Battle of the Somme
100 years on
New Zealand’s soldiers would never forget the lectures they attended in France at the end of August 1916 as they prepared to go into battle on the Somme for the first time.
They were delivered by a huge red-headed Scottish major. His instructions could not have been clearer. They included the statements: ‘‘We don’t want prisoners. We have to feed prisoners. What we have to do is to kill Huns. The only good Hun is a dead Hun.’’
Lindsay Inglis, a 22-year-old captain, who attended one such lecture, later wrote: ‘‘It would be interesting to know to what extent . . . [these lectures were] responsible for deeds of the kind which even in war amount to nothing less than brutal murder. We were astonished that it should have been officially sanctioned.’’
He made these comments after he had been told that some New Zealand soldiers had acted with unprecedented cruelty on the battlefield. No record has been kept of how many German soldiers were gunned down after they had surrendered, but New Zealand war diaries and private diaries alike bear witness to the New Zealanders’ war crimes.
According to one of New Zealand’s war diarists, who was describing the killing of German prisoners in the Switch Trench, the first of the objectives on September 15, 1916, wrote: ‘‘No prisoners except wounded were taken by this battalion, as at this stage, it was impossible to do so without delaying the operation.’’
Private William Wilson’s account of what happened after the New Zealanders captured a German machine gun post that had previously mown down scores of his comrades is even more chilling:
‘‘The Huns . . . never tried to escape, but threw up their ‘paws’ and . . . above the roar of the battle we could . . . hear [their cry]. ‘Mercy, Kamerad, mercy!’ But they had done too much damage with their two machine guns . . . Their cry for mercy was never heeded. As I was making for the scene, I saw the bayonet used for the first time. God it was frightful! But it was all over in a few seconds. Fully a dozen Germans were [left] lying in their death throes. Some of the Huns tried to run but they were quickly dropped.
‘‘One of our officers rushed forward [to prevent] . . . any more slaughter. He had to . . . threaten our men with his revolver to keep them off. As I arrived ... a German was on his knees with his hands above his head [begging for] mercy. A young chap . . . walked up to him, gazed at him a few seconds, and then deliberately at three yards’ distance pushed out his rifle and blew the Hun’s head practically off.’’
Claude Burley, a 27-year-old private in the 2nd Wellington Battalion, was equally to blame. He and his comrades were ordered to send to the rear four Germans they had captured in Flers, the village the New Zealanders occupied on September 15. However, as Burley later confessed: ‘‘We were all so mad at them killing six of our mates and the Sergeant that we ‘ended’ them with our bayonets.’’
So was it just the red-haired major’s lectures which had brainwashed these decent, clean-living New Zealanders?
The following description of the horrors which Captain Inglis and his men observed on the way to the front line suggests that this may well have contributed to their desensitisation. It appeared to blur the line between right and wrong:
‘‘To the reek of explosives which filled the air farther back among the guns was added the stench of corpses, which lay about everywhere on and in the earth, tilled down by shells. Dead of both sides, swollen and sodden, [in] mudstained grey and khaki uniforms, were tossed in all attitudes among the earth of the parapets, and heaved out behind the crumbling ditches that passed for trenches.
‘‘Pale, discoloured hands and limbs, stiff feet and swollen buttocks projected grotesquely from the soil. Obscene disintegrated things lay about in the worst parts. Here and there the bottom of a trench would quiver hastily as one stepped on a corpse trampled under the mud. Fat, green flies, too bloated to fly, crawled adhesively on one’s face and hands. Rotting clothing and equipment lay about.’’
To be fair, there were some cases where the killing of surrendering Germans really was unavoidable if the advance was not to be delayed. Inglis mentioned how his decision to press ahead to the north of Flers, the village they had captured on 15 September, meant he was unable to tell the men lagging behind him not to throw grenades into a dug out which a German minutes before had attempted to surrender to Inglis.
However, his greatest regret on September 15, 1916 was his failure to give clear instructions to the men in his battalion who had seized Grove Alley, the New Zealanders’ final objective north of Flers. On seeing that Germans advancing towards their right rear were threatening to cut them off, Inglis had sent a message to one officer in the captured trench, telling him to send some men back to snuff out the threat. Unfortunately, when the men on the right retired as ordered, all the other troops in the captured trench followed suit, and it was lost.
Next morning a superior officer said to Inglis: ‘‘Why the hell didn’t you stay there?’’, a question which prompted Inglis to write: ‘‘I was sore enough about that withdrawal without his rubbing it in, and at that moment could cheerfully have murdered him.’’
Perhaps at that precise point of time, if not later, he sympathised with those New Zealanders who had been unable to restrain themselves when they came face to face with their German tormentors. ❚ Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s book Somme: Into The Breach is published by Viking Penguin for $40.