Perspectives On The Front

Talk about a brand: the Somme!  

Where a year later, in 1917, Passchendaele would become synonymous for the wretchedness and brutality of the conditions at the front, the Somme was to be identified for its bloodiness, sheer waste, and  stupidity. Designed primarily to relieve the embattered French troops at Verdun, by the time the four month offensive petered out in November 1916, 400,000 Commonwealth soldiers had been killed, wounded or were missing; 60,000 of them the first day. . . and among these 680 men of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment  – the hardest hit battalion of any on that day.

While much of the attention of the British Army was pointed towards the Somme in the summer of 1916, the Canadian Divisions were occupied in Flanders for much of the Spring and Summer months and wouldn’t make their way south until later in August.

For the individual soldier, moving from Flanders to the Somme was often viewed with relief as they escaped the claustrophobia of the fields around Ypres and moved to a region characterized by wide open expanses and rolling hills.  

“The whole field of the Somme is chalk hill and downland, like similar formations in England. It has about it, in every part of it, certain features well known to every one who has ever traveled in chalk country. . . Where two slopes adjoin, such plowing steepens the valley between them into a gully, which, being always unsown, makes a track through the crops when they are up. Sometimes, though less frequently, the farmer plows away from a used track on quite flat land, and by doing this on both sides of the track, he makes the track a causeway or ridgeway, slightly raised above the adjoining fields. This type of raised road or track can be seen in one or two parts of the battlefield (just above Hamel and near Pozières for instance), but the hollow or sunken road . . . are everywhere. One may say that no quarter of a mile of the whole field is without one or other of them.” 

This description taken from The Old Front Line, written in 1917, is as apt today as it was then. 

It’s what strikes you as you drive down the Albert-Baupaume Road;  bright yellow fields of mustard sweep across the horizon in great arcs that drop off in to valleys, abruptly changing colour as they blend seamlessly with the opposite incline. But looking at the rolling hills of the Somme one can imagine the labour in having to charge across these fields in the heat of the summer, straining up and down the slopes, achievements measured in yards.

As they had in so many places along the front, the Germans had occupied the best defensive positions in the area, digging deep trenches and bunkers, reinforced with seasoned wood, iron girders and concrete.  The Y Ravine, with the high ground of Hawthorne Ridge to the west was a natural defensive position.

“Just below us on the lower slopes of this Hawthorn Ridge he had one vast hiding place which gave us a great deal of trouble. This was a gully or ravine, about five hundred yards long, well within his position, running (roughly speaking) at right angles with his front line. Probably it was a steep and deep natural fold made steeper and deeper by years of cultivation. It is from thirty to forty feet deep, and about as much across at the top; it has abrupt sides, and thrusts out two forks to its southern side. These forks give it the look of a letter Y upon the maps, for which reason both the French and ourselves called the place the ” Ravin en Y” or “Y Ravine”.

Today the Ravine is still off limits protected, ironically, by barbed wire and signs that warn of unexploded ammunitions

Unlike the men of the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers and the 2nd South Wales Borderers, both scheduled to attack in the first wave, the men of the Newfoundland Regiment who were waiting 200 yards behind the front line in the newly built St John’s Road, had a two hour wait. They would not be able to see the massive mine explode along Hawthorne Ridge to the West at 7:20am. 

The blast was the signal to move, but as the first wave climbed over the top and headed to the British wire, German machine gun fire and artillery ripped apart the columns. The men of the Inniskilling Fusiliers fell back into the trenches as soon as they raised themselves above the parapet.

The commander of the 1st Border Regiment waited patiently for the white flare that would signal the capture of the German front line – his signal to move. He wouldn’t have long to wait. Within minutes of the first wave going over, white flares were seen and he ordered his men to attack, crossing bridges that had been built to carry them over the British front trenches. 

But moments before, as machine gun fire continued to rake the advancing troops, the German commander fired a flare, a white one, to call in more artillery. By 8:00 the 1st Borderer’s attack was at a standstill and 530 of them were dead, wounded or missing. 

Thirty minutes after the first wave, the men of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, followed in the footsteps of the Fusiliers to a similar fate. And like the Fusiliers, many of the Regiment’s dead and wounded, which would amount to 550 men, fell back in to the trench that they had just left.

Finally, at 8:45am,  the Newfoundland Regiment got the word to move off.  It must have been  unnerving to have waited for so long that morning, just a few hundred yards from the bloody chaos that was taking place along the front line; listening to the continuous machine gun fire, artillery blasts and the screams of the men who preceded them. Moving forward they had to make their way over the bodies of the Inniskilling Fusiliers and the Scottish Borders that were piling up, the wounded among the dead. Eventually the congestion of dead and wounded was too much and they climbed out of the communication trench to go the last 200 yards to their front line in the open, exposed to the german guns.

The Danger Tree, located just beyond the Newfoundlander’s own wire was to have been a rallying point for the troops but instead became a focal point for enemy fire and the furthest point of the Newfoundlander’s advance. By all accounts the lasting image as they made their way to their own wire is of men walking through the gunfire, the objective 600 yards further on, their chins tucked in to their right shoulder, braving a blizzard.