The Good Soldier by Gary Mead

Author:Gary Mead
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd

He had a point. If all infantry company commanders had been forced to walk rather than ride, the total saving each year would have been perhaps 8,000 tons of shipping space, a negligible amount. Yet if the king could make a largely meaningless symbolic gesture by giving up drink, then why could not Haig, by relinquishing horses used by infantry commanders? He was, however, in no mood to compromise with a government whose Secretary of State for War sought the opinion of French soldiers as to his competence, and who had sent a failed former C-in-C to gather evidence against him.

Despite appearances to the contrary, Haig’s public face – of indomitable confidence that all was going according to plan – sometimes crumpled in private. By the end of the first week of November, he belatedly recognised that, in some respects at least, no real progress had been made since the early days of the war: ‘The communications are still very bad. In fact we are fighting under the same conditions as in October 1914, i.e with rifle and machine guns only, because bombs and mortar ammunition cannot be carried forward as the roads are so bad.’108

Towards the end of 1916, appalling weather set in – heavy rain and chilly temperatures. The area around the Somme had become a morass of shell-pocked swamp. The evidence of his senses and those of others perpetually contradicted Haig’s deeply nurtured ambition of a German collapse, yet it was as if he shrugged his shoulders and accepted that the only solution was more of the same, particularly as, by this late in the year, he was increasingly desperate to show some sign of genuine success. In what has been justifiably called a political battle, Haig exerted subtle pressure on Gough, GOC Fifth Army, on 12 November, to try to capture a ‘heap of rubble’109 that was formerly the village of Beaumont Hamel – the taking of which had been a goal for 1 July. Gough, unswervingly loyal to Haig, readily agreed.

The Battle of the Ancre, as this final stage of the Somme became known, resulted in casualties of more than 20,000 BEF and Dominion troops, for the capture of Beaumont Hamel and its neighbouring village, Beaucourt. Despite thick early-morning fog on 13 November, the first day of the battle, and more intelligent use of a creeping barrage, the Fifth Army’s divisions rapidly became bogged down in a muddy slime which often reached their waists and rendered their rifles unusable. If the strategic aim was still to achieve a breakthrough, this was a pointless battle; if it simply was a matter of attrition, it was unjustifiably costly. Despite as much artillery ammunition being expended on the Ancre as across the whole battlefield on 1 July, on a front six times shorter, the end result was an advance to a paltry maximum depth of 2,000 yards.

But by this time Haig was in any case working to a different agenda. For in the midst of the Battle of

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