brighton was with the West Lancashire brigade of an artillery division.
“The rats were bloated with all those corpses to eat and were crawling with lice and countless millions of bluebottles. I couldn’t exaggerate the number of bluebottles. They’d laid their eggs in the corpses and they’d come out like froth – they were the maggots which had grown.
The rats were eating their rations as well.
“Every soldier had to have 3 days rations in their pockets. Everywhere there were soldiers with ragged pockets in their overcoats. The rats had eaten their rations through their pockets whilst they were asleep.”
Jack Cross from Buckinghamshire, a sergeant in the 13th rifle brigade had to spend a day disposing of hundreds of bloated bodies turned black by the sun.
When he was 89, he returned to the scene and stood at the edge of a huge crater and recalled how they carried the corpses up to it on stretchers and tipped them over.
“The poor beggars rolled down into this crater and they covered them over with chalk as they got to the bottom. We then went back to fetch more bodies and we did that until we cleared the ground of all these poor fellows and that’s where they’re buried…. in the bottom……there.”
At this point, as he recounted the tale, Jack became overcome with grief and had to take a brief pause.
“Fancy a soldier crying!…….God rest their souls. “And then from then on, that night, we moved up onto the front line, ready to go on to the attack on the night of the 10th. We got up there, got all ready, got all the boys in the trenches, told them exactly what to do, where to go to, who to follow and about a quarter of an hour before we should have moved off – 8.45 at night it was – and those ‘Jerries’ (Germans) sent over one of those coalboxes. Oh dear, oh dear, you talk about cutting us up rough. My whole section – number 4 section in my platoon, including the corporal sat there on the firesteps with all the rifles ready to go over the top and then…..just like that….they were dead.”
Jack paused to weep.
“Good god, they were some of my best men. It threw me over the corner and then I got up and thought, “OK Jack, you’re still all in one piece boy. The whistle went off and we went over the top.
His friend Fred was with him and he’d been hit. Fred said, “It’s OK, that only caught my jacket” so off we went again but we’d only got about ten yards when….wallop! I got hit right in the hip. That lifted me up and dropped me down as if I was a sack of straw, all amongst this long grass and I thought, “you got it then, Jack”. I stuck my head down, got the old steel helmet and pulled it right down over the front and thought to myself, “you won’t put one through there if I can help it.” Anyway, the firing ceased a little bit and I hopped up and knew I’d just passed a shell hole and thought, “if I can get in there, I shall be all right” I dived into the shell hole and as I did that, I was caught in the left leg with another one.”
After two months, allied advances could only be measured in yards but then in September, a great new weapon appeared which was to help change the course of the battle.
Len Lovell saw a tank in action for the first time anywhere in the world.
“We weren’t told it was a tank because there was no such word at that time. We’d been told something was coming up – a “superman drendel” or something. We had no idea what that meant but when we saw it, we were so in awe of it when it did appear as the Germans were.
His role then with the King’s own Yorkshire light infantry was to advance behind the tank and wipe out German machine gun posts.
“We were equipped with bombs, we didn’t have rifles but if we knocked a few Germans out who were wounded we had to finish them off with what was basically a lump of lead piping. So all we had to do was keep following the tank, keep peering around the side. The Germans were as terrified of the tank as we appeared to be. They stayed there until they realised they had to get out of the way or else be squashed. The Germans got out of the way but those who couldn’t or wouldn’t – well, the tank just went over them and they were squashed.
By the end of the Battle of the Somme in November 1916, the Germans had been pushed back less than 4 miles. The cost was almost 150,000 allied dead and another 300,000 wounded.
I heard more recollections from veterans who didn’t want to be named.
“It hurts me but I’ve learned to accept that there are other generations now that don’t care tuppence about it and if you happen to mention to them that you were on the Somme, they look bored. It means nothing to them and it hurts.”
Another:-
“Once I was de-mobilized and got back onto civvy street, the people at home hadn’t the faintest idea of what the ordinary infantryman had had to put up with. They hadn’t the foggiest idea in this world. I suppose that was only natural but it’s a bit hurtful though. It’s nice to think that people do remember and that you’re appreciated for what you tried to do and I’d like to leave it at that now because I don’t see how future generations will ever appreciate what took place in World War 1.
Another:-
“I believed it was the war to end all wars and I really did believe that until 1939 when World War 2 broke out and my belief system was shattered. I have no faith in the philosophy now. Wherever there are men on this earth, they’ll fight each other.”
Unknown Writer From UK
Published U.S. Legacies June 2003
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