‘My pal gave a shudder and lay still – he was 17’
HISTORY ZERO HOUR by Jolyon Fenwick (Profile Books £25)
THE view could not be more peaceful. Cows chew the cud on pastures lined with tall and leafy trees; a field rises gently into the distant horizon; the sky is blue and clear, all beneath it green and pleasant.
There are ten panoramic, wide-angle photographs of country scenes in this unsettling book, each unfolding to the width of four foolscap pages.
They capture a summer’s morning, fields of maize and wheat, rapeseed and rye, copses of oak, fruit trees, tractor tracks meandering through the crops, a church spire, a chateau tower. Unsettling? How could that be? A clue is in the occasional glimpse of red poppies and white gravestones — line upon line of them.
Because this is the exact landscape in Picardy in northern France today where, on July 1 a century ago, the massed armies of Britain and Germany faced each other before unleashing slaughter on a scale never seen before.
This is the front line of the murderous Battle of the Somme.
Jolyon Fenwick took his colour photographs of these bucolic scenes last year. In chilling contrast, he accompanies them with searing first-hand accounts of the blood-and-gore encounters, the sheer inhumanity that took place in these same spots in 1916.
Where, for example, we now see cattle grazing peacefully near the village of Thiepval, the kilted soldiers of the Highland Light Infantry — half of them just teenagers — climbed from their dug-outs at 7.30am and breezily advanced into ground that was supposed to have been cleared of Germans by hours of overnight artillery fire.
Instead, they were met with a non- stop hail of bullets fired by dug-in German gunners who had so many targets they did not need to aim, just keep the trigger depressed.
After 30 agonising minutes, 15 officers and 400 men lay dead, dying or seriously wounded.
Behind them, a second wave peered through the smoke but could not make out what was happening. So they shook hands and went over the top, too.
One of the few survivors recalled how ‘a bullet burned the back of my neck. Beside me, my best pal fell, raised himself up on one hand, gave a smile, a shudder and then lay still. He was only 17.’
Along the 15-mile front, similar dramas of ‘glorious’ death and narrow escapes were being enacted every few yards, in the offensive that was supposed to end nearly two years of stalemate on the Western Front. Hundreds of thousands of eager fighting men had been specifically recruited back in Britain for this supposedly pivotal moment when the war would be won. On that first day alone, 116,000 British soldiers went into battle, ‘in good faith and bad boots’, as Fenwick tells us. By nightfall, half were casualties, close to 20,000 of them dead. Before the Somme Offensive was called off four and a half months later, its objectives unreached, the death toll of British soldiers was more than 130,000, of whom, in Fenwick’s words, ‘30,000 had corporeally ceased to exist’. No wonder the earth there now is so rich and fertile, fuelled by so many human remains. The juxtaposition of that lovely landscape with the horrors that took place a century ago — of the benevolent-looking now with the doom-laden then — left me with a renewed sense of the futility of World War I, for all the heroism and self-sacrifice of the men who fought in it. What Owen, Sassoon and the other war poets put into words, Fenwick has captured visually with his modern photographs, each of which is overprinted with the exact handwritten military information that was on reconnaissance pictures taken by the Royal Engineers at these same spots before the battle began.
‘Enemy front line 230 yards,’ an Army cartographer scrawled in his best italic hand 100 years ago to help his comrades about to go into battle. ‘MG [machine gun post] 300 yards’ — these are now just hedges or the edge of a field, for which men in their thousands gave their lives.
AMONG the many books on the centenary of World War I, this is perhaps the most unusual and the most moving. Here are the actual ‘ corners of a foreign field that are for ever England’.
They are tranquil now, and the author takes consolation from the fact that ‘the horrors of war have been replaced by the healing powers of nature’.
But I’m not so sure. What lies beneath the earth is an event of senseless and wholesale destruction that the rain can never wash away nor the cornfields conceal.
Reading this book and looking at its poignant landscapes, the words of that gentle Sixties antiwar song were buzzing in my head: ‘Oh when will they ever learn?’
12 The age of Sidney Lewis, the youngest soldier to enlist in WWI