Boy Soldiers of the Great War (31 page)

The two battalions of the Barnsley Pals had been in and out of the line on several occasions and the men, including Frank, could not help but notice the wire in front of the German lines which would have to be cut if the attack was to be a success. Frank remembered:

Their wire was about four times as wide as ours. The quantity of wire they had, heavens, you couldn’t have got through that in a month of Sundays. Our wire was narrow compared to theirs. When they were saying, ‘Our guns will tear up the wire so that
you can get through’, I thought, ‘By God, I hope so,’ but no. We knew all the time we were in for a bashing and we couldn’t do anything about it. We weren’t daft.

Len Thomas had also heard the optimistic predictions. On 30 June he wrote:

In the evening our officer Lt Paine told us a breakthrough was expected, the cavalry would go clean through and at 5 p.m. next day, 1st, the guns were to be dismounted and taken to a position about seven miles up the Bapaume Road but not expected to be put into position as the war would now become mobile. We hoped so, but many were very dubious, especially about moving …

As part of the final preparations, battalions such as the Barnsley Pals had been issued with a diamond or triangle of tin to be worn on the back of their haversacks. Although the weather had been poor, 1 July was forecast to be hot and dry, a perfect summer’s day. In these conditions the triangles would work well, reflecting the sun’s rays to the RFC, who would be circling overhead looking for indications of the extent of the advance.

The triangles were the lightest of the extra equipment that Frank Lindley would carry into action.

We had entrenching tools strapped low across our fronts. They should have fitted at the back but we used to strap them across the front to protect our privates from a bayonet thrust or a piece of shell or owt. We were loaded down with stuff. We had a Mills bomb in each pocket and a bandolier around us, the pouches full of ammo. I had a telephone slung on a leather strap – and they weighed a ton – and a coil of wire as well as my gun.

In the hours of darkness, the battalions were brought forward, crowding into the front line and support trenches. As they filed
up the communication trenches, they were frequently held up. Frank recalled:

As we stood there, one of these German shells we called ‘coal boxes’ dropped on top and covered us all. We scattered ourselves a bit. My knees were red-raw with the soil hitting me. The next bloke to me started shaking, jibbering like an idiot. He was absolutely unhinged, couldn’t do a thing. We had to bypass him and travel on because they were shoving us forward.

They were shelling us in the rear. I was cheek by jowl with one of our sergeants, Sergeant Jones, and this salvo of shrapnel came right over the top of us and rattled on our hats. Some must have gone down the back of the sergeant and he was done. Blood was coming out between his back and his haversack, and had bespattered me. I don’t know if he was dead.

Just a few hundred yards from Frank Lindley, the 11th East Lancashire Regiment was filing into its front line. Better known to posterity as the Accrington Pals, these men were drawn primarily from the town itself or close by, from places such as Chorley, Blackburn and Burnley. For the best part of four months, the battalion had been out in Egypt undergoing intensive training, but in March they returned and headed for France and the trenches near the Somme village of Serre. In April they received a new officer, Second Lieutenant Reginald Battersby from Blackley in Manchester – present at the front courtesy of significant string-pulling back home. Now, as a sixteen-year-old, he was in the trenches preparing to lead his platoon over the top in the third wave of the attack.

Reginald was not the only sixteen-year-old officer at the front that day. Second Lieutenant Philip Lister was serving with the 10th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (KOYLIs), a battalion due to attack in the first assault. Born on 30 July 1899, Philip had applied for a temporary commission in January 1915, his almost
infantile handwriting evidently not impeding his application. He had trained for a year before being sent in a draft of seven officers to join the KOYLIs in June 1916 as the battalion made final preparations for the offensive. During the hours before the attack, they were holding trenches no more than a mile to the south of the German-held village of La Boiselle, and so were in a prime position to see the biggest mine explode a couple of minutes before the signal to go.

As these young lads began to move up to the line, Cecil Lewis was making for the aerodrome hangars. He wanted to make lastminute checks to his aircraft, to ensure that all would be well when he took off in a few hours’ time. He turned in to get some rest but in the early hours was up again, checking once more as a final precaution.

Cecil had been detailed to be the first flight up, and would therefore have a grandstand view of the attack, which would go in at 7.30 a.m. It was fully daylight when he took off, and as he flew over the battlefield he could see the devastation resulting from the week-long bombardment.

Square miles of country were ripped and blasted to a pock-marked desolation. Trenches had been obliterated, and still, as we watched, the gunfire continued, in a crescendo of intensity. Even in the air, at four thousand feet, above the roar of the engine, the drumming of firing and bursting shells throbbed in our ears.

All the battalions were now waiting to go. Frank Lindley recalled:

When you stood on the fire step, your head was just over the parapet. One or two of the blokes got dinted by snipers. One in particular, he must have been dozing, because all of a sudden he came crashing down on me and his hat had a great slice in it at the side. I don’t know if it’d done his skull, as there was no sign of blood, but he was out.

As Frank waited for the whistles to go, Cecil Lewis was flying up and down the line. He had been warned against flying too close to La Boiselle, where two mines were due to go up, but he would be able to watch from a safe distance.

We were over Thiepval and turned south to watch the mines. As we sailed down above it all, came the final moment. Zero!

At Boiselle the earth heaved and flashed, a tremendous and magnificent column rose up into the sky. There was an ear-splitting roar, drowning all the guns, flinging the machine sideways in the repercussing air. The earthy column rose, higher and higher to almost four thousand feet. There it hung, or seemed to hang, for a moment in the air, like a silhouette of some great cypress tree, then fell away in a widening cone of dust and debris.

In the trenches, the ground rocked violently. Frank Lindley was the best part of two miles from another mine placed under a German redoubt at Beaumont Hamel.

The birds were singing in the copses around. It was a beautiful day, beautiful. We had this morning chorus and then it all happened, just like a flash. We were stood there waiting, ready for the officer to blow his whistle, and our barrage lifted and then bang! a great big mine went up on the right-hand side. We saw it going sky high, one huge mass of soil. It shouldn’t have gone up till we were on the top because it alerted the Germans and they were up and waiting for us and when we attacked they cut us to ribbons, totally ripped us to pieces.

To the right of the Barnsley and Accrington Pals were the Leeds Pals, or the 15th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment as they were officially designated. Like all other units, they had their fair share of underage boys, including several who had enlisted at fourteen or fifteen. Horace Iles was one of those boys, a lad
from Woodhouse in Leeds. He was now sixteen, and had already been wounded once, hit by shrapnel when the Germans had bombarded the Pals’ trenches in May 1916. He had been sent to hospital in England and had not been back long with his platoon in B Company. As they moved up the line, several men had been wounded by German shelling, but they finally reached the front line and were ready to go. All the men knew what they had to do. They must sweep over the German front, second, third and fourth lines to the south of the village of Serre, and then consolidate the gains.

As the debris settled from the mine explosions, tens of thousands of men left their trenches and went forward. The Barnsley Pals attacked up a rise towards the German trenches. Frank Lindley recalled that it was not a steep rise, but to them that morning, laden with equipment, it looked like a mountain. Even as the advance began, casualties were falling.

One bloke was climbing out, and he’d got hold of the top of the ladder and this shell must have chopped him right across the middle. It left his feet and the bottom half in the trench and all his insides were hanging down the blinking trench wall. It was a shocking sight, looking at that lot.

Cyril José, who had been out in France for a year, was seventeen. He had gone over the top just yards away from the smaller of the two explosions on the edge of La Boiselle, following his platoon officer, Lieutenant Eric Gould. Cyril had gone over with his friend Norton Hedge, another underage volunteer and a veteran of eighteen months’ fighting. This was Norton’s fourth time over the top. In two letters home, written just after the attacks, Cyril described the next few minutes in his usual upbeat style.

We were told it would be a walk-over … Of course we might expect to be sniped at by a stray German naturally! We would
advance, take the first line, go on to village of Ovillers then on to 3rd & 4th lines to village of Pozieres. If we met any opposition here we would dig in and other regiments would come through us. Quite simple!

Well, we went over … with the feeling in us of the song ‘Over the top, over the top & never come back again.’ Some people say you go absolutely mad. You don’t! I’ve never felt so cool & matter-of-fact in my life. I was surprised. But I was still more surprised at the reception. You know what a hailstorm is. Well, that’s about the chance one stood of dodging the bullets, shrapnel
etc.
Of course it must have been that stray sniper!! ‘Johnny’ [Cyril’s name for a German], always considerate, ordered me to have a rest when I had got about 20 yards from his parapet.

Cyril had been shot through the left shoulder five minutes after going over the top. He had done comparatively well, for he had lost touch with Norton Hedge, and his officer, Lieutenant Gould, had been killed soon after, leaving Cyril to cross almost 800 yards of no-man’s-land before he was hit.

At Serre, the German trenches were much closer, but Frank Lindley was struggling even to reach the enemy wire.

I was in the first wave on the extreme left. We scrambled on to the fire step and then on the top, when I glanced over. They were all going on our right. There was nothing on our left. There was no cheering, we just ambled across, you hadn’t a thought; you were so addled with the noise. Second Lieutenant Hirst was next to me. He had just got wed before we came away, and was a grand chap, but it wasn’t long before he got his head knocked off.

Out of the corner of your eye you could see the boys going down but there was no going back, they had what we called ‘whippers-in’ with pistols and they could shoot you if anybody came back, so we moved forward as best we could, it was implanted in our heads. You could hear the bullets whistling past and our lads were
going down flop, flop, flop in their waves, just as though they’d all gone to sleep. As I laid flat out there in No Man’s Land, up on top jumped one of our whippers-in with pistol ready, and we were all laid out in shell holes, and he said, ‘Come on, come on.’ He hadn’t gone two yards before he went up in the air, riddled.

Cyril’s relative success was now his potential undoing. In the minutes before he was wounded, he had advanced far enough into no-man’s-land to make it impossible to return, and he lay close to a number of dead and wounded men. Those who were unhurt were now hiding in shell holes and where possible helping the wounded. Every man carried what was known as a first field dressing, held in a little pocket lightly stitched in the front of the tunic. As Cyril was incapable of bandaging himself, another man opened Cyril’s coat and retrieved his dressing, placing the bandage against the wound. This quickly became saturated with blood and another bandage was applied, but with the same result. Cyril threw away both bandages and let the wound bleed, hoping it might clot of its own accord. He lay back, and in doing so could well have seen Cecil Lewis’s plane as the young pilot flew up and down the same part of the line looking for evidence of progress. There was little to suggest the German lines had been penetrated at all. Cecil wrote:

My logbook for July 1st contains the following entries. ‘From our point of view an entire failure. Not a single ground sheet of Battalion or Brigade Headquarters was seen. Only two flares were lit on the whole of both Corps fronts.’ … I was bitterly disappointed.

At Serre, Frank was trying to advance but the situation was hopeless.

We had to dodge from shell hole to shell hole to try to get through. All their wire was piled up in great coils, tremendous, and there
was just the odd gap. As soon as you made for that gap it was R-R-R-R-R, all you could do was dive in a shell hole, and the ground was pitted with shell holes because our guns had tried to bust all their wire up. Bullets were like a swarm of bees round you, you could almost feel them plucking at your clothes. Them that made for the gaps in their wire were all piled up where the machine guns just laid them out. Some were hanging on the wire, but it was no good. It was pure murder so we tried picking the Jerries off because they were on the trench top, some of them, cheering their mates on while our lads on the wire were hanging like rags. Some I recognized, ‘that’s so and so,’ I thought, but one burst of one of their big machine guns and they were in bits. Arms and legs were flying all over.

I didn’t know anybody in the shell holes I got in. We were all mixed up. There was no conversation, it was self-preservation, dive in and risk what you got. The final shell hole we got in was the finish, a whiz bang came over us and split, I never heard it coming. Shrapnel went right through my thigh and took my trousers in with it, I looked down and there was blood running freely and another bit of metal sticking out.