15.
The Somme.
Throughout my journey, I had always felt a bit sad when saying my goodbyes to the people I’d been fortunate in meeting but the following morning was different; it wasn’t forever, so the feeling of loneliness that I had felt the other times didn’t happen and it also reminded me that my journey was nearly done. Not yet, though, as the Somme Battlefield was next.
The 1st July 1916 will always be known as the darkest day of the British Army. 19,240 British soldiers were killed whilst a further 57,470 were wounded. The French also lost about 7,000 men. These figures were for the first day alone and a lot of the casualties were from Lord Kitchener’s ‘Pals’ Battalions, who had joined up together on the outbreak of the war. Men and boys who worked together, played sport together or who just lived in the same area joined one of the hundreds of ‘Pals’ Battalions that were formed throughout the length and breadth of Britain. Unfortunately these friends, colleagues and team members died together, thus totally devastating the areas that they came from.
The most infamous of these were the Accrington Pals from Lancashire. During the first 20 minutes of the Somme offensive they were almost totally annihilated. Out of the 720 men who went over the top, 584 were killed, wounded or went missing. I can’t imagine what the reaction was like in their home towns when the telegrams started being delivered to the unfortunate families. They knew that a large battle had taken place and that their men had probably been involved, but because of government restrictions the newspapers couldn’t tell the British public what had really happened on the Somme until later.
Although capturing the German positions and advancing the British and French lines was an objective, it was only a secondary one. The main objective of the Battle of the Somme was a battle of attrition, fought in order to relieve some of the pressure of the French at Verdun. In this it was a successful, as the Germans had to move their reserves up to the Somme and it might have stopped a French collapse at Verdun but that ‘victory’ was very, very costly to every town, city and village across the British Isles and further afield in the Empire as well as in France.
The Battle of the Somme carried on through the summer of 1916 and into the autumn, before finally fizzling out after an early snowfall in November 1916. The French and British advanced by the grand total of 12km, but the price paid was very high, with the British sustaining 420,000 casualties and the French a further 200,000. On the other side, an estimated 500,000 Germans were killed, wounded or just vanished.
The weather was fine to start with, but it began to drizzle when I got to my first destination of the day. This wasn’t good news as I’m short sighted and as blind as a bat without my specs. I can cope with anything that Mother Nature throws at me except bloody drizzle! Anyway, I didn’t have much choice in the matter, but it meant that I literally didn’t see very much for the majority of that day’s riding.
The rain meant that I missed a couple of the cemeteries that I had meant to visit, so the first destination that I reached was the Delville Wood South African cemetery and memorial. The Battle of Delville Wood began on the 15th July 1916 when the 1st South African Infantry Brigade captured those woods. They managed to hold onto them for six days despite numerous German attempts to recapture them. During this time many British units in the area tried in vain to reach the South Africans, but they were driven back by the Germans. Eventually they were relieved and upon the roll call after the battle only 780 of the original 3,153 men present before the battle remained.
Delville Wood was bought by the South African government in 1920 and serves as their national monument on the Western Front. The memorial itself is located in the middle of Delville Wood that was replanted with trees in the years after the war, but near to the memorial is a single tree that deserves a mention. ‘The Last Tree’ is a Hornbeam and is the only pre-war survivor still alive in those woods today. How did it survive when all of its contemporaries died in that maelstrom of steel, lead and explosives? Nature is a great healer and to look at that tree, you’d never know that it was once blasted and shot to within an inch of its life. It’s a living reminder that the war wasn’t that long ago, really.
The ground under the woods still bears the scars, but in a softer way than at Verdun, so I was happily able to walk around whilst thinking about the events that took place there. That little walk took me back to the road where I had left my bike, but before I left I had to visit the South African men who died in those woods so far from home. The cemetery contains 5,523 men, mostly South Africans. Although a staggering 3,593 remain unidentified.
Back on the road, I headed west through the village of Longueval before stopping at another memorial and cemetery which lies on the outskirts of the village. (The next few days would mean a lot of stopping and starting for me.)
Caterpillar Cemetery mostly contains the remains of soldiers from New Zealand who were killed during the Battle of the Somme, although there are also some Welsh soldiers buried there who were killed in 1918. 5,569 Commonwealth soldiers are buried at this cemetery; 3,796 are unidentified. In 2004, the remains of an unidentified New Zealand soldier were removed from this cemetery and reinterred at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Wellington, New Zealand. The memorial that was also built at this site commemorates over 1,200 NZ soldiers who died in that area and have no known grave.
A little bit further west I turned north towards the small hamlet of Bazentin where I visited Bazentin-Le-Petit Military Cemetery that contains the remains of 182 British soldiers, who were killed whilst capturing Bazentin from the Germans on the 14th July 1916.
About 1 ½ miles to the west I caught up with the 1st Australian Division, who spent the remainder of the war in France and Belgium following their evacuation from Gallipoli during December 1915. After visiting the 1st Division memorial on the northern outskirts of the village of Pozieres, I went to the Ovillers-La Boisselle Cemetery on the southern side of Pozieres where 2,761 soldiers are buried. The majority are Aussies, but there are a few British graves as well as a single German.
Every time I visited a cemetery on my journey I always felt sad, but I felt a bit worse at that particular cemetery. They’d survived the hell of Gallipoli only to be killed in France.
It is only natural, I suppose, that I’m still slightly embarrassed about writing about my inner feelings and emotions that I felt throughout my little journey but I will try anyway:
Although it had finally stopped raining, the grass was still soaking wet as I sat down amidst the rows of dead Australians, I just didn’t know what else to do? A few moments before I had been remembering the heat and dust of Anzac cove where a lot of those men had fought, the beaches and high bluffs that had cost too much blood to capture. I remembered the cemeteries where their comrades lay, but most of all I remembered the sea. All I could think was that those poor men thought they would be safe once they had left Gallipoli and that the sea was their escape....
“Bloody hell Phil, snap out of it!” was something that I said to myself a lot throughout my journey and the Australian cemetery was no different. I picked my sorry self up off the grass but I knew that it would happen again. Anybody who doesn’t feel themselves welling up whilst visiting the Western Front cemeteries isn’t paying enough attention to the events that occurred there, although I was a long way past caring if people saw me or not. The Gallipoli campaign had saddened me, before Macedonia and the Balkans made me embrace my emotions. The Italian Front shocked me and made me cry, whilst the Western Front tore the feelings from my heart and drowned them in a wave of tears.
I have not been very forthcoming in speaking about my journey and some people still just regard it as a little bike ride. It was I suppose, but the true journey wasn’t about the travelling, it was an expedition into my own mind, a journey of emotions that I couldn’t explain in spoken words when I returned home. We can’t speak to the dead, but I think that they communicated well enough with me through other means....
Although the cemetery mostly contains Australian dead, the memorial wall that surrounds it does not. That wall commemorates over 14,000 British soldiers who were killed during the German advance during March 1918 and who have no known grave.
Further along the road west from Pozieres I visited Gordon Dump Cemetery which contains the graves of 1,676 Commonwealth soldiers, before heading to the village of La Boisselle.
Somewhere near there, I realised that I had run out of water and couldn’t find a drinking fountain, so I attempted to ask an old Frenchman for some water. Not being able to remember the French word for water, I ended up using the German word “wasser” for some reason? Oh dear god! He just looked at me with a strange expression on his face, so out came the translation card again whilst I mimed drinking. He held a finger up, (no, not that one!) before going into his house and returning with a jug of water and two glasses of red wine. We toasted France, the Queen of England (I think?) and ‘Le Mort’, before vigorously shaking my hand and wishing me “bon voyage.”
Just to the south of the village of La Boisselle lies the huge Lochnager Crater that was blasted out of the earth by British engineers on the 1st July 1916 during the opening stages of the Battle of the Somme. It was probably the most successful occurrence for the British on that fateful day. As most readers of this book will have some knowledge of the terrible events of that day and to some degree the following months, I’m going to turn my description of it around and concentrate on another tragedy.
In Britain, modern day Germans have a reputation for being both efficient and well organised but it would seem that this isn’t just a modern trait. The British expected to more or less walk into the German positions unopposed, as they thought that the German troops in their frontlines would either be dead or demoralised after suffering a 5 day artillery bombardment. Unfortunately for the British, the Germans had learnt their lessons from earlier in the war and had dug deep concrete reinforced shelters, where their troops could take cover from the heavy shelling. Thus, the Germans emerged from their shelters relatively unscathed to the surprise of the British. Another surprise was the fact that a lot of the German barbed wire was still intact, despite the destruction of the wire being one of the main objectives for the British guns. This wasn’t the case in the French sector, as they’d had the foresight to use high explosive shells that flattened the wire, instead of the shrapnel shells that didn’t cut the wire for the British.
Unfortunately for some of the German troops, artillery wasn’t all that they faced. For about a year before the opening scenes of the Battle of the Somme, mining and anti mining operations had become normal for both sides on the Somme sector of the front, with both sides trying to either blow up the enemy or disrupt their mining attempts. Despite this, the Germans couldn’t manage to stop 19 mines being blown up under their front lines on the 1st July 1916.
6,000 Germans died on that day due to either the British mines or the more successful French attacks in the south of the sector. The mines were a double edged sword for the British though, as a lot of soldiers became trapped in the craters and, with nowhere to hide, they were mown down by German machineguns that had been quickly repositioned on the eastern lips of the craters.
When you think of the British attacks on the Somme, you imagine thousands of British soldiers being cut down by machineguns whilst trying to get past the intact German barbed wire and, although this was true in some places, the failure of the British artillery to destroy the German guns probably cost most men their lives. The German batteries opened fire against the British trenches after the attacking troops had left, thus in a lot of cases they literally had nowhere to go and were stuck in no man’s land, between the mostly intact wire and the murderous machinegun fire, whilst their escape was blocked by the German artillery shells landing to their rear.
Although the British managed to capture some of the German trenches, they couldn’t hold these positions due to their high casualties, an inability to bring forward reserves and the tenacity of the German counter attacks. Lessons were learnt by the British after that disastrous day and the British efforts for the rest of the battle were concentrated on capturing smaller objectives instead of the whole sector at once.
Ultimately the Battle of the Somme was considered a victory for the French and British, as it bled the Germans dry of their reserves and relieved some of the pressure on Verdun to the south, but what a price to pay! One of the mines that were exploded on the first day formed the present day Lochnagar Crater (it was 2 mines that were exploded simultaneously, really.) 60,000lbs of ammonal high explosives were packed in two charges beneath the site and at the time, it was the largest ever man made explosion (although it didn’t keep this record for very long.) It totally destroyed an approximate 400ft stretch of the German front lines and flung the debris up to a height of 4,000ft. The resulting crater is 300ft wide and 70ft deep and is one of the few remaining testaments to the horror that occurred early on that summer’s morning in 1916.
When visiting the crater, I remember being slightly sad as well as disappointed. Maybe that isn’t the best word to use, but the crater itself didn’t awe me like the craters further east at Vauquois had done. Yes, the Lochnagar crater was bigger in depth and width, but it was just a hole in the ground, whilst the Vauquois craters were a preserved battlefield with the provenance that came with it. I’m probably being too critical of Lochnagar, as the terrain around Vauquois has not been returned to agricultural usage like at the Somme. Anyway, it’s good that this small part of the battlefield has been preserved, unlike most of the other craters from the Somme mines that have been filled in.
After leaving the now very busy Lochnager Crater, I headed south towards the village of Fricourt and hopefully somewhere a bit quieter. Fortunately I knew about just the place.
To the north of the village lies the German Fricourt Cemetery which is the resting place of 17,027 German soldiers, who either died on the Somme battlefields in 1916 or during the German offensive of spring 1918. I spent about an hour sat at the base of one of the trees that dot the cemetery, just staring at the thousands of stark black crosses whilst listening to the birdsong above. Once again, I had found the peace that I craved amongst the company of long dead Germans.
Upon leaving the cemetery, I noticed some poppies growing by the roadside adjacent to the entrance. The sight of those blood red poppies made me recall a short passage written by a distant relative of mine, the Rev Thomas Tiplady, who served as a chaplain in France and Flanders.
“Poppies are the flowers of forgetfulness---the flowers of sleep and pleasant dreamings. And they bloom luxuriantly on the French front.”
“Traurigkeit. Sleep well, lads.”
In the middle of a field, just to the west of the village, lies Fricourt New Military Cemetery.
Although this was a much smaller cemetery compared to the German one that I’d just left, it affected me more emotionally when I walked through the brick and stone gate posts.
Fricourt had been captured on the 2nd July 1916 by the 10th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment and most of the graves that stood before me bore the regimental horse emblem.
210 soldiers are buried at that cemetery, 159 are from the West Yorkshire Regiment.
The next cemetery was the Norfolk Cemetery at Becourt that contains 549 Commonwealth soldiers, before going back through La Boisselle and heading a few miles northwest to Blighty Valley Cemetery that contains the remains of 1,027 Commonwealth soldiers.
For all that day, I had been able to see the huge Thiepval Memorial that towered over the Somme Battlefields and cemeteries in the surrounding area and it was no less impressive when I eventually reached it.
The Thiepval Memorial serves two purposes, with the first being a memorial to the missing of the Somme. It bears the names of 72,194 men from the British Isles and South Africa who have no named grave. It is also the Anglo-French Somme Battlefield memorial to recognise the fact that both countries fought together during the offensive. Unfortunately when I visited it, it was covered in scaffolding, due to the repairs and refurbishments that were taking place to get it ready for the centenary of the Somme offensives the following year. The outside of the monument might have been hidden but the inside where the names are was still the same.
Douaumont at Verdun had been bad enough, but as an Englishman, I found the Thiepval Memorial worse. Every single name was familiar and I soon decided to be on my way. I’m sure that the missing wouldn’t mind me deciding not to linger there, although some of the living might see it as some kind of slight against their memory. It wasn’t, I had just had enough of it all by then.
Whilst sitting next to my bike near the entrance, a British guy came to talk to me. Unfortunately I don’t remember his name, but he managed to cheer me up a bit, so thanks for that, whoever you are.
About a mile north of Thiepval, is the location of Ulster Tower that was built to commemorate the men of the 36th (Ulster) Division, as well as other soldiers from Ulster who were killed during the war. Now I was determined to leave politics, especially Irish politics, out of my journey, so I will just say that it’s a fine memorial that serves its purpose well.
Back down towards Thiepval I visited the Connaught Cemetery that contains the graves of 1,268 Commonwealth soldiers, but despite the name, the majority of the dead originate from across Britain, although there are a fair few Irish troops mixed in.
I had then planned to enter Thiepval Woods that are located just to the south west of Connaught Cemetery. Fortunately, to enter them you have to get permission from the Somme Association, who own the woods and which I didn’t have. Oh well, it probably saved me from revisiting some of the demons inside my head again!
By that point I’d had enough for the day, but to get to the campsite in the town of Albert, I had to go past a couple more British cemeteries and I couldn’t bring myself to ignore them. So after heading west to the village of Hamel, I headed south and visited Hamel Military Cemetery on the outskirts of the village, which commemorates about 500 men who are buried or believed to be buried at that cemetery. The road then went through a very spooky feeling wood for a couple of miles before reaching the village of Aveluy, where I visited Aveluy Communal Cemetery that contains the graves of 613 Commonwealth soldiers.
It was early evening when I finally rolled onto the campsite at Albert, although fortunately just before they closed the campsite reception for the night. Once I’d eaten I decided to clean the inside of my rucksack out. Yes, not very exciting I know, but I’m glad that I did.
Throughout my journey I had been making a mark in my diary every time that I left a poppy somewhere, but I made the mistake of not writing the exact number down and the last time that I had counted up the tally had been in Italy. Anyway, to cut the story short, I had found a sealed bag of 300 poppies hidden at the bottom of my bag. I knew that I was a bit behind in leaving them, but not that much! I thought that I only had 133 poppies left to leave before I reached the grand figure of 2015, so the extra bag of 300 messed up my plans somewhat and I had to come up with a plan to dispose of them. In the meantime I went off to have a look around the town of Albert that I’d read so much about during the war years.
About halfway between the cities of Amiens and Bapaume, Albert was the closest town to the Somme battlefields and was therefore a well known haunt for the British and Commonwealth troops when they weren’t getting shot at. Although due to its proximity to the front lines, it was reduced to nothing more than a pile of rubble by the end of the war. Due to that, there isn’t that much to see in Albert these days that is related to the war. One noticeable building is the rebuilt Basilica of Notre-Dame de Brebieres that is crowned by a modern replica of the Leaning Virgin (although the modern replica isn’t leaning.)
After being hit by shell fire in January 1915, the statue spent the next 3 years leaning at a right angle towards the ground and legend said that the war would end when it finally fell. It was finally knocked down by British Artillery fire after the Germans captured Albert during their spring offensive of 1918 and although the war didn’t end straight away, it did end that year, so the legend was nearly correct.
The next morning I was up and off before the sun came up and, being summer, it was bloody early! I had a horribly long day ahead of me with a lot to do. The first port of call was Martinsart British Cemetery, about 2 miles north of Albert. This cemetery was different in that all the headstones are made from a darker sandstone instead of the usual creamy white Portland stone. I don’t know why this is the case but it was no less beautiful than the ‘normal’ cemeteries, just a bit different. There are 488 Commonwealth soldiers buried at that location.
Next, I headed north through the village of Martinsart and back through the village of Hamel, before turning north west towards Beaumont-Hamel (Newfoundland) Memorial Park.
That location was established in the memory of the men from the British dominion of Newfoundland, who were killed during the Great War (Newfoundland didn’t become part of Canada until 1949.) The 74 acre site is the location where the Newfoundland Regiment were more or less wiped out during the 1st day of the Battle of the Somme. Out of 801 officers and men who had started the advance, 233 were killed, 386 wounded and 91 just went missing during the attack against Beaumont-Hamel. With the size of their losses, they never took their objectives for that day and Beaumont-Hamel wasn’t captured until the November of that year.
The memorial itself is extremely evocative, as instead of a war like statue, they decided on a life like statue of a caribou on top of a rock that is looking out over the former battlefields. In my eyes, that’s a very fitting memorial to those men who died so far away from their homes, an indication of the lives that they left behind. Just in front of the memorial is the preserved battlefield, but you can only access that by walking along the trenches, as the rest of the battlefield was fenced off. I didn’t bother as I’d had enough of trenches by then but anyway, they were too well preserved, with every last reminder of the suffering that occurred there hidden from view.
There was one thing that puzzled me about the memorial park, though, and that were the signs that dotted the area, telling you to keep out of certain places by warning you about unexploded munitions. How was the memorial park different to any other 20th century battlefield in the world? It took me a few minutes to figure it out and the answer was that it wasn’t any different. The battlefield wasn’t the problem. Instead, the health and safety culture of Canada and the threat of being sued were the problem! You can kind of understand their fears about it, but they’d be better off putting signs up to say that they can’t be held responsible for other people’s stupid actions!
Near the entrance I also visited the memorial for the British 29th Division that the Newfoundland Regiment was part of. This wasn’t the first time that I had tried to pay my respects to the dead of the 29th Division, as they had formed part of the British invasion force at Suvla Bay, Gallipoli. At least this time I had managed to get to their locations.
Fortunately I had visited there when it was really quiet, as I’d heard that it can get a bit busy at times. It opens from 9am to 5pm and I was there at 6.30am. Naughty me, but the fence wasn’t too high! Because I was technically trespassing and there were a couple of workers about, to get to the cemeteries at that location, I hopped back over the fence and followed the edge of a farmer’s field before going back over the fence nearer the cemetery. The French don’t always stick to the rules, so the farmer probably wouldn’t mind. Whilst I was in the field, I also inadvertently broke the French law about souvenir hunting. I’ve only recently found out that it’s illegal to remove items from the battlefields, although it might just be another law that everybody ignores, going by the amount of museums and other displays that I’d seen along my route. Anyway, I can always take it back if they want me to? The said item is part of a Lee Enfield rifle with half a bayonet still attached. It was in plain view at the side of the field and now hangs on my living room wall as a lasting reminder. Sorry!
The cemetery that I had sneaked to was Hawthorn Ridge Cemetery no2, which contains the graves of 200 Commonwealth soldiers with the vast majority dying during the opening hours of the Battle of the Somme. After sneaking back out of the memorial park, I followed a road up a small hill to the west before turning onto a track across a field that led towards Hawthorn Ridge Cemetery no1, which almost became the end of my journey!
After visiting the cemetery that contains the graves of about 150 Commonwealth soldiers, half of whom are unidentified, I walked around the walls of the small cemetery to a position that overlooked the Hawthorn Ridge crater a couple of hundred yards to the north. I took my rucksack off and began to lower myself to sit with my back against the cemetery wall, but something stopped me at the last second. I can?