LITMIR.BIZ

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just east of Lihons, where it left the sector with which we are now concerned. The position was held by the right wing of the 2nd Army (formerly von Buelow’s, but now under von Below, a brother of the General commanding on the extreme left in Poland), and the troops in line opposite the British on July 1st were principally the 14th Reserve Corps, made up of Baden, Wurtemberg and Bavarian divisions.

       GOMMECOURT TO THIEPVAL.

      It is clear that the Germans expected the attack of the Allies and had made a fairly accurate guess as to its terrain. They assumed that the area would be from Arras to Albert. In all that area they were ready with a full concentration of men and guns. South of Albert they were less prepared, and south of the Somme they were caught napping. The history of the first day is therefore the story of two separate actions in the north and south, in the first of which the Allies failed and in the second of which they brilliantly succeeded. By the evening the first action had definitely closed, and the weight of the Allies was flung wholly into the second. That is almost inevitable in an attack on a very broad front. Some part will be found tougher than the rest, and that part having been tried will be relinquished; but it is the stubbornness of the knot and the failure to take it which are the price of success elsewhere. Let us first tell the tale of the desperate struggle between Gommecourt and Thiepval.

      The divisions in action there were mainly from the New Army, though there were two of the old regulars, which had won fame both in Flanders and Gallipoli. They had to face a chain of fortified villages—Gommecourt, Serre, Beaumont Hamel, and Thiepval—and enemy positions which were generally on higher and better ground. The Ancre cut the line in two, with steep slopes rising from the valley bottom. Each village had been so fortified as to be almost impregnable, with a maze of catacombs, often two storeys deep, where whole battalions could take refuge, underground passages from the firing line to sheltered places in the rear, and pits into which machine guns could be lowered during a bombardment. On the plateau behind, with excellent direct observation, the Germans had their guns massed.

      It was this direct observation and the deep shelters for machine-guns which were the undoing of the British attack from Gommecourt to Thiepval, As our bombardment grew more intense on the morning of July 1st, so did the enemy’s. Before our men could go over the parapets the Germans had plastered our front trenches with high explosives and in many places blotted them out. All along our line, fifty yards before and behind the first trench, they dropped 6-in. and 8-in. high explosive shells. The result was that our men instead of forming up in the front trench were compelled to form up in the open ground behind, for the front trench had disappeared. In addition to this there was an intense shrapnel barrage, which must have been directed by observers, for it followed our troops as they moved forward.

      At Beaumont Hamel we had constructed a mine, the largest known in the campaign. At 7.30 acres of land leaped into the air, and our men advanced under the shadow of a pall of dust which turned the morning into twilight. “The exploding chamber,” said a sergeant, describing it afterwards, “was as big as a picture palace, and the gallery was an awful length. It took us seven months to build, and we were working under some of the crack Lancashire miners. Every time a fresh fatigue party came up they’d say to the miners, ‘Ain’t your ctceteraed grotto ever going up?’ But, my lord! it went up all right on July 1st. It was the sight of your life. Half the village got a rise. The air was full of stuff—waggons, wheels, horses, tins, boxes and Germans, It was seven months well spent getting that mine ready. I believe some of the pieces are coming down still.”

      As we began to cross no-man’s-land, the Germans seemed to man their ruined parapets, and fired rapidly with automatic rifles and machine-guns. They had special light mousqueton battalions, armed only with machine-guns, who showed marvellous intrepidity, some even pushing their guns forward into no-man’s-land to enfilade our advance. The British moved forward in line after line, dressed as if on parade; not a man wavered or broke rank; but minute by minute the ordered lines melted away under the deluge of high-explosive, shrapnel, rifle and machine-gun fire. There was no question about the German weight of artillery. From dawn till long after noon they maintained this steady drenching fire. Gallant individuals or isolated detachments managed here and there to break into the enemy position, and some even penetrated well behind it, but these were episodes, and the ground they won could not be held. By the evening, from Gommecourt to Thiepval, the attack had been everywhere checked, and our troops— what was left of them—were back again in their old line. They had struck the core of the main German defence.

      In this stubborn action against impossible odds the gallantry was so universal and absolute that it is idle to select special cases. In each mile there were men who performed the incredible. Nearly every English, Scots and Irish regiment was represented, as well as Midland and London Territorials, a gallant little company of Rhodesians, and a Newfoundland battalion drawn from the hard-bitten fishermen of that iron coast, who lost terribly on the slopes of Beaumont Hamel. Repeatedly the German position was pierced. At Serre fragments of two battalions pushed as far as Pendant Copse, 2,000 yards from the British lines. North of Thiepval troops broke through the enemy trenches, passed the crest of the ridge and reached the point called The Crucifix, in rear of the first German position. Not the least gallant of these exploits was that of the Ulster Division at the death-trap where the slopes south of Beaumont Hamel sink to the Ancre. It was the anniversary day of the Battle of the Boyne, and that charge when the men shouted “Remember the Boyne ” will be for ever a glorious page in the annals of Ireland. The Royal Irish Fusiliers were first out of the trenches. The Royal Irish Rifles followed them over the German parapets, bayoneting the machine-gunners, and the Innis-killings cleared the trenches to which they had given Irish names. Enfiladed on three sides they went on through successive German lines, and only a remnant came back to tell the tale. That remnant brought many prisoners, one man herding fifteen of the enemy through their own barrage. In the words of the General who commanded it:—“ The division carried out every portion of its allotted task in spite of the heaviest losses. It captured nearly 600 prisoners and carried its advance triumphantly to the limits of the objective laid down.” Nothing finer was done in the war. The splendid troops, drawn from those volunteers who had banded themselves together for another cause, now shed their blood like water for the liberty of the world.

      That grim struggle from Thiepval northward was responsible for by far the greater number of the Allied losses of the day. But, though costly, it was not fruitless, for it occupied the bulk of the German defence. It was the price which had to be paid for the advance of the rest of the front. For, while in the north the living wave broke vainly and gained little, in the south “by creeks and inlets making” the tide was flowing strongly shoreward.

       THE SOUTHERN SECTION.

      The map will show that Fricourt forms a bold salient; and it was the Allied purpose not to assault this salient but to cut it off. An advance on Ovillers and La Boisselle and up the long shallow depression towards Contal-maison, which our men called Sausage Valley, would, if united with the carrying of Mametz, pinch it so tightly that it must fall. Ovillers and La Boisselle were strongly fortified villages, and on this first day, while we won the outskirts and carried the entrenchments before them, we did not control the ruins which our guns had pounded out of the shape of habitable dwellings. Just west of Fricourt a division was engaged which had suffered grave misfortunes at Loos. That day it got its own back, for it made no mistake, but poured resolutely into the angle east of Sausage Valley.

      Before evening Mametz fell. Its church stood up, a broken tooth of masonry among the shattered houses, with an amphitheatre of splintered woods behind and around it. South of it ran a high road, and south of the road lay a little hill, with the German trench lines on the southern side. The division which took the place was one of the most famous in the British Army. It had fought at First Ypres, at Festubert and at Loos. Since the autumn of 1914 it had been changed in its composition, but there were in it battalions which had been for twenty months in the field. The whole division, old and new alike, went forward to their task as if it were their first day of war. On the slopes of the little hill three battalions advanced in line—one from a southern English county, one from a northern city, one of Highland regulars. They carried everything

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