Category Archives: battle of the somme

Tuesday 10th July 2018 – BARRY HAY …

… once famously said “one thing I want to tell you all, and that it’s good to be back home”.

And so as I staggered in through my front door at about 21:50 last night I did have to say that I couldn’t have agreed more with him, even though I was confronted by the European Cardboard Box Mountain.

So having crashed out good and proper last night at about 21:30 after my marathon session around the northern half of the Somme front line, I was up and about at about 05:40, long before the alarm.

I’d even found time to go off on my travels too, where I ended up in a comfortable household with a woman from Shrewsbury (and who could pronounce it correctly too) and her two teenage daughters. It started off by my having received a huge packet of documents – deeds for Reyers, deeds for Expo, life assurance policies and the like. It turned out that I had finally become fed up of my bankers and closed my accounts. I needed to file the documents away safely and so I reckoned a safety-deposit box that I had in a bank would do. But then it turned out that I had of course closed the bank account so I wouldn’t have access. A self-storage unit might do, but I didn’t think that that was permanent enough. So o the way home I stopped, parked my car (which was pale green) on a bad corner and applied some kind of dry shampoo to my hair (it was long) to clean it. But cars kept on bumping into mine and pushing it further around the bend so in the end I had to abandon the procedure (and the top off my shampoo tube which I had dropped on the floor somewhere) and drive the car away. I passed several petrol stations where I could have obtained some water to rinse my hair but later found that I could comb it out – except for where it had been badly applied and I ended up looking like a pineapple. This woman was going through her paperwork too, and reckoned without actually saying it that although she came from a good family background she had been adopted. I was explaining about how I’d been born on one side of Shrewsbury (which I hadn’t) and how I’d lived fora while on the other side of the town (which stretching the imagination a little, you might say is true).

Somehow I still didn’t feel in the mood to do too much so I had a shower and a tidy up, packed everything away, said goodbye to the most bizarre landlady I had ever met in my life (and, believe me, I’ve met a few) and loaded up Caliburn – who still had his wheels on which surprised me greatly.

And I forgot to take a photograph of the hotel too.

It was looking miserable and cloudy, and I could even smell the rain, but anyway I set off on my travels, remembering this time to stop at the LeClerc that I had found yesterday evening to pick up stuff for lunch (but forgot my breakfast too while I was at it).

Dodging the roadworks and following the diversions, I eventually arrived at Albert and called in at the Super U to find some breakfast. But not before I was accosted on the car park by someone who was clearly looking for a job. Much as I admired his initiative, I couldn’t do anything for him of course, but this is the second time (the first being at Soissons a good many years ago) that I’d been propositioned like this.

Breakfast was taken at the side of the road in Albert and then I went for a wander around the town.

Albert is of course famous as being the main British assembly point behind the lines, and for the fact that it was visible (or, at least, the spire of the church is visible) from the German lines at la Boisselle. Consequently it was under heavy artillery fire throughout the war.

There’s the famous church of course, with its statue of Mary perched on top, offering up Jesus to the clouds. And the legend that God would reach down and take up the baby if a virgin ever walked past.

With it being such a magnificent target, the Germans naturally aimed at it, but after it had been hit and almost fallen (and French engineers had chained it to the tower) another legend grew up that differed according to whoever you spoke to.

Either

  1. whichever side that knocked down Mary would lose the war
  2. the war would not end until Mary had been knocked down

As it happens, it was the British who knocked it down in March 1918 when the town had fallen to the Germans in the Spring Offensive.

From Albert I headed off to Dartmoor Cemetery a mile or so to the east of the town.

This is a famous cemetery, and for a couple of reasons too. Firstly, it’s the last resting place of a couple of people called Lee. They are father and son who fought side-by-side on the Somme and were killed on the same day almost in the same place.

The second reason is that it’s the site of the grave of Harry Webber.

In 1914 his three sons joined up for the War and were accepted as officers. Harry Webber then petitioned the War Office, offering to serve the British Army in any capacity they liked, so that he would have the privilege of saluting his three sons.

After all, he had plenty of free time, having just retired from the Stock Exchange at the ripe old age of 65.

Despite being refused on many occasions, his persistence led him eventually to be appointed as a Lieutenant Transport Officer to one of the Regiments on the Somme.

And it was there on the Somme that he was killed by a shell.

Aged 67 at the time of his death, he is the oldest known battle casualty of the War.

Next stop is Mansell Copse and the Devonshire Cemetery.

Here, the Devonshire Regiment had to charge down a hill, across a railway line and up the other side into the German trenches at Mametz. And while the artillery had blown away most of the wire and most of the defences, there was a well-protected machine gun built into a substantial cross in the civilian cemetery halfway up the other side.

Captain Martin, who was said to be a keen modeller, went home on leave just before the battle and made a clay model of the battleground, and on his return just before the battle told his colleagues where he thought the machine gun would catch him and his men.

And sure enough, after the battle had passed over the spot, they found his body exactly where he had predicted.

The War poet William Hodgson wrote
I, that on my familiar hill
Saw with uncomprehending eyes
A hundred of thy sunsets spill
Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,

And I suspect like most sensitive people, he maybe had an idea that he would be one of them.

He was a Lieutenant in the Devonshire Regiment and he too met his death in the attack on Mametz on 1st July.

At Carnoy, in the village square, this was the casualty treatment centre for this part of the front.

General Rawlinson had asked for every ambulance train on France to be standing by behind the lines to evacuate the wounded. There were 20 of them, but the Quartermaster-General sent him just three.

As a result, some wounded men had to lie here in the open for as long as five days before they made it back to a hospital.

One soldier, with a slight wound to the foot, discovered when he arrived at a hospital after all that time that the wound had turned gangrenous and his entire leg had to be amputated.

That’s one of the reasons why the cemetery at Carnoy is so large, but only a handful of graves are “unknown” – they mostly all came from the casualty clearing station, having died in that five-day period.

One Captain, Captain Neville, was in charge of four battalions. He gave each one a football and ordered each battalion, at the start of the battle, to kick a ball all the way to Berlin.

Two of the footballs made it back to Blighty, but Captain Neville didn’t.

Up on the ridge at the top of Carnoy, I’m standing on the German front line looking right across to the Devonshire’s trench at Mansell Copse.

Somewhere not too far from where I’m standing, although I can’t see it because of all the wheat, it the crater caused by the Kasino Point mine. This blew away a large proportion of the German defenders and as it was blown late, took the defenders completely by surprise.

This was one of the reasons why the attack on this section of the line was so successful, and the village of Montauban, a couple of kilometres behind me, fell quite quickly.

The British front line soldiers were through quite easily, and sat waiting for the second line and the cavalry, because they had completely broken the front and there was nothing now between them and Berlin.

But at this moment, unfortunately, General Rawlinson lost his nerve. Having heard of the disasters on the other fronts, he could not believe that there had been a breakthrough here at Montauban and refused to order the second line and the cavalry forward.

He noted in his diary as early as 12:15 on that day that “there is no hope of getting the Cavalry through today”.

Meanwhile, the British first-line troops were sitting staring at empty fields and empty forests, and did so for two days, and when Rawlinson finally did order his reserves forward, it was too late.

The Germans had refortified the line by this time and the slaughter started again.

Had Rawlinson only kept his nerve, the War could have ended 12 months earlier. But then that was Rawlinson’s big failure. he hated Kitchener and had no faith whatever in, in fact he had nothing but contempt for Kitchener’s “New Army” of civilian volunteers. They may not have been as well-trained as his beloved regulars but they certainly played their part.

And he was a born-and-bred infantryman too and had no understanding of and no faith in the cavalry either, and no concept of the panic that a well-handled cavalry division could create behind enemy lines.

Not quite relating to the First Day on the Somme, I went just down the road to the Military Cemetery at Guillemont Road.

One of the people lying in here is Raymond Asquith. He was the son of Herbert Asquith, the British Prime Minster at the time.

So having concluded my visit to the Somme Battlefield, the next question was bound to be “what to do next?”

Heading towards home was the obvious answer and I decided that I would at least reach Rouen before I thought about a place to stay.

But Amiens was awful. There were roadworks all the way through the centre and what should have been a 15-minute drive turned into over an hour.

And from then on it just seemed to get worse.

I had to stop not far outside Amiens for lunch. and also a little half-hour doze. And as usual, I felt a little better after that.

But my better humour didn’t last much longer. Not long after my little pause I came across yet ANOTHER “road closed” sign, and we disappeared down yet ANOTHER enormously long diversion.

But it’s an ill-wind that doesn’t blow anyone any good, and we eventually ended up just a couple of miles away from the autoroute that runs down the coast from Abbeville. So at least I was able to hot-foot it to Rouen and make up a little lost time.

But I lost it all in Rouen because, once more, there were road works just about everywhere and we crawled through the city and it took us ages.

Just WHEN are they going to build a by-pass around it? It’s totally crazy having all of this traffic on the city streets.

On the edge of the city I put in some diesel and then settled down on the autoroute just to get clear of the place. Caliburn was running quite well with just a little vibration that’s sprung up from somewhere, and we were bowling along quite nicely, so I just kept going.

Still three hours to home though, but only 2 and a bit via the motorway if you don’t mind the péages.

And one of my friends had told me a very useful tip. I’ve been paying “Class 2” for Caliburn because he’s over 1m90 in height, but apparently vans of Caliburn’s size are really “Class 1”, and apparently I ought to argue.

So at the first péage passage, Caliburn was classed as “Class 2”. So I pressed the button and explained. Sure enough, the tariff changed over to “Class 1”.

At the second péage, still “Class 2”, but as soon as I pressed the button to call, the tariff changed automatically to “Class 1” and a voice from Control said, before I’d even had time to say anything “I’m sorry. I’ve changed it for you”.

So this is a well-known phenomenon that doesn’t even need explaining, and when I think of all the times that I’ve travelled on the péages in a van and all the excess tolls that I must have paid and how I’ve been ripped off, and how the autoroute companies have been there ripping off van drivers for 15 years.

They must have made millions out of van drivers illegally over the years.

By the time that I reached Caen I really was flagging but I decided that with just an hour or so to go, I’d keep going. If I really felt bad I’d stop for another doze at the side of the road.

But here we are, back at home. 500 or so kilometres with just a brief doze and another stop for fuel. A far cry from when I could do 1000 kilometres non-stop without batting an eyelid, even after a full day’s work, but it’s still the longest day that I’ve had for several years, and it’s also after a good day out around the battlefields.

I ought to be really proud of myself, but to be honest, I’m just too tired to care right now.

Monday 9th July 2018 – NOT ONLY DID I …

… make it to Canada today, I was actually in Newfoundland and Labrador too!

But more of that anon.

With something of a very disturbed sleep (and I’ve no idea why) I finally crawled out of bed at some time rather later than the alarm.

There was plenty of work to be done this morning but for some reason or other I wasn’t really in the mood enough to do it. I don’t know where my energy seems to have gone to at all.

Anyway, at 09:00 and the morning rush-hour gone, I went outside and hit the streets. First stop was to load up with food as the lunchtime stuff is getting low, but would you believe that I drove all of the 45 kilometres to Serre, all the way through the city of Arras and several other small towns, and didn’t even find a single supermarket?

Serre was one of the vital points on the Somme front line that needed to be taken, but the attack had bogged down long before the village had been reached. The “Accrington Pals” who had attacked the village had been decimated.

All around the area are several cemeteries that contain the bodies of the fallen that were recovered from the barbed wire when the battlefield was cleared after the German retreat in early 1917 and were still being recovered in the 1920s.

One piece of land that had been part of the front line had been given to the City of Sheffield and it’s known as Sheffield Park. Tile has worn away many of the features but you can still see the trenches and the shell holes quite clearly.

Narrowly avoiding being squidged by a French lorry driver who was speeding and not paying attention, I visited a few other cemeteries of note and then headed for the Hawthorn Redoubt.

This was a prominent hill overlooking the front line and the British Army dealt with it by the simple expedient of tunneling underneath it and packing the tunnel full of explosives. The explosion of the mine at 07:28 was the signal for the attack to begin.

The crater is certainly impressive – it has to be seen to be believed, but it’s by no means the largest that was exploded on that day. It is famous however as its detonation was actually captured on film.

Down the road from there I entered Newfoundland and Labrador. This is another corner of a foreign field that is forever Canada, although I can’t claim asylum there (I did ask).

It’s where the Newfoundland Regiment, all 800 of them, were ordered into attack but due to a misunderstanding, instead of going through the communication trench to the front line, they left their trenches in the rear and advanced in the open, in full view of a couple of German heavy machine guns.

It has to be said that there were a couple of hundred German machine gunners on the Somme front line, and they alone counted for a very large proportion of the 60,000 or so British casualties on the 1st July.

By the time the Newfoundlanders reached the front line, there were just 95 left. They probably hadn’t even wounded a single German.

I ended up having quite a chat with a nice Canadian girl from St Johns who told me that her great grandfather’s brother is still lying somewhere out there on the battlefield.

Here we were interrupted by a band of pseudo-Scottish pipers who insisted on attempting to play Scotland the Brave and Cock o’ the North and were most unimpressed when I suggested that they went to practise a Highland Fling on the field containing the unexploded ordnance.

Next stop was the Thiepval Ridge and its massive memorial to the missing. Over 75,000 soldiers who lost their lives on the Somme have no known grave and when you see the size of the shell holes that remain, it’s hardly surprising.

Their names are all recorded here,but you’ll see several gaps that are clearly where names have been filled with cement. Bodies are regularly discovered even today on the battlefield and if they are identified, their names are removed from the memorial.

And there are several cases of the “missing” subsequently coming to light, having gone to ground in rural France.

The leader of the pipe band and his acolyte came over to me here (they had been going from memorial to memorial trying to play the pipes) and demanded an explanation of my earlier comments. This led to quite a heated and animated discussion, particularly when I suggested how he could obtain a better sound from his pipes (a method which involves eating several plates of baked beans).

It seems that all of these Scots pipe bands who died for freedom only died so that Scots pipe bands can express their freedom and no-one else is allowed to have any freedom of expression if it disagrees with the opinions of the Scots pipe bands. But I put him right on that score and he slunk off with a flea in his ear.

A good pipe band is a magnificent thing, but a poor pipe band is one of the worst things in the world to have to suffer to hear. It’s even worse than a mouth organ, and regular readers of this rubbish willknow my opinion about that.

The sky had clouded over by now, but I carried on, visiting Sausage and Mash valleys, where a couple of machine guns on a spur of high land in between them decimated the attacking soldiers.

It’s here thuugh that we have the Lochnagar Crater. This was the largest mine exploded on the day and you can tell that by the size of the crater.

Cecil Lewis, an RFC pilot who was flying over it on the day, gives a vivid description of it in his autobiography Sagittarius Rising.

Back 40-odd years ago there were plans to fill in and redevelop the crater, as has happened with a couple of others, but a British person bought the land to preserve its integrity and he’s made quite a passable job of a tourist attraction of it.

But from the top of it, you can certainly see the futility of attacking up “Sausage” and “Mash” valleys.

It was already 19:00 by this time and so I shot off back to Lens. I’d had no food at all during the day, so I was well-pleased in stumbling across a LeClerc supermarket where I could grab some stuff to make a butty – just before they closed the doors too.

And back here in the heat I had a shower and washed my clothes before eating it too.

But 143% of my day’s activity on the fitbit told its own story. By 21:30 I was tucked up in bed and I’ll do the rest tomorrow.

Sunday 8th July 2018 – WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT …

canada national parks vimy ridge france… that by the end of the day I would have been setting my foot inside Canada?

Only in your wildest flights of fancy would you have imagined it, but nevertheless, here I am. And quite right too if you ask me.

I DID say “never say never”, didn’t I? And where there’s a will there are relatives. So Canada here I came.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here, aren’t I?

As expected, I had a bad night with my noisy neighbours. But not so bad that I wasn’t able to go off on a nocturnal ramble.

A rather distressing one in fact. Two men were trying to extract a piece of wood from underneath a huge pile halfway up a scaffolding at IKEA of all places. The pile titled alarmingly and caused two yellow dumper-type lorries to swerve. One of them crashed into Caliburn and badly damaged him, but the lorries didn’t stop until they were round the corner. I didn’t know which one was responsible for the damage so I challenged them both. But they both denied it. A friend of mine, someone from school, was travelling as a passenger in one of them and he reckoned that it was the other so I challenged that driver but he still persisted with his denial. I tried to explain that I had seen what happened with the wood so they could hardly be blamed and the insurance would deal with it anyway, but they still refused to admit which one of them it was.

premiere class hotel rocourt liege belgium july juillet 2018Awake before the alarm, I did some more paperwork and then tidied up ready to leave.

I had a gentle moan at the receptionist about my neighbours (it was hardly her fault, was it?) so she offered me a complementary coffee.

It pays to complain, if you do it nicely enough.

Round the corner to fuel up Caliburn, to the Carrefour Sunday supermarket for bread and some buns for breakfast, and then on the road in the blinding heat for France, eating my bread rolls and drinking my coffee as I drove.

My route took me all the way down the motorway well into France, and I came off at Denain and headed for Douai.

Regular readers of this rubbish in one of its very first incarnations will recall that I called Denain “The Land of the Living Dead”. All of that area, Denain, Douai, Doullens, they are all old mining and heavy industrial towns and the collapse of Western European heavy industry in the 1980s affected them terribly.

They were bad 20 years ago but now they are even worse than parts of Stoke on Trent, and that really is saying something, I’ll tell you that. Horrible, sad, decaying cities.

I found a place to stop and eat my sandwiches, and then went to book a room in either Albert or Arras. And I don’t know what is happening there right now but prices are through the roof. There’s clearly something going on.

All that I’ve managed to find in my price range is a flea-pit in Lens about 20 miles away from where I want to be. That’s not a good sign.

But anyway, I’m back on the road and heading for this afternoon’s destination. And The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav is doing her best to confuse me.

But before I actually reach there, I’m side-tracked … "yet again" – ed … by something that’s not on my list of places to visit.

tank cemetery guémappe franceI’d heard of the “Tank Cemetery” somewhere in the back of my mind, where graves were laid out in the shelter of an abandoned tank, but that was up north.

So seeing a sign for the “Tank Cemetery” around here at Guémappe, I went for a look.

It relates to inter alia an action on 23rd and 24th March as a continuation, I suppose, of the Battle of the Somme, when the village was stormed by soldiers of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, and then subsequently by a couple of Field Ambulance Units until it was overrun in the German “Spring Advance” of March 1918.

And there are 64 Cameron Highlanders buried in one mass grave here.

foncquevillers military cemetery franceAnyway, I eventually reach my destination. This is Foncquevillers Military Cemetery.

Foncquevillers was a British stronghold behind the front line in early 1916 and it’s where part of the british Army assembled to plan its attack on the Somme.

What we are going to be doing over the next few days is to sketch out the plan of attack of 1st July 1916 when General Rawlinson’s disastrous handling of the the Third and Fourth Armies led to a debâcle unparalleled in British history and a disaster second only to Dunkirk.

I’m not going to write too much about it here because there is so much to say and I can go on for ever … "not with a bayonet through your neck you couldn’t" – ed … and besides, it’s going to be spread over a couple of days … "and several fields too" – ed.

So I shall just say that I had a very pleasant afternoon ambling through the sunshine.

And you’ll be surprised at just how much is left to see after 102 years. Most of the stuff has been ploughed away but you do occasionally find some gems.

But from there I headed north to Lens. All 45 kilometres of it and it’s rather a drag.

vimy ridge memorial franceBut Rupert Brooke famously talked about “a corner of a foreign field that is forever England”.

What he didn’t say is that there’s a couple of corners of foreign fields that are forever Canada and I’m standing in one right now.

I came here with Nerina 30 years or so ago, but I’ve no idea where my photos might be, and so I came by again.

vimy ridge memorial franceAnd for those of you who couldn’t see the monument clearly, here’s a close-up of it in all its glory.

It’s a monument not only to the events on Vimy Ridge over Easter 1917 but also to all of the fallen Canadian soldiers who have no known grave – more than 11,000 of them.

And their names are engraved on tablets as we saw at the Menin Gate at Ieper.

vimy ridge memorial franceYou can see why possession of Vimy Ridge was something worth fighting for – if anything is worth fighting for, that is.

The view all over the plain between Douai and Lens is phenomenal, and it’s the first real occasion that the British and French had of actually overlooking the German front lines – the Germans always going for the heights.

But I’ll come back to all of that in a bit.

Right now I’m off to my hotel. I eventually find it by the railway station in Lens. I’m pretty disappointed with this one – not for the least of the reasons being the weird landlady who clearly ought topass the bottle around instead of keeping it for herself.

The room is OK and stifling hot, so I nip downstairs and bring up the fan. That’s much better.

A quick wash of the undies and I sit down to do some work but my heart isn’t in it and eventually I drift off to bed with most of the stuff undone.

I can’t keep it up these days like I used to.