Secret Warriors by Taylor Downing

Author:Taylor Downing
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781605987507
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2015-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

Even now I am haunted by the touching look of the young, bright, anxious eyes, as we passed along the rows of sufferers. Hardly ever did any of them say a word, except to ask for water or relief from pain. I don’t remember any single man in all those thousands who even suggested that we should save him and not the fellow next to him... There, all around us, lying maimed and battered and dying, was the flower of Britain’s youth – a terrible sight if ever there was one, yet full of courage and unselfishness and beauty.20

After the seismic shock of the first day on the Somme, the system gradually recovered. On the second day, more than 33,000 wounded men were treated. Sloggett and Bowlby met with General Rawlinson, commander of Fourth Army, who was in direct command of the offensive. Medical officers were rushed in from quieter parts of the front with the intention of carrying out more urgent surgery in the CCSs. The evacuation system began to catch up with the massive congestion caused on the previous day. By the third day, the numbers being moved on from the CCSs actually exceeded the numbers arriving. And by the end of July the CCSs had treated about 96,000 men, of whom approximately 10 per cent had been operated on. It was a remarkable number to have coped with.

The battle rumbled on for several months, and when Haig visited a CCS in September, he was astonished to meet a surgeon who had carried out eighty-two operations in the previous ten hours.21 But he was encouraged by the cheerful mood of the wounded men he met; their morale seemed to be high, despite the horrors they had endured. Possibly it was for this reason that he felt able to continue with the offensive for another two months until the winter rains of November brought the fighting season to an end.

Haig lost 420,000 men killed, wounded, missing and captured during the Somme. But despite these appalling losses the British Army had survived intact. The hard-pressed medical services had played a large part in enabling the army to fight on and preventing a catastrophic collapse in morale.

The next major offensive, the Battle of Arras in April-May 1917, had the dubious distinction of causing the highest daily average death toll of any battle fought by the British during the war. Twelve CCSs and twenty-eight ambulance trains were prepared for the battle, proportionately far more than had been available at the Somme. Again, the medical systems struggled but finally coped with the vast scale of casualties. And again the local army commander, this time General Allenby, paid frequent visits to the CCSs to gauge conditions and assess morale. Once more, what he saw made him feel that the offensive could continue. And it did, although this time it lasted for only a month.

One consequence of the battles of the Somme and Arras was that the CCSs began to specialise. By the Third Battle

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