Thin Black Line
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Using old tactics against modern weapons ie, mass charges of infantry across
open fields into dug-in belt-fed machine guns:
open fields into dug-in belt-fed machine guns:
90 years on, the Somme remembered
Max Hastings
Saturday July 1, 2006
The Guardian
Captain WP Nevill of the 8th East Surreys was a complete ass. In the line in France, he liked to stand on a firestep of an evening, shouting insults at the Germans. Knowing that his men were about to participate in their first battle and keen to inspire, he had a wizard idea.
On leave in England, he bought footballs for each of his four platoons. One was inscribed: "The Great European Cup. The Final. East Surreys v Bavarians. Kick-off at Zero." Nevill offered a prize to whoever first put a ball into a German trench when the "big push" came.
Sure enough, when the whistles blew on July 1 1916, and 150,000 English, Scots, Welsh and Scottish soldiers climbed ladders to offer themselves to the German machine-guns, Nevill's footballers kicked off.
One of the few eye-witnesses to survive described watching a ball arch high into the sky over no-man's-land, on its way to the German trenches near Montauban. No winner collected Nevill's prize, however. Within minutes the captain was dead, as were most of his men.
Here is one of the enduring images of the Somme, which even after 90 years retains its fascination for a generation reared on Blackadder. In whom does not the spectacle of a field of poppies inspire a surge of mingled pity and rage?
So it did, among those who were there in 1916. One of my great-uncles, like Nevill an officer in the East Surreys, described the wild flowers in front of the parapets in his unhappy letters home. I have them all, including one to my grandfather, begging him to use his supposed influence to get my great-uncle transferred to the Royal Flying Corps. He was killed before Nevill.
The Somme is perceived as the great betrayal of innocents - and of the old working class in khaki - by Britain's ruling caste in breeches and glossy riding boots. It is thought to exemplify the futility of the first world war, and to represent the apogee of suffering in its campaigns. Like most such national legends, it would not have survived this long if there were not some truth in it.
Revisionist historians, of whom John Terraine was the foremost in his 1961 biography Haig: The Educated Soldier, have tried to persuade us that its generals were not the unfeeling brutes which caricature suggested.
They have failed. Haig was not a fool, indeed he administered Britain's huge armies in France with notable competence. But his own diaries present an image of an aristocratic Border Scot on the make; not much troubled by losses except insofar as these frustrated his military purposes; and preoccupied with royal intrigue.
He often wrote privately to King George V, not least expressing disgust about politicians, the despised "frocks". No British general of the second world war dared to emulate Haig's practice of serving champagne in his chateau headquarters while his men were drinking mud out of shellholes. He shared with most of his subordinates a pathetic faith in the power of artillery bombardment, and an almost unlimited willingness to keep attacking, even when battle after battle demonstrated that his offensives were profiting only the manufacturers of headstones.
The Somme assault was the most spectacular of Haig's failures. It was launched at the urgent behest of the French, to relieve pressure on Verdun, where a million "poilus" and "fritzes" were slaughtering each other.
The July 1 assault was preceded by weeks of British bombardment, which failed to achieve most of its purpose: much German barbed wire remained uncut; sufficient German machine-gunners survived in deep dug-outs.
In some sectors, attackers reached the first and even second German lines. "While we were rounding up prisoners," wrote Captain Herbert Sadler of the Royal Sussex, one of the successful British units, "I came upon one of the Fusiliers being embraced round the knees by a trembling Hun who had a very nice wristwatch. After hearing the man's plea for mercy the Fusilier said, 'That's all right, mate, I accept your apology, but let's have that ticker.' "
Yet, before British commanders could exploit such local successes, the Germans were able to shore up their lines. Haig's armies lost almost 60,000 dead and wounded on the first day. They continued to suffer through the months that followed, in increasingly grotesque attempts to reinforce failure.
Some units, ordered to launch assaults from the second line, were slaughtered by the Germans even before reaching the British front. This was the sort of tactical folly for which posterity justly declines to forgive Haig and his "donkeys".
Yet, in some important respects, popular legend errs in its understanding of what happened in 1916, and indeed between 1914 and 1918. First, our idea of the mindset of British soldiers is wildly over-influenced by the writings of soldier-poets, men like Frederic Manning, who wrote:
These are the damned circles Dante trod,
Terrible in hopelessness
But even skulls have their humour,
An eyeless and sardonic mockery
Infinitely more characteristic was the view expressed by the veteran HEL Mellersh, writing in 1978. He deplored the delusion that most combatants thought the war "one vast, futile tragedy, worthy to be remembered only as a pitiable mistake. I and my like entered the war expecting a heroic adventure and believing implicitly in the rightness of our cause; we ended greatly disillusioned as to the nature of the adventure, but still believing that our cause was right and we had not fought in vain."
As to the merit of the cause, it is striking to perceive the number of modern historians, some of them German, who perceive the Kaiser's Germany as an aggressive military tyranny of the nastiest kind. They argue that its victory in the first world war would have been a catastrophe for the freedom of Europe.
I am aware of no responsible historian who believes there was a way to break the stalemate of the western front, even with tanks. The technologies of killing and destruction had advanced vastly faster than those of mobility and communication. In battle after battle, defenders proved able to reinforce a threatened place faster than the attackers could exploit success there.
The obvious answer was to stop attacking. The allies might have sat tight in their trenches, and waited for blockade, starvation and the Americans to force the Germans to quit. Because the Germans occupied a substantial part of France, an overwhelming political and strategic onus rested on the French and British to sustain the offensive.
And yes, there was also a stubborn belief on the part of Haig and his subordinates that to abandon a commitment to attack would be unsoldierly, unBritish, wet - what we might characterise as the spirit of Captain Nevill.
One further issue should be considered. The allied generals of the first world war have been damned by posterity for their faith in attrition.
In the second world war, British strategy and tactics were overwhelmingly influenced by a determination that there should never again be a battle as costly, and as repugnant to popular sensibility, as the Somme.
Yet such fastidiousness was made possible by the fact that between 1941 and 1945 the Red Army did the attriting on behalf of us all. During that war, British and American ground forces killed about 200,000 German soldiers. The Russians killed about four million. Stalin's armies experienced a hundred Sommes, and Russia lost 27 million lives. Somebody, somewhere had to suffer to wear down Hitler's Wehrmacht. It was Britain's good fortune that this time it was not us.
As the bugles sound at the ceremonies in northern France today, we can mourn the hundreds of thousands they recall, and cherish a bleak gratitude. The scale of sacrifice remains unique. But the great poppy fields of the second world war lay in Russia rather than France and Flanders.
