Forgotten Voices of the Somme (27 page)

The next morning, I had to take a squad of men with me to collect the pay books from our dead. It's a picture that's been in my mind ever since. Absolutely horrific. Every yard or so there was a dead man, and of course we had to sort our own men out from the others that had been there before. This was war at its worst. There were men with half faces, men with empty brain cavities, headless corpses, corpses without limbs. We were tripping over intestines, where men had been disembowelled. That was all the way up to the German wire.

Why did I survive? I have thought about it over and over again. How can anybody possibly walk seven hundred yards through those machine guns and not be hit? The only thing I can think of is that when I was a boy, I had been in the country and seen the old horse-drawn reaping machines. The people that I stayed with used to
glean
after the reapers had been over the fields. That means picking up the waste sheaves of corn. When the field was finished, here and there, odd stems of corn would be left standing. I can only think that just as they missed the reaper – so the survivors must have missed the machine guns.

Private Tom Bracey

9th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers

We moved into the line at Ovillers. We knew that the first days had failed because we could see the dead about, the wounded, hundreds of stretchers. It was late in the afternoon when we went in. We went back to Albert, and we were told that we would be making an attack at Ovillers. That was on the seventh. We were told to tear up all our writing paper. I tell you, I was scared. I'd seen all these bodies. But my friend Albert said, 'Now we'll show 'em what we're made of!' He was full of life, Albert, but the rest of us were very quiet. We just grinned at one another.

Royal Fusiliers after the attack of July 7.

Men of the
Royal Warwickshire Regiment
after an attack.

So we went up at eight o'clock at night, and we sat down waiting to attack. It was just about getting dark. I remember talking to a proper cockney – been in prison. The officer came up and told us that our machine-gun team was being taken out of the attack. They decided that our Vickers gun was too heavy for the attack. It needed six men. The gun itself was 381/2 pounds, the tripod was forty-eight pounds, a box of 250 rounds was twenty-one pounds, there were four of those, and then there were all the spare parts. So they told us to return to the transport lines. God, that was a relief to me.

And then we heard the bombardment. Blimey, talk about thunder and lightning. After that, we were waiting for news of the men who attacked. We didn't hear anything, but the next morning we watched them coming out of the line. I could have cried. I asked about my friend Monty – he came from Hammersmith, he was always after the girls – and they said he was blown to bits. We lost fifty per cent of the battalion from shellfire before they even went over. They were very quiet.

Sergeant Charles Quinnell

9th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers

We were going to have a go at the village of Ovillers, and we were the third lot to have a go at it. Our objective was 250 yards away. Every man had a sandbag with twenty Mills bombs in it, and each Mills bomb weighs two pounds, so that was forty pounds of weight; we had two extra bandoliers of fifty rounds in addition to our 150 rounds in our pouches, and every alternate man had a shovel or a pick.

There was a four-hour bombardment. As soon as it started, the Germans' retaliation came and for four hours we had to sit there and take four hours of everything he slung at us. We lost twenty-five per cent of our men before we went over. I was in the second wave. My platoon officer was in the first wave: he took two sections over and I followed with the other two sections.

The first wave went over, and as soon as they had gone I gave the order 'Advance!' – up the ladders – over the top. The first wave, when I got through our wire, were down. Two machine guns played on them and they were absolutely wiped out. Everybody was either killed or wounded. We went through, we got halfway across, and then the two machine guns found us and they traversed. They played on us like spraying with a hose. At the finish I was

the only man standing but I'm not one of those heroes who want to take the German Army on my own – so I went to earth; I got down behind the lip of a shell-hole.

I kept looking to see where these machine guns were. I couldn't see them but there was a German in the trench about a hundred yards away and he was standing up on his parapet and flinging bombs, so I shot him. The machinegun crew spotted me and they opened up on me. I ducked my head down and I'm behind the lip of this shell-hole and the dirt was just spraying down the back of my neck. 'You bastard!' I said. He thought he'd got me and he played his machine gun somewhere else.

I put my head up again – he spotted it – and back came the machine gun, and down I had to go. I stopped there for about quarter of an hour. By this time the machine guns had stopped and I took one convulsive leap over into the shell-hole and there were seven wounded men in there. Well, we bound one another up, and there we stopped all day. When it was dusk, I brought them back to our own line.

Now, we'd paid the penalty – we'd taken the machine-gun fire of those two machine guns – but the companies on our right had got through, and they took Ovillers. Our company went into the line 193 strong on the night of the sixth, and on the night of the seventh there was eighteen of us fit men, that was all.

But there you are, the mission was accomplished, we'd taken the machinegun fire off the companies on our right and they'd got through, so that was our reward.

Private Victor Lansdown

16th Battalion, Welch Regiment

The bullets were whistling past our ears. This man was holding up his hand. He had his rifle, but only the finger and thumb in it, because three fingers had been shot off. He said, 'Look what the bastards have done!' I said, 'Lie down! Make yourself as small as possible!' We kept going until the officer gave the signal to get down. We spotted a shell-hole, which we dived into head first. The tops of our bodies and our legs stuck up in the air.

Jack fixed up the gun and fired a blast into the wood – and that brought the revenge: a hail of bullets. I passed out. I was unconscious. It wasn't till later that we came to the conclusion that a bullet had hit my helmet and stunned

me. At the same time, a bullet had gone through my leg, so Jerry had given me an anaesthetic, and I never felt any of it . . . But poor old Jack had a bullet through both his legs, and he felt both of them.

When I came to my senses, Jack asked if I could get at my water bottle, so I turned over on my back, and handed him my water bottle. And then I could see my leg. The bullet had ripped my puttee, and the two ends were hanging down, soaked in blood. There was nothing I could do about it. I'd lost so much blood, I was too weak to do anything.

Private Albert Hurst

17th Battalion, Manchester Regiment

About two o'clock on Sunday morning, we got into a position in Bernafay Wood, facing Trônes Wood. We had to take up a position in a trench occupied by about thirty dead South Africans, who'd been caught by enfiladed fire. We could also see dead men in the open ground between Bernafay and Trônes Wood, from a previous attack. Our objective was to take a trench in Trônes Wood.

As we attacked, a German machine gun was firing at us from further up Trônes Wood, but we seemed to have a charmed life; none of us were hit, as far as I could see. Before we got very far, one of our shells got there and killed the machine-gun team. Trônes Wood was still a wood – it had been behind the lines and the trees were still profuse. As we were moving across, we heard cheers coming from the bottom of the wood, which we concluded came from our sixth battalion. Once we were in the wood, the problem was keeping in touch with each other, through the trees and undergrowth.

We arrived at a T-shaped trench in the middle of the wood that had been abandoned by the Germans. We all agreed that this must be our objective, so we stopped. I thought we should have carried on to the edge of the wood. We could have gone further. It seemed like a daft position to take up, but we mounted our machine gun and stayed there. We stuck in the position that we'd been allotted to – and that was it!

Now, somebody had sent me some chocolate and I stood up to hand it out to the others. Just then, a shrapnel shell burst and it hit everybody except one of us. I got shrapnel in my foot. No one was badly wounded. We'd been ever so lucky, but the only chap who wasn't injured was too shocked to bandage us up. We started to make our way back through the wood, to a dressing station.

We went down a communication trench, but I decided to take a more direct route because I didn't know where this trench was leading. As I was going, I was joined by another chap of B Company who'd been shot in the shoulder. My wound was numb, but I was losing plenty of blood. We struggled on until we thought we were out of range of the Germans, and we stood up and tried to walk. I picked up a broken branch to help me. And then I heard two shots. One bullet flicked across my helmet and bounced away, and the other one hit him. I called out to two
South African
stretcher-bearers and told them that my friend was wounded, and they said they'd pick him up. I crawled the rest of the way to the dressing station, and my friend died in hospital the next day. At the dressing station my foot was dressed, and I was sent to a military hospital in Rouen.

Corporal Harry Fellows

12th Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers

It was twelve o'clock on the morning of July 12. We got the order, 'All Lewis gunners parade at once with guns, ammunition and two days' rations.' Mametz Wood had been captured, and our CO had orders to move our battalion. He couldn't move it in daylight, but he was sending in the Lewis gun section. We marched in fours as far as Fricourt, and then we went into single file until we entered Mametz Wood. We entered the wood, and about sixty yards inside the officer stopped us, told us to drop our packs and our guns, and the captain and the sergeant went forward to see if we'd arrived at our position. My mate
Alf Templeford
said to me, 'What about some souvenirs?' There were loads of dead Germans lying about, and we started looking for Iron Crosses, watches, things like that. We'd got about a hundred yards, when a shell dropped just where the other lads were resting. I ran over. I never saw such carnage in all the time I was in France.

Private Philip Cullen

4th Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry

In July and August the flies and the stench were terrible. It was piteously hot, and the dead don't stay very long before they start to smell. If it hadn't been for
Bill Healey
, our second sergeant, I don't suppose I should have been here. He saw me laying and panting. I couldn't breathe. The stench had got into my throat. I don't know where the hell he got it from, but Bill always had a water