TOM MORGAN'S SOMME DIARY
- PART 1
TOM MORGAN'S SOMME DIARY
- PART 1
One of the most symbolic places on the Somme (for me at least) is the Beaumont Hamel area. Together with the village of Serre, a short walk to the North, this area was at the "top" of the Somme offensive lines. (I ignore for the moment, but do not discount or forget, the diversionary attack at Gommecourt, two or three miles further North.)
There is a multitude of impressions, ideas and prejudices about the Battle of the Somme. Depending on the individual's point of view, the soldiers of the Somme were full of genuinely-felt expectation of success, or they were doomed from the very start. They were "the flower of England's manhood" or they were rank amateurs. They were the victims or bad luck, or they were the victims of uninspired leadership. They were heroes, climbing out of their trenches under a hail of bullets and lining up for the slow, ordered advance towards the enemy positions, or they were fools. It seems to me that whatever your viewpoint, you will find your proof around Beaumont Hamel.
I parked the car, unhitched the folding camper and prepared my home for the next few days. This done, I sat in the doorway and took in the view.
The fields of the Somme are unusual to English eyes. Large and rolling, they seem to be divided in a quite arbitrary way; one crop will suddenly end and a later or different one will begin. The fields run right up to the roadsides. There are no fences, no hedgerows, no cover of any kind. The only trees allowed to grow to maturity are those on land which is unusable for farming, so the craters have trees growing on the rims and inside, on the banks. The cemeteries have their deliberately-planted trees and the large trees of the Newfoundland Memorial Park, together with the nearby clump marking the Hawthorn Redoubt mine crater are a notable landmark and orientation point, standing on their high ground and visible from most parts of this area. There are woods on the Somme, but in the Beaumont Hamel area the presence of trees usually signifies a Great War site.
Looking from left to right, I could see the site of the "White City" - a large, flat field nearby. Next came "the Sunken Lane." Beyond, on higher ground, was the crest of the Redan Ridge, its mine-craters marked by trees. Then there were the trees bordering the Hawthorn Redoubt mine crater. To the right of these were more trees, marking the perimeter of the Newfoundland Memorial Park. Each of these places was within ten minutes' walk from where I sat drinking my coffee. One of the first things you notice, on the Somme, is that the distances involved are very, very small. If you look at the first photograph in Lyn Macdonald's book, "Somme" you will see the area I'm describing. Two narrow roads run towards each other from the bottom corners of the photograph and meet in the centre. My camper was set up in the garden of an English couple, Julie and Michael Renshaw, who have bought the land at the very tip of this triangle and built their home there.
THE HAWTHORN RIDGE MINE CRATER
On my first evening on the Somme, I went for a walk. Leaving Julie and Michael Renshaw's land, I walked a couple of hundred yards to the position of the British front line of 1st July, 1916 and then a further couple of hundred yards to the Hawthorn Ridge Crater. Here was a formidable strong point, protecting the very edge of the ridge beyond which, sheltering in a little hollow, was the village of Beaumont Hamel itself. The redoubt here would have to be silenced effectively if the attack on this sector was to have any chance of success, and the mine achieved this spectacularly. The crater today is marked by trees, the surrounding fields being cultivated up to the very limits of the rim. Here and there one can see the places where the local farmer tips cartloads of large, flint nodules into the crater. Presumably he and his ancestors have been doing this for the past eighty years, but the effect on the crater is absolutely minimal. They would never fill it in this way, not even if their plough turned up flints for a thousand years.
The climb down to the bottom of the crater is a difficult one because of the trees which grow on the sloping sides and at the bottom. There are whole trees here, quite invisible from the surface. And there are brambles and saplings, untended, to trip anyone who makes the descent. The crater receives many visitors judging by the well-worn paths leading up to and around it, but there is little evidence to suggest that many of them risk the scramble to the bottom. When you do reach the tip of this upturned pyramid in space, truly evidence of a world turned upside down, you seem to be in some secret place, moist, windless, shady and almost unbearably quiet.
Time for reflection at the bottom of the crater. This place has special significance for me because of a childhood memory. My grandmother had an illustrated book, which celebrated in pictures the reign of King George the Fifth and Queen Mary. It was a large book, but it chronicled a long and eventful reign, so there was a lot of ground to cover. The editors devoted one double-page spread to the Western Front, 1914-1918, and must have chosen their images very carefully. One of the largest pictures showed the Hawthorn Ridge mine going up on 1st July, 1916 - a huge, towering mushroom of earth. This picture made a big impression on me. I still have the book and can see where I took a pencil and in a childish hand, wrote my name in the portion of sky to one side of the eruption - "Tommy." This image, recorded on still and movie film at the moment of the explosion, remains one of the most powerful visual icons of the war and has been used to illustrate countless books and TV programmes, even when the subject has been other battles in other places. It certainly made a big impression on me as a child and now here I was, all these years later, crouched at the very bottom, looking at the distant sky through a slowly-swaying canopy of leaves and thinking of my grandmother who had died just three years before, aged 100 years.
From the bottom of the crater one can see a feature not easily noticeable from the surface - there are really two craters, overlapping each other so that they resemble a figure eight. This is a reminder that the original tunnel used to lay the first of July mine was used again for a second one, in November. Back to the surface.
From here, looking towards the British front line positions, it's easy to see the tremendous damage that the defenders of the Hawthorn Redoubt would have been able to inflict upon the attacking troops trying to cover the two hundred yards or so between their trenches and the top of the ridge. Their position at the edge of the ridge also gave them observation and clear fields of fire over other, more distant parts of the attack front. No wonder so much time and effort was put into extinguishing the position. As soon as the debris had cleared, British troops rushed to take the crater but when they got there, they found that the Germans were already digging themselves in on the far side. The British held the near side for the time being, but had to give up their positions later in the day.
Unbelievably close really, at the foot of the hill, is the road from Auchonvillers to Beaumont Hamel and just across the road is the beginning of the Sunken Lane.
THE SUNKEN LANE
This narrow lane ran more or less parallel to the trench-lines and was about half-way across No-Man's Land. In preparation for the 1st July attack, tunnels had been dug to the lane, so that it could be used as a jumping-off point. The 1st. Lancashire Fusiliers attacked from here and Geoffrey Malins, the 1916 movie camera-man who was filming the battle, included a shot of them waiting in the lane, bayonets fixed. They lie against the bank which faces the Germans. The lane is just a few dozen yards from the position from which Malins filmed the explosion of the mine.
These men had been waiting in the Lane since the early hours of the morning. at 7.30 a.m. they scrambled up the sides and begin their advance in the direction of Beaumont Hamel. They came under fire almost immediately from two machine-guns. From the Sunken Lane, the ground is flat at first, but after a couple of hundred yards there is a steep downward slope, not visible from the British positions. As they slowed down to negotiate this slope, the Fusiliers became even easier targets. The slope is as far as any of them got and many lie there to this day, for Beaumont Hamel British Cemetery stands just below the slope, containing 176 graves. A further 180 dead or dying were found in the Sunken Lane later in the morning.
Many of the men buried in the cemetery are known to be Lancashire Fusiliers but about half of the burials are unidentified by name. The dead of 1st July lay out in the open where they fell until November when, following the capture of Beaumont Hamel, it became safe to move about above ground here.
Today, the lane looks much as it does in the flickering, 1916 film-shots. After the 1st July, the lane became a front-line trench in itself, and there are still signs of dug-outs in the banks. The sides of the lane are overgrown, with here and there, a tree or two, allowed to grow because they don't interfere with the cultivation of the surrounding land. A farmer had used two narrow tree-trunks to support a strip of plastic red-and-white warning tape which cordoned off a small area at the top of the bank. There was a sign hanging from one of the trees - "Entree Interdite - Danger." I went to have a look and found myself looking down into what I assumed must be a collapsed dug-out. It was a hole about eight feet deep. At the bottom a smaller hole suggested that the dugout went even deeper. A neat, round hole, big enough for a man to pass through on his hands and knees, ran from the side of the hole, towards the Sunken Lane. (A year later this hole had still not been filled in and another, smaller one had appeared not far away, evidence of the hastily-constructed dugouts which honeycombed the "enemy" side of the lane. Traces of their entrances can still be seen in the bank.)
The lane runs up towards the Redan Ridge. The truly "sunken" part of it is relatively short, however. Like many historically-charged places on the Somme, you find when you get there that a lot happened in a very small space.
MUNICH TRENCH and FRANKFURT TRENCH
These cemeteries are among a group of four which can be found on the Redan Ridge, just beyond Beaumont Hamel. They are important because they mark the site of two trenches which stood here and which were the subject of the very last action of the Battles of the Somme. The July 1st attacks around Beaumont Hamel failed and were not immediately renewed, as happened in places further South. Essentially, there were two main stages of fighting in this area - 1st July and 15th November, when the 51st (Highland) Division captured the village.
(It is perhaps because the 1st. July sites were not too badly ravaged by later fighting that so many of them survive today, making them the target of many visitors, with the Newfoundland Memorial Park among the "top of the league" places.)
After the capture of Beaumont Hamel on 15th November, some of the day's objectives remained untaken. These included the German positions overlooking the village and known as Munich Trench and Frankfurt Trench. On 18th November, the attack was renewed when units of the 32nd Division advanced in the early morning, through a driving snowstorm which later turned to sleet and then freezing rain. The attack failed and was called off, leaving 1,387 men killed or wounded in front of Munich Trench. However, a small force of men from the 16th Highland Light Infantry, plus some men of the 11th Border Regiment had managed to cross Munich Trench and had become cut off in the next German position, Frankfurt Trench. No-one knew that this small force of about 100 men was there, until some men managed to cross back to the British lines. Several rescue attempts were mounted, but they all failed with even further losses. The Men in Frankfurt Trench managed to hold on until a week after they originally reached their objective, and were finally obliged to surrender on November 25th.
The bodies of the men killed in front of Munich Trench remained out in the open until the Germans moved their lines back in 1917. Then the first of many searches of this part of the Somme battlefield took place, when V Corps constructed several cemeteries in this area, among them New Munich Trench British Cemetery and Frankfurt Trench British Cemetery. These places are not visited as often as some of the other cemeteries in the area. The visitors' books of all British cemeteries, usually housed along with a copies of the cemetery registers in a bronze safe built into the wall just inside the gate, consist of small ring-binders. When the books get full, the earliest pages are removed (and filed, I believe) and new blank pages are added. In some of the most popular cemeteries, a full book will contain entries for the last few months only, with new blank pages having to be added very regularly. At New Munich Trench Cemetery, the visitors' book has about ten pages. They span the last 19 years. Not all visitors would have signed the book, of course, but in 1985, no-one signed it at all. In 1986, the seventieth anniversary of the Somme Battles, just one visit was recorded. It's a lonely place.
Standing here, on the Highest point of the Ridge and looking back towards
Beaumont Hamel, I saw houselights here and there and realised how late it
was getting. Here I was, at the point where the battle ended. Before me as
night fell I could make out the dark shape of the trees round the Hawthorn
Ridge crater, where it all began four months earlier, at 7.20 a.m. on Saturday,
1st July, 1916. The walk home from one point to the other took no more than
15 minutes.
Copyright © Tom Morgan,
July 1996
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