THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME. Buchan John
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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.
The first day of July dawned hot and cloudless, though a thin fog, the relic of the damp of the past week, clung to the hollows. At halfpast five the hill just west of Albert offered a singular view. It was almost in the centre of the section allotted to the Allied attack, and from it the eye could range on the left up and beyond the Ancre glen to the high ground around Beaumont Hamel and Serre; in front to the great lift of tableland beyond which lay Bapaume; and to the right past the woods of Fricourt to the valley of the Somme. All the slopes to the east were wreathed in smoke, which blew aside now and then and revealed a patch of wood or a church spire. In the foreground lay Albert, the target of an occasional German shell, with its shattered Church of Notre Dame de Bebrieres and the famous gilt Virgin hanging head downward from the campanile. All along the Allied front, a couple of miles behind the line, captive balloons, the so-called “sausages,” glittered in the sunlight. Every gun on a front of twenty-five miles was speaking, and speaking without pause. In that week’s bombardment more light and medium ammunition was expended than the total amount manufactured in Britain during the first eleven months of war, while the heavy stuff produced during the same period would not have kept our guns going for a single day. Great spurts of dust on the slopes showed where a heavy shell had burst, and black and white gouts of smoke dotted the middle distance like the little fires in a French autumn field. Lace-like shrapnel wreaths hung in the sky, melting into the morning haze. The noise was strangely uniform, a steady rumbling, as if the solid earth were muttering in a nightmare, and it was hard to distinguish the deep tones of the heavies, the vicious whip-like crack of the field-guns and the bark of the trench-mortars.
About 7.15 the bombardment rose to that hurricane pitch of fury which betokened its close. Then appeared a marvellous sight, the solid spouting of the enemy slopes—as if they were lines of reefs on which a strong tide was breaking. In such a hell it seemed that no human thing could live. Through the thin summer vapour and the thicker smoke which clung to the foreground there were visions of a countryside actually moving— moving bodily in debris into the air. And now there was a new sound—a series of abrupt and rapid bursts which came gustily from the first lines, like some colossal machine-gun. These were the new trench mortars—those wonderful little engines of death. There was another sound, too, from the North, as if the cannonading had suddenly come nearer. It looked as if the Germans had begun a counterbombardment on part of the British front line.
The staff officers glanced at their watches, and at half-past seven precisely there came a lull. It lasted for a second or two, and then the guns continued their tale. But the range had been lengthened everywhere, and from a bombardment the fire had become a barrage. For, on a twenty-five mile front, the Allied infantry had gone over the parapets.
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