24 Hours at the Somme by Robert Kershaw

Author:Robert Kershaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2017-05-17T04:00:00+00:00

Hauptmann Schorer, the commander who had advised his messenger Leutnant Stahlhofer not to dally at the Schwaben after midnight, was taken prisoner. Over 60 of his men were taken out of the redoubt and herded across no man’s land to the British lines. Crozier moving towards them saw ‘an advancing crowd of field grey’ and his men opened fire at 600 yards. ‘Damned . . .’ shouted an officer, ‘give them hell.’ Men whose nerves had been stretched taut throughout the catastrophic advance simply blazed away. ‘Cease fire, for God’s sake!’ Crozier ordered, having observed who they were through binoculars. They were being escorted by wounded British, but the fire ‘ripples on for a time’. Crozier got them back under control, but there were few regrets. ‘After all they are only Germans,’ one youngster remarked. Hauptmann Schorer never made it back to the British lines; he and many of his men were straddled by German artillery.10

As the momentum of the Ulster attack swept on to the fourth line and reached out for the fifth, the wounded left behind were abandoned to a miserable fate. Medics were often unable to reach them and many died alone. Private Hugh Adams recalled ‘fellas crawling back that couldn’t walk’. One put his rifle down and covered himself with a groundsheet, a pathetic effort to shut out the horrors all around. He was dead when Adams got to him. ‘No one to touch them!’ in their dying moment, he sadly recalled:

I used to think it was terrible to see young lives – the blood of life oozing out of them. Nobody there to lift their head – not one – nobody there to care – that was it!

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