ULSTERS' ATTACK ON THE SLOPES OF THIEPVAL
"NOT A MAN TURNED TO COME BACK, NOT ONE"
The Division was put to the great test on July 1, 1916, the memorable
day of the opening of the Battle of the Somme and the British attack
in force to break through the German trenches in Picardy. It was a
formidable task. The strength of the enemy positions was that they
stood on high ground. That, also, was the reason of their importance.
The table-land must be taken and held to permit of an advance in the
stretch of open country spreading on the other side to the north. It
was to be uphill work. So the battle became the greatest the world has
ever known, so far, for its dimensions, the numbers engaged and the
duration. The Ulstermen were in the left wing of the British lines,
and the scene of their operations was, roughly, three miles of broken
country, dips and swells, on each side of the river Ancre, between the
village of Beaumont Hamel, nestling in a nook of the hill above the
river, eastwards to the slopes of Thiepval, perched on a height about
500 feet, below the river, all within the German lines. The main body
of the Division assembled in the shelter of a Thiepval wood.
"Porcupine Wood" it was called by the men. The trees were so stripped
of foliage and lopped into distorted shapes by enemy gun-fire that
their bare limbs stood up like quills of the fretful porcupine. At
half-past seven in the morning the advance commenced. For ten days the
British batteries had been continuously bombarding the whole German
front. There was no sudden hush of the cannonade at the moment of the
attack. For a minute there was a dramatic pause while the guns were
being lifted a point higher so that they might drop their shells
behind the enemy's first lines. Then the British infantry emerged from
their trenches and advanced behind this furious and devastating
curtain of fire and projectiles.
The morning was glorious and the prospect fine. The sun shone brightly
in the most beautiful of skies, clear blue flecked with pure white
clouds; and as the Ulstermen came out of the wood and ranged up in
lines for the push forward, they saw, in the distant view, a sweet and
pleasant upland country, the capture of which was the object of the
attack. In the hollows the meadows were lush with grass, thick and
glossy. There was tillage even, green crops of beetroot growing close
to the ground, and tall yellowing corn, far behind the main German
trenches. It was like a haunt of husbandry and peace. The only sound
one would expect to hear from those harvest fields was that of the
soothing reaping-machine garnering the wheat to make bread for the
family board of a mother and a brood of young children. But no tiller
of the soil was to be seen, near or far. The countryside to the
horizon ridge was tenantless, until these tens of thousands of British
soldiers suddenly came up out of the ground. Even in the
Franco-Prussian War of 1870 the agriculturists of northern
France--then, as now, the zone of conflict--remained in the homes and
pursued their avocations. During the battle of Sedan, which sealed the
fate of France, an extraordinary incident occurred--a peasant was
observed in one of the valleys within the area of the fight calmly
guiding the plough drawn by a big white horse. "Why should the man
lose a day?" says Zola in _The Downfall_. "Corn would not cease
growing, the human race would not cease living, because a few thousand
men happened to be fighting." But war is waged differently now. It is
spread along fronts hundreds of miles in extent and depth. Millions of
men are engaged. They burrow underground and are armed with terrific
engines of destruction. So it was that behind that green and pleasant
land, bathed in sunshine, ferocity and death are skulking underground.
Those elaborately interlacing white chalky lines over the face of the
landscape mark the run of the German trenches. Each dip is a
death-trap. The copses are barricaded with fallen timber and wired;
the villages are citadels, the farmsteads are forts, the ridges of the
two plateaux are each one succession of batteries. Swallows were
darting to and fro hawking for flies for their young, and in the clear
air soaring larks were singing to their mates brooding on their eggs
in the grass, showing that Nature was still carrying on her eternal
processes, but the husbandman had fled the deceiving scene, and the
after-crops from his old sowings of corn and mustard were mixed with
weeds in No Man's Land.
Things befell the Ulstermen, when they appeared in the open, which
were things indeed. The fortunes of war varied along the British
advance. A group of war correspondents on a height near the town of
Albert, about midway in the line, noticed that while some of the
British battalions were comparatively unmolested, the resistance of
the enemy to the left or west was of the fiercest and most desperate
character. The Germans seem to have expected the main assault at this
part of the field of operations. Their guns and men were here most
heavily massed. On the left of the valley made by a curve of the
river Ancre is a crest, in a crease of which lay on that July morning
the village of Beaumont Hamel, or rather its site, for it had been
blown almost out of existence by the British artillery fire. Under the
village--as shown by explorations made after it fell--were a vast
system of passages and cellars, in which whole battalions of Germans
found shelter from the bombardment. On the right of the valley is the
plateau of Thiepval. It was as strong a position as the consummate
skill of German engineers and gunners could make it. On the sky line
at the top of a ridge of the plateau were the ruins of the village of
Thiepval--heaps of bricks and slates and timber that once were walls
and roofs of houses--encircled by blackened stumps of trees that once
in the spring were all pink and white of the apple blossom. The ground
sloping down to the valley, and the valley itself was a network of
German trenches--mostly turned into a maze of upheaved earth-mounds by
shell-fire--studded with many machine-gun posts. The main part of the
Ulster Division advanced across the valley that rose gently, with many
undulations upwards, to the slopes on the western or left side of
Thiepval. They had to take what were called the A, B and C lines of
trenches. As will be seen, they pushed far beyond their objective.
Clouds of smoke had been liberated from the British lines to form a
screen for the attackers. Into it the men disappeared as they marched,
line after line, in extended order, over the intervening stretch of
ground. But almost immediately they were all scourged--especially the
Ulster battalions on the extreme left moving towards Beaumont
Hamel--with machine-gun fire poured at them from various points, to
the continuous accompaniment of short, sharp, annihilating knocks. The
bullets literally came like water from an immense hose with a
perforated top. The streams of lead crossed and re-crossed, sweeping
the ranks about the ankles, at the waist; breast high, around their
heads. Comrades were to be seen falling on all sides, right, left,
front and rear. So searching was the fire that it was useless to seek
cover, and advance in short rushes in between. So the lines kept
undauntedly on their way, apparently not minding the bullets any more
than if they were a driving and splashing shower of hail.
"Let her rip, ye divils!" shouted some of the Ulstermen in jocular
defiance at the enemy and his machine-gun; "and," said an officer
relating the story, "the Bosche let her rip all right." One of the
wounded rank and file told me that in the advance he lost entire
perception of the roar of the British guns which was so impressive as
he lay with his comrades in the wood, though they still continued
their thundering. Their terrible diapason of sound seemed to be lulled
into absolute silence, so far as he was concerned, by the hollow,
crepitating "tap-t-t-tap" of the German machine-guns; and the swish,
swish, swish of the bullets, of all the noises of battle the most
unnerving to soldiers assailing a position. But the Ulstermen were in
a mood of the highest exaltation, a mood in which troops may be
destroyed but will not easily be subjugated. The day had thrilling
historic memories for them.
"July the First on the banks of the Boyne,
There was a famous battle."
The opening lines of their song, "The Boyne Water," recounting the
deeds of their forefathers, came inevitably to their minds. "Just as
we were about to attack," writes Rifleman Edward Taylor of the West
Belfast Volunteers, "Captain Gaffikin took out an orange handkerchief
and, waving it around his head, shouted, 'Come on, boys, this is the
first of July!'" "No surrender!" roared the men. It was the answer
given by the gallant defenders of Derry from their walls to King James
and the besieging Jacobites. On the fields of Picardy new and noble
meanings were put into these old, out-worn Irish battle-cries. One
sergeant of the Inniskillings went into the fray with his Orange sash
on him. Some of the men provided themselves with orange lilies before
they went up to the assembly trenches, and these they now wore in
their breasts. But, indeed, their colours were growing in profusion at
their feet when they came out of the trenches--yellow charlock,
crimson poppies and blue cornflowers, and many put bunches of these
wild flowers in their tunics. So the Ulstermen were keen to prove
their metal. They divided their forces and advanced to German
positions on the right and left. Through it all their battle-shout was
"No surrender." But there was one surrender which they were prepared
to make, and did make--the surrender, for the cause, of their young
lives and all the bright hopes of youth.
When the battalions on the right reached the first German line they
found shapeless mounds and cavities of soil and stones and timber,
shattered strands and coils of barbed wire, where the trenches had
been, and the dead bodies of the men who were in occupation of them at
the bombardment. The Ulstermen then pushed on to the second line,
which still held living men of courage and tenacity who had to be
disposed of by bayonet and bomb. On to the third line the Ulstermen
went at a steady pace. They were still being whipped by machine-gun
fire. Their ranks were getting woefully thinner. In their tracks they
left dead and wounded. At the sight of a familiar face among the
curiously awkward attitudes and shapes of those instantaneously killed
there was many a cold tug at the heart-strings of the advancing men,
and many a groan of sorrow was suppressed on their lips.
The moaning of the wounded was also terrible to hear, but their spirit
was magnificent. "Lying on the ground there under fire, they had no
thought of their own danger, but only of the comrades who were going
forward, and they kept shouting words of encouragement after the
attacking column until it was well out of sight," said an Inniskilling
Fusilier. "One company, recruited mainly from the notorious Shankill
road district of Belfast, was going forward, when a wounded man
recognised some of his chums in it. 'Give them it hot for the Shankill
road,' he cried, and his comrades answered with a cheer." The same
man, giving a general account of the fiercely contested attack on the
enemy positions, said, "It was a case of playing leapfrog with death,
but all obstacles were overcome, and the Fusiliers carried the enemy
trenches with a magnificent rush. The Huns turned on them like baffled
tigers and tried to hurl the Irishmen out again, but they might as
well have tried to batter down the walls of Derry with toothpicks. The
Inniskillings held their ground, and gradually forced the enemy still
further back."
The German trenches, with their first, second, third, fourth and fifth
lines, formed a system of defences of considerable depth, into which
the Ulstermen had now penetrated for distances varying from two to
three miles in depth. It was a land of horrible desolation. The ground
at this point was almost bare of vegetation. It was torn and lacerated
with shell holes. The few trees that remained standing were reduced to
splintered and jagged stumps. All was smoke, flashes, uproar and
nauseating smells. In this stricken battle area the defence was as
stubborn and desperate as the attack. It seemed impossible for men
with a nervous system and imagination to retain their reason and
resolution in the terrific, intensive and searching preliminary
bombardment. Nevertheless, the Germans did it. The British guns had,
indeed, wrought widespread havoc. Not only lines of trenches were
pounded to bits, but spots outside, affording concealment for guns and
troops, were discovered and blown to atoms. There were, however, deep
dug-outs going as many as thirty feet below ground, and in some cases,
even at that depth, there were trapdoors and stairs leading to still
lower chambers, and up from these underground fortifications the
Germans came when the cannonade lifted. There were also hidden
machine-gun shelters in the hollows and on the slopes which the
British artillery failed to find. The resistance offered to the
advance of the Ulstermen was accordingly of the most obstinate and
persistent nature. The hand-to-hand fight with bayonet and bomb at the
third line of trenches was described by a man of the Irish Rifles as
"a Belfast riot on the top of Mount Vesuvius." No more need be said.
The phrase conveys a picture of men madly struggling and yelling amid
fire and smoke and the abominable stench of battle. Yet the enemy's
fourth line fell before these men who would not be stopped. There
remained the fifth line, and the Ulstermen were preparing to move
forward to it when the order came to fall back. The state of affairs
at this time of the evening is well explained by one of the men--
"We had been so eager that we had pressed too far forward, and
were well in advance of our supporting troops, thus laying
ourselves open to flank attacks. The position became more
serious as the day advanced, and the supporting troops were
unable to make further progress, while the Huns kept hurrying up
fresh men. We kept shouting the watchword of 'No Surrender,'
with which our fathers had cheered themselves in the siege of
Derry, and every time the Huns attacked we sent them reeling
back with something to remind them that they were fighting
Irishmen. We couldn't help taunting them a lot. 'Would you like
some Irish rebellion?' we called out to them, and they didn't
like it. They kept throwing in fresh reinforcements all day,
and gradually the pressure became almost unbearable. Still we
held our ground, and would have continued to hold it if
necessary."
"Retirement," he adds, "is never a pleasant task, especially after you
have fought your corner as we fought ours. We felt that the ground won
was part of ourselves, but orders had to be obeyed, and so we went
back." The retirement was to the third line of trenches, at the point
known as "the Crucifix," just north-west of Thiepval. It was carried
out at nightfall, after fourteen hours' continuous fighting. This
section of the Division, in the words of Major-General Nugent,
"captured nearly 600 prisoners, and carried its advance triumphantly
to the limits of the objective laid down."
The battalions, two in number, operating on the left at Beaumont
Hamel, were not so fortunate. They were broken to pieces by the
devastating machine-gun fire. The remnants, by a magnificent effort,
succeeded in getting into the German trenches. They were held up there
by an utterly impassable curtain of shells and bullets. It was not
their fault that they could not advance any further. They had to face
a more terrific ordeal than any body of men have had to encounter in
battle before. "They did all that men could do," says Major Nugent,
"and, in common with every battalion in the Division, showed the most
conspicuous courage and devotion."
Lieut.-Colonel Ambrose Ricardo, D.S.O., of Lion House, Strahane,
commander of the Tyrone battalion of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers,
gives an account of the experience of the Ulster Division which is of
the greatest value for the reasons it supplies why the Division lost
so heavily and thus were unable to hold the advanced positions they
had taken. He first describes how his men set out for their plunge
into the terrible unknown. "Every gun on both sides fired as fast as
it could, and during the din our dear boys just walked out of the wood
and up rumps we had cut through our parapet and out through lanes in
our wire," he says. "I shall never forget for one minute the
extraordinary sight. The Derrys on our left were so eager they started
a few minutes before the ordered time, and the Tyrones were not going
to be left behind, and they got going without delay. No fuss, no
shouting, no running; everything orderly, solid and thorough, just
like the men themselves. Here and there a boy would wave his hand to
me as I shouted good luck to them through my megaphone, and all had a
happy face. Most were carrying loads. Fancy advancing against heavy
fire carrying a heavy roll of barbed wire on your shoulder!"
Then dealing with the Division generally, Colonel Ricardo states that
the leading battalions suffered comparatively little until they almost
reached the German front line, when they came under appalling
machine-gun fire which obliterated whole platoons. "And, alas for us,"
he cries, "the Division on our right could not get on, and the same
happened to the Division on our left, so we came in for the
concentrated fire of what would have been spread over three Divisions.
But every man who remained standing pressed on, and, without officers
or non-commissioned officers, they carried on, faithful to their job.
Not a man turned to come back, not one."
Eventually small parties of all the battalions of the Division--except
the two operating towards Beaumont Hamel--gathered together in the
section of the German third line, which was their part in the general
British advance. They had captured, in fact, a portion of the famous
Schwabon Redoubt on the summit of the ridge facing them, and set to
work to consolidate it. "The situation after the first two hours was
indeed a cruel one for the Ulster Division," continues Colonel
Ricardo. "There they were, a wedge driven into the German lines, only
a few hundred yards wide, and for fourteen hours they bore the brunt
of the German machine-gun fire and shell-fire from three sides, and
even from behind they were not safe. The parties told off to deal with
the German first and second lines had in many cases been wiped out,
and the Germans sent parties from the flanks in behind our boys. Yet
the Division took 800 prisoners, and could have taken hundreds more,
had they been able to handle them."
Major John Peacocke, "a most gallant and dashing officer" (as Colonel
Ricardo describes him), was sent forward to see how matters stood. He
crossed "No Man's Land" at a time when the fire sweeping it was most
intense. Taking charge of the defence of the captured position, he
gave to each unit a certain task to do in furtherance of the common
aim. Then he sent runners back with messages asking for
reinforcements, for water and for bombs. "But," says Colonel Ricardo,
"no one had any men in reserve, and no men were left to send across.
We were told reinforcements were at hand, and to hold on, but it was
difficult, I suppose, to get fresh troops up in time. At any rate the
help did not come. In the end, at 10.30 p.m. (they had got to the
third line at 8.30 a.m.), the glorious band in front had to come back.
They fought to the last and threw their last bomb, and were so
exhausted that most of them could not speak. Shortly after they came
back help came, and the line they had taken and held was reoccupied
without opposition, the Germans, I suppose, being as exhausted as we
were. Our side eventually lost the wedge-like bit after some days. It
was valueless, and could only be held at very heavy cost. We were
withdrawn late on Sunday evening, very tired and weary."
A private in one of the battalions sent to his parents in Ulster a
very vivid account of the advance. As he was crossing "No Man's Land"
two aspects of it, in striking contrast, arose in his mind. "How often
had I, while on sentry duty in our own trenches, looked out over that
same piece of ground," he says. "How calm and peaceful it looked then;
how fresh, green, and invitingly cool looked that long, blowing grass!
Now, what a ghastly change! Not a level or green spot remained. Great,
jagged, gaping craters covered the blackish, smoking ground, furrowed
and ploughed by every description of projectile and explosive. In the
blue sky above white, puffy clouds of shrapnel burst, bespattering the
earth below with a rain of bullets and jagged shrapnel missiles."
Tripping and stumbling went the men over the broken and ragged ground.
"Fellows in front, beside, and behind me would fall; some, with a
lurch forward, wounded; others, with a sudden, abrupt halt, a sickly
wheel, would drop, give one eerie twist, and lie still--dead!" They
find the first line in the possession of comrades; and moving on to
the second, came to blows there with the enemy. "An Inniskilling,
scarcely more than a boy, standing on the parapet, yells madly 'No
surrender,' and fires several shots into the German mob. From every
part of the trench we closed forward, bayonet poised, on the crowd of
grey figures. A short scuffle; then we swayed back again, leaving a
heap of blood-stained greyishness on the ground. 'Come on, boys!'
yells the lieutenant, springing up on to the parapet. 'Come on, the
Ulsters.' Up we scramble after him and rush ahead towards the far-off
third line. Vaguely I recollect that mad charge. A few swirlings here
and there of grey-clad figures with upraised hands yelling 'Kamerad.'
Heaps of wounded and dead. Showers of dust and earth and lead.
Deafening explosions and blinding smoke. But what concerned me most
and what I saw clearest were the few jagged stumps of the remnants of
the wire entanglements and the ragged parapet of the third line--our
goal!"
From this enemy trench the Ulsterman looked back over the ground he
had covered, and this is what he saw: "Through the dense smoke pour
hundreds and hundreds of Tommies, with flashing bayonets and distorted
visages, apparently cheering and yelling. You couldn't hear them for
the noise of the guns and the exploding shells. Everywhere among those
fearless Ulstermen burst high-explosive shells, hurling dozens of them
up in the air, while above them and among them shrapnel bursts with
sharp, ear-splitting explosions. But worst of all these was the silent
swish, swish, swishing of the machine-gun bullets, claiming their
victims by the score, cutting down living sheaves, and leaving bunches
of writhing, tortured flesh on the ground." He, too, noticed that
their co-operating Divisions had failed, for some reason, to advance.
"Look there, something _must_ be wrong!" he called out to his
comrades. "Why, they're not advancing on _that_ side at all," pointing
towards the left flank. "Not a sign of life could be seen," he says.
"The Ulster Division were out to the Huns' first, second, third,
fourth, and even fifth lines, with all the German guns pelting us from
every side and at every angle."
Many a brave and self-sacrificing deed was done in these affrighting
scenes. Here are a few instances taken haphazard from the records of
one battalion alone, the 9th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. They were
repeated a hundredfold throughout the Division.
Corporal Thomas M'Clay, Laghey, county Donegal, assisted
Second-Lieutenant Lawrence to take twenty prisoners. He conveyed them
single-handed over "No Man's Land," and then returned to the German
third line, all the time having been under very heavy fire. When he
got back he had been fighting hard for ten hours. Private Thomas
Gibson, of Coalisland, saw three Germans working a machine-gun. He
attacked them alone, and killed them all with his clubbed rifle.
Corporal John Conn, Caledon, came across two of our machine-guns out
of action. He repaired them under fire, and with them destroyed a
German flanking party. He carried both guns himself part of the way
back, but had to abandon one, he was so utterly exhausted.
Lance-Corporal Daniel Lyttle, Leckpatrick, Strabane, was trying to
save two machine-guns from the enemy when he found himself cut off. He
fired one gun until the ammunition was spent, then destroyed both guns
and bombed his way back to the rest of his party at the Crucifix line.
Sergeant Samuel Kelly, Belfast, volunteered to take a patrol from the
Crucifix line to ascertain how things were going on our right.
Corporal Daniel Griffiths, Dublin; Lance-Corporal Lewis Pratt, Cavan;
and Private William Abraham, Ballinamallard, went with him. The latter
was killed, but the remainder got back with valuable information.
Sergeant Kelly did great work to the last in organising and
encouraging his men when all the officers of his company had fallen.
Corporal Daniel Griffith, Lance-Corporal Lewis Pratt, with Private
Fred Carter, Kingstown, bombed and shot nine Germans who were trying
to mount a machine-gun. Private Samuel Turner, Dundrun, and Private
Clarence Rooney, Clogher, forced a barricaded dug-out, captured
fifteen Germans and destroyed an elaborate signalling apparatus,
thereby preventing information getting back. Lance-Corporal William
Neely, Clogher; Private Samuel Spence, Randalstown; Private James
Sproule, Castlederg; and Private William R. Reid, Aughnacloy, were
members of a party blocking the return of Germans along a captured
trench. Their officer and more than half their comrades were killed,
but they held on and covered the retirement of the main party,
eventually getting back in good order themselves and fighting every
inch of the way. Private Fred Gibson, Caledon, pushed forward alone
with his machine-gun, and fought until all his ammunition was used.
Private James Mahaffy, Caledon, was badly wounded in the leg early in
the day, and was ordered back. He refused to go, and continued to
carry ammunition for his machine-gun. Lance-Corporal John Hunter,
Coleraine, succeeded in picking off several German gunners. His cool
and accurate shooting at such a time was remarkable. Private Robert
Monteith, Lislap, Omagh, had his leg taken off above the knee. He used
his rifle and bayonet as a crutch, and continued to advance. Private
Wallie Scott, Belfast, met five Germans. He captured them
single-handed, and marched them back to the enemy second line, where a
sergeant had a larger party of prisoners gathered.