Today is the anniversary of the bloodiest day in British History... the Battle of the Somme... in my previous post I went twice with the school to the Battlefields, the aim was to provide spiritual and pastoral support, which I did and to lead an act of remembrance in a tiny 'chums' cemetery near the village of Sere on the Somme. It is an incredible place, a 'thin place' for all the wrong reasons!
The story of that day (simply put)...
The British Army was short of men so Kitchener launched a recruitment drive which encouraged men to join up on mass "join with your chums fight with your chums". The idea was that factories, clubs, towns etc. could join up together and form a new battalion, a decision which was to backfire tragically! On the morning if the 1st a huge barrage was aimed at the German lines (along an eight mile front) the idea was that the barrage would decimate the German defences and cut the barbed wire... however the Germans were using steel wire and British shells were made with lead shrapnel, and the Germans had had time to build deep defences including huge forts known as redoubts up to 40 feet deep!
At 7.29 a series of huge mines were set off (several craters remain in particular the crater, Lochnagar near La Boiselle) one near Beaumont Hammel was set off early resulting in the slaughter out of the Newfoundland regiment and the General responsible being court marshalled - only 68 out of 700 were present at roll-call on the 2nd July). At 7.30 all along the line whistles were blown and the men got up out of the trenches and began to walk slowly across no-mans land. The reason they walked slowly in line was that General Rawlinson did not believe that relatively untrained men could not be trusted to go at speed! (the experienced Ulster Regiment near Theipval began to crawl whilst the barrage was still underway then at 7.30 got up and ran, they captured a German redoubt but found themselves isolated and were ordered to retreat - under fire from the Germans and into the allied barrage!)
As you are probably aware the Germans had time once the guns fell silent to get up from their redoubts and set up their machine guns... the battle was almost universally a whitewash... the official history shows that on that one day alone on the Somme... 19,240 were recorded as killed, 2,152 were missing, 35,493 were wounded and 585 were captured - a total of 57,470 casualties on one day! Never before or since has the British Army lost more men on one day! The tragedy of the Chums/Pals regiments/battalians was that many of them were nearly completely wiped out, leaving many businesses and even towns almost devoid of young men (it has been suggested that as many of these units were from Northern Industrial towns (Yorkshire, Lancashire and the North East) that we still feel the echoes of it today - as it could well have been one reason for the need to build workforces for the mills etc. by immigration rather than from local folk 30/40 years later... which is used to excuse violence and racism in some northern towns today)... 2 units have become famous in particular the Grimsby Chums and The Accrington Pals... never again was this method of recruitment used! It was in a cemetery that contained 42 of the Grimsbys and Accringtons buried in no-mans land were they died that we held our act of remembrance.
It was customary to hang jam jars and cans on the barbed wire in no-mans land to act as alarms. If German reconnaissance parties tried to creep up the the Allied lines the troops would hear the rattling of the jars and cans as the Germans crept through the wire. Arriving at the front line during the dark of night to relieve the duty battalions one officer heard the familiar rattling from the wire, he quickly organised his defences. An officer from the battalion about to head back through the communication trenches to the rear told him that the severity of the fighting had not allowed them to get out to the wire to attach anything at all. As the sun rose the fresh troops were able to look over the rim of the trenches with periscopes, they were met with the sight of bodies, bits of bodies and skeletons stripped by crows hanging up and down the wire, rattling in the wind... still left from the first day of the Battle.
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