Tommies: The British Army in the Trenches by Rosie Serdiville & John Sadler

Author:Rosie Serdiville & John Sadler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Casemate
Published: 2017-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

High summer

Rawlinson’s idea – which, as Richard Holmes points out, was the novel one of reinforcing failure – involved more costly and fruitless attacks on those strongpoints where earlier costly and fruitless attacks had failed. In the south, opportunities beckoned. Attacks on 3 July did indeed gain ground though it took another nine bloody days to secure Mametz Wood. On 14 July, Fourth Army mounted a dazzling night attack with a full and effective bombardment. The infantry were preceded by a hurricane fire, brief but devastating. Significant gains were made for, by Somme standards, modest losses. This was bite and hold in the best sense but it was not a breakthrough. Far from it, those key areas of Delville and High Wood remained in German hands and the taking of both would be long drawn out and terrible.

Manning their outpost in no man’s land during the night of 1/2 July, Charles Moss and his comrades had no leisure for pondering on grand tactics:

The darkness of the night was often broken by brilliant glow from arching Verey lights being fired across No-Man’s-Land. As each light died out, we were blinded, the darkness being deeper than ever. The sudden change from blackness to such weird and ghostly light thrown onto the tragic shapes of the charred stumps of trees whose tops had been blasted off during previous bombardments made the place such a terrible eerie sight, that I felt as though I was no longer on the civilised world.

People have heard a lot about Hell, but no one has come back from there to tell us what it really is like. I know I was very near to it as the red light from the star shell and explosions fell on the hollow, whilst the cries of despair from the wounded mingled with the Devil’s tattoo of rifle and machine-gun fire. We thought the Germans might send a bombing raid over so we’d had to struggle out into No-Man’s-Land where we got into a big shell hole and set to with picks and shovels to make it into a Lewis gun post.

One of my gunners ‘got the wind up’ very badly. He would dash himself from one side of the hole to the other at each shell-burst. I was urging him to keep still in the bottom of the hole when he gave a great gasp and groaned ‘Death, oh death! They’ve knocked a bloody hole right through us’. He scrambled out of the shell-hole before anyone could help him and I saw no more of him till I reached the 3rd Battalion at South Shields in 1917 where I found that the shrapnel had wounded him in the shoulder and given him a Blighty that got him to England.

Next morning the gun team had scrambled back to the wrecked front line and ‘stood to’ with the remainder of ‘C’ Company. Despite their fragile position, no attacks came. Charles and his comrades retired along a communication trench:

This was one of the shelters that had been used as an advanced dressing station.

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