Somme ghosts come alive BOOKS

SOMME: INTO THE BREACH by Hugh Sebag-Montefiore (Viking £25)

We Were told it would be a walk-over,’ Cyril Jose, a soldier in the Devonshire regiment, later wrote about the first day on the Somme. Others were equally insouciant about the advance towards the German lines at 7.30am on July 1, 1916. Captain Billie Nevill of the east Surrey regiment arranged for his men to kick two footballs ahead of them as they crossed No Man’s Land.

how terribly wrong they were is poignantly and graphically revealed in hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s history of that first day and the four-month offensive that followed it.

Jose, who was 17 years old and had lied about his age in order to enlist, wrote his sister a letter about what happened when he went over the top with his comrades.

‘You know what a hailstorm is,’ he wrote. ‘Well, that’s about the chance one stood of dodging the bullets, shrapnel etc.’

Somehow he got to within 20 yards of the German trenches before he was shot in the chest. It was five minutes after the advance had begun.

‘I couldn’t get back to our own lines until the next morning. I didn’t eat anything, but lived on pulling off dead men’s water bottles . . . About 6am July 2nd, I began crawling back to our line.’

he made it. he was luckier than Nevill, who was killed as he chased after his football just two weeks short of his 22nd birthday.

The soldiers at the front had been told that by the time they climbed out of their trenches, the German defence system would have been obliterated by the enormous artillery attack that was planned.

‘Not even a rat would be left alive in the German trenches after our bombardment,’ Lieutenant-General Aylmer hunter-Weston predicted. Many in the ranks remained unconvinced. ‘If the Germans obstinately refuse to die and make way for us,’ a private named Percy Jones noted, ‘our scheme will become impractical.’

EveN savvy Jones could not have imagined what would eventually happen on July 1. The bombardment failed. Across a huge front line, men were asked to attack a German defence system of deep trenches and dugouts which, far from being obliterated, was in many sectors not even touched.

The Germans emerged from shelter largely unscathed and turned their machine guns on the advancing British.

In some cases the gunners were so busy their fingers were badly burned by their weapons while their thumbs, which they had to repeatedly press down on the safety catch as they were shooting, became, according to one of the men, ‘shapeless, swollen lumps of meat’. Far worse was happening to their British targets.

Sebag-Montefiore quotes extensively from eloquent and harrowing accounts by the soldiers on the receiving end of the fire.

Many never even got out of the trenches. A soldier called Tommy ervine was queuing to use the ladder to climb the parapet when one of the men ahead stumbled back towards him.

As ervine asked him what was wrong, the man opened his mouth and blood came gushing out in great spurts. he had been hit in the head by a German bullet and died almost immediately.

Once they were over the parapet and into No Man’s Land, the soldiers found themselves walking into what many of them, without much exaggeration, called ‘hell’.

‘They went up on top singing,’ wrote Bert ellis, a private in the 1st Newfoundland regiment — the only overseas infantry involved that first day. ‘It was like hell let loose. The machinegun fire mowed our men down like wheat before the scythe. You could almost see the bullets, they came so thick and fast.’

Private Arthur hollings of the Leeds Pals (one of many Pals battalions of men from the same towns) would have agreed.

‘No sooner had the first lot got over the parapet than the Germans opened up a terrific bombardment,’ he wrote.

‘It seemed impossible for a

square inch of space to be left free from flying metal.’

In some sectors of the front line, German defenders taunted the attackers by climbing on to their parapets and waving at them to come nearer, so they could be mowed down more easily.

Even the British Official History was later to admit that the attempt to reach one small village was doomed from the start. ‘Only bullet-proof soldiers could have taken Thiepval on this day,’ it recorded.

Infamously, the British Army suffered more casualties on July 1, 1916 than on any previous day in history — more than 19,000 men lost their lives. The British High Command was, at first, appallingly blase about the slaughter.

‘The battle has begun well,’ General Henry Rawlinson noted in his diary. His superior officer, Douglas Haig, the man in overall command of the British Forces, commented on July 2 that British casualties ‘cannot be considered severe in view of the numbers engaged and the length of line attacked.’

Admittedly this was when he was unaware of just how many men were killed, missing or wounded but the cold dispassion of his words is still breathtaking. In one sense Haig was lucky, in that he believed God was on his side.

On the eve of the Somme he wrote to his wife: ‘I think it is Divine help which gives me tranquillity of mind, and enables me to carry on.’

At much the same time, his sister wrote to say their dead brother had contacted her through a medium and wanted Haig to know that God was letting Napoleon advise him. Who knows? Perhaps this was an added source of confidence.

Recent historians have attempted to rescue the reputations of senior generals such as Haig and Rawlinson from the ignominy into which they had fallen, but Sebag-Montefiore is more inclined to the older view of them as donkeys leading lions.

HIS heroes are the junior officers and the ordinary soldiers. Their voices emerge loud and clear in his pages.

The best historians of the war have always made good use of the words written by the participants themselves, but few have done so as effectively as here.

Letters home prove surprisingly frank about what the men endured.

‘Shells rain down like hailstones, exploding everywhere,’ Australian Ben Leane, who fought in the later stages of the Somme campaign, wrote.

‘Men are thrown bodily into the air, others are torn asunder, others again receive great gaping wounds and some go down with such severe shell shock, that they are worse than useless.’

He was writing to his wife. One hopes she was able to cope with the truth.

Home was rarely far from soldiers’ thoughts. ‘At this time, it would be milking time,’ Private Leslie Bell, a 19-year-old farmer’s son serving with the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers near Thiepval, wrote just before going over the top.

‘The cows would be coming in from the meadows. And everything would be lovely and peaceful in our village.’

Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s book is a moving record of the death and destruction into which Bell — and tens of thousands like him — were about to be pitched at the Somme.

Nothing captures the carnage so vividly as the words of those who endured it