The Somme 1916

The First of July

Ed Skelding

• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473884762
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: History

The Walking the Western Front series started in 2012 with the release of two films on the Ypres Salient. Directed by acclaimed film maker Ed Skelding with guest historian Nigel Cave, the series of films offered a detailed tour of the battlefields, explori

CHAPTER ONE

ALBERT

The sun is setting over Albert. Banners of the richest and palest hues float out, they ravish the eye and melt the heart. I turn from them to look out over the east. All along the horizon gun-flashes quiver as if some fearful aurora borealis were continually appearing. Every now and then huge explosions send up pillars of smoke as though the internal fires of the earth had broken through. It is an inferno. Can anything live in that? Heaven on one side: Hell on the other. One should not hope to come out of that alive.’

The words of Lieutenant Max Plowman of the 10th West Yorks echoed the thoughts of many men who would soon be committed to a desperate life or death struggle. The series of bloody events that was the 1916 Battle of the Somme would claim more than a million Britsh, French and German casualties in less than five months.

With the passing of time, as the centenary of the great battle draws near, an ever increasing number of visitors come to visit the battlefields. Most begin their journey in the town of Albert, once called Ancre, after the river which passes through it. Before the First World War, it supported a small but thriving industrial community, with a population of some seven and a half thousand souls. With the onset of war most decided on the safer option of leaving, while a few stayed behind to look after their property or make a living selling ‘small comforts’ to the troops.

Following their failure to break through the French and British forces on the River Marne, and the collapse of the Schlieffen Plan to take Paris, the Germans fell back to form the line of defence that became the ‘strip of murdered nature’ - the Western Front.

As elsewhere, German engineers had chosen the best of the high ground on which to build their defences. On the Somme the Germans made good use of their time, constructing a series of formidable redoubts, built on the ground taken following their first brief encounter with the French in late September and early October 1914. It meant that before the battle began, the Germans had almost two years to construct and perfect the trenches and deep dug-outs that confounded the British on 1 July 1916.

Only a mile and a half behind the front line, Albert had the misfortune of being, at various times, the target for the artillery of both sides. It was first targeted by the Germans on 29 September 1914, when they directed fire onto any buildings which might have given shelter to the enemy. The pounding was destined to continue for the next four years, gradually reducing the place to rubble.

Known as ‘Albert’ (as in Uncle Albert) to the Tommies during the war, the town is dominated by the basilica of Notre-Dame-de-Brebières, a place of worship and pilgrimage which dates from 1897. It was an early target for the German artillery, the brick belfry towering to more than 200 feet offering an ideal observation post to whoever occupied it. What gave it its special place in the memory of the men who passed through here was the sixteen foot high gilt figure of the Virgin Mary, holding the infant Jesus aloft in her outstretched arms. In January 1915 it was hit by a German shell, leaving her hanging at a precarious angle.

 

For the British soldiers who came here, the Virgin took on an almost mystical significance and led to a saying among them that when she fell the war would end. As it happened, their predictions were only slightly out, as the tower and the figure were both destroyed on 16 April 1918 by British artillery, after the town had been taken by the Germans as part of their spring offensives, their last great attempt to win the war.

This account of a soldier’s eye view of Albert on the eve of the battle comes from Private Tommy King of the 16th Battalion The Royal Scots:

‘It was pretty dark by 9 and we had another half hour’s tramp before we reached the little town from which I write. I will call it ‘A’, although ‘R’ for rubble would serve just as well, for it has been badly knocked about. Even the kirk has not escaped the Fritzes’ wrath. The drumfire is much louder here, for we are not far from the front.’

When I first came to Albert in 1992, I was struck by the ‘old-worldliness’ of the place, the sense of history sitting heavy on its shoulders. To my eye, things have changed only a little since then. Now, there are many more tours carrying battlefield pilgrims and students, coming here to learn about one of the great set-piece battles of the First World War. The basilica has had a facelift and a museum attached. Otherwise, the town has stayed pretty much in a time-warp. There are the cafes, bars and restaurants that I have frequented over the years, and the languid atmosphere that makes the place so very French.

This photograph, taken in 1993, shows the demarcation stone on the western outskirts of Albert on the road that leads to Amiens. It marks the spot where the Germans were halted in their headlong advance during the March 1918 Battle of the Somme; having re-taken all of the ground that they had lost in the 1916 battle, this was where they were halted. This was as far as they got. On top of the stone, the helmet of a Poilu, the French Tommy, the ‘poor bloody infantry’, who fought and died to keep their country safe from the invader. The demarcation stones found along the Western Front in France and Flanders show where the Germans reached their furthest point, each with a French, British or Belgian helmet.

The same can be said for the villages of the Somme. Overwhelmed by the events that overtook them in 1916, many became familiar names to Britain and her Dominions, notorious as places of hardship and death.

While the ground continues to gives up rusting weaponry, much of it still dangerous and best left alone, it is considerably less common than when I first came here. I recall an occasion in 1994, when researching the quarry near the village of Guillemont with my ever patient wife Margaret, trying to locate the area where Noel Chavasse won the first of his two Victoria Crosses. At that time, the quarry was only some ten or twelve feet deep with a bank of chalk along its northern edge. My maps showed me that it had been a German strongpoint in front of the village and that it was likely that such a spot would have been part of their fortifications.

This photograph shows the quarry as it looked in 1993. At that time, evidence of the German occupation in 1916 could still be found.

Walking over the base of the quarry soon gave up a number of items…combination cutlery spoons and forks, horseshoes, nails, water bottles and the other detritus of what looked like a sizeable camp. Now curious about what else might be here, I began to explore. Climbing up the face of the quarry to investigate the soft soil along the lip, my efforts soon revealed a piece of rusting metal; with little effort, I continued my excavation and to my surprise, here was a German rifle, with the bullets still in the magazine.

It soon became apparent that this was a trench that had seen much action. Twenty years later, when filming with Nigel Cave, I took the rifle back, to film it and the location for the Chavasse story; as it happened, the whole place had been ploughed over by the local farmer. No trace of the quarry where I had found so much evidence of the German occupation remained; only a chalky scar on the landscape gave any indication that this had once been a very dangerous place to be in 1916.

Twenty years later looking from the same spot but in the opposite direction towards the village of Guillemont, all traces of the quarry have now all but vanished.

It was finds like that, and the stories of how much hardware was still being found, that brought home the reality of the slaughter that took place over these now quiet woods and fields. On many of my first visits here, I stayed with Mike and Julie Renshaw at Les Galets, near the village of Auchonvillers. Mike told me the remarkable story of a German identity disc he found in Mametz Wood. He recalled that while walking through the wood, as part of the research he was doing for a book in the Battleground Europe series, he found a small fragment of a German identity disc.

On my first visit to the village of Pozières I met the delightful Josianne Outrequin who kept the local cafe – Les Routiers, nicknamed ‘le sardine’, after the celebrated house speciality. After a coffee and introductions, she led me down to the cellar where her husband had assembled a large collection of battlefield memorabilia. She insisted that I take the rusting remains of a German rifle as a memento, explaining that it had been found when they were doing some building work. I was happy to accept, and thanked her for her kindness. It remains part of my modest collection. The cafe has changed hands more than once since then; now, as Le Tommy, it is a popular watering-hole for the battlefield tourist.

It provided only a couple of letters to tell anything about the soldier who wore it; imagine his reaction then, when walking in the same area some time later, a glimmer of something at the base of a tree caught his eye. On closer inspection, and to his lasting amazement, he had found the missing part of the disc, which now lay in his hand. When the two pieces were joined they gave up the name Willi Diel, aged 19, from Wiesbaden. It was truly remarkable that the two pieces had been found at all, never mind so far apart in time and place. The photograph of the disc can be seen in Mike’s book, Mametz Wood, on page 126.

CHAPTER TWO

THE GRANDSTAND

The location of The Grandstand, above the village of Dernancourt, a short distance west of Albert, was where General Rawlinson and his staff came to view the opening of the Battle of the Somme early on the morning of 1 July. I first came here in 1992 to research a series for Tyne Tees Television – The Somme 1916 with my presenter Cliff Pettit; an excellent guide, he provided me with a wealth of information both for the chronology of the battle and for the locations that would illustrate our story.

During the making of this and subsequent films cove...