The Long Run (4 page)

Communication networks stopped at the front line, so that as soon as troops left that point their position was unknown. During battle, despite elaborate precautions such as burying cable in triplicate along different
routes, communications were more than likely to be cut off by enemy shellfire. Generals therefore had to rely on fragmentary reports from runners. It was not until 1918 that armies developed sophisticated signals services and had access to wireless sets. This flaw in communications technology cannot be overestimated as an explanation for high casualties on the attacking side. As [Richard] Holmes has put it, “it was not primarily the growth of killing power that gave the Western Front its distinctive character: it was the fact that communications always lagged behind weaponry. It was always easier for a defender, driven back on his own communications, to reinforce his failure than it was for an attacker, his communication stretched across the abrasive edge of the battlefield, to reinforce his success.
⁵⁸

Added to this, “The entire culture of the British regular army militated against effective improvisation.”
⁵⁹
This despite the huge numbers of soldiers involved. The total mobilization figures for the combatants were Britain, 8.4 million; France, 7.9 million; Germany, 13.2 million; Russia, 15.8 million; USA, 4.3 million.
⁶⁰

Perhaps its sheer human mass allowed the fighting to somehow develop a life, and a timeline, of its own. Even contemporary advertising picked up on this perplexity, such as this text, placed by a Canadian laundromat:

H
OW
L
ONG
W
ILL THE
W
AR
L
AST
?

The whole world is asking this question. Lord Kitchener intimates it may last three years. Kaiser Bill told his soldiers they would be back in Germany before the leaves begin to fall…

Meanwhile economical living is being practiced, and thousands are benefiting through the saving which is possible by the Dry Cleaning process. –advertisement by a Halifax laundry, November 13, 1914
⁶¹

Not only was the war supposed to be over by Christmas, but to one young German lieutenant, “War is like Christmas.” All involved nations had entered the fray fueled by the enthusiasm of thousands and thousands of young men.
⁶²
A Berlin journalist wrote, “We lack the words to describe these experiences…We are standing in the middle of the greatest joys of our lives. Our victory wagon
⁶³
has departed and will no longer be able to be held back.”
⁶⁴

But Christmas came and passed and 1914 became 1915. The short, decisive combat European powers had been building up to for four decades was over, “but nobody had won it.”
⁶⁵

The Newfoundland Regiment had spent those early months training in Edinburgh, Stob’s Camp, and Ayr. Robertson’s conduct was noted as fairly good: four instances of being late or absent from parade, each earning him two or three days of being confined to base. On September 1, they were sent to Alexandria, and on the 13th, Gallipoli. Robertson endured a month there before illness saw him transferred to the hospital ship
Valdivia
, then to a hospital in Mudros. From there he was brought via Port Suez and Marseilles to England. He would rejoin the Regiment in France.

31
Thierry Terret and J.A. Mangan eds,
Sport, Militarism and the Great War
(London: Routledge, 2012), 13.

32
John Simkin, “Football and The First World War,”
Spartacus Educational
, online, accessed August 2015.

33
Terret and Mangan,
Sport
, 13.

34
These truces incited the military establishment on both sides. They were thought to result from the soldiers’ proximity, as the trenches were so close and the men kept there so long the two sides became familiar with each other through shouted conversations. Adolf Hitler, then a young German corporal, was particularly opposed to them. Participants in the Christmas truce could be severely punished, even court-martialed for treason, and on subsequent Christmas Eves, special bombardments were ordered to stifle any potential outbreaks of seasonal peaceful lulls. The news of this fraternization was embargoed and censored to various degrees by all the nations involved. On November 11, 2008, ancestors of those British and German soldiers restaged the Christmas Day match. The Germans won 2-1. There are many sources for information about the 1914 Christmas Truce, including, Malcolm Brown ed,
Meeting in No Man’s Land: Christmas 1914 and Fraternization in the Great War
, (London: Constable, 2007).

35
Tony Ashworth, “The Live and Let Live Syndrome,” in Neiberg,
Reader
, 208-211.

36
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 343.

37
Terret and Mangan,
Sport
, 2-3.

38
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 371.

39
Ibid. 367.

40
Neiberg,
Reader
, 15.

41
Hadley and Legler,
Posters
, 13-14

42
Heather Jones, “Prisoners of War,”
The British Library
, online, accessed September 2014.

43
“For here mud stands for much more than a mere amalgam of water and soil. It is made up of excrement, dead soldiers and animals, shrapnel, barbed wire and the remnants of poison gas. For all the opportunities it offered to bacteria, surrounding splintered trees and dead men, it seems to be opposed to nature. This mud bears the terrifying potential to engulf the soldiers who struggle through it, to suck them down–sputtering, choking, drowning–and to convert their corpses into yet more mud.” Todman,
The Great War
, 1.

44
Frederick Hadley and Martin Legler,
Posters of the Great War
(South Yorkshire: Pen & Sword Military, 2013), 63.

45
Ian F. Beckett,
The Making of the First World War
(New Haven: Yale UP, 2012), 87-8.

46
Hadley and Legler,
Posters
, 129.

47
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 226.

48
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 227.

49
Ibid., 229

50
Hadley and Legler,
Posters
, 63.

51
Ibid., 81.

52
Ibid., 97.

53
Neiberg,
Reader
, 3.

54
Todman,
The Great War
, 145; Richard Curtis.
Blackadder: The Whole Damn Dynasty, 1485-1917
, (London: Penguin, 1980) 412.

55
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, xxxv.

56
Ibid., xxxvii.

57
Neiberg,
Reader
, 13.

58
Ferguson,
Pity of War
, 304.

59
Ibid., 305.

60
Ibid., xxiv.

61
Nicholson,
Fighting Newfoundlander
, 195.

62
Jeffrey Verhey, “Soldiers, War Enthusiasm: Volunteers, Departing Soldiers, and Victory Celebrations,” in Neiberg,
Reader
, 159.

63
Also in keeping with military tactics of the time, the victory wagon was horse-drawn. All the nation’s armies relied on horses, and 8 million horses and mules perished during the war. Neiberg,
Reader
, 195.

64
Neiberg,
Reader
, 155.

65
Michael Howard,
The First World War: A Very Short Introduction
(London: Oxford UP, 2002), 36.

CHAPTER FIVE

“Heard we are to go to France in April.”

– Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Lovell Hadow, appointed officer commanding the 1st Battalion, Newfoundland Regiment, December 6, 1915, while the Regiment was serving in Gallipoli. Personal diary, mid-January, 1914.
⁶⁶

Z-
DAY, THE START
of the Big Push, was originally scheduled for June 29, but postponed due to weather. It was envisioned as a systematic progression of firepower from guns and howitzers and mortars against the German trenches and observation and machine-gun posts building into a continuous and lethal cascade.
⁶⁷
The German retreat would be rapid, the British victory decisive. This would bring an end to the war.

This contemporary account describes the lead up to the battle:

The scene of the battlefields at night was of terrible beauty…The fields at the edge of the battle of guns were very peaceful…A staff officer had whispered a secret to us at midnight in a little room, when the door was shut and the window closed. Even then they were words which could only be whispered, and to men of trust… The attack will be made this morning at 7:30.

It was 7:30. Our watches told us that, but nothing else. The guns had lifted and were firing behind the enemy’s first lines, but there was no sudden hush for the moment of attack. The barrage by our guns seemed as great as the first bombardment. For ten minutes or so before this time a new sound had come into the general thunder of artillery. It was like the “rafale” of the French soixante-quinze, very rapid, with distant and separate strokes, but louder than the noise of field-guns. They were our trench-mortars at work, along the whole length of the line before me.

It was 7:30. The moment for the attack had come. Clouds of smoke had been liberated to form a screen for the infantry, and hid the whole line. The only men I could see were those in reserve, winding along a road by some trees which led up to the attacking point. They had their backs turned, as they marched very slowly and steadily forward. I could not tell who they were, though I had passed some of them on the road a day or two before. But, whoever they were, English, or Irish, or Welsh, I watched them until most had disappeared from sight behind a clump of trees. In a little while they would be fighting, and would need all their courage.

At a minute after 7:30 there came through the rolling smoke-clouds a rushing sound. It was the noise of rifle fire and machine-guns. The men were out of their trenches, and the attack had begun.
⁶⁸

Soon after, Hadow, as the Newfoundland Regiment’s Battalion Commander, sent for information, asking, “Has the enemy’s front line been captured?” But the response was not encouraging: “The situation is not cleared up.”
⁶⁹

The Regiment had started from St. John’s Road, crossing about 250 yards of ground, under enemy fire, before they reached even their own front line. When “A” Company and “B” Company struggled their way through their front wire, they could look down the incline and observe the barrier of German wire. It was supposed to be cut to pieces. It was not.

Still, the Regiment continued its advance. They were alone and exposed to the full brunt of enemy fire.

Within a half hour, Hadow made his way to Brigade Battle Headquarters, where he reported to Brigadier-General Douglas Edward Cayley that the attack had failed and the Regiment’s casualties were high. Regardless, Cayley ordered Hadow to assemble whatever remnants of the Regiment he could find and attempt another advance. Fortunately, this order was soon countermanded; in any case, Hadow could not find a single uninjured one of his soldiers.
⁷⁰
Robertson was among the wounded; in fact, his fate at that exact time may have been unknown, as he had gone over the top, been shot in his right leg, and was now lying wounded in the field.

Field Marshall Douglas Haig had deployed 120,000 men that morning. Because he was assured in his assumption that the preceding wire cutting and barrages had succeeded in erasing enemy defences, many of his soldiers were not fitted out for attack, but carting equipment to fortify positions supposed to have been secured by the artillery.

Instead, more than 19,000 British soldiers died and 14,000 were wounded—to this day the worst losses in the history of the British army. Altogether, The Somme, as the 1916 battle was then known, would prove the most disastrous engagement of the First World War. In less than five months, there were more than a million casualties: 420,000 for the
British, 420,000 for the Germans, and 200,000 for the French.

The ground itself would be contested again and again until the Armistice in 1918. By then, soldiers from more than twenty-five countries had fought there, “Perhaps making it the place that best describes the World War. Americans, Australians, Canadian, Chinese, Indians, Irishmen, Moroccans, New Zealanders, Senegalese, South Africans…had all come to the Somme.”
⁷¹

Without victory, the losses encapsulated what could be called “a folk memory,”
⁷²
“the British group-memory, the epitome of incompetent generalship and pointless sacrifice”
⁷³
that resonated for decades.

From
Blackadder Goes Forth
:

Melchett: Now, Field Marshal Haig has formulated a brilliant tactical plan to ensure final victory in the field.

Blackadder: Would this brilliant plan involve us climbing over the top of our trenches and walking slowly towards the enemy?