July 10 2016
the German position was impregnable.
In the circumstances, the courage to carry on beggars belief. These were miners and millworkers from small, solid homes. Many had never left Lancashire before. July 1 1916 asked of them a grit and selflessness that has rarely been asked of young men since. There is magnificence in their acceptance. Or, as Private Harry Wilkinson said: “We went on until we got dropped.”
Of the 720 Accrington Pals involved in the attack on Serre, some 585 “got dropped”.
Chorley Pals had 175 men in the attack; 34 were killed, 59 wounded. The figures are small relative to totals for the day, the worst in British military history. (Along the entirety of the battlefront, there were 19 240 deaths among 57 470 casualties.)
But the impact on northern communities was immense. Everyone knew someone who wasn’t coming back. Black curtains were drawn across hundreds of windows. Suddenly, the “Pals concept” of sending into action together friends, workmates and neighbours didn’t look so bright. It hit localities too hard. It was ditched. The 11th Battalion, East Lancs continued to serve with distinction (at Arras, Ploegsteert and elsewhere) but was shorn of its Pals character.
Benoît and I now quartered the Memorial Park, ceded to the city of Sheffield in perpetuity in the ’20s by the landowner. The Chorley Pals plaque was inscribed “Where larks sing and poppies grow/They sleep in peace for ever more” — which is the sort of thing you say when there’s nothing you can say. We walked out to three British and Commonwealth cemeteries sited in or around no-man’s-land. Here was the peace and dignity denied to the men in the trenches.
I imagined that standing behind each pristine tomb was a young man, perhaps from Chorley, waving cheerily, as they did. And then they were gone.
We drove up to Serre, barely significant enough to show up on radar these days: a farm or two, a smattering of brick houses and a memorial to the Sheffield Pals. (Post-war, the city of Sheffield adopted Serre, pouring reconstruction cash into the district.) “Not the sort of place I’d want to die for,” said Benoît, as we drove out of the tiny village just moments after we had driven into it.
“I doubt it was a question of choice,” I said.
Back in Chorley, Steve Williams had shown me, as well as the Pals statue, a startlingly good and free little war museum (“Remembrance Experience”) in the town’s Astley Hall. This needs visiting. But to get the full measure of what local Pals went through you should travel to Serre. It’s both a long way from Chorley, and very close indeed. — © The Telegraph