Tolkien and the Great War (19 page)

Smith had received his orders for the Big Push a week after his return from his May leave in England, and on the eve of Tolkien's crossing. Since then, he had hardly been out of the trenches. On the day Tolkien left Étaples, Smith's men had set out from Warloy for their battle station, singing. Orders were that they would wait until after the initial assault before emerging to consolidate the British gains, taking their picks and shovels so they could dig in. But after twenty-four hours crammed into sodden dugouts in the wood west of the Ancre, they had been told the attack was off and had retired to billets to wait.

The night before the rescheduled attack they moved into dugouts further forward, near a pontoon bridge across the rivermeads at Authuille, for four hours' fitful sleep, and were up at five o'clock. At six the bombardment began again, deafening in its intensity, shaking the ground. They crossed the bridge just after ‘zero hour'. Now they struck uphill, passing brigades of artillerymen stripped to the waist as they slaved to feed the huge guns, and reached the trenches that ran into the southern edge of Blighty Wood.

Several hundred yards beyond the small, much-battered wood, up a steady slope, was the British front line, a stretch known as Boggart Hole Clough. On the far side of No Man's Land, where Smith had patrolled it one night in May, was the heavily fortified Leipzig Salient, at the toe of Thiepval Ridge. By now it should have been overrun and left far behind by the advance. The Salford Pals would simply walk across the open country from the wood and climb down into the Salient with their picks and shovels. Later they would move on nearly two more miles to refortify another conquered enemy strongpoint.

But no sooner was Smith under the trees than walking wounded and stretcher cases began to stream past. Further in, the wood was full of corpses. Now the battalion in front started to bunch up, and the labourers and businessmen of Salford, and the Oxford University men, paused. Their eyes streamed from tear gas; their ears were filled with the
ping
of bullets and the crack of falling branches. Smith, now the battalion
intelligence officer
, attempted to take in the situation from a trench at the far edge of the wood. Across the blasted desolation through
which the British communication trenches ran up to Boggart Hole Clough, enemy machine guns were rattling away from the high ground to the east.

The idea of an orderly march forward was rejected at last but, three hours into the battle, the Pals' advance resumed. The first company was sent out of the wood in rushes, but platoon by platoon they withered into the ground. The next group went out under a smokescreen, dashing from shellhole to shellhole, but no news came back out of the chaos. Orders came down to advance along the crowded trenches instead. This was done by men including Smith's old platoon, collierymen mostly, but they sent word back that their front line was choked with the dead and the wounded, and was impassable. Furthermore, the German artillery had now turned its attention on Boggart Hole Clough. The Pals were ordered back to the confines of Blighty Wood, which came under a rain of shells for the rest of the day.

Remarkably, a few Salford Pals had already defied the odds to reach Leipzig Salient, parts of which were by now in British hands. There they were trapped all day with pockets of men from other battalions, desperately fighting off German troops with bombs and bayonets. They could not be pulled back until night fell, when the survivors of Smith's battalion withdrew from Salient and wood. Heading back the way they had come that morning, they found the whole area now littered with discarded guns, grenades, and ammunition. Everywhere, men sat brokenly, or lay silent in the darkness. After a second day under shellfire in the trenches around Authuille, Smith's platoon and others were sent back to man Boggart Hole Clough for a further twenty-four hours under intermittent but intense bombardment.

Only half the battalion had returned to its village billets in the small hours of 4 July. G. B. Smith was fortunate that he no longer commanded a platoon: four of the Pals' officers had been killed and seven wounded. Thirty-six of the ‘ordinary' soldiers were dead or missing and more than two hundred and thirty had suffered wounds. Most had fallen on the first morning before they even reached their own front line.

For Tolkien, the relief of seeing his friend safe and sound on Thursday 6 July was overwhelming. GBS arrived alone ahead of the Salford Pals, who followed early the next morning. These were fraught days. The divisional signal office at Bouzincourt was hit by shells on Friday night and its cabling wrecked. Meanwhile, Smith, recovering from his sixty-hour ordeal under fire, was involved in the hasty reorganization of his depleted battalion into just two companies; but between their chores in this garrisoned Picardy village smelling of death, the two Oxford TCBSites spent as much time together as they could. Waiting for news of Rob Gilson, they talked about the war, strolled in an unspoilt field of poppies, or took shelter, on Friday, from the heavy rain that fell all day; and in true TCBSian fashion they discussed poetry and the future. But on Saturday the Salford Pals left for the trenches due east across the Ancre, where they were going to back up the continuing British assault on Ovillers, the German strongpoint overlooking the valleys of Sausage and Mash and Blighty Wood. After seeing his old friend once more, Smith departed.

The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers limped back into Bouzincourt on the morning of Monday 10 July 1916 and collapsed into their billets. After a few hours' sleep, the men were roused and the battalion moved to Senlis, another crowded hamlet a mile further from the front, to rest in more comfortable billets and to take stock. They had found La Boisselle thick with the bodies of the dead, hundreds of them wherever the eye looked, and far more in British khaki than German field-grey. In several assaults on the German lines to the south of Ovillers they had added to the carnage fifty-six of their own men, killed or missing; twice that number were wounded. Even counting those who had remained at Bouzincourt, only a dozen soldiers of ‘C' Company were left.

Though the full-scale assault had now given way to many smaller skirmishes, the chance of injury was still high, and the chance of being killed considerable. If you were an officer, it was clear, the odds were stacked against you. One subaltern was dead, one had been left to succumb to his wounds in a German
dugout, and one (who had simply been carrying supplies) had been shot in the knee. Frederick Dunn, the 23-year-old captain of ‘A' Company, had been shot through the head. Such were the facts before Tolkien as he headed for the first time into the trenches of the Western Front.

The orders to move came on 14 July, after a night interrupted by sudden, thunderous noise. With its French ally in mind, the British High Command had planned a decisive stroke for Bastille Day: as dawn reached Tolkien at Senlis, 22,000 soldiers were sweeping across the German second line from the southern British positions on the Somme. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers marched off at mid-morning through Bouzincourt and down into the Ancre valley. The road was flanked by resting soldiers and bustling with men, wagons, horses, and mules in motion. Old and new flowed together: for every motorized vehicle, there were roughly two horse-drawn wagons or carts and three riding horses. ‘
That road was like
a pageant,' wrote Charles Carrington, a subaltern of the Royal Warwickshires whose experiences over the next few days closely relate to Tolkien's. ‘The quieter men lay down, but the younger ones, officers and men, ran about like children to see the sights.' Further down towards Albert, big pieces of artillery boomed away in hollow or copse or ruinous house. On top of the town's war-damaged basilica glimmered a golden statue of the Virgin Mary, half-toppled, with the infant Christ in her outstretched arms. Superstition held that when she fell the war would end.

Tolkien's brigade skirted the northern edge of the town, crossed the river, and bivouacked by an embankment, where the stream ran out of a wood at the foot of the long chalk down that rose to the German heights. Around the Roman road running north-east from Albert was a panorama of tentless bivouacs where soldiers brewed tea around stacks of rifles, or hurried on errands, or aimlessly foraged for souvenirs among the strewn detritus of armies. Some even managed to sleep, though the ground here was shelled intermittently. The land now
was scarred, and the rural backdrop of the hinterland torn away.

As the afternoon waned, Tolkien's battalion and the Royal Irish regulars were told that they were to take part in a ‘show', as soldierly euphemism had it. They left the rest of the 74th Brigade by the embankment and headed up the busy road lined by scorched, stunted trees, turning left in the lee of a ridge to find the entrenched headquarters of their two divisional sister brigades. Beyond the grey ridge lay No Man's Land. Bodies lay out there still from 1 July. To the right glimmered a vast white crater, where Rob Gilson had watched the enormous mine explode at the start of the battle. To the left, the height of Ovillers thrust forward like a finger from the chalk uplands behind it.

‘
Something in the make
of this hill, in its shape, or in the way it catches the light, gives it a strangeness which other parts of the battlefield have not,' wrote John Masefield in his 1917 survey of the area,
The Old Front Line.
The height does not seem especially prominent, yet from here the German invaders could survey the battlefield from Bécourt, where the Cambridgeshires had launched their attack, to Leipzig Salient, where so many Salford Pals died. Trying to take the hill of Ovillers on the day of the Big Push, five thousand men had been wounded or killed. Two days later, the tally had risen by half as many again. While Tolkien was meeting with G. B. Smith at Bouzincourt, the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers had joined a third assault, which petered out in costly and inconclusive manoeuvres. In recent days, with La Boisselle in British hands, Smith had seen battle inside the strongpoint on the hilltop itself.

Ovillers remained a powerful obstacle, fiercely defended. In the southern face of the hill, just below its crest and amid the rubble of a French hamlet with its burnt-down church, a labyrinth of trenches had been cut, guarded by hidden machine guns. At dawn that Bastille Day the garrison at Ovillers had fought off battalions advancing from north-west, south, and south-east. Though the attack was no more than a diversion from the main assault further along the front line, Ovillers had appeared (as
The Times
said) ‘like a volcano in violent eruption'. Now the 7th Brigade, part of Tolkien's division, was renewing
its assault on the south-eastern defences, but it was battle-weary and depleted. The 11th Lancashire Fusiliers and the Royal Irish were being sent up to lend a hand.

As dusk fell on 14 July, Tolkien tramped with his companions up into La Boisselle. Sewn into his uniform was the regulation first-aid packet, containing a sterile field dressing in case he was wounded. Underfoot the ground was clay, stiff yet sodden from the rains and torn by traffic. Nightfall inevitably brought movement in the other direction: the wounded being evacuated from the battlefield. The moon was brilliant, and the sky full of starburst shells and flares. Many small wooden crosses could be glimpsed as the old British front line fell behind. It was, wrote Carrington,
‘a new country…a desert of broken chalk – ditches, holes, craters, mounds and ridges, dry and thinly overgrown with weeds, and all interlaced with rusty strands of barbed wire'
. The village of La Boisselle itself had been erased, yet still shells fell on it with a rising shriek, a roar and a crash. Then suddenly the trenchworks changed: the churned muck underfoot was replaced by straight duckboards and the walls now soared fifteen feet up, each fire-bay equipped with its own ladder. This was a monument of German engineering, and it showed scant sign of damage after the great bombardment.

The Lancashire Fusiliers passed into the maze and on uphill by German trenches to the right of the Roman way. The road was now raised on an embankment, but no longer lined by trees: they had been blasted out of existence. Going was slow, and single-file. Part way along they passed through an open area containing a broken-down ambulance wagon. This was land newly taken from the Germans, and at high cost. So it was on the approach to Ovillers that Tolkien first encountered the lost of the Somme: heralded by their stench, darkly hunched or prone, or hanging on the wire until a stab of brightness revealed them, the bloated and putrescent dead.

With the old front line a mile behind them, they turned left into a trench that cut across the road, dipped into Mash Valley, and climbed again directly towards Ovillers, a low silhouette of hedges and ruins against the black sky. The trench was soon
crammed with anxious soldiers, jostling with a digging party of Royal Engineers.

The hill ahead erupted in light and noise shortly before midnight on 14 July 1916 as the 7th Brigade attacked. The Lancashire Fusiliers watched, waiting in reserve and ready to move into the captured ground to hold it against any counterattacks. But the brigade was beaten back. Abruptly, the order came for the reserve troops to join in a second attack at two o'clock. There was barely time for the Fusiliers to line up to the right of the survivors of the previous charge before they were launched, bayonets fixed, into the assault.

The first objective, the trench guarding Ovillers' south-eastern perimeter, lay 120 yards uphill, opposite a parallel trench tenuously held by the British. But the two were actually linked at their eastern ends by a third, perpendicular trench, where German soldiers lurked around the corner. Thus the attackers would have to traverse an open square held on two sides by the enemy and swept by up to six machine guns.

The Lancashire Fusiliers, however, never entered the fatal square. First they had to negotiate an obstacle course. Farmers had cut the slope into terraces, the Germans had sown it with barbed wire, and the British had ploughed it up again with enormous shellholes. The Fusiliers walked into a storm of bullets and a chaos of wire entanglements, and they scarcely reached their own forward trench.