Tommy (7 page)

The battle of Loos was to be the biggest fought by the British army in its history thus far. First Army was to attack with the six divisions of I and IV Corps, with the newly-formed XI Corps, comprising the Guards Division and two inexperienced New Army divisions, in reserve to exploit success. Early on the morning of 26 September Haig gave the order to launch the gas from its cylinders, and the infantry went forward at 6.30. On the southern part of the front there was considerable success: Loos itself was taken, and the German first position overrun. However, it proved impossible to get the reserves up in time to exploit these gains. French, probably concerned that Haig might commit them prematurely, had unwisely retained control of them, and it was typical of his old-fashioned style of command that when he heard of the break-in he drove up to see the corps commander and give his orders in person. Precious time was wasted.

The two New Army divisions, moving up along busy roads with rain hammering down, were not in fact ready to go forward till mid-morning on the 26th. When they reached the intact German second opposition they were very roughly handled: the twelve attacking battalions, some 10,000 strong, lost 8,000 officers and men in under four hours. The history of the German 26th Infantry Regiment is deservedly much-quoted.

A subsequent attack was described by Captain W. L. Weetman, one of the few surviving officers of 8/Sherwood Foresters, in a letter to his former commanding officer.

Loos cost the British more than 43,000 men, including three major generals and the only son of the poet and writer Rudyard Kipling. It was the end for Sir John French. Haig ensured that the papers on his handling of the reserves were circulated in London, and French's political support, waning since the spring, at last collapsed. He left France on 18 December, resentful and embittered, returning home to a peerage (he quipped bitterly that he might take his title from the town of St-Omer, which had housed his headquarters, and be Lord Sent Homer) and the post of commander in chief of home forces. Haig replaced him, and General Sir William Robertson, French's chief of staff since early 1915, became chief of the imperial general staff in London, where he staunchly supported Haig's insistency on the primacy of the Western Front. Lieutenant General Sir Launcelot Kiggell, previously assistant to the CIGS, replaced him at Haig's headquarters.

The failure of the September offensive did not deter Jofffe, and Haig inherited the requirement for another Allied offensive. This time it was to take a new form, elaborated at a meeting at Chantilly on 14 February 1916. Instead of the familiar two-pronged attack, with an Anglo-French jab in Artois in the north and a French thrust in Champagne in the south, the two armies were to attack side by side on the River Somme. The British took over the front from Arras to Maricourt, just north of the Somme, in early 1916, forming a 4th Army, commanded by the happy Rawlinson, in order to do so. Haig was especially anxious to relieve French troops because, on 21 February, the Germans had begun their attack on the French fortress of Verdun. Although it is impossible to be sure of the motivation of General Erich von Falkenhayn, who had taken over from the exhausted Moltke as chief of the general staff in the autumn of 1914, it is likely that the traditional view remains correct: he was attacking at Verdun not in the hope of making territorial gain, but with the deliberate intention of provoking an attritional battle which would ‘bleed the French army white'. Haig had never had any realistic alternative to the place of that summer's Allied offensive: and now, with the attack on Verdun, he was to be constrained in time too.

In April general headquarters was moved south from St-Omer to Montreuil, better placed to watch over the extended British front, and on 26 May Haig entertained Joffre in his (remarkably modest) quarters in the nearby Château de Beaurepaire. All too well aware that many of his New Army troops, upon whom the battle would largely depend, were not yet fully trained, Haig suggested that he might not be able to attack till August. Joffre exploded that there would be no French army left by then. Haig soothed the old gentleman with some 1840 brandy, but it is clear that he fully understood the coalition dimension of the battle: on 10 June he told Kiggell that ‘the object of our attack is to relieve pressure on Verdun'.
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We have already seen how soldiers' spirits lifted when they left Flanders for the wider horizons of the Somme, and Rawlinson's reaction was no exception. ‘It is capital country in which to undertake an offensive when we get a sufficiency of artillery,' he recorded in his diary, ‘for the observation is excellent and with plenty of guns and ammunition we ought to be able to avoid the heavy losses which the infantry have always suffered on previous occasions.'
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The same rolling landscape that so cheered men moving to the Somme provided the Germans with admirable ground for defence, and Rawlinson faced two well-prepared lines, with a third in the early stages of construction. The front line, with the Roman road from Albert to Bapaume slashing obliquely across it, incorporated fortified villages like Serre, Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, and Fricourt, and the pattern of spurs and re-entrants provided admirable fields of fire.

The chalk enabled the Germans to construct deep dugouts, some more than 30 feet deep and effectively impervious to destruction by all but the heaviest guns. These were no surprise to the British, who had already captured one near Touvent Farm, in the north of the attack sector. Rawlinson and his chief of staff devised a plan of attack based on the methodical reduction of strongpoints by artillery and the step-by-step advance of infantry; but this ‘bite and hold' project did not please Haig, who wanted something bolder, ‘with the chance of breaking the German line'. There is, though, evidence that Haig did not see a breakthrough as the battle's most likely option. His head of intelligence, Brigadier General John Charteris, wrote in spring that: ‘DH looks on it as a “wearing-out” battle, with just the off-chance that it might wear the Germans right out. But this is impossible.'
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The eventual plan of attack was a compromise. It embodied a week's bombardment which saw Rawlinson's gunners firing a million and a half shells, the explosion of mines beneath selected points of the German line, and a massed assault by 4th Army's infantry behind a creeping barrage. Two divisions of General Sir Edmund Allenby's 3rd Army were to attack at Gommecourt, just beyond Rawlinson's northern boundary, to distract German attention from the main effort. Finally, Lieutenant General Sir Hubert Gough's Reserve Army (renamed 5th Army towards the battle's end) was on hand to push through the gap. On 22 June, with his artillery bracing itself to unleash the heaviest bombardment thus far delivered by British gunners, Rawlinson warned his corps commanders: ‘I had better make it quite clear that it may not be possible to break the enemy's line and push the cavalry through in the first rush.'
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Much of what went wrong on that bright, bloody morning of 1 July 1916, the British army's most costly day, with 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of them killed and 2,152 missing, was determined before the first shot was fired. Rawlinson's initial deductions were correct, though even his ‘bite-and-hold' scheme would have been costly. But a methodical bombardment which forfeited surprise and yet failed to deal adequately with the German front line, and scarcely at all with the second, out of range to Rawlinson's field artillery in its initial gun-lines, meshed unhappily with Haig's insistence on the need for rapid exploitation. Rawlinson's artillery density, with one field gun to every 21 yards of trench and a heavy gun for every 57, was less than had been achieved at Neuve Chapelle. And although a recent historian has described subsequent criticism of the plan as ‘hindsight, untroubled by any understanding of the realities of the time', it did not require lofty strategic vision to suspect that the artillery would not do all that was expected of it.
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Rifleman Percy Jones of the Queen's Westminster Rifles (waiting to attack at Gommecourt with 56th London Division) wrote: ‘I do not see how the stiffest bombardment is going to kill them all. Nor do I see how the whole of the enemy's artillery is going to be silenced.'
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The strategic imperative which had taken the British to the Somme ensured that there could be no let-up despite the heavy casualties and disappointing gains of the first day. Rawlinson bewilderingly decided to jettison the normal military principle of reinforcing success in favour of consolidating the ground he had gained in the south – where the whole of the German first position on Montauban Ridge had been taken – and renewing his attack on untaken objectives further north. Haig overruled him, placed Gough in command of the northern sector of the battle, and told Rawlinson to press matters south of the Albert-Bapaume road. It took 4th Army a fortnight to secure positions from which it could assault the German second line on the Longueval-Bazentin Ridge, and the gruelling process involved a bitter battle for Mametz Wood in which 39th (Welsh) Division would be badly mauled.

Rawlinson's next major attack was delivered under cover of darkness early on 14 July 1916. Crucially, the artillery density was far higher than on the first day of the battle – ‘two-thirds of the number of guns … would have to demolish only one-eighteenth of the length of trench'.
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Darkness limited, though because of ‘fixed lines' did not wholly negate, the effect of the defenders' machine guns, and the final five minutes of intense bombardment added psychological dislocation to the considerable physical destruction achieved over the previous three days. The attackers secured the ridge, although, crucially, they failed to take High Wood and Delville Wood, both of which sat like sponges on the crest and would enable the Germans to seep troops forward over the weeks that followed. The plan for cavalry exploitation did not work, less because of the cavalry's inherent limitations than the familiar problem of initiating exploitation as soon as an opportunity was identified.

Fourth Army spent the next two months on Longueval Ridge, fighting what Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson rightly call ‘The Forgotten Battles', a series of local offensives in which Rawlinson never brought his full weight to bear. It does not require hindsight to recognise this. Company Quartermaster Sergeant Scott Macfie of the King's Liverpool Regiment told his brother that:

But however correct we may be to criticise an army commander who was all too evidently still learning his trade, to grasp the true texture of the Somme we must look at the Germans too. Their rigid insistence on regaining captured ground meant that British attacks were followed by German counterattacks, often as futile as they were costly. Artillery ammunition was now arriving in unprecedented quantities, and the British rarely expended less than a million rounds a week that summer, more than they had fired in the first six months of the war. In the week ending 20 August they fired no less than 1,372,000 shells, and the Germans, still locked in a death-grip at Verdun, were losing the artillery battle.
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Lieutenant Ernst Junger, who was to become not only Germany's most highly-decorated officer but one of the conflict's longest-lived survivors, recalled that his company was led forward by a guide who had ‘been through horror to the limit of despair' and retained only ‘superhuman indifference'. Once on the battlefield, Junger saw how: