TOM MORGAN'S SOMME DIARY - PART 2

NEWFOUNDLAND MEMORIAL PARK

I woke at 7.30 a.m. on the second day of my visit to the Somme and washed and shaved. The day promised to be gloriously sunny and warm, and I sat in the morning sunlight and ate breakfast. As I sat looking towards the Hawthorn Ridge I saw a tour coach draw up on the crest. Early starters. The tour party climbed out of the coach and walked towards the Hawthorn Ridge Number 1 British Cemetery which I could see marked by its two evergreen trees and Cross of Sacrifice on the skyline. In the time it took me to drink two cups of coffee they had seen the cemetery, trooped across to the Hawthorn Ridge crater, looked inside it, returned to their coach and departed. I imagine they then stopped off to visit the Newfoundland Memorial Park, but when I arrived there, about forty minutes later, they were nowhere to be seen. Early risers, and fast workers.

By the time I arrived at the park, it was clear that it was going to be a blazing, hot day. Although it was still not quite 9.00 a.m., there were a few other visitors already there when I arrived; the Park was living up to its reputation as the most visited Great War site on the entire Western Front (except possibly for the Menin Gate, at Ypres.). Many hundreds of thousands of words have already been written about this place (and I think I have probably read them all) so no description is necessary here. I will only describe my impressions.

The first impression is one of almost total disorientation. From my camper, I could see the Park very plainly, even at night, when the great bronze Caribou which dominates the site is floodlit. But once there, the perimeter of the park cut off from the surrounding country by the surrounding trees, it was impossible to locate myself within the greater plan of the Somme Battlefield sites. Which way was the Hawthorn Ridge Crater? Where was Beaumont Hamel? Why is the Thiepval Memorial, some miles away on its high ridge, behind me? Why isn't it out there, behind the German lines? It seemed that the trench-lines had taken some curious twist and that I was facing in entirely the wrong direction. This caused me some consternation and the answer is, familiarise yourself with the lie of the land, by reference to maps, before you visit these places! It will save a lot of wandering and wondering. The trench-lines meandered all over the countryside.

I began by climbing the steps and sloping path to the Caribou Memorial itself, to get an overall view of the Memorial Park. All around me were the trenches of 1st July, 1916. They are grass-covered now, but the broken ground still bears testimony to the battering it received all those years ago. The Park is quite large, and there are many interesting parts to see. If the coach party had been and gone in forty minutes, then they must have missed a lot. I was there for more than two hours and filled several pages of my notebook with observations to be written up later.

Although the Park covers quite a large area, one aspect of the site brought back to mind what I felt so often on the Somme - so much happened in such a small space. This was when I looked at the places which figure so strongly in the reason for the very existence of this Memorial Park - the advance of the Newfoundland Regiment on the morning of July 1st, 1916. I knew that they had been ordered forward at about 8.20 a.m. to attack the German lines, and that they had found the communication trenches so full of dead and wounded that their officers had decided to order the Battalion out of the trenches and across the open ground towards the front line, to reach their intended starting-point more quickly. At the time, the earlier, original attack of 7.30 a.m. had broken down and nothing much was happening out in the open to occupy the attention of the German defenders of Beaumont Hamel. So it was that every German machine-gun within range was able to direct uninterrupted fire on the Newfoundlanders as they advanced, with artillery joining in soon afterwards. The worst slaughter took place as the Newfoundlanders crossed the British front-line trenches and had to bunch to pass through the gaps cut in the wired defences before passing into No-Man's Land. It was in these gaps, and in the first few yards out into the open that it all happened. Here they fell in great heaps and those behind had to climb over the dead and wounded bodies of their fallen comrades. And they had to do this here. In this exact spot, the place I was looking down on from my high viewpoint next to the Caribou, in the midst of the British trenches. It was not "along the side of this ridge" or "somewhere near the crossroads over there" - it was in front of these very trenches, in such a small part of the whole site.

The trenches themselves seem to run in all directions, doubling back on themselves, crossing each other in a confusing maze behind and to either side of the Caribou Memorial. But there is no mistaking the front line. There the tangled trench-lines smooth out into one continuous line and the ground takes on a different texture as the open space of No-Man's Land begins, dotted with shell-holes of all sizes.

Hauling myself out of the trench, and drawing myself up from a crouch to stand at full height, I looked straight across No-Man's Land and received another of those orientation surprises which are so common on the Somme. The German front line trenches were not directly across No-Man's Land at all, but over to the left, running almost at a right angle to the British lines. Maps confirmed this later, but it came as a surprise to one who expected to climb out of a trench and see the German positions directly opposite. It must have been even more confusing to the soldiers who left these trenches here on 1st July, 1916 and took their first look towards their enemy. They, of course, had no time to look around, puzzled, and wait while they thought it all out, as I did, before walking towards the German trenches.

It seemed disrespectful, somehow, to walk across this old No-Man's Land, like walking across a huge grave, or a huge deathbed. The Newfoundlanders, like the men who had launched the attack in this sector at 7.30 a.m. had not been able to peacefully walk the few hundred yards out in the open. So I decided not to. Instead, I walked along the line of the British front line trench, visited the first of three cemeteries within the park, Y-Ravine Cemetery, and came to the German line by that way.

The German trenches look far more solidly-built than the British ones, and much deeper. Behind these trenches, the land falls away slightly, and one can see how the Germans threw up a high mound behind their front trench, so that sentries and observers would not appear silhouetted against the sky. Looking back towards the British lines, one can appreciate the impossibility of any attempt to cross No-Man's Land in this sector, if faced with an enemy able to fire from such well-prepared positions as these.

Behind the front line is the infamous Y-Ravine, a natural cleft in the ground running away from the battlefield and away towards Beaumont Hamel. This feature, heavily wired and defended by the Germans, was honeycombed with dug-outs in 1916. On a high plinth, overlooking the ravine, his strong face turned for ever in the direction of Beaumont Hamel, stands the huge bronze statue of a kilted Scottish soldier, the memorial to the 51st Highland Division. Many men of the Division attacked from these same trenches when they successfully captured the village in November. Not far away from here, just after this final attack, the survivors buried the bodies of forty-six of their fellow highlanders in a large shell-hole - now Hunters Cemetery. This burial is remembered in the shape of the cemetery, which is circular, with the mens' gravestones set in a circle around the base of the Cross of Sacrifice.

From the German lines I walked to the last of the three cemeteries within the Memorial Park - Hawthorn Ridge Number 2 Cemetery. Here there are buried 214 soldiers who died here on 1st July. Not all of them were Newfoundlanders. A calculation came to mind. Even if all 214 were Newfoundlanders, and even if we add the thirty-eight Newfoundlanders buried in the Y-Ravine Cemetery on the opposite side of the Park, we reach a total of 252. Yet the casualty returns show that 684 men (or 710 men if you accept another source) died here. Either way, the calculation draws on to its inexorable conclusion. The Missing, always a kind of silent majority in these places, are commemorated by name on a tablet set into the base of the Caribou Memorial.

Leaving the Memorial Park, I began driving towards Beaumont Hamel. Here, near the Memorial Park, the fields on either side of the road are slightly raised up, about three feet above the road surface on either side. Obviously, some road-widening had been going on here, possibly to make it easier for today's super-coaches to negotiate the bends and reach the Park. The first stage of the work must have been to use a bulldozer to shave off about a yard of the field-boundary on either side of the road. The result was an instantly-widened road, ready for the resurfacing which would complete the work. I was thus looking at a three-feet-deep cross section of part of the Somme battlefields, as cleanly cut away as if some archaeological team had done the work. I stopped the car, opened the door and got out. As I leaned out, one foot on the ground, something caught my eye. Inches from my foot I saw five bullets, still smooth under their coating of Somme chalk, and still held together by the corroded remains of their steel clip. Mine was the first hand to touch them in eighty years. Within a few yards, and without really trying, I found more bullets, pieces of barbed wire, the handle of a petrol-tin, and countless jagged shell-fragments. The fields of the Somme may have been ploughed eighty or more times since the days of the battle, and all the immediate hindrances to agriculture removed, but ploughing touches only the surface. Below ground, who can say what relics remain, buried by the shells, upheavals and shifting emphasis of later actions? Thinking on these things, and wondering how much of it was also true of the Missing Newfoundlanders, I drove down to Beaumont Hamel, straight through the tiny village and on to Serre.

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