The assault might have proved more successful if they had been taught to stay alive — as all good soldiers should be — if they had dashed across at night, for example, with no equipment except a shovel and a few grenades, which would have achieved just as much, if not a great deal more. At such a time the British Army should have called on a nation of poachers instead of a nation of cricketers. It was war, not sport, but the casuality lists on this day or perhaps at some other time might have included the following group of names — though it was never sure whether they were killed, wounded, or simply missing:
L/Cpl John Cade
7th Buffs
Pte Robert Hood
11th Sherwood Foresters
Pte Edward Ludd
5th Sherwood Foresters
Sgt William Posters
7th Sherwood Foresters
Cpt George Swing
7th Royal West Kent
Pte Richard Turpin
1st Essex
Cpl Walter Tyler
2nd Essex
Their demise was not reported in The Times, though in their disappearance they were not divided.
38
After the opening of the Somme battle it was plain that the British people were willing to accept the appalling casualties of their soldiers, and that the soldiers themselves would take whatever massacres were foisted on them by the incompetents in control. Such passive attitudes allowed the offensive to continue, and led to the Passchendaele carnage of the following year. No great voice was lifted against this internal ripping to pieces of a country.
The British were all right as long as they did the attacking and were being shot down or blown to pieces. It was as if casualties actually kept up their morale — at least one is led to believe so by those who did not do the fighting. It was the staff officers’ war. They stayed alive, and as such the war belonged to them. Those officers who did die perished willingly in the public school spirit. For the old men in command it was a game of tactics in which live pieces were used, though it soon degenerated into a penny dreadful for those other ranks who in their gloom and despair did not know how to end it except by getting killed themselves.
On the Somme the strongest part of the German line was selected for attack. For this reason the Germans doubted that it would after all be made there, in spite of the preparations. The clues that it might be the spot chosen could be seen as a feint, so the British prided themselves on having achieved strategical surprise, a useless advantage when the defences are impregnable. But the Germans held themselves ready, in case it should after all turn out to be the real thing.
The British commanders did not know how to keep the times of their attack secret, as if the more dead and wounded lying between the lines, the more successful the battle. There was no such thing as surprise, not only because of lengthy bombardments which advertised an attack loud and clear for days if not weeks beforehand but because it was always possible to trick the exact date of the offensive out of the British Army staff.
The French would not unreasonably want to know when their villages were going to be in danger from artillery replies and counterattack. But at the same time there may have been someone among them able to transmit information across to the Germans. The British staff, scornful of petty secrecy, were dangerous romantics who had never heard of spies. In any case, British grit was always supposed to triumph in the end, in spite of corpse-filled shell-holes, or bodies hanging like scarecrows on the barbed wire to rot in full view of eighteen-year-olds who had not yet ‘gone over the top’ but were soon to do so.
In February 1916 the inhabitants of Meaulte, close to the Somme and behind the front line, were ordered to evacuate their village, since they would be in peril when the big attack started. But the inhabitants did not want to leave, in spite of the danger, protesting that they would not only lose their livestock but, more important, the whole of the present year’s crop.
They sent an eloquent and moving petition to King George V in London, explaining their feelings on the matter. One of the king’s secretaries passed it back to Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander in France, who had the magnanimity to allow the French villagers to stay where they were, warning them however that they must remain in their houses for three days from July 1st. Months in advance, therefore, he had given away the exact date of the British attack. From then on the Germans began to strengthen their line which, even after 400,000 casualties and five months later, the British failed to break.
Yet on the first day of the Somme battle the British Army was at the height of its quality regarding the skill and spirit of the men. This was never to be regained, at any time during the rest of the war. It was wasted away in ten minutes. Though the soldiers of the Somme were only half-trained compared to the pre-war peacetime army, they could fire their rifles generally at a more rapid rate than those who came later. As volunteers they possessed ‘dash’ and intelligence, while those conscripts of the next two years became dogged and despairing, and tried to stay alive longer, though they had little chance of doing so. It was admitted by the staff that they did not have the quality of the men who went down on the Somme.
The blow finished Britain as a world power, and as a country fit for any hero to live in. The heroes and their heroic spirit was dead. If they had survived they would indeed have insisted after the war that England be made habitable for them. But such an insistence would have disturbed the old order too fundamentally for its comfort, which with sadistic prescience saw to it therefore that those heroes did not outlast them.
The men of the Somme did not die because they wanted to perpetuate the class structure of English cities and the English countryside, nor the power of those five per cent, who owned ninety-five per cent of the country’s wealth. As they went up to the front they thought some unwritten and unspoken agreement existed that this would be done away with for ever if they took part with all their might and main in the war.
They did not fight for England as it was. They fought to change England, as much as, if not more so than, to protect their country from the Germans with whom, deep down, they had no quarrel. The fact is that their deaths (which they did not expect) only made sure that the England they disliked would remain in the ascendant. In that sense they actually betrayed their country by going to fight for it. But it is difficult not to succumb to treachery when it is callous enough.
39
Reading the official history of the Battle of the Somme one is struck by the vast preparations that went on for months beforehand, of the immense labour of building roads, tramways, and narrow-gauge railways through the otherwise empty fields, and the erecting of tents, depots, and huts; the hauling of ammunition and guns, the sinking of wells for water, the siting and equipping of hospitals to receive the wounded, the allotting of so many trains per division for its supplies — all this meticulous timetable planning to create a superb and efficient factory for getting 300,000 men up to the front and into slaughter, an organization that covered the whole of northeastern France. The only trouble was that it didn’t work.
There were nearly a million and a half British soldiers in France and Belgium on June 30th, 1916, holding ninety miles of front, making an average of ten men of all arms to defend every yard of ground facing the Germans. On most sectors of the line this was much less, since the proportion on those parts where an offensive was being prepared — e.g. the Somme — had to be more or less double.