Three Armies on the Somme Read online

  Churchill did not understand the First World War, or the central place of the Somme within it. As Gary Sheffield recently commented, Churchill’s analysis of the Somme “combines a blithe disregard for what was possible in 1916 with an astonishing lack of understanding of the realities of combat on the Western Front.”11 Churchill showed no appreciation of the military skill, strength of purpose and moral courage required to fight and win such a battle and such a war: a battle and war of attrition. Although he could explain his own role and attitude well enough, as Sydenham recognised, “in accordance with the views he consistently holds,” he was unable to admit that the Somme, a key element of a coherent whole, in fact came close to success.12 More apposite was Lord Esher’s post-war verdict, that “the battle of the Somme settled the inevitable issue of the War.”13 The British Empire committed its keen volunteer citizen armies to this three-nation encounter. France contributed the military expertise of her much-battered army. The German army offered resistance almost to the end of its resources and moral strength. Three empires engaged with and suffered through this blood-sacrifice, and its long, tragic denouement. It is wrong and morally reprehensible to dismiss this human phenomenon on the grandest scale as a futile engagement in a futile conflict, as so many do.

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  TO APPRECIATE THE true nature of the Somme the battle must be viewed through the eyes of those who fought and observed. Even before the guns had fallen silent Britain’s official battle chronicler and future poet laureate John Masefield had begun work on The Old Front Line, the first of many guides to the battlefield “from which the driving back of the enemy began.” As he surveyed the British front of 1 July 1916 he felt that the war and the world were turning:

  The old front line was the base from which the battle proceeded. It was the starting-place. The thing began there. It was the biggest battle in which our people were ever engaged, and so far it has led to bigger results than any battle of this war since the battle of the Marne. It caused a great falling back of the enemy armies. It freed a great tract of France, seventy miles long, from ten to twenty-five miles broad. It first gave the enemy the knowledge that he was beaten.14

  Some sixty years later, as children and grandchildren rediscovered their forefathers’ fire-trench or resting-place along the old front line, Colonel Howard Green made clear, in the introduction to the 1972 reprint of Masefield’s work, how the world had indeed turned: “For the men who fought there, and the nations they fought for, it was never the same after the Somme. The songs, the writing, the poetry, became cynical, after the Somme.”15 Such war-induced cynicism has masked the true character of the Somme ever since.

  As time moved on and events receded the weight of history accumulated. Historians assessed and judged these writings and recollections. Generals’ reputations were made, lost and made again, and ordinary soldiers’ stoic heroism gleamed ever more brightly from the greying mud. Military histories—official, scholarly, popular or sensational—sought to recount and critique the battle. One former subaltern in particular, Basil Liddell Hart, made his judgement on history and imposed his opinion on posterity. The most influential British military writer of the inter-war years had fought on the Somme before gas had cut short his front-line service. While recuperating he drafted a eulogy for the high command. Later, invalided out of the army and disillusioned with its superior officers, he turned his productive pen to a critique of the army’s failings in the Great War, and of Britain’s continental strategy in general, as a salutary example for the future. In particular, his history, The Real War, laid out many of the charges for the trial-by-literature of the British commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, and his subordinates, which continues to this day.16 In this tone, Liddell Hart set the agenda for subsequent scholarship. As well as such historical assessments, the Battle of the Somme left a rich artistic legacy. Serving poets, official war artists, demobbed novelists, unborn writers wove a literary and cultural memory that obscured as much as illuminated the battle and the war of which it was a part.17 Gradually, inexorably, the battle passed from personal memory to popular myth, both a paradigm and a cliché of the Great War.

  Why should this morass be churned up once again? Despite the Somme’s notoriety, we have only a partial picture of the battle, and a rudimentary understanding of its true nature, impact and legacy. Taking their cue from Churchill and Liddell Hart, English-language accounts focus narrowly on the military operations themselves, and in particular on key events and themes: the disastrous first day; the deficiencies of high command; the bravery of the ordinary soldier; the use or misuse of the tank. Fundamentally they dwell on the British Empire’s experience, and the role of ally and enemy alike receive scant recognition. In the clutch of new (if hardly novel) battle narratives which appeared to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the Somme, the prevailing paradigm went unchallenged: even the most scrupulous accepted that “as a result of France’s grievous loss at Verdun … the predominant force undertaking the offensive would now be the British army (with the French as a lesser contributor), and the commander chiefly responsible for directing the operation would be not Joffre but Haig.”18 Nowadays Britain’s Somme is remembered as a national tragedy: “the glory and the graveyard of Kitchener’s Army” as Liddell Hart dubbed his massacre of the innocents.19

  Yet the Somme can feign none of the heroic tragedy of Gallipoli or Dunkirk, for the Somme was a victory, if an unappreciated one. As the old battleground was trodden once again for its ninetieth anniversary, the long-standing controversies showed no signs of abating: “Raw emotive sentiments and folk myths [vie] with the academic assessments of military historians,” Peter Hart acknowledged. “There is no doubt that the Somme was a tragedy and the massed slaughter and endless suffering it epitomises cannot simply be brushed aside by the justification of cold blooded military necessity.”20 Is the root cause of this incongruity that this victory was won at too high a cost? In an industrial war just such an attritional campaign would have to be fought, and won, at some point and at some time. Casualties were expected to be high in the largest single battle fought by British arms in any war to date. The most quoted (and misquoted) statistic of British military history is that of the casualties of the first day of the Somme. There were 57,470 casualties of whom 19,240 were killed or died of wounds:21 “the greatest loss and slaughter sustained in a single day in the whole history of the British Army” Churchill bluntly recorded.22 They were excessively high on this particular day because an inexperienced and partially trained force went “over the top” with deficient artillery support and overambitious objectives. From this first-day setback the army learned a harsh but valuable lesson. Over the ensuing 140 days of battle tactical methods improved and losses diminished in proportion. In comparison with the ferocious single-day engagements of pre-industrial wars, where 30 per cent of an army might be left killed and maimed on the field, the Somme is unremarkable.23 After the first day it was just another battle, albeit a continuous one: a campaign, in fact; the longest and the costliest of the war, with twelve major component engagements designated by Britain’s official battlefield nomenclature committee, and innumerable smaller skirmishes. Moreover, as the French historian Pierre Miquel has acknowledged, this unprecedented loss of life was a “consensual sacrifice,”24 something very hard to comprehend ninety years later in a casualty-averse age, in which individual battlefield losses are newsworthy events. In Tender Is the Night F. Scott Fitzgerald had his characters visit the site of their great battle, as so many others would do in the 1920s and 1930s. “See that little stream,” one remarked:

  We could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backwards a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs … This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes.25

  In the second decade
of the twentieth century nations accepted, understood and even welcomed such a blood sacrifice, for a cause and to a greater, noble, purpose.

  The Somme was not simply a British campaign. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and Newfoundland all left their young men and their memorials on the battlefield, stone testaments to imperial cohesion standing alongside English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish monuments. Committed after all hope of surprise had gone, the Newfoundland Regiment was cut to pieces at Beaumont Hamel on 1 July. The South African Brigade was destroyed in holding Delville Wood against repeated enemy counter-attacks. In six weeks at Pozières the Australian Imperial Force sustained 23,000 casualties, as many as in their eight-month stay at Gallipoli.26 Such heroic sacrifices forged national myths.

  Two other armies fought on the Somme. To understand the battle it is essential to consider the French and German roles and experiences alongside those of the British. The Somme was an Anglo-French offensive, carried out by French as well as British troops in roughly equal numbers, directed overall by Frenchmen, and one element of a broader allied grand strategy in which Russians and Italians also played their parts. This goes some way to explaining the location and duration of the battle. French casualties number around two hundred thousand: nearly half of the British figure, and deserving of more than a paragraph or two in the history books. Coming on top of those at Verdun, they were hard to accept with so little obvious reward, and consequently this further sacrifice is now all but forgotten in France, subsumed in the greater hecatomb of 1916. For France the Somme was not a novelty, merely a disappointment. The offensive was conceived as a deliverance: from the bloodletting that France had endured at Verdun since February; from nearly two years of German occupation of her northern départements. In planning and preparing the 1916 campaign General Joseph Joffre, France’s commander-in-chief and de facto allied generalissimo, had envisaged a massive assault which would rupture the German trench line and drive the enemy from occupied France. Politicians and public were promised decisive victory after two years of sacrifice. It was a promise that Joffre could not keep. As the 1916 campaign developed, he came to realise that such a decision was impossible given the military circumstances of the Western Front in 1916. His field commanders, notably General Ferdinand Foch, who was charged with preparing the summer offensive, told him so. His manpower reserves, eroded by the battle at Verdun, were insufficient. Matériel and munitions of war were inadequate for an operation on such a scale. The inexperienced British army would have to be relied upon to bear the lion’s share of the fighting. Yet national and international imperatives meant that the offensive must still go ahead. Verdun could be relieved, and enemy reserves could be kept from allied fronts. Above all, France’s glorious army, tied down at Verdun, would once more be on the offensive.

  When the French attacked to the south of the British front on 1 July 1916 they experienced a brief epiphany. With heavier artillery support and more sophisticated infantry tactics than their allies, they advanced two and a half miles and took six thousand prisoners in the first assault, suffering relatively light casualties. Yet this tactical fillip was far short of the strategic decision on which Joffre had staked his reputation. With British failure to the north to be redeemed, the French army’s contribution to the offensive grew. Over ensuing months the pattern of piecemeal attacks on limited sectors of the front, occasionally punctuated by large-scale assaults, came to symbolise the Battle of the Somme. Although the French army was moving inexorably forward, literally grinding the German army into the mud, the snail’s pace, and the lack of any obvious sign of victory—a town captured or a river crossed—sapped the morale of the troops and the will of the nation. The Somme seemed to be becoming another Verdun, which war-weary France could ill-afford. Redemption reverted to purgatory. Joffre and Foch were singled out for blame. Both lost their field commands at the end of the battle. France would win through the politico-military crisis which engulfed the nation in 1917 and, led by a rehabilitated Foch, drive the enemy from her soil the year after. Yet the fall-out from the Somme scarred the French psyche and divided the French public. The Third Republic lived on borrowed time until the next German invasion.

  Ironically for France, the Somme had served its purpose, although this was not immediately evident. The German army’s Somme, was a gruelling, morale-sapping experience, “the muddy grave of the German field army” in one participant’s oft-quoted judgement.27 At the end of 1915 the German commander-in-chief, General Erich von Falkenhayn, had hit upon pure attrition as the means to bring France and her allies to the negotiating table. The following summer on the Somme, Falkenhayn was to be hoist by his own strategic petard. Hundreds of thousands of men were to be lost defending this nondescript bend in the river. Added to the mounting losses at Verdun, by the end of the year the German army had suffered over one million irreplaceable casualties on the Western Front. For Germany, with her armies everywhere entrenched on enemy territory and making further conquests in the East in the summer of 1916, the Somme was a rude awakening. Modern industrial war was not about controlling territory, but involved deploying machines to kill men. Falkenhayn had expected to contain the allied offensive, as he had done so often in 1915. Indeed he did. But as Ernst Jünger later recorded, on the Somme, Germany’s soldiers found themselves engaged in a new sort of combat: “What we had … been through had been the attempt to win the war by old-fashioned pitched battles, and the stalemating of the attempt in static warfare. What confronted us now was a war of matériel of the most gigantic proportions.”28 In this relentless Materialschlacht on the Somme, Germany’s once proud and victorious divisions met their Nemesis—a tenacious, determined enemy who, despite no obvious strategic breakthrough, simply would not let go. By the end of the battle “the army had been fought to a standstill and utterly worn out.”29 Only the onset of winter saved it from collapse. Attacked on all fronts, Germany realised she was in a death struggle with an enemy with limitless resources and deeper pockets. Falkenhayn was relieved of his command and sent to redeem himself in Romania. The duumvirate who succeeded him, Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff, had no illusions that Germany was fighting for survival and desperate measures were needed. Their military dictatorship, hardly obscured by a fig-leaf Kaiser, polarised German society and sowed the seeds of post-war political meltdown. One Somme survivor, Corporal Adolf Hitler, would be the ultimate beneficiary, and Hindenburg and Ludendorff would connive in his warped resurrection of German militarism.

  IN HIS RESIGNATION speech to the Commons in December 1915, Churchill stated: “In this war the tendencies are far more important than the episodes. Without winning any sensational victories we may win this war. We may win it even during a continuance of extremely disappointing and vexatious events.”30 In this judgement he showed considerable foresight, even if his later memoir was infused with hindsight. The Somme, disappointing and vexatious though it may have been, unsensational in its immediate results, reinforced the tendency towards allied dominance of Germany. Recognition of that truth prompts many questions. Why was it fought? How was it fought? What did it achieve? What were its consequences? How is it remembered? Was it, as contemporaries suggested, the turning point of the war? Was it, moreover, a turning point in history?

  The history of the First World War is overabundant with studies of what went wrong, what the consequences were for those trapped in the maelstrom, and how things should have been done better, a genre which Churchill’s The World Crisis helped to start. Objective analysis of the reality of the war—the problems which it threw up for nations and their armies and the solutions that were found—is a more recent trend, with the old myths and clichés continually recycled alongside. Certainly the Battle of the Somme has much history. In particular, the nature of the Somme experience has been explained better than the battle’s significance. If the pen has not proven mightier than the sword, it has nevertheless shaped a far longer struggle over our memory of the Somme, a struggle which still continues
. From the propaganda-tinged reports produced by both sides even as the combat raged, through the diaries and memoirs published by its veterans, to the sensational or scholarly accounts of later generations, the Somme has never ceased to fascinate. Three Armies on the Somme inevitably offers much that is familiar, but also much that is new. As a military history its reinterpretation of the twentieth century’s first truly modern battle adds breadth, depth and clarity to earlier narrowly focused histories. Yet it presents much more than a narrative of how the battle was fought. Over ninety years on there is also a need to consider why the Battle of the Somme was fought, and the profound impact that it had on those who fought it; to consider French and German experience alongside British; to observe the wider world as it watched this earth-shaking battle unfold; and to consider how these experiences shaped the memory and history of those who came after.