The British Armies in France and Flanders reached their full strength
before their great offensive on the Somme in the summer of 1915.
In material and in manhood they were the best that England and the
Empire could produce. The men were the fine flower of their race,
in intelligence, physique, training, and spirit. In time of peace
they would have lived to be leaders, administrators, artists, poets,
sportsmen, craftsmen, the “quality” of their nation; the fathers of
splendid children. They were in living splendour the priceless treasure
of the British folk—and they were squandered, wasted, and destroyed....
Behind them now was an immense power in artillery and ammunition and
the material of destruction. The factories in England had been working
at full pressure, millions of women had been stuffing shells with
high explosives; guns, guns, guns came pouring up the roads towards
the front in an endless tide; the ground was piled with ammunition
dumps, and British Generals had at their command a fighting machine
incomparable at that time, not only in weight of metal, but above all
in freshness of enthusiasm and heroic human fire.
The British Armies rose out of their ditches for the great attack with
an ardour that had never been seen before in the history of war, and in
my judgment will never be seen again. They believed that at last—after
artillery duels deciding nothing, after muddled battles like that of
Loos, mining and counter-mining, and trench raids, and the gain of
little salients at murderous cost—they were going to “do the trick” and
end the war by irresistible attack. I saw the glory of those young men
and the massacres of their bodies and hopes.
At the first assault, after the greatest bombardment ever seen yet
still leaving forests of barbed wire and a fortress system of trenches
and tunnels twenty miles deep behind the German front lines, they were
mown down in swathes by German machine-gun fire, and afterwards, in
isolated positions to which they staggered, blown to bits by German gun
fire. By desperate courage they smashed through the outer earthworks of
that infernal trench-system; for five months they fought through that
twenty miles, yard by yard; but it was sheer slaughter all the way, and
they were the victims of atrocious staff work, incompetent generalship,
ruthless disregard of human life, repeated and dreadful blundering.
The British Generals cannot be blamed. They were amateurs doing their
best in an unknown type of war. They had to learn by failures and by
mistakes. Perhaps their mistakes were not worse than those of the
enemy’s High Command; or not much worse. But for the men it was Hell.
They were ordered to attack isolated positions, which often they
captured although the whole arc of German gun fire for forty miles
around was switched on to their bodies until they were annihilated.
High Wood, Delville Wood, Trones Wood, Mametz Wood—a hundred more—are
names that bleed with the memory of enormous sacrifice of British
youth. In the end they won through to open ground and forced the enemy
into a far retreat to the shelter of the Hindenburg line.
The German losses in these battles of the Somme were frightful too, and
for a time certainly broke the spirit of the German Army, as thousands
of letters left in their dug-outs proved beyond doubt. Their agony was
as great as that of the British troops. They were pounded to death in
their trenches and dug-outs, until all that land stank of their bodies,
and one could not walk without treading on them. They were stunned
by shell fire, tortured by fear beyond human control as they crawled
out of their broken ditches to meet British bayonets. Their heroism
was wonderful, as all our men confessed with an admiration which
extinguished hate among those—nearly all—who had a sense of chivalry.
But their losses, though enormous, were not as great as the British
suffered, not half as great, I think, because defence was less costly
than attack in those conditions. By the end of the battle of the Somme
half a million of the finest manhood of Great Britain had been killed,
wounded, blinded, shell-shocked, and broken.
The tide of wounded flowed back from the fields of the Somme in
endless columns of ambulances, where the bad cases lay under brown
blankets with only the soles of their boots visible. To the end of
my life I shall remember those upturned soles and the huddled bodies
above. The walking wounded formed up in queues outside the dressing
stations: silent, patient, dog-weary, caked with a whitish clay.
The casualty clearing stations were crammed, and the surgeons were
overworked while, row upon row, the badly wounded were laid on the
grass outside the tents or on blood-stained stretchers waiting for
their turn. The “butcher’s shop” in Corbie had a great clientèle.
Whiffs of chloroform reeked across the roadways. Fresh graves were
dug in cemeteries behind the lines, in spreading areas. The lightly
wounded, after a little rest, came back laughing, cheering and joking.
A Blighty wound!... Home again!... Out of it for a few months of grace!