Premier’s Westfield Modern History Scholarship
The Somme
David Hanley
Richmond River High School, North Lismore
Sponsored by
Very successful attack this morning... All went like clockwork... The battle is going very well for us and already the Germans are surrendering freely. The enemy is so short of men that he is collecting them from all parts of the line. Our troops are in wonderful spirits and full of confidence.
- report by Haig on the first day of attack, 1 July 1916
The battle of the Somme on the Western Front in July 1916 is easily one of history’s most recognisable events. Any student of World War I can easily command respect through a divulging of statistics of the operation on that 1 July 1916: 20,000 dead or wounded in the first hour, 53,000 on the first day and more than 1,500,000 over the course of the campaign. Yet after 90 odd years, the study of history books, photographs, film, even personal accounts can never replace the empathy of understanding and experience of the Western Front one gains when actually standing in a trench or searching dumbfounded through the names of tens of thousands of soldiers whose fate remains to this day unknown.
The trench was a horrible sight. The dead were stretched out on one side, one on top of each other six feet high. I thought at the time I should never get the peculiar disgusting smell of the vapour of warm human blood heated by the sun out of my nostrils. I would rather have smelt gas a hundred times. I can never describe that faint sickening, horrible smell which several times nearly knocked me up altogether.
- British Captain Leeham, talking about the first day
of the Battle of the Somme, in Tommy Goes to War
My visit to this most infamous battlefield was made with the desire to experience as much of the area’s memorials, museums and sites as I could. I was keen to follow an Australian experience as well as an overall historical perspective. My experience proved much more than I was prepared for. The battlefield of the Somme now covered in beautiful shades of green, alive with the activity of farming, remains hauntingly quiet, ever remindful of what occurred so many years before. The memorial at Thiepval, housing 73,367 names of the missing on the Somme, is a significant reminder of the suffering and futility of the event.
A new visitor centre linked to our Australian Museum in Canberra allows the student to research all that is important about this campaign.
Monuments at the Ulster Tower and Mouquet Farm, and the Newfoundland Memorial at Beaumont Hamel allow historians to retrace the trench systems and battle strategies of the day. The Tank Monument at Pozieres (first tank engagement 15 September 1916) heightened my interest in early tank warfare and I was lured by locals to visit Flesquieres in search of the ‘Deborah’. This tank was dug out from the paddocks by local farmers in the 1990s and painstakingly restored. My excursion proved bitter sweet. I found Deborah, but she was locked away in a private barn with the owner ‘on vacation’.
At La Boisselle the Lachnagar Crater is a 100 metre wide and 30 metre deep mine hold that typifies the struggle for position on the battlefield. More significant, however, is the memorial to a young French soldier lost in the explosion in 1916 and uncovered in 1996.
At Vimy Ridge where a most magnificent memorial to trench warfare is maintained by the Canadian Government, my young guide enlightened me to the uses of mine warfare. More than to blow up positions from underground, much of the mining that occurred was to alter the surface above so that offensive and or defensive positions could be found. Vimy Ridge is pitted with mine craters—a testimony to the need to break the stalemate and to the bitter fighting that took place there.
I had always been intrigued by the names of places such as Deville Wood, where 4000 South Africans experienced the unimaginable nightmare of 400 artillery rounds per minute. After six days, 143 men emerge alive. They held their position and the South African National Museum stands as a unique monument to such bravery against the odds.
Numerous museums dot the Somme. The best include the underground Somme 1916 Museum in Albert and the most impressive Historial of the Great War at Peronne, with its open galleries and student focused resources.
Without exception, no study of the Somme is complete without a visit to Villers-Bretonneux, experiencing the Adelaide Cemetery, the Australian Memorial and Hamel. This ‘Australian’ village welcomes Aussies at any time, but April is especially significant. Of all my Anzac Day observances, Saturday, 23 April 2005, will remain my most complete. Driving rain and bitter cold were tempered by the warm welcome at the Victorian School. The Franco-Australian Museum within this small school gives a wonderful account of the life of Australian soldiers behind the lines. I feel it is important for our students to understand why such observances are maintained by generations of primary school children at the ends of the earth from Australia. The stone at the building’s entrance is testimony to the bonds forged in war:
The empathetic nature of the Somme is no more significant than at Rancourt. This is the only village of the Somme with the sad distinction of having cemeteries for France, Britain and Commonwealth, and Germany. It is understandable but poignant that most cemeteries are commemorated with beautiful gardens, sandstone monuments and home country memorials, except of course for the German cemeteries. Dark and foreboding, they sit uncomfortably: the legacy of an invading and unwanted intrusion.
Flanders Fields
... yesterday I visited the battlefield of last year. The place was scarcely recognisable. Instead of a wilderness of ground torn up by shells, the ground was a garden of wild flowers and tall grasses. Most remarkable of all was the appearance of many thousands of white butterflies which fluttered around. It was as if the souls of the dead soldiers had come to haunt the spot where so many fell. It was eerie to see them. And the silence! It was so still that I could almost hear the beat of the butterflies wings ...
- letter from a British officer, 1919
My previous visits to Ieper had been centred on the Menin Gate. I had been drawn to the names of the 55,000 missing. This visit would give me time to explore the region and hopefully to further develop my understanding.
Ieper is a most beautiful town. It has a tragically romantic story, particularly from 1914 to 1918 when it was totally destroyed, then painstakingly raised phoenix-like brick by brick from the ruins. Yet unlike The Somme and France in general, Flanders seemed more ‘commercial’ in its memories of and memorials to the Great War. During my time there I was continually torn between my reverence and awe of this place and time and my uneasiness at the tourism which brought bus loads of mainly British to the district. On The Somme; the war, the trenches, the sacrifice, are softly remembered as they slowly fade and return to the earth. Only the monuments stand tall and the solitude and silence make the experience very personal. In Flanders, one is always sharing the moment and the trench with coach loads of people on tourist drives of the area.
My personal view and experience of Flanders was also coloured by the ironies of war set down by poets such as John MacRae and Wilfred Owen. I have always been torn between the contrasting sentiments of poems such as following:
‘In Flanders Fields’ / ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
—Lieutenant Colonel John MacRae / GAS! Gas! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
- Wilfred Owen
Visiting the interactive In Flanders Field Museum takes one back into WWI like no other museum I have visited. I became a young German soldier with a chemistry background who was taken from the front line to experiment with chemical warfare. The rest is history. Another persona was of a young Belgian nurse who suffered greatly through the war and after, eventually committing suicide in the 1920s. The experience bombards the mind and body with the realities of war and one exits feeling both enlightened by the experience and sickened by the reality.
Driving around the surrounding areas I visited Passchendaele and Zonnebeke, where I came across a little museum, the Memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917. Opened on Anzac day 2004 this little gem introduced me to the tunnels used in WWI. I’d known about tunnels and crater warfare, but I’d never realised just how many soldiers lived and died underground. At Passchendaele alone the tunnel network could house 12,000 soldiers. That equals the population of the district in 2005. Uniquely recreated underground galleries featured soldiers’ quarters and their fear of living and dying underground, either by cave-in or by drowning. Each year more and more tunnels are found, usually by home owners building extensions etc.
The museum curator introduced me to Bayernwald, a German trench system recently uncovered and the one I had read about on the web and was keen to explore; the Belgian Trench of Death; and the Ysertower, with its 22-floor Peace Museum. He also obtained my services to try to find 108,000 photos of those who died in the 1917 battle at Passchendaele. At the time they had 80 photos and since I have helped find two more.
My studies in Ieper would not be complete without the tourist visits to Hill 60–Queen Victoria Rifles Museum, Hill 62–Sanctuary Wood Museum and Hooges Crater Museum. Tyne Cot cemetery, the French Memorial at Kemmel Hill and the German cemeteries at Langemark and Vladslo reminded one of the fact that more than 30 nationalities fought here in the Great War.
The war in Belgium has become clearer to me. The early period can be understood by those coming together to defeat a terrible foe: flooding the land, immobilising the forward push, protecting the innocent. This is John MacRae’s war, a call to defend, before the futility, before the Somme. As the war of attrition developed the area became the senseless war of Wilfred Owen:
‘In Flanders Fields’ / ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
—Lieutenant Colonel John MacRae / If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
- Wilfred Owen
I understand Ieper much better now. Yes, it is more commercial, but the real testimony to Ieper is found at 8 p.m. every evening, every day since 1918, when hundreds of tourists and locals, young and old, gather within the Menin Gate; its grand arches loud and echoing one moment, silent the next. I stood shoulder-to-shoulder among the observers as the Ode was majestically repeated and felt as if I was the only person there. This was what I had hoped to experience in Flanders Field.
Verdun
The whole earth is ploughed by the exploding shells and the holes are filled with water, and if you do not get killed by the shells you may drown in the craters. Broken wagons and dead horses are moved to the sides of the road, also many dead soldiers lie here. Wounded soldiers who died in the ambulance have been unloaded and their eyes stare at you. Sometimes an arm or leg is missing. Everybody is rushing, running, trying to escape almost certain death in this hail of enemy shells. Today I have seen the real face of war.
- German musketeer Hans Otto Schetter
My desire to visit Verdun stemmed from the quest to gain an impression and understanding of WWI outside the Australian experience. Verdun was, to many, the most bloodiest of battlefields. It was here that the war was lost and won. It was this Maginot Line theory that forced the Germans to develop the Schlieffen Plan. It features little in the Australian experience of the Great War, but it lacked none of the passion, sacrifice, futility and depravity that marked the four years of warfare. Here German and French passions and hatred clashed, bringing the old world fumbling into the modern world.
This picturesque town steeped in ancient history became the centrerpiece of French defences after the 1871 defeat by Germany. In the surrounding foot hills 14 heavily fortified underground fortresses were built, designed to stop any future German invasion. It succeeded only in forcing Germany to go around and invade through Belgium. The eventual clash of Europe’s giants along the Maginot Line would become the greatest ‘fight to the end’ of the whole war.
In the surrounding hills I discovered enough memorials - French, and American (there was a distinct lack of German memorials, although not of cemeteries) - and enough history to keep any WWI enthusiast busy for weeks. I came across Fort Vaux and Fort Douaumont, two of the original bastions of defence, nestled almost unrecognisable among deep green forests. Foreboding messages of unexploded bombs warn against walking freely around these places. Once inside, the fortifications open into miles of underground concrete tunnels, not rushed in their building like on Flanders, but deliberate, secure, entombing. Men lived, fought and died down there in the chilly damp recesses - soldiers from both sides, as they captured and recaptured this valuable ground.