the battle begins

Forward into hell

Shane Hegarty describes the first bloody day of battle

'The glory of a perfect day broke and so did the song of the birds," recalled Pte. David Starret of the 36th (Ulster) Division. "Breakfast appeared. Some washed. The officers shaved. Quiet everywhere - you would have thought the war had ended. We fell in and moved off, Woodbines in mouth, across the Ancre swamp. A couple of shells fell. 'Jerry has woken up!' "

In the hour before 7.30am on July 1st the artillery fire doubled. Beneath the screaming metal, and under return fire from German shells, soldiers were gathered in the British trenches, astounded by the din. "The sound was different, not only in magnitude, but in quality, from anything known to me," recalled Sgt R.H. Tawney of the Manchester Regiment. "It was not a succession of explosions or a continuous roar; I, at least, never heard either a gun or a bursting shell. It was not a noise; it was a symphony."

Some had slept, but many had been on their feet all night. Most had eaten, but because of organisational problems others would be going into battle on an empty stomach. Each soldier in the first wave carried his weapon, 220 rounds of ammunition, two grenades, extra rations, two gas helmets, an entrenching tool, wire cutters, and two sandbags. Anticipating hand-to-hand fighting, some soldiers carried knuckle-dusters, knives or lengths of chain. A triangle of tin was tied to each of their backpacks, intended to glint in the sunlight and tell of their progress across No Man's Land.

One company commander had given his men four footballs, with a prize for the first men to kick one all the way to the German trenches. On each ball was written: "The Great European Cup. The Final. East Surrey v Bavarians. Kick Off at Zero".

The wait was agonising. "The only thing I can compare it with is like waiting for someone to die," according to one soldier of the Ulster division. "You know it's coming and you wish to God it was over and done with. You smoked fag after fag, took sips of water, oiled the rifle, did everything over and over again. Even above the shelling you could hear small noises like a man sucking air between his teeth and this got on your nerves more than the shelling."

The orders were clear. When the barrage ceased, and the whistles blew, the leading waves were to go over the top at one minute intervals and walk forward, five yards between each man, at a steady pace of 50 yards a minute.

Ten minutes before Zero Hour, the Germans, who had been using earphones to track the British digging, had been given the signal they needed that the offensive was imminent. At 7.20am, the enormous mine at Beaumont Hamel detonated, and a hump of earth and chalk was heaved into the air, sending shockwaves along the line and leaving a crater over a hundred metres wide. Two hundred British soldiers rushed to secure its rim.

At 7.28am the remaining mines went off. At 7.30am the bombardment stopped, 15 minutes earlier than other mornings in the hope that the Germans would be tricked into remaining in their trenches. After the horrific noise of the previous hours, there was an eerie silence along parts of the line. In the section occupied by the Tyneside Scottish, there was the low drone of bagpipes warming up. Then whistles blew, and the men of the British and French armies stood up and began walking towards the enemy. At the point where the two allies met, a French commandant offered his elbow to the British colonel. They cordially linked arms and together marched their troops into battle.

MUCH OF THE GERMAN line was either waiting, or rushing back to their trenches. "The English came walking, as though they were going to theatre or as though they were on a parade ground," observed one German soldier. "We felt they were mad. Our orders were given in complete calm and every man took careful aim to avoid wasting ammunition."

In some points, the Allied shells had done their job and the wire was shredded, but in others the gaps were hard to find. "When we started firing, we just had to load and reload," according to one German account. "They went down in their hundreds. You didn't have to aim, we just fired into them. If only they had run, they would have overwhelmed us."

The scene quickly became chaotic. Men were scythed down as they desperately sought a way through. Shells crashed down. Men hung dead from the wire. The kilts of the Scottish soldiers sometimes snagged on the barbed wire, where they were picked off while desperately trying to free themselves. Stretcher-bearers dashed into the field, under fire. Where there had been some progress, soldiers herded German prisoners quickly across No Man's Land. Sometimes they were then shot at by other British soldiers presuming them to be an enemy charge.

Many of the men were utterly petrified. They cowered in shell-holes, or attempted to run from the battle. "A good many men were lying as they'd dropped, where they couldn't have hit anything but each other," recalled Sgt Tawney. "Those able to move crawled up at once when spoken to, all except one, who buried his head in the ground and didn't move. I think he was crying. I told him I'd shoot him, and he came up like a lamb. Poor boy, he could have run from there to our billets before I'd have hurt him."

Wounded and dying lay across the field, the desperate moaning a growing accompaniment to the sound of gun fire. Sgt Tawney was soon among the casualties. "I don't know what most men feel like when they're wounded. What I felt was that I had been hit by a tremendous iron hammer, swung by a giant of inconceivable strength, and then twisted with a sickening sort of wrench so that my head and back banged on the ground, and my feet struggled as though they didn't belong to me."

And there was the job of killing. For most it was their first experience of killing another human being, and many were distraught at the consequences. "I had never killed a man with a bayonet before and it sent cold shivers up and down my spine many's a night afterwards just thinking about it," recalled a soldier.

As ordered, the artillery fire had moved on ahead, but was now trained on parts of the line where the British were supposed to me - not where they were. The small pockets of men who made it as far as the enemy lines and beyond found themselves isolated, and often without an officer to guide them. There had been initial success to the south of the battlefield, and the Ulstermen had made swift progress, but with failures along the line it remained a desperate situation.

AN HOUR AFTER THE ATTACK, about a third of the allied forces had made their objectives, with the rest either struggling or wiped out. At 8.30, the second wave had been sent over the top. Those in the successive waves had no illusions about the massacre that was taking place. They had also been originally given specific tasks that were now largely redundant. 3,000 men (four battalions) of the Tyneside Irish left reserve trenches, christened Tara-Usna as a nod to their heritage, at the same time as the main attack but had to walk a full mile (across "Avoca Valley") just to reach the British front line. The German machine guns had a clear view.

"I could see, away to my left and right, long lines of men," recalled Sgt Galloway of the 3rd Battalion of the Tyneside Irish. "Then I heard the 'patter, patter' of machine guns in the distance. By the time I'd gone another ten yards there seemed to be only a few men left around me; by the time I had gone 20 yards, I seemed to be on my own. Then I was hit myself."

It took 20 minutes to reach the cover of the British trenches, by which time many of the Tyneside Irish had been wiped out. Incredibly, about 30 men made it as far as the village of Contalmaison, HQ of the German Division, to find themselves isolated and doomed.

Yet, from behind the line, it could look deceptive. Pte Anthony Brennan was among the 16th (Irish) Division being held in reserve. After a couple of hours, his battalion ventured out to watch the battle. "Here we lounged about lazily watching line after line of khaki-clad figures moving towards the sky-line in front. Their pace was so leisurely, and the regularity of the spacing so well maintained that one was reminded of the 'skirmishing order' drill of field training days, and found it difficult to appreciate that this was the real thing.

"Looking back, I don't think that at the time I did appreciate that the enemy was anywhere near, and that as the khaki lines moved forward and lay down, and then up and forward again, there were many who lay down for the last time. For us, at any rate, the hours passed pleasantly. Any idea we may have had that the affair was just a 'picnic' was quickly dispelled before evening, when the Gordons began collecting their dead comrades. I remember walking along a line of kilted corpses, most of them, alas, in their early twenties. I had been enjoying the day but this ghastly sight brought me up with a jerk."

Meanwhile, the 36th (Ulster) Division - aiming for a fortress called the Schwaben Redoubt - had been among the few to adopt different tactics, and before Zero Hour crawled into the grass, wire and shell-holes of No Man's Land and got as close as possible to the enemy lines so as to rush them.

Either side of the River Ancre, the Ulstermen had then moved towards the German line. To the north, the first wave met little opposition but as the Ulstermen passed the first line of German trenches, hoping that successive waves would mop them up and secure them, the defenders were instead intact enough to pop up and shoot at them from behind. Successive waves, however, found it far stickier. As the Germans returned to their positions, and with the Allied artillery barrage now trained elsewhere, they began to rain bullets upon the Ulstermen moving towards them. Despite reaching the German trenches, the Ulstermen would soon be under attack from three sides and forced into a frantic retreat.

To the south of the Ancre, the Ulstermen captured Schwaben Redoubt in a chaotic, hand-to-hand fight. Their success - and failures either side of them - had created a dangerous bulge that left them open to attacks on either flank. Nevertheless, commanding officer Maj Gen Nugent was ordered to send the reserve 107th into the battle as planned at 8.30am. Three-quarters of an hour later, the order was rescinded, but it was too late. Four battalions, representing the four corners of Belfast, were already in No Man's Land. Many of them were wiped out almost immediately.

Among those in this wave was David Starret, batman to the West Belfast Volunteers' commanding officer Lieut Col Percy Crozier. They moved into an "inferno of screaming shells and machine-gun bullets. Crouching, we slowly moved across No Man's Land. The colonel stood giving last orders to his company commanders, and I beside him. Bullets cutting up the ground at his feet he watched the advance through his glasses. Then he went off the deep end and I danced everywhere at his rear. Something had gone wrong. When the fumes lifted we saw what it was - a couple of battalions wiped out. Masses of dead and dying instead of ranks moving steadily forward."

Crozier tried to rally the survivors, yelling at the bugler to "Sound the advance! Sound, damn you. Sound the advance." But, as Starret recalled, "the bugler's lips were dry. He had been wounded. His lungs were gone. A second later he fell dead at the colonel's feet."

They scrabbled towards the German D line (fourth trench) but were forced to retreat, under fire, to the C line.

The Ulstermen may have captured the Schwaben Redoubt, but besieged and unlikely to be relieved, they held out until evening before retreating to the first line of German trenches, where they fought on until the morning of July 2nd, having suffered very heavy casualties.

ALONG THE LINE, MANY of the positions won by isolated bands of soldiers were gradually lost again. There were rare successes, notably the taking of Leipzig Redoubt in the north despite German counter-attacks. It was here, British soldiers came across the body of Freiwilliger Eversmann, whose diary detailing the terror of the barrage was plundered.

Throughout the day there were moments of extraordinary bravery. A stretcher-bearer who carried wounded for 12 hours even though he had been hit by shrapnel. A corporal who led 20 German POWs across No Man's Land and then returned to the battle. Ulstermen would receive three of the nine Victoria Crosses awarded for the action. Two of these were posthumous.

As night came, many of the survivors straggled back to the British lines. The warm day had given way to a hellish scene as the night drew in on the dust and smoke of the battlefield. The grass of the Somme valley was littered with corpses as well as wounded, whose every move was greeted by a spray of German gunfire.

There were 8,000 Germans casualties. Some 35,000 British, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and Newfoundlanders had been wounded, 2,000 were missing and 20,000 killed. Battalions had been reduced to rumps. Men who had worked together before the war, volunteered together, intended to fight and win together, had died together almost as soon as they had stepped from their trench. Never had the British army lost so many men on a single day. The front line, meanwhile, had hardly budged.