One of the most disappointed men in the army was on General Haldane’s staff. He was an old cavalry officer, and this major of the old, old school (belonging in spirit to the time of Charles Lever) was excited by the thought that there was to be a cavalry adventure. He was one of those who swore that if he had his chance he would “ride into the blue.” It was the chance he wanted and he nursed his way to it by delicate attentions to General Haldane. The general’s bed was not so comfortable as his. He changed places. He even went so far as to put a bunch of flowers on the general’s table in his dugout.
“You seem very attentive to me, major,” said the general, smelling a rat.
Then the major blurted out his desire. Could he lead a squadron round Delville Wood? Could he take that ride into the blue? He would give his soul to do it.
“Get on with your job,” said General Haldane.
That ride into the blue did not encourage the cavalry to the belief that they would be of real value in a warfare of trench lines and barbed wire, but for a long time later they were kept moving backward and forward between the edge of the battlefields and the back areas, to the great incumbrance of the roads, until they were “guyed” by the infantry, and irritable, so their officers told me, to the verge of mutiny. Their irritability was cured by dismounting them for a turn in the trenches, and I came across the Household Cavalry digging by the Coniston Steps, this side of Thièpval, and cursing their spadework.
In this book I will not tell again the narrative of that fighting in the summer and autumn of 1916, which I have written with many details of each day’s scene in my collected despatches called The Battles of the Somme. There is little that I can add to those word-pictures which I wrote day by day, after haunting experiences amid the ruin of those fields, except a summing-up of their effect upon the mentality of our men, and upon the Germans who were in the same “bloodbath,” as they called it, and a closer analysis of the direction and mechanism of our military machine.
Looking back upon those battles in the light of knowledge gained in the years that followed, it seems clear that our High Command was too prodigal in its expenditure of life in small sectional battles, and that the army corps and divisional staffs had not established an efficient system of communication with the fighting units under their control. It seemed to an outsider like myself that a number of separate battles were being fought without reference to one another in different parts of the field. It seemed as though our generals, after conferring with one another over telephones, said, “All right, tell So-and-so to have a go at Thièpval,” or, “Today we will send such-and-such a division to capture Delville Wood,” or, “We must get that line of trenches outside Bazentin.” Orders were drawn up on the basis of that decision and passed down to brigades, who read them as their sentence of death, and obeyed with or without protest, and sent three or four battalions to assault a place which was covered by German batteries round an arc of twenty miles, ready to open out a tempest of fire directly a rocket rose from their infantry, and to tear up the woods and earth in that neighborhood if our men gained ground. If the whole battle-line moved forward the German fire would have been dispersed, but in these separate attacks on places like Trones Wood and Delville Wood, and later on High Wood, it was a vast concentration of explosives which plowed up our men.
So it was that Delville Wood was captured and lost several times and became “Devil’s” Wood to men who lay there under the crash and fury of massed gunfire until a wretched remnant of what had been a glorious brigade of youth crawled out stricken and bleeding when relieved by another brigade ordered to take their turn in that devil’s cauldron, or to recapture it when German bombing-parties and machine-gunners had followed in the wake of fire, and had crouched again among the fallen trees, and in the shell-craters and ditches, with our dead and their dead to keep them company. In Delville Wood the South African Brigade of the 9th Division was cut to pieces, and I saw the survivors come out with few officers to lead them.
In Trones Wood, in Bernafay Wood, in Mametz Wood, there had been great slaughter of English troops and Welsh. The 18th Division and the 38th suffered horribly. In Delville Wood many battalions were slashed to pieces before these South Africans. And after that came High Wood … All that was left of High Wood in the autumn of 1916 was a thin row of branchless trees, but in July and August there were still glades under heavy foliage, until the branches were lopped off and the leaves scattered by our incessant fire. It was an important position, vital for the enemy’s defense, and our attack on the right flank of the Pozières Ridge, above Bazentin and Delville Wood, giving on the reverse slope a fine observation of the enemy’s lines above Martinpuich and Courcellette away to Bapaume. For that reason the Germans were ordered to hold it at all costs, and many German batteries had registered on it to blast our men out if they gained
