- from ‘the War Illustrated’, 22nd July, 1915
- 'The Glorious First of July'
- by Edward Wright
Battle Pictures of the Great War
On Midsummer Day, 1916, the result of the labours of our myriads of munition workers was displayed to the enemy. A line of flame and thunder stretched for ninety miles from Ypres to the Somme River. The German commanders hurried up reserves to meet the coming shock of our infantry attack. But no attack was delivered. Day and night the crashing line of fire was maintained. In sunlight the German trenches were veiled in a fog of bursting shells. By starlight French townspeople, thirty miles away, sat in darkness on their roofs, watching with grim joy the strange long rim of roaring radiance on their eastern sky-line.
Nothing like our bombardment has been seen in any field of the European War. The front of flame was .longer than that which the Germans had produced at Gorice and Verdun, and it lasted longer. It was the first grand triumph of the workers in our munition factories. Our country was using shells by the million, and wearing out guns by the thousand, in order to save the lives of our soldiers. At times the French armies from the Somme to Rheims joined in the unparalleled bombardment, making the line of flame one hundred and eighty miles long.
Triumph of Organisation
Sir Douglas Haig, sitting with his Staff near his central telephone exchange, was using tens of thousands of motor-lorries in the way a skilful fencer uses his rapier. By continually changing the sector at which the main shell supply was delivered, he varied the spear-head of his bombarding force. Our airmen attacked the German balloons and aeroplanes, thus blinding the enemy's aerial observers, until at last our shell supplies could come up in daylight as well as in darkness, without the enemy knowing what part of his force would next be swept with extreme intensity, by our heavy artillery. Our guns were also able to concentrate and reconcentrate along our front of ninety miles, leaving the enemy ignorant of the new direction in which they were massing.
Never has an army worked as ours then worked in sustaining for a week the thunderous flame of our grand bombardment and the continual clouds of our asphyxiating gas. No longer were we weakly replying to German gas attacks with mild, innocuous, intoxicating fumes. We were giving the Germans, who had tortured us with chlorine gas, a new gas of our own that took them by surprise. As our infantry raids on the hostile lines increased in number, our men were able to see heaps of gassed, dead figures in the opposing trenches on the very days when the German communiqués said that our clouds of poison had floated harmlessly over the German lines.
The German Staff Deceived
Meanwhile, the German Staff had to decide where to mass its best troops—the Prussian Guard and its main reserve. Sir Douglas Haig, by a violent demonstration near the Somme River on June 27th, seems to have misled the Germans. For it afterwards appeared that they thought this British move was a feint, and that our main attack would be delivered between Albert and La Bassée, with Arras as the centre of our breaking movement. The Prussian Guard was placed north of Albert, near the hamlet of Gommecourt, and the main stream of German. shell was directed towards the batteries round Arras.
But on Thursday arid Friday, June. 29th and 30th, our troops round Arras had an easy time of it compared with the labour that fell upon the men holding the line just north of the Somme. Here were a Territorial Division, an Ulster Division, Tynesiders, Manchester men, Scotsmen, and English county battalions, who came up to make the attack, and worked first to supply the guns. For forty-eight hours they slept only by snatches, amid the unending thunder that disturbed the atmosphere and produced a great downfall of rain. The mud added to the difficulties of maintaining the flow of ammunition between the columns of motor-trucks and the batteries; but, in spite of all troubles, our bombardment, gas attacks, and raids continued. Then, at six o'clock on Saturday morning, July 1st, 1916, Sir Douglas Haig revealed his long-prepared plan of attack, and showed the Germans that he had outplayed them. Our great bombardment had been a bluff. On our southern wing, by the Somme, was one of the finest armies of France, under one of the finest French commanders, General Foch. Foch had been remarkably quiet during our week of hurricane fire. Instead of knocking the enemy's trenches about as he could have done, he had lent us some of his quick-firers, in order to increase the volume of our fire, and make it seem that France was so exhausted by the long defence of Verdun that she had to leave the great answering, offensive movement entirely to Britain.
General Foch Surprises the Enemy
But on the glorious First of July, when our army of the Somme sent out its last smashing tornado of shells, the army of General Foch spoke even louder than ours did, and with thousands of siege-guns abruptly flattened the enemy's trenches on a sector of some eight miles. For an hour and a half the morning mist, half veiling the downland country between Peronne and Baupaume, was thickened by the smoke of half a million or more high-explosive shells. Then, at half-past seven, nothing could be seen from the great chalk ridges where the German observing officers, sheltering in deep caverns in the chalk, peered through their periscopes. The British and French armies sent out huge, rolling masses of black smoke that blanketed all the front and screened the rows of brown and blue figures that were moving on the German lines.
The general movement of the Allies extended for some thirty miles, from Foncqucvillers, about twelve miles southwest of Arras, to Foucaucourt, about seven miles southwest of Peronne. A considerable part of this general movement was designed to hold the Prussian Guard and the main reserve under Prince Rupert of Bavaria. The German armies were arranged somewhat like those of the Allies. The strongest force, under Rupert of Bavaria, faced the British lines as far as Thiepval. Then southward, from the Somme sector to the Oise River, mainly facing the French, was the Sixth German Army, which bad fought at Charleroi under General von Buelow, and was now commanded by General von Einem. It was against Einem that our main attack was directed. We had managed to assail his northern wing at its point of junction with the army of Rupert of Bavaria, while the French force under General Foch drove unexpectedly in upon Einem's centre of communications at Peronne. Meanwhile, it was vitally essential that Einem should be stopped from getting help from his immediate neighbour, Rupert of Bavaria. The Prussian Guard at Gommecourt, for instance, was only twenty-four miles away from Peronne, with a light railway service connecting them with Einem's northern wing. Therefore, they had to be violently held in the position to which they had been lured by our long, deceptive bombardment.
Rupert's Men in Readiness
The necessity for this holding action against Prince Rupert's forces gave occasion for one of the finest examples of indomitable tenacity in British history. All Rupert's men were prepared for our attack. They apparently knew it would take place on July 1st, and they certainly divined that the Gommecourt salient, above Albert—the westernmost point in France held by the enemy—would be a critical position. When our bombardment opened at six o'clock on Saturday morning all the German troops retired to dug-outs twenty to thirty feet below the trenches. Then, at half-past seven, when our guns lifted on the enemy's second line, the Germans came out of their lowest cellars in the chalk, bringing their machine-guns with them, and entered a series of upper dug-outs, which had loopholes almost on the surface of the ground.
They began to fire through these loopholes when our screen of black smoke went up, and they continued to fire throughout the first phase of the action. They did not at first take any aim—our smoke screen prevented that—but their machine-gun positions were so arranged that a mechanical and continuous shower of bullets swept all the zone between the opposing fronts and pattered against our sand-bags. The German system of defence was an extraordinary piece of engineering. The machine-gunners could not be reached by our shells, and, being provided with gas helmets, they could not be killed by our gas attacks.
At the same time as the German machine-guns opened fire the German artillery flung a storm of shrapnel over our front trenches. Around Gommecourt were three curtains of intense shrapnel fire between our men and their goal. For here it was that the Germans had concentrated their main mass of guns. Yet the British troops came out steadily under the awful rain of death, raised their own machine-guns on the parapet, and then, dropping in hundreds but never wavering, made their way across a zone of five hundred yards to the enemy's front line.
Devilish Machine-Gunners
The Prussian Guard also came with its machine-guns through our curtain of fire, and fought with great courage in the open No Man's Land between the wooded promontory of Gommecourt and our positions round Lebuterne. In the end our men were defeated, because they had not behind them the enormous weight of artillery the Germans had. But this local defeat won the general battle for us. AH the forces of the .Crown Prince of Bavaria were held down at the appointed place, with the result that General von Einem could not obtain any reinforcements and suffered, not a local defeat, but a far-reaching disaster.
South of Gommecourt, between the Hill of Serre, the valley of the Ancre, and the ridge of Thiepval, our troops were at first amazingly successful. In a series of charges, as heroic as .that made by the Scottish Division at Lens, our men took the German trenches, and then bombed their way into Serre and Thiepval, reaching the third and last line of German works. Some battalions had no casualties whatever in the rush against the German first line, but we did not allow for the remarkable intrepidity of some of the German machine-gunners. These men were devilish in spirit when our wounded lay at their mercy and tried to creep to shelter.
Einem Calls Reserves from Verdun
At Serre and Thiepval they. let our charging lines pass them, and then came out of their dug-outs, swept our rear, arid knocked down our parties who were bringing up bombs for the troops ahead in the German third line. One German gunner was found wounded in nine places and still fighting like a dervish of the Sudan. Little more than a score of these determined men, working behind our victorious line, succeeded in stopping ammunition reaching our troops at Serre and Thiepval. They thus compelled our men to retire when the Crown Prince of Bavaria, about midday on Saturday, flung his reserve against the two points on his wing that were so near to breaking. Yet the actions at Thiepval and Serre completed the design of the terrible action at Gommecourt, and extended Rupert's army to its full strength. Our troops hung on for four days to the south of Thiepval, where they repulsed the German Guard and all the other reserves of Prince Rupert. He could not spare a single battalion for Einem. So Einem had slowly to gather reinforcements from Rheims and Verdun in order to meet the main allied attack. And Einem could not do this in time.
For in our main assault our success Was swift and complete. We aimed at the great German salient built on a ridge overlooking our position at Albert, and known as the Fricourt salient from a village lying at the point of it. The main strength of .the position, however, resided in a great fortified chalk ridge, some five miles long, extending from the hamlet of Boisselle to the village and brickfield of Montauban. The hamlet of Mametz rose on the southern slope of the ridge.
The Pincers Hound Fricourt
We did not make an immense, surging charge all round the great salient, but delivered two great thrusts. Fricourt was not attacked, but the line on either side of it was broken in two places about two and a half miles from each other. The Gordons advanced against Mametz, and, though raked horribly by machine-gun fire, stormed the position and held it. Then some miles away on their right the men of Lancashire, supported by the Surreys, Kents, Essex, Bedfords, and Norfolks, carried the main ridge at Montauban in one strong, narrow stream of invasion. At the other end of the ridge, by Boisselle, the Suffolks and the Tynesiders, with the Tyneside pipers playing on their men, swept by the northerly German hill fortress and advanced well beyond the salient to the village of Contalmaison. The Suffolks reached this village at the price of only one man killed, but again the German machine-gunners in our rear near Boisselle checked our advance.
The Measure of Success in Four Days
The fact was our wonderful troops did more than had been expected of them. Fricourt was left untouched for two days, as we had made larger gains on either side of it than had been designed. Our principal attention was directed towards smashing up the reinforcements that Einem hurried towards the high ground on the ridge. There we broke brigade after brigade, leaving Fricourt open like a trap for more Germans to enter. But we joined our two wedges round Fricourt on Sunday afternoon, stormed Boisselle the next day, and then advanced some miles eastward along the road to Combles.
So tremendous was the pressure with which we pushed back Einem's northern wing that General Foch's army, m four days of sledge-hammer work, took the plateau south of the Somme, dominated Peronne, hauled up the great French siege-guns, and brought Einem's northern railway and motor communications beneath a heavy incessant shell fire. In other words, Haig's and Foch's armies did as much in four days' fighting to threaten the German routes of supply at Peronne as the Germans had done in five months' fighting to threaten the French routes of supply at Verdun.
