Read Forgotten Voices of the Somme Online
Authors: Joshua Levine
Tags: #History, #Europe, #General, #Military, #World War I
Every morning when a runner could come to our lines, he was asked what are the casualties today. It's rather cold to think that we hoped that the casualties would be heavy, so that we could leave this hell. It was hell. It was really hell. When we left Verdun, the remains of my troop were gathered, and we had to walk from Verdun to
Bar-le-Duc
along the
Voie Sacrée
, which was a stream of mud, on which we walked with many difficulties, because there was many holes and bumps and lorries going up and down. We had to walk along, and we were very weary, thirsty, hungry but all the same we could walk miles and miles because we were escaping from that hell – and very happy to escape.
All the same, during those ten days of walking, we had no sleep, no rest at all. We just went on without much thinking. Arriving at the middle of Voie Sacrée, we were told that
General Petain
was there. His habit was to stand on a little perch, at the top of a few steps, to salute the men that were coming back from Verdun. We felt so powered that the general would come and salute the men who took his orders.
70th Infantry Regiment
, French Army
I was an officer, driving lorries, carrying soldiers. So I had to run the Voie Sacrée, going to Verdun. It was the only road going to Verdun which it was possible to run over. Day and night, without any stopping, there were lorries going and coming back with soldiers, barbed wire, bombs, food – all things necessary for the armies, and coming back with men, wounded, tired, or changing.
Every ten metres, there was an old soldier throwing some stones in the holes of the road. The holes were made by the lorries and also by the bombs which were thrown day and night by the Germans. They knew without Voie Sacrée, we had lost Verdun. But we won Verdun because we kept Voie Sacrée. Every day, the lorries were running, one behind the other, with men, tired, half sleepy. Sometimes there was a car or lorry that was damaged; it was immediately pulled out of the road, immediately. The road ought to be kept safe.
That was the rule and the order.
Early in 1916, the Battle for Verdun started. I was a medical officer with the artillery formation firing at the French force
at Verdun
. Douaumont had been taken, and up there we had our observation posts looking far into the enemy countryside. One day I got a telephone message that a man up on an observation post complained of heavy pain in his stomach, and vomiting. It was an abdominal emergency, and I had to go up. There were two communication trenches going up and down, and the French artillery knew exactly where these trenches were, and they fired without pause. I had to go up, but before I got up, somebody told me that I had to take a gas mask with me. I never saw a gas mask before, but we knew that the French artillery fired gas shells on to the German positions. Up I went with my gas mask – consisting of a piece of gauze with a bit of cotton wool soaked
in a certain fluid
– and up I went, to the top of Douaumont.
In Douaumont, we had two observation posts looking through slits in the very strong concrete bunkers, right down into the enemy territory, and there was my man with an acute appendicitis. We carried him down to the floor itself, and down, down, down we went. Many yards underground, protected by reinforced concrete, the French had established a little operating theatre, where there were constantly two German surgeons on duty. One of them was by chance from Berlin, my native town. He operated on this man, and now came another question: how to get him down into the German lines.
I wandered through the casements, and there I found one casement bricked up, and on it somebody had written, 'Here lie one 1052 German soldiers.' I asked what that meant. I was told that one thousand and fifty-two German soldiers – a whole battalion – had been in that casement, where they had stored barrels of fuel for the flame-throwers. Somebody had been very careless and the whole thing blew up and nobody was left. They couldn't even get at them, so they bricked up the casement and wrote this notice about the dead soldiers.
So now the question arose, how to bring the casualties, and this justoperated man, down to our positions. We had the experience with the British, that whenever they had a wounded man in their forward lines, they went along with the
Red Cross
flag and we did not fire at them. The German guns were silent until the Red Cross flag had disappeared. The British didn't fire at
us, either. Artillery fire ceased completely and infantry fire stopped. So we got the idea to do the same trick with the French. We formed a kind of convoy, in front of it a man with the Red Cross flag, in the middle another man with the Red Cross flag, and in the rear a third man with the Red Cross flag, but unfortunately the result was exactly the contrary. The French artillery opened up. It was intense fire and several of the stretcher-bearers were wounded and killed, so we had to give up this attempt. We had to bring the men down at night. There must be a little difference between the English word 'gentleman' and the French word 'cavalier'.
French Officer
One day, we were ordered to pack and start a march of sixty-six miles to join the battle at Verdun. We could hear the bombardment from the very first day. We used to walk twenty miles a day. We joined Verdun in May 1916 after the big rush, but still the position was in very bad conditions. We had a long way to walk to reach our trenches which were in very bad condition. They had been bombarded, they had been razed out, many soldiers had not yet been buried. We were suffering of mud everywhere and the food supply came irregularly, because we had to ask volunteers to go far behind the line under the bombardment to get our food: bread, wine, soup and sometimes some meat.
I don't know whether it's due to the sense of humour of the quartermaster's service, but one evening we had for supper salt herrings. Needless to say, in Verdun, the water was rather scarce, and we had wine but it doesn't replace the water when you are very thirsty. The water we had to find by ourselves.
We had to try to find a spring or get water out of a bomb hole. For a while, we were taking water from a small spring. One day, looking for a missing comrade, I went to the spring. The body of my comrade was in the spring. We carried on drinking the water all right. Nothing happened.
We had bombardment every day, sometimes the whole day, sometimes the whole night. Our shelters were very poor; we couldn't expect to escape with that kind of shelter, we just had to creep in the mud to find a bomb hole not full of rain water, and stay there to keep our guns clean if possible. And we had rats to keep us company.
One day, we were supposed to be relieved by another regiment but – and it happened very often with the army orders and counter orders – we remained
eight days in the snow. Many men had their feet frozen: some of them had to cut them off. Our losses were pretty high, especially in officers. The quarters behind the line where we used to take our rest was very poor. The straw was sometime moist or rotten, and the welcome was not very warm because the people had been seeing so many soldiers from both sides. We were so filthy, that we put all our clothes, guns and helmets in the river just to wash them. That was the only way, so once we were clean we started on leave.
War being a tough game, soldiers needed some compensations, and during the war we had the compensation of so-called
'
Mariannes de guerre'
. We got into touch with these women through advertising in a weekly illustrated newspaper called
La Vie Parisienne
. We received many very friendly letters from these ladies, sometimes with pictures of them. Some were even married. They sent us packages, they usually asked us what we were in need of, tinned food, chocolate, home-knitted woollen socks. One of my '
Mariannes
' was quite particular. She sent me flowers, perfume, cigars. I don't know what the perfume was for. When I was on leave I used to visit my '
Mariannes
'. We used to go to the theatre, or to restaurants or to movies. We had as good a time as we possibly could have during the war. At the time, I was in correspondence with seven of them. As my leave was ten days, I had time to meet all of them. I continued to write to three of them until the end of the war – and I nearly married one. But I changed my mind.
Cometh the Hour
We were told by our officer that we were to take part in the attack, and the men were excited. Everybody thought it would be a walkover.
In late May, Haig was visited by Joffre, who informed him that the French Army would be 'ruined' by the German attacks on Verdun unless the assault on the Somme could be mounted by July 1. Haig would have preferred to hold off until mid-August, but his protests fell on deaf ears. He was forced to accept that the needs of the French were paramount, and the date of the attack was set for June 29. Haig still believed that the infantry could achieve a breakthrough, to be exploited by the cavalry, which would lead to the total defeat of the German Army. Yet by June 16, he was declaring – in an order to
Sir Henry Rawlinson
, Commander of the
Fourth Army
– that the aim of the offensive was now to relieve the pressure on the French at Verdun. Talk of a breakthrough was set aside.
In the meantime, preparations were taking place at a furious pace. Huge numbers of troops needed to be trained in assault tactics before being ferried to the front. Artillery and ammunition had to be brought forward. The majority of the guns were eighteen-pounders and 4.5-inch howitzers, but heavy guns, howitzers and trench mortars were also distributed regularly along the front. To cope with all this movement, road and rail links had be built, improved and maintained. Thousands of miles of telephone lines had to be dug into the ground, deep enough to guarantee their safety from shellfire. Work began on tunnels stretching underneath the German lines, in which explosive charges were laid, to be detonated prior to the attack. Casualty clearing stations had to be built, vast quantities of water and rations had to be made available, and all of these preparations had to be concealed from the enemy.
The artillery barrage in advance of the attack began on June 24. More than a million and a half shells were fired on to enemy positions, but as the attack grew closer, bad weather pushed zero hour back to 0730 hours on July 1.
Private Frank Lindlay
14th Battalion, York and Lancaster Regiment
In June 1916, we were rushed to France for a big attack, to liberate the French at Verdun. They were getting a real doing, and we had to make a diversion.
Corporal Don Murray
8th Battalion, King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry
They took us from the line, back about ten kilometres, right away from the fighting. There, they had the whole country flagged out, a precise replica of the German lines with little flags. We started practising, ready for the big attack that was to come. And there was all sorts of speculation about the date, no one knew it exactly – in case we were taken prisoner.
Captain Philip Neame VC
Headquarters, 168th Infantry Brigade
The troops [of
56th Division
] did
training
out of the line before the first of July and this involved marking out the skeletons of the German trenches we were going to attack, and they were rehearsed in forming up and in advancing in attack formation, to attack the German trenches, so that each unit knew intimately where and how it was going to carry out the attack. They were moving in small columns of a few men separated at intervals – that is to say three or four men in a little column, and then a few yards away another little column, and a few yards away another little column. In 1914 and 1915 they had advanced in shoulder-to-shoulder line. As the result of the casualties which occurred from the enemy machine-gun fire, these different formations were taken up to avoid the great casualties.
Private William Holbrook
4th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers
They had taken photographs of the German trenches on the Somme that we had to take, and we were taken to the coast near Calais, and we dug the trenches exactly as they were in the photographs, and practised attacking them for ten days. There was barbed wire in front of them.
Private Tom Bracey
9th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers
We had a mock-up battlefield. The trouble was that we were all concentrating on one point. All these men attacking one trench. But when we came to the actual attack, you couldn't do that. There was barbed wire and artillery fire, and it wasn't like the practices.
Lieutenant Norman Dillon
14th Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers (attached to 178th Tunnelling Company, Royal Engineers)
I was attached to a tunnelling company, digging mines for the Somme offensive. What I did with them was to
listen
. That meant sitting down in the bowels of the earth, in front of the village of
Fricourt
. You had to listen to what the Germans were doing. You had to outsmart them. You could easily hear people tapping away long distance through the chalk. If they were making an explosive chamber to put the charge in, you could hear a much more hollow sound and then, following that, you would hear the sinister sliding of bags of explosive into the chamber, and following that, you got out . . . if you could . . . otherwise there would have been no following that . . .
There was someone listening twenty-four hours a day. It was vital to know what the Germans were doing. If you didn't, you lost track of the whole operation. It wasn't very pleasant work. Tunnelling companies lost a great number of people with a very high casualty rate. But one was young, and took it all in one's stride. And at least you were under cover, and out of the range of shellfire.