Too Important for the Generals by Allan Mallinson

Author:Allan Mallinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2016-06-02T04:00:00+00:00

It is not known what Haig’s theology made of the first day when eventually he discovered what actually had happened. The Australian historian (albeit a parti pris one) John Laffin was profanely blunt about it: ‘[Haig] saw God in his own image.’fn6

In October, John Masefield, on his mission to do for the Somme what he had done for Gallipoli, looked at what he could of the old battlefield, spoke to whom he could, including Haig, and read what he could. And of that first morning of the British army’s most debilitating battle ever, 1 July 1916, he wrote:

It was fine, cloudless, summer weather, not very clear, for there was a good deal of heat haze and of mist in the nights and early mornings. It was hot yet brisk during the days. The roads were thick in dust. Clouds and streamers of chalk dust floated and rolled over all the roads leading to the front, till men and beasts were grey with it.

At half past six in the morning of 1st July all the guns on our front quickened their fire to a pitch of intensity never before attained. Intermittent darkness and flashing so played on the enemy line from Gommecourt to Maricourt that it looked like a reef on a loppy day. For one instant it could be seen as a white rim above the wire, then some comber of a big shell struck it fair and spouted it black aloft . . .

In our trenches after seven o’clock on that morning, our men waited under a heavy fire for the signal to attack. Just before half-past seven, the mines at half a dozen points went up with a roar that shook the earth and brought down the parapets in our lines. Before the blackness of their burst had thinned or fallen, the hand of Time rested on the half-hour mark, and along all that old front line of the English there came a whistling and a crying. The men of the first wave climbed up the parapets, in tumult, darkness, and the presence of death, and having done with all pleasant things, advanced across the No Man’s Land to begin the battle of the Somme.fn7

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