OUT OF THE WOOD
Sites that commemorate the battles of World War 1
HE track was rough but drivable. We pulled up at the memorial park. It was some way off the road, down a hill, in the middle of the farmland where men were slaughtered on July 1 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme.
We got out to stand in the Sheffield Memorial Park, which commemorates the Pals battalions of the British Army’s 31st Division.
They came from Barnsley and Bradford, Leeds, Hull and Durham, Sheffield, Accrington and Chorley and, at 7.30am on a sunny Saturday 100 years ago, jumped out of trenches to be mown down.
“Not a man wavered, broke ranks or attempted to go back,” reported Brigadier-General Hubert Rees. “[I could never have] imagined such a magnificent display of gallantry, discipline and determination.”
The park is directly behind where the front line ran. All around, treeless hectares have returned to farming. But the park stands out, once again a copse as it was pre1914. Shell craters and trench indentations remain, keepsakes of cataclysm. Memorials punctuate the site. I made for the monument to the Accrington Pals, most famous of the battalions who fought here.
The structure, in brick, was erected in 1991. Next to it at ground level, and more recent yet, is a plaque to the Chorley Pals. These fellows, 200 or so, constituted a company within the Accrington Pals battalion, there not being enough volunteers from Accrington to form a full battalion. But no one has ever heard of the Chorley Pals. The old mining and mill town has been overshadowed for a long time, though their story is astounding.
Through late 1914, after they had signed up in a burst of patriotic enthusiasm, the 221 Chorley chaps trained around town and were indulged by local associations with socks, mufflers and potato pie suppers. A Chorley lady taught some of them French.
In March 1916, they transferred to France. By late April, they’d tasted trench life, fronting the tiny, German-held village of Serre. This was to be their target in the coming Big Push.
Meantime, they shuttled between the front and R&R 11km to the rear, around Warnimont wood. The Chorley men were gifted at soccer. They beat the Bradford Pals 4-0. At 6.15pm on June 30, they set out from Warnimont for their final trek back to the front.
We followed the route roughly from Bus-lès-Artois, a forgotten village if ever there was one.
A dozen or so war cemeteries, the more moving for their polished restraint, stamp the land along the way, the only reminders.
We drove on, as the Pals had marched. They were jovially optimistic. A day or two earlier, 26-year-old Private Will Cowell, a Chorley collier, had written to his wife: “You’ll see me stepping home just as if there’d never been a war on, and we will have a wagonette for a day out, just see if we don’t!” (Cowell was killed on July 1.)
Once in the trench system, the Pals were at the north end of the 24km Somme attack front. They faced two significant handicaps. The first is evident at the site: the Germans were on a ridge.
The second was that the weeklong artillery barrage intended to destroy German defences hadn’t worked. The Germans were too well dug in. They were shaken but not shattered, therefore ready.
Time ticked on towards 7.20am. Later, survivor Private James Henry Roberts wrote to his wife: “Five minutes to go, and every man joking and smoking. And now, ‘Over you go, lads.’ Not a waver. With machine-guns everywhere and … shells bursting, how that choir of hell sung!”
Four waves of men went over the top. Initially, they walked. After the week-long British shelling, there wasn’t supposed to be “a rat left alive” in the German lines. Running was against orders. So the men were cut down “like swathes of corn” by the machine-guns of the German 169th Infantry regiment.
As German machine-gunner Otto Lais wrote, the gun barrels became so hot that the coolant liquid evaporated, so gunners peed into a bucket and used that. Then there was the shelling.
Years later, Private Richard Barrow of Charnock-Richard said: “Once I got over the top, all hell let loose. One lad never got out of the trench … As we moved forward, I saw my best mate, Tom Robinson, blown up by a shell… [Then] I was hit in the head.”
It was all over within 25 minutes. A few men reached German lines, most never to be seen alive again. Others were massacred before they emerged from the trench system, in no-man’s-land or as they grappled with barbed wire. It was hopeless;