THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME – First & Second Phase (Complete Edition – Volumes 1&2) E-Book

John Buchan

• Herausgeber: e-artnow
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 186

Beschreibung

This carefully crafted ebook: "THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME – First & Second Phase (Complete Edition – Volumes 1&2)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. John Buchan (1875-1940) was a Scottish novelist and historian and also served as Canada's Governor General. With the outbreak of the First World War, Buchan worked as a correspondent in France for The Times. The Battle of the Somme, also known as the Somme Offensive, was a battle of the First World War fought by the armies of the British and French empires against the German Empire. It took place between 1 July and 18 November 1916 on both sides of the River Somme in France. It was one of the largest battles of World War I, in which more than 1,000,000 men were wounded or killed, making it one of the bloodiest battles in human history. The battle is notable for the importance of air power and the first use of the tank. At the end of the battle, British and French forces had penetrated 6 miles (9.7 km) into German-occupied territory, taking more ground than any offensive since the Battle of the Marne in 1914.

Leseprobe

John Buchan

THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME – First & Second Phase

(Complete Edition – Volumes 1&2)

e-artnow, 2016 Contact: [email protected]

ISBN 978-80-268-5157-8

Table of Contents

The Battle of the Somme, First Phase

The Battle of the Somme, Second Phase

THE BATTLE OF THE SOMMEFIRST PHASE

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

CHAPTER I. PRELIMINARIES.

CHAPTER II. THE FIRST STAGE.

CHAPTER III. THE SECOND STAGE.

CHAPTER IV. CONCLUSION.

CHAPTER I. PRELIMINARIES.

Table of Contents

From Arras southward the Western battle-front leaves the coalpits and sour fields of the Artois and enters the pleasant region of Picardy. The great crook of the upper Somme and the tributary vale of the Ancre intersect a rolling tableland, dotted with little towns and furrowed by a hundred shallow chalk streams. Nowhere docs the land rise higher than 500 feet, but a trivial swell—such is the nature of the landscape— may carry the eye for thirty miles. There are few detached farms, for it is a country of peasant cultivators who cluster in villages. Not a hedge breaks the long roll of cornlands, and till the higher ground is reached the lines of tall poplars flanking the great Roman highroads are the chief landmarks. At the lift of country between Somme and Ancre copses patch the slopes, and sometimes a church spire is seen above the trees from some woodland hamlet. The Somme winds in a broad valley between chalk bluffs, faithfully dogged by a canal—a curious river which strains, like the Oxus, “through matted rushy isles,” and is sometimes a lake and sometimes an expanse of swamp. The Ancre is such a stream as may be found in Wiltshire, with good trout in its pools. On a hot midsummer day the slopes are ablaze with yellow mustard, red poppies and blue cornflowers; and to one coming from the lush flats of Flanders, or the “black country” of the Pas de Calais, or the dreary levels of Champagne, or the strange melancholy Verdun hills, this land wears a habitable and cheerful air, as if remote from the oppression of war.

The district is known as the Santerre. Some derive the name from sana terra—the healthy land; others from sarta terra—the cleared land. Some say it is sancta terra, for Peter the Hermit was a Picard, and the piety of the Crusaders enriched the place with a thousand relics and a hundred noble churches. But there are those— and they have much to say for themselves— who read the name sang terre—the bloody land, for the Picard was the Gascon of the north, and the countryside is an old cockpit of war. It was the seat of the government of Clovis and Charlemagne. It was ravaged by the Normans, and time and again by the English. There Louis XI. and Charles the Bold fought their battles; it suffered terribly in the Hundred Years’ War; German and Spaniard, the pan-dours of Eugene and the Cossacks of Alexander marched across its fields; from the walls of Peronne the last shot was fired in the war of 1814. And in the greatest war of all it was destined to be the theatre of a struggle compared with which its ancient conflicts were like the brawls of a village fair.

Till Midsummer in 1916 the Picardy front had shown little activity. Since that feverish September when de Castelnau had extended on the Allies’ left, and Maud’huy beyond de Castelnau, in the great race for the North Sea, there had been no serious action. Just before the Battle of Verdun began the Germans made a feint south of the Somme and gained some ground at Frise and Dompierre. There had been local raids and local bombardments, but the trenches on both sides were good, and a partial advance offered few attractions to either. Amiens was miles behind one front, vital points like St. Quentin and Courtrai and La Fere were far behind the other. In that region only a very great and continuous offensive would offer any strategic results. In September, 1915, the British took over most of the line from Arras to the Somme, and on the whole they had a quiet winter in their new trenches. This long stagnation led to one result: it enabled the industrious Germans to excavate the chalk hills on which they lay into a fortress which they believed to be impregnable. Their position was naturally strong, and they strengthened it by every device which science could provide. Their High Command might look uneasily at the Aubcrs ridge and Lens and Vimy, but they had no doubts about the Albert heights.

THE GERMAN POSITION.

The German plan in the West, after the first offensive had been cheeked at the Marne and Ypres, was to hold their front with abundant guns but the bare minimum of men, and use their surplus forces to win a decision in the East. This scheme was foiled by the heroic steadfastness of Russia’s retreat, which surrendered territory freely but kept her armies in being. During the winter of 1915-16 the German High Command were growing anxious. They saw that their march to the Dvina and their adventure in the Balkans had wholly failed to shake the resolution of their opponents. They were aware that the Allies had learned with some exactness the lesson of eighteen months of war, and that even now they were superior in men, and would presently be on an equality in ammunition. Moreover, the Allied command was becoming concentrated and shaking itself free from its old passion for divergent operations. Our generals had learned the wisdom of the order of the King of Syria to his captains: “Fight neither with small nor great but only with the King of Israel”; and the King of Israel did not welcome the prospect.

Now, to quote a famous saying of General Foch, “A weakening force must always be attacking,” and from the beginning of 1916 the Central Powers were forced into a continuous offensive. Their economic strength was draining rapidly. Their people had been told that victory was already won, and were asking what had become of the fruits of it. They feared greatly the coming Allied offensive, for they knew that it would be simultaneous on all fronts, and they cast about for a means of frustrating it. That was the reason of the great Verdun assault. Germany hoped, with the obtuseness that has always marked her estimate of other races, so to weaken the field strength of France that no future blow would be possible and the Frcneh nation, weary and dispirited, would incline to peace. She hoped, in any event, to lure the Allies into a premature counter-attack, so that their great offensive might go off at half-cock and be defeated piece-meal.

None of these things happened. Petain at Verdun handled the defence like a master. With a wise parsimony he refused to use up any unit. When a division had suffered it was taken out of the line and replaced by a fresh one, so that none of the cadres were destroyed. He was willing enough to yield ground, if only the enemy paid his price. His aim was not to hold territory, for he knew well that he would some day regain with interest all he had surrendered, but to destroy the German field army. His plan succeeded. The German force was, as the Freneh say, accroche at Verdun, and was compelled to go on long after any hope of true sueeess had vanished. The place became a trap where Germany was bleeding to death. Meanwhile, with the full assent of General Joffre, the Generalissimo in the West, the British armies made no movement. They were biding their time.

Early in June the ill-conceived Austrian attack on the Trentino had been checked by Italy, and suddenly—in the East—Russia swung forward to a surprising victory. Within a month nearly half a million Austrians had been put out of action, and the distressed armies of the Dual Monarchy called on Germany for help. The inevitable von Hindenburg was brought into play, and such divisions as could be spared were despatched from the West. At this moment, when the grip was tightening in the East, France and Britain made ready for the supreme effort of the war.

Germany’s situation was intricate and uneasy. She had no large surplus of men immediately available at her interior depots. The wounded who were ready again for the line and the young recruits from the 1917 class were all needed to fill up the normal wastage in her ranks. She had no longer any great mass of strategic reserves. Most had been sucked into the maelstrom of Verdun or despatched East to von Hindenburg. At the best, she had a certain number of divisions which represented a local and temporary surplus in some particular area. Beyond these she could only get reinforcements by the process known as “milking the line ”—taking out a battalion here and a battalion there—an expedient both cumbrous and wasteful, for these battalions were not fresh troops, and their removal was bound to leave many parts of her front perilously thin. Germany in the West was holding a huge salient—from the North Sea to Soissons, and from Soissons to Verdun. If a wedge were driven in on one side the whole apex would be in deadly danger. The Russian field army could retire safely from Warsaw and Vilna, because it was mobile and lightly equipped, but an army which had been stationary for eighteen months and had relied mainly upon its fortifications would be apt to find a Sedan in any retirement. The very strength of the German front in the West constituted its weakness. A breach in a fluid line may be mended, but a breach in a rigid and most intricate front cannot be filled unless there are large numbers of men available for the task or unlimited time. We have seen that there were no such numbers, and it was likely that the Allies would see that there was no superfluity of leisure.

The path of wisdom for Germany in June was undoubtedly to fall back in good order to a much shortened line, which with her numbers might be strongly held. There is reason to believe that soon after the beginning of the Allied bombardment some such policy was considered. The infantry commanders of the 17th Corps were warned to be prepared for long marches and heavy rearguard fighting, instructions were given for holding bridgeheads far in the rear, and officers were advised that the retreat might be either a retirement at ease or a withdrawal under pressure from the enemy. Had such a course been taken it would have been unfortunate for the Allied plans. But such a course was impossible. The foolish glorification after the naval battle of May 31 forbade it. The German people had been buoyed up under the discomfort of the British blockade by tales of decisive successes in the field. The German Chancellor had almost tearfully implored his enemies to look at the map, to consider the extent of German territorial gains, and to admit that they were beaten. He was one of those who did not fulfil Foch’s definition of military wisdom. “The true soldier is the man who ignores that science of geographical points which is alien to war, which is the negation of war and the sure proof of decadence, the man who knows and follows one vital purpose—to smash the enemy’s field force.” The dancing dervishes of Pan-Germanism had already announced in detail the use to which the occupied territories would be put. For Germany to fall back from the Somme to the Meuse would have toppled down the whole flimsy edifice of German confidence. It was unthinkable; her political commitments were too great; her earlier vainglory sat like an Old Man of the Sea on her shoulders.

Yet, in spite of this weakness in the strategic situation, the German stronghold in the West was still formidable in the extreme. From Arras southward they held in the main the higher ground. The front consisted of a strong first position, with firing, support, and reserve trenches and a labyrinth of deep dug-outs; a less strong intermediate line covering the field batteries; and a second position some distance behind, which was of much the same strength as the first. Behind lay fortified woods and villages which could be readily linked up with trench lines to form third and fourth positions. The attached trench map will give some idea of the amazing complexity of the German defences. They were well served by the great network of railways which radiate from La Fère and Laon, Cambrai, and St. Quentin, and many new light lines had been constructed. They had ample artillery and

shells, endless machine-guns, and consummate skill in using them. It was a fortress to which no front except the West could show a parallel. In the East the line was patchy and not continuous. The Russian soldiers who in the early summer were brought to France stared with amazement at a ramification of trenches compared with which the lines in Poland and Galicia were like hurried improvisations.

THE BRITISH ARMIES.

The British Armies had in less than two years grown from the six divisions of the old Expeditionary Force to a total of some seventy divisions in the field, leaving out of account the troops supplied by the Dominions and by India. Behind these divisions were masses of trained men to replace wastage for at least another year. With the possible exception of France, Great Britain had mobilised for the direct and indirect purposes of war a larger proportion of her population than any other belligerent country. Moreover while engaged in also supplying her Allies, she had provided this vast levy with all its necessary equipment. Britain is so fond of decrying her own efforts that few people have realised the magnitude of her achievement. There is no precedent for it in the history of the world. She jettisoned all her previous theories and calculations; and in a society which had not for a hundred years been called upon to make a great effort against an enemy, a society highly differentiated and industrialised, a society which lived by sea-borne commerce and so could not concentrate like certain other lands exclusively on military preparation, she provided an army on the largest scale, and provided it out of next to nothing. She had to improvise officers and staff, auxiliary services, munitionment—everything. She had to do this in the face of an enemy already fully prepared. She had to do it, above all, at a time when war had become a desperately technical and scientific business and improvisation was most difficult. It is easy enough to assemble quickly hordes of spearmen and pikemen, but it would seem impossible to improvise men to use the bayonet and machine gun, the bomb and the rifle. But Britain did it—and did it for the most part by voluntary enlistment.

The quality of the result was not less remarkable than the quantity. The efficiency of the supply and transport, the medical services, the aircraft work, was universally admitted. Our staff and intelligence work—most difficult to improvise—was now equal to the best in the field. Our gunnery was praised by the French, a nation of expert gunners. As for the troops themselves we had secured a homogeneous army of which it was hard to say that one part was better than the other. The original Expeditionary Force—the “Old Contemptibles,” who for their size were probably the best body of fighting men on earth—had mostly disappeared. Territorial battalions were present at the First Battle of Ypres, and New Service battalions at Hooge and Loos. By June, 1916, the term New Armies was a misnomer. The whole British force in one sense was new. The famous old regiments of the line had been completely renewed since Mons, and their drafts were drawn from the same source as the men of the new battalions. The only difference was that in the historic battalions there was a tradition already existing, whereas in the new battalions that tradition had to be created. And the creation was quick. If the Old Army bore the brunt of the First Battle of Ypres, the Territorials were no less heroic in the Second Battle of Ypres, and the New Army had to its credit the four-mile charge at Loos. It was no patchwork force which in June was drawn up in Picardy, but the flower of the manhood of the British Empire, differing in origin and antecedents, but alike in discipline and courage and resolution.

Munitions had grown with the numbers of men. Anyone who was present at Ypres in April and May, 1915, saw the German guns all day pounding our lines with only a feeble and intermittent reply. It was better at Loos in September, when we showed that we could achieve an intense bombardment. But at that date our equipment sufficed only for spasmodic efforts and not for that sustained and continuous fire which was needed to destroy the enemy’s defences. Things were very different in June, 1916. Everywhere on the long British front there were British guns—heavy guns of all calibres, field guns innumerable, and in the trenches there were quantities of trench-mortars. The great munition dumps, constantly depleted and constantly replenished from distant bases, showed that there was food and to spare for this mass of artillery, and in the factories and depots at home every minute saw the reserves growing. Britain was manufacturing and issuing weekly as much as the whole stock of land service ammunition which she possessed at the outbreak of war. The production of high explosives was sixty-six times what it had been at the beginning of 1915. The

monthly output of heavy guns had been multiplied by six in the past year, and that of machine-guns by fourteen. We no longer fought against a far superior machine. We had created our own machine to nullify the enemy’s and allow our man-power to come to grips.

THE GREAT LOMBARDMENT.

About the middle of June on the whole ninety-mile front held by the British, and on the French front north and south of the Somme there began an intermittent bombardment of the German lines. There were raids at different places, partly to mislead the enemy as to the real point of assault, and partly to identify the German units opposed to us. Such raids varied widely in method, but they were extraordinarily successful. Sometimes gas was used, but more often after a short bombardment a picked detachment crossed no-man’s-land, cut the enemy’s wire, and dragged home a score or two of prisoners. One, conducted by a company of the Highland Light Infantry near the Vermeil es-La Bassée Road, deserves special mention. Our guns had damaged the German parapets, so when darkness came a German working-party was put in to mend them. The Scots, while the engineers neatly cut off a section of German trenches, swooped down on the place, investigated the dug-outs, killed two score Germans, brought back forty-six prisoners, and had for total casualties two men slightly wounded. During these days, too, there were many fights in the air. It was essential to prevent German airplanes from crossing our front and observing our preparations. Our own machines scouted far into the enemy hinterland, reconnoitring and destroying.

On Sunday, June 25th, the bombardment became intenser. It fell everywhere on the front; German trenches were obliterated at Ypres and Arras as well as at Beaumont Hamel and Frieourt. There is nothing harder to measure than the relative force of such a “ preparation,” but had a dispassionate observer been seated in the clouds he would have noted that from Gommecourt to a mile or two south of the Somme the Allied fire was especially methodical and persistent. On Wednesday, June 28th, from an artillery observation post in that region it seemed as if a complete devastation had been achieved. Some things like broken telegraph poles were all that remained of what, a week before, had been leafy copses. Villages had become heaps of rubble. Travelling at night on the roads behind the front—from Bethune to Amiens—the whole eastern sky was lit up with what seemed fitful summer lightning. But there was curiously little noise. In Amiens, a score or so of miles from the firing line, the guns were rarely heard, whereas fifty miles from Ypres they sound like a roll of drums and wake a man in the night. The configuration of that part of Picardy muffles sound, and the country folk call it the Silent Land.

All the last week of June the weather was grey and cloudy, with a thick brume on the uplands, which made air-work unsatisfactory. There were flying showers of rain and the roads were deep in mire. At the front—through the haze—the guns flashed incessantly, and there was that tense expectancy which precedes a great battle. Troops were everywhere on the move, and the shifting of ammunition dumps nearer to the firing-line foretold what was coming. There was a curious exhilaration everywhere. Men felt that this at last was the great offensive, that this was no flash in the pan, but a movement conceived on the grand scale as to guns and men which would not cease until a decision was reached. But, as the hours passed in mist and wet, it seemed as if the fates were unpropitious. Then, on the last afternoon of June, there came a sudden change. The pall of cloud cleared away and all Picardy swam in the translucent blue of a summer evening. That night the orders went out. The attack was to be delivered next morning three hours after dawn.