Twelve Days on the Somme: A Memoir of the Trenches, 1916 Read online

One other viewpoint clearly held by Rogerson and his comrades which might challenge received opinions is that there is no sign of that bloodlust, that virulent attitude to the foe, which has become the stuff of fierce academic argument in recent years. He writes, “The English soldier could not hate his enemies for long,” citing an occasion when, unable to move for two days in water-logged trenches, the men insisted on sharing their infrequent mugs of tea with a wounded German. “‘. . . Here's a drop of tea for Fritz,’ the men would say, as they propped up the captive and fed him as a nurse would feed a patient” (pp. 60–1).

  This reminiscence prompted Rogerson to one of his most memorable affirmations (remarkable in a man who was himself brought up with a strong Christian background and who after the war was to take up a career in the field of public relations):

  We were privileged, in short, to see a reign of goodwill among men, which the piping times of peace, with all their organised charity, their free meals, free hospitals, and Sunday sermons have never equalled. Despite all the propaganda for Christian fellowship and international peace, there is more animosity, uncharitableness, and lack of fellowship in one business office now than in a brigade of infantry in France then. Otherwise, we could never have stood the strain. [p. 61]

  How was the book received on publication, which took place in November 1933, just in time for the annual Armistice commemorations? It attracted enormous attention. Rogerson's own meticulously compiled scrapbook, now held with numerous other papers in the Documents Department of the Imperial War Museum, teems with evidence of a range of response about which most writers today could only dream. The Daily Express serialised it, the first instalment being printed on Armistice Day itself. The Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, was quoted as having accepted the book as “a welcome addition to [my] library”. The former war leader, David Lloyd George, wrote personally to Rogerson, telling him: “Your remarkably vivid book . . . gives a better understanding of the point of view of the fighting soldier than almost anything I have read.” The reviewer in the Sphere commented: “I hope every Englishman will read it and [that] he will hand it on to some English boy.” In similar terms, the reviewer in the Sunday Times expressed the hope that “perhaps the book will at least help the younger to understand the older men. Certainly it is worth their while to read it because a more genuine and unbiased account of trench warfare would be hard to find.”

  Significantly, the book's place in the then current literary spectrum, especially its relation to the surge of disenchanted war literature, did not go unnoticed. Borrowing Rogerson's own striking phraseology as quoted earlier, the News Chronicle stated: “The war novelists [sic] are divided into two classes—those who think the soldiers in the line were besotted brutes and those who treat them in a brighter vein as adventurous heroes. Mr Sidney Rogerson's Twelve Days is a protest against the sewer school in which no one ever laughed . . .' etc., etc. In the opinion of the Birmingham Post, the book “belongs to an earlier period of war writings, before the demand for the squalid had set in after All Quiet”, the reviewer, be it noted, not feeling the need to give the full title of Remarque's ground-breaking work because of its obvious celebrity. Similarly, a magazine called Everyman gave the book reasonable but far from effusive praise, the reviewer describing himself as “preferring Blunden's equally truthful pages”. The Glasgow Herald's reviewer struck a slightly different note, musing that the book seemed “a little blind to the point of view of those more highly strung creatures who were oppressed to the edge of madness by the beastliness of the whole business”.

  All this might seem to the present-day reader a storm in a distant literary teacup were it not for one important aspect of the war-book war that has not yet been discussed. Here the necessary voice to listen to is that of one of the most forceful and challenging of military and political historians writing today, Correlli Barnett, whose “case” against the revisionists of the late 1920s and early 1930s was first made in his cogent work The Collapse of British Power, published in 1972. It is necessary to know that he propounds his argument with due caution, stating: “This is a delicate topic for a historian who has never known a battlefield, for he is sitting in judgement on men who endured ordeals that he fears he himself could not support. The author approaches these writers in personal humility, and in wonder at their courage and fortitude.”

  Having made clear his position, however, he goes on to argue in commanding terms that the determination of such writers to tell what they saw as the real truth about the war could have dangerous consequences which they could not have foreseen:

  Thus whereas the trench reminiscences began to appear in an epoch when they seemed the belated truth about an experience which now belonged completely to the past, they continued to appear in a new epoch where they had an immediate relevance to the present and the future. What began as an epitaph ended as a warning. As a warning, the war books seemed to say that war was so terrible and futile that the British ought to keep out of another one at any cost.*

  How does Rogerson stand in relation to this pattern of argument? Here it is important to stress once more when the book was published. We can see with hindsight that by 1933 the threat of another war was beginning to raise its head, since that year saw the rise to power of the Nazi party in Germany, under a leader, Adolf Hitler, who was himself fashioned by and, indeed, intellectually distorted by, his own experiences of the Western Front war.

  The answer is that Rogerson had himself foreseen what might be described as the pacifist dilemma and had made it an important theme in his book. It becomes a matter of serious discussion in the final chapter, in which he quotes the opinion of a fellow officer killed later in the war, Peter Palmes: “It's better to face up to it, and be ready to defend your life and your heritage rather than lie down and bleat about peace while some one walks roughshod over you” (p. 163).

  Building on that statement Rogerson continues in a trenchant passage:

  At the time we only felt that Palmes was expressing very succinctly sentiments with which we all agreed, even if we had not thought of them in quite the same dispassionate way, but I have tried to record his remarks as fully as possible since they seem to have a special significance in these after-days. Gathering resonance with the years, they echo out of the mist and mud of that Somme upland with all the force of prophetic warning. What would Peter Palmes, farmer by nature, and warrior by necessity, have had to say could he have lived into the post-war era and seen how Youth attempts to ensure peace by refusing to look on reality. Are we not as a nation behaving very much like the small boy who, alarmed at noises in the dark, will cover his head with his bedclothes lest he see that of which he is terrified? [p. 163]

  It is a powerful case, yet the sad fact is that viewpoints such as Rogerson's had their brief hour of fame and were then overwhelmed by the prevailing tide. The impact of Twelve Days seems to have been a transitory one. In 1937 Rogerson published an equally fine book on the Aisne campaign in 1918, when his 8th Division, sent to what was thought to be a quiet sector after surviving two of Germany's make-or-break offensives in March and April, found itself in the path of another massive onslaught in May. Entitled The Last of the Ebb, this book was bold enough to include in it, by special invitation, an account of the campaign by a German general; indeed, it even numbered among its dedicatees “our friends the enemy”, thus attempting to strike a note of reconciliation between Britons and Germans decades before such gestures would again become possible. Yet that work too has been largely forgotten. His name does not readily occur in books reflecting on the literature of the inter-war years. There is, for example, no place for him in Samuel Hynes's magisterial survey of the First World War and English culture, A War Imagined. Nor does the redoubtable Paul Fussell find space for him in his much lauded, highly influential volume The Great War and Modern Memory. This only emphasises, however, that he is long overdue for a return to the public stage. In this context Greenhill's decision to reprint this book in time for the nin
etieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme is a worthy and honourable one.

  I hope readers will forgive me if I end this Introduction on a personal note. When Greenhill Books invited me to write it I accepted at once. This was because I have known and admired this book for over thirty years. My first foray into the matter of the Battle of the Somme was a television documentary which I wrote and directed for the BBC to coincide with the battle's sixtieth anniversary in 1976. I was aware as I was devising it that, being scheduled for late June that year, it would inevitably concentrate almost exclusively on the battle's opening phase, in particular on the disastrous attack of 1 July 1916. Yet I did not feel able to do anything like justice to the battle unless I had also studied its frequently overlooked later stages. The Somme was not, after all, a one-day encounter, but a prolonged campaign running from high summer almost to the edge of winter, none of its phases being significantly less important than any other.

  During the period of research and production I had two principal allies, to whom I have been conscious ever since of a very great debt. One of these was Martin Middlebrook, whose pioneering work The First Day on the Somme, first published in 1971, has long been recognised as a modern First World War classic; additionally it was Martin who first introduced me to the terrain of the Somme and was my consultant throughout the making of the programme.

  The second was that remarkable character, the diligent, ever enthusiastic Rose E. B. Coombs, then Special Collections Officer at the Imperial War Museum, and heavily engaged at that time in the last stages of preparing for publication her outstanding guide to the Western Front, Before Endeavours Fade, which first appeared in print in August 1976 and has long been an indispensable vade mecum for serious visitors to the French and Belgian battlefields. In one of my numerous conversations with her about the Somme I asked her if she could name one book above any other which would allow me to come to grips with the campaign's final phase. Without hesitation she answered, “Twelve Days.” I accepted her advice, read the book, and, it could almost be said, never looked back. This Introduction, therefore, is not only a tribute to Sidney Rogerson; it also offers me a welcome opportunity to pay tribute to the memory of the late, unforgettable Rose Coombs.

  All that remains is briefly to celebrate Sidney Rogerson's further career. As already indicated, he was much involved in publicity and public relations, working at various times for the Federation of British Industries, ICI and the Army Council at the War Office. He travelled widely in Europe, Canada and the United States. He contributed to a rich variety of papers and periodicals and was the author of a number of highly esteemed works other than those on military subjects, including such titles as The Old Enchantment, Propaganda in the Next War, Our Bird Book and Both Sides of the Road. One of his greatest interests was cricket, especially Yorkshire cricket, his last publication being a biography of that great Yorkshire-born England all-rounder Wilfred Rhodes. To write its Introduction he secured the services of none other than than the great Australian batsman Sir Donald Bradman. Being myself a Yorkshire-born cricket aficionado, if a player of minimal talent, it gives me a special pleasure to be able to claim that I share with the great Sir Don the privilege of having contributed an Introduction to one of Sidney Rogerson's books.

  MALCOLM BROWN

  2006

  * Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 185.

  † Watson, p. 1.

  * Correlli Barnett, The Collapse of British Power, Eyre Methuen, London, 1972, p. 435.

  AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

  JESTING PILATE, with a surer eye for the enduring, might have inquired, “What is War?” There have been almost as many answers as there were individuals who knew the Great War directly, not to mention the second-hand versions, plain and coloured, of those who passed on such tales as we chose to tell. The war, it seems, was many wars. There was the grim-smiling-faces-of-undaunted-boys' war of the early correspondents with attacking battalions dribbling footballs across a sporting No-Man's-Land. There was the Generals' war, of the clean map-squares, in which there was never any muddle, no one was ever afraid, and the troops always advanced, by the right, in perfect formation, “as if on parade.” Even when they came back again, as they not infrequently did, they retired reluctantly, in good order, dressed by the left. Recently there has been the war of the Sewers, in which no one ever laughed, those who were not melancholy mad were alcoholically hysterical, and most of the action took place in or near the crude latrines of the period.

  The simple soldier smiled as he read about himself in the heroics of the war scribes. The bemused survivor is slightly irritated to find his experiences exploited by marrow-freezing agents of peace for all time. Propaganda, during the war, if it failed to reach the fighting man, found its mark at home; England had no lack of civilian warriors who became increasingly bloodthirsty in proportion as the fighting man's appetite for battle grew feebler with every leave. But this post-war propaganda, piling corpse on corpse, heaping horror on futility, seems bound to fail from every point of view. In its distortion, the soldier looks in vain for the scenes he knew. On the other hand, Youth, the target presumably of these peace missiles, remains unpunctured. Youth is not to be beaten into brotherliness by bladders of scarifying sound. Bogies tend always to degenerate into buffoons. The “Corsican ogre” of one year is the tubby “Boney” of the next. The figure which awed the statesmen of one generation is the nursery pantaloon of their grandchildren. Time effaces the mental scars as rapidly as the grass covers the shell-holes. Tin soldiers and toy howitzers are as popular to-day as ever they were, though it is true that no enterprising manufacturer has yet turned out a working model of a gas projector. Meanwhile the world in strict self-defence arms itself against itself, just as before, and the balance of power is again turning in the scale of might.

  Secondly, propaganda must be based on truth if it is to succeed over a long period, and to represent the war as one long nightmare is to exaggerate one aspect at the expense of the other.

  The description in the following pages is entirely without propagandist urge or intention. It is a plain, unvarnished account of one short tour in the Somme trenches during the winter of 1916, written in the hope of recalling to the soldier the scenes with which he was familiar, and of presenting the younger generations with an accurate picture of life as we lived it in those days. And life in the trenches was not all ghastliness. It was a compound of many things; fright and boredom, humour, comradeship, tragedy, weariness, courage, and despair. Those who were lucky lived, and every six or nine months saw most of their friends die. Soon, the places were filled and the daily round went on. Any description of a long period must focus attention on the high lights, the whirl of battle, the shock of raid and mine. It must skip the lengthy, humdrum and frequently amusing intervals. A short tour, such as that dealt with here, while not less terrible or more amusing than another, condenses into swifter drama the common experience, and leaves room for some background of detail. In the record here set down nothing has been consciously added or exaggerated and nothing material has been left out. Not to weary the reader, one eventless day on the way into the line and one coming out have been omitted, but otherwise every person and incident is real, and everything, including the conversations, is set down in its context.

  SIDNEY ROGERSON

  1933

  I

  UP THE LINE

  IT was a cold night. There had been snow during the day, and at dusk the wind had risen. Just to complicate matters the camp warden had caught the servants looting the old German dug-outs for firewood, so we had been forced to fill our brazier with ration coal. The result was that the bell-tent which served as B Company's officers' mess and sleeping quarters was filled with a maximum of smoke for a minimum of warmth, and the three of us, with soot-blackened faces and aching lungs, lay in our flea-bags and smoked, and sipped whisky and water out of tin cups, and curs
ed and discussed the latest rumours—wonderful rumours that we were to entrain shortly for Italy, for Salonika, for any other front but the Somme.

  It was the evening of November 7, 1916, when the Somme offensive was spluttering out in a sea of mud. The place was Citadel Camp, a dreary collection of bell-tents pitched insecurely on the hillside near the one-time village of Fricourt. Our unit was the 2nd Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment. Although I was officer commanding B Company, I had actually less experience of France than either of the others, who both wore the 1914 Star. Mac, the senior of the two, was a lean, youthful Irishman, whose characteristics were a cynical sense of humour and an astonishing cool courage which, being observed by those in authority, caused him to be singled out to lead raids, to crawl about on his belly in No-Man's-Land, or to undertake any single-handed exploit of a perilous nature. He had enlisted as a mere boy, and had been sent at once to the signal section attached to one of the Indian Divisions. He had been posted to us with a commission about three months previously. George Hall was a very different type. Whereas Mac and I were in our very early twenties, he was over thirty—a real Yorkshireman, stubborn, stolid, and cheerful. After years of service in the ranks of the regiment he had been commissioned, and made a very conscientious, dependable officer.

  We were all lucky to be the possessors of a sense of humour which persisted in rising equally above the various forms of boredom which beset us and the many manifestations of “frightfulness” which the enemy and the staff visited upon us. Still, though we could laugh heartily at ourselves as a trio of blackamoors, we were tired, like the majority of the Battalion—mentally rather than physically, for our condition was splendid. This was the regiment's second experience of the “Blutbad.” Some of us remembered that sunny last evening in June when we had assembled with such high hopes in the trenches opposite Ovillers La Boiselle. How we had jested and joked, even collecting pieces of chalk wherewith to label as our own trophies the guns we were so sure of taking ! Some of us too, remembered the next night, when, with every officer but one a casualty, and our dead hanging thick on the German wire, we had been withdrawn, sweating and shaking and shattered. It had taken us three months to recover from that blow—three months which had been spent in that putrid boneyard around Vermelles, where the front was a maze of trenches old and new, German, French, and British; trenches blown in and disused or abandoned and derelict; British fire trenches which had once been German communication trenches; trenches ending in saps twenty yards from the enemy line; salients, re-entrants, and fortified mine craters—all reeking of death and stagnation. Men vomited over the task of digging new trenches, for bodies were unearthed at every yard. The deepening of the front line turned a German officer out of the mud beneath our very feet. A sap led into an overgrown trench full of French skeletons of 1914. Most pitiful, the attempt to straighten a piece of trench broke into a dug-out where sat huddled three Scottish officers, their faces mercifully shrouded by the grey flannel of the gasmasks they had donned when death came upon them. In such places as the Kaiserin trench the parapet was revetted with corpses thinly hidden by rotting sandbags whence at night the rats fled squeaking from their ghoulish repasts.