Valour Road by John Nadler

Author:John Nadler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada

THE SHOW

Charlie and Leo Clarke, September 1916

When the Second Battalion arrived by train in Albert, they knew little of the battle that had been raging for the past two months along the nearby River Somme. Charlie Clarke and his comrades had been too preoccupied with survival during their long summer in the Ypres salient to pay attention to this new battlefield. But on August 30, the day the battalion arrived in this theatre, the Battle of the Somme was still a work in process—a work made up in equal parts of overweening ambition, monstrous miscalculation, and mass homicide.

General Sir Douglas Haig had conceived of the offensive in the Somme River valley as the key to finally breaching the German line and ushering in an Allied breakthrough that would turn the course of the war. In his diary, he envisioned “getting as large [as possible] a combined force of French and British across the Somme and fighting the Enemy in the open!” He hoped to create a sizeable enough gap in the German line to push through mounted troops, which would storm across the front in strength and then form a bridgehead in German territory that would ultimately lead to a German collapse in the west.

At least one of Haig’s own generals was skeptical, arguing that the scheme had the potential, at best, to seize two enemy trenches and kill some Germans. But the French endorsed the plan—indeed, insisted on it—because, in their view, it would relieve pressure on their besieged armies at Verdun, where they had been fighting since February 21. (Ultimately, they would lose half a million men in this theatre.) As early as April, during the initial planning stages of the offensive, the French commander-in-chief, Marshal Joseph Joffre, had agitated for the attack to come off as soon as possible. But Haig wouldn’t be rushed. As he wrote in his diary, he didn’t want “any offensive on a large scale from being made until all is ready.” Haig and his planners wanted to attack on August 15. “Papa Joffre” balked. A former military engineer in the colonies who had never commanded an army or soldiers in the field before the Great War, Joffre had nevertheless risen to become the unchallenged generalissimo of the French war effort, and for many Frenchman its saviour. He declared that “the French Army would be ruined!” if forced to wait until mid-August for relief.

Haig reluctantly agreed to move up the start date by six weeks. By the eve of the offensive on July 1, he had amassed nineteen British and three French divisions, supported by 1,000 field guns, 180 heavy guns, and 245 heavy howitzers, which in the week before the attack had spat one million shells (out of a stockpile of three million) at the enemy’s defences. Haig had fielded a host of awesome might, so awesome he at times believed himself to be an instrument of destiny. “I do feel that in my plans,” he wrote to his wife, “I have been helped by a Power that is not my own.

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