A Walk Through Pozières

In this first Episode of the Old Front Line, Military Historian Paul Reed takes you on a walk across the Somme battlefields at Pozières, the scene of heavy fighting in 1916. We visit the cemetery and memorial, and travel through the village to 'Mucky Farm'. We also introduce a regular feature looking at WW1 objects, talking about a Great War officer's whistle. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Old Front Line, with me, military historian Paul Reid. This is a regular podcast where we can travel together across the haunting battlefields of the Great War, from Flanders to the Somme and beyond. So what's in this week's episode? In this very first episode I want to start as I mean to go on really. The whole purpose of this podcast is to share with you some of the stories and the tales that I've picked up as I've wandered around the battlefields of the First World War over nearly 40 years. In each episode we'll have a virtual walk across one of these battlefields and we'll also dip into some of the history of the Great War and objects connected to that history. So let's get started. So where to begin our journey along the old front line? Well, inevitably for me, I suppose it has to be the Somme battlefields. And we're going to start today on the old Albert-Bapome road, the old Roman road that cuts through the middle of the Somme battlefields, delineates it from north to south and cuts through the area where the fighting was at its fiercest in those months from July to November of 1916. It is a Roman road, reminding us that the Somme was not always just the scene of conflict in the First World War. It was part of northern France, which had seen fighting over many, many centuries. And the remnants of the Roman world there are among the places that we are most familiar with. Gomercourt, Dernancourt, Morlancourt, these villages that end with"-court", c-o-u-r-t it's a derivation of an old pickety word meaning roman encampment so these were the places where the romans had their camps and their garrisons and that echoes through the Somme battlefields but let's bring ourselves back to 1916 and we're on that Albert Bapaume road just on the outskirts of the village of Pozières where Between July and September of 1916 there was very heavy fighting initially with British units from the 12th Eastern Division, Kitchener's men, who had fought at Loos in 1915. and in the Battle of the Hohenzollern Craters and had taken part in the attack further away at Mash Valley at the beginning of the Somme and then moved up to the ground surrounding Pozières. There's also men from the 48th South Midland Division, Midland Territorials, who had fought in the approaches to the village of Pozières. But it is a village, of course, most remembered for the involvement of men from Australia. the men from the Australian Imperial Force, some of the first ANZACs who had joined the Australian forces on the outbreak of war in 1914, had served at Gallipoli in 1915, their defining moment in many respects in that early period of the war, and then arrived in northern France to take part in operations on the Western Front. And for the 1st Australian Division, this was to be their first great battle of the First World War, more of them later. But we're standing on the edge of the village first, outside one of the many Somme cemeteries. This is Pozier's British Cemetery and Memorial. And it's... is a huge site with imposing walls and a large cemetery within. It combines both a burial ground of men who died largely in the 1916 battle and a memorial to the missing that commemorates those who fell in the fighting of March and April of 1918 and have no known grave. So let's go in. As we come down into the cemetery, we can see the rows and rows of headstones panning out before us. There are in fact 2,760 burials here of which 690 are Australian and 218 are Canadian. testifying to the importance of this area of the battlefield to both Australia and Canada. Australia connected here to the fighting at Pozières and Canada in the next village, the village of Courcelette. But there are many British soldiers buried here as well and plot one on the left, which is normally the original plot of a cemetery, but in this case these are all graves that were brought in from the surrounding battlefield, has got a lot of men from the 48th South Midland Division who were very heavily involved in the initial advance towards So we see here men from the Gloucestershire Regiment, the Royal Berkshire Regiment, the Ox and Bucks Light Infantry and the Bucks Battalion. The original plot is in fact plot two, which is to your right. And there's a bit of an open area here of grass. And there were at one stage, we know this from contemporary images both during the war and just after the war, there were some unit memorials here, including one to the 8th Battalion of the Australian Imperial Force. But it was also used as a holding area for wooden crosses from graves from this cemetery, I presume, but also possibly from some surrounding cemeteries before they were shipped back to the family of the soldiers that they commemorated and this was something that was done in the immediate post-war period people could apply for the crosses and have them sent home it wasn't that widely publicized so not everybody did it and there's a fascinating project on the internet now called the returned and also on twitter where you can look into see which crosses have survived and in which churches or buildings that are in and it's very much an organic project something that's still going going on because more and more of these are being found. It's a fascinating aspect of the commemoration of the dead in the Great War. Amongst the burials here, there is an Australian Victoria Cross recipient, Sergeant Claude Charles Castleson, who served with the Australian Machine Gun Corps, and he was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross for bringing in wounded soldiers during the fighting near Pozières Cemetery, the civilian cemetery, in July of 1916. He was typical of many Australian soldiers in that he wasn't born in Australia. He'd come from Lowestoft in Suffolk and had emigrated to Australia in 1916. 1912 where he'd worked on a sheep farm. He'd served at Gallipoli with the 18th Battalion Australian Imperial Force and then transferred to the Australian Machine Gun Corps on their arrival in France and served with them here at Pozières before he was killed. There's also a Canadian soldier buried roughly in the middle of the cemetery at the end of a row. It's a couple of graves that were added in recent years, bodies found on the battlefield and recovered and then reburied. And this soldier, David John Carlson, was from the 8th Canadian infantry killed near Pozières on the 8th September 1916 and he was found by some British visitors to the battlefields who were walking across the fields noted a row of buttons and on investigation there were human remains beneath and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission were contacted and recovered the body and identified him from an aluminium identity disc that was found with the body. So the story of the dead in the Great War really is not over. Even more than a century later the remains of soldiers killed in the Great War are still being recovered. We've had a look around the cemetery but what about the memorial, the Pozières memorial to the missing? Well what are memorials to the missing? How do they come about? Well at the end of the Great War on most battlefields something like 50% of the dead were unaccounted for, they had no known grave. And it wasn't simply that they just disappeared into the mud or were blown to pieces by shell fire, although all of those things happened on almost every First World War battlefield, sadly. Certainly with the case of this memorial, which commemorates almost 15,000 men who have no known grave, very many of these men were actually buried by the enemy, by the Germans, because this memorial commemorates largely men who died in March and April of 1918. Although the official dates run from... 21st March 1918 up to the eve of the final Somme offensive the 7th August 1918 the day before the big push at Amiens on the 8th but the majority of these names on here are men who died particularly on the 21st March 1918 the first day of the German Kaiserschlacht the Kaisers Offensive but right throughout that period on the Somme up to the point they almost reached Amiens and broke through the old Somme battlefields by late March March and early April of 1918 and in that offensive as the Germans move forward they obviously captured positions in which there was a large amount of British dead and they buried that dead either in shell holes or in those trenches there are plenty of contemporary German photographs that show trenches full of dead with the trenches being covered over but the location of those graves come the end of the war and in the post-war period could not not be identified or where they were found in post-war clearances there was no means to identify the remains of the soldiers that were discovered there. So when you travel around the March 1918 battlefields around St Quentin and across towards Perron and Bapaume and down towards Albert and to the outskirts of Villers-Bretonneux you find a lot of graves from that period but the vast majority are unknown and whoever they are they will be commemorated here on the Pozières Memorial. Now over the years of working as a battlefield guard I've brought many many people here with Ledger Holidays battlefield tours. And it's always an incredible experience to bring somebody to visit a family grave or a name on a memorial like this. And often they tell you so much about that person that it stays with you, and you learn so much as well. The great thing about the First World War is that you learn something new almost every day, no matter what book you read and no matter what documentary you look at, or even on Twitter, some of the amazing things that people post there. But I brought a chap once who came to see a sergeant in the Machine Gun Corps and we found the name on the machine gun corps panels and he showed me that evening a letter that had been received from one of this soldier's comrades just after the war when he'd returned from a prisoner of war camp And it was a terrible tale. There they were in the forefront of the fighting on the 21st of March on the outskirts of St. Quentin, and they'd been firing their Vickers machine guns all morning, but they'd run out of ammunition. And the Germans had overrun the position and surrounded them and were about to take them prisoner. And this sergeant was the number one on the gun, so he was the man firing it. And he'd taken the breech block out, he'd disabled the machine gun, but was standing right by the gun. And the German officer jumped down into the trench, moved forward and said to him, are you the man that had fired this gun? And he replied, yes. And he shot him at point blank range, killed him instantly. Now, this is not to cite a crime, although technically it is a war crime. It is to really, I suppose, echo the dreadful nature of battles and battlefields and warfare. Here was an officer that led his men into an attack, seeing them mown down by a machine gun fire, which no doubt had angered him, and there was the man responsible for the deaths of his men, and this was his reaction. The brutal, cold hand of war. That's what that story tells us about, I suppose. While this is the Pozières Memorial to the Missing, originally it was intended to site this memorial close to the city of Saint-Quentin, where the vast majority of the men whose names are on this memorial were killed in the March 1918 battles. But by the late 1920s, the French were prohibiting the construction of major British monuments, except if they were built on the location of an existing cemetery. And around Saint-Quentin, there were no cemeteries, of any size that could accommodate a memorial like this, so a decision was made to move it to Pozières. There are so many names on here, so many different stories. We could fill endless podcasts with them and I'm sure we shall return to some of them in due course. But one name that I often go to visit when I come here is Wilfeth Elstob, who, like me, was born in Sussex. He was born in Chichester and his father was a vicar who worked in Chichester Cathedral, a place I know very, very well indeed. And he went off to university, to Manchester, studied at Manchester University and then in Paris before the Great War and when the war broke out in August 1914 he joined his local territorial battalion the 6th Battalion of the Manchester Regiment as a private soldier. Now given his education and background it was quickly apparent that he should be an officer and had applied to the public schools battalion of the Royal Fusiliers but a vacancy came up in the 16th Manchester as one of the newly formed Manchester Pals battalions and he joined them as an officer, a second lieutenant, a platoon commander in the autumn of 1914 and took his men overseas the following year. They served in that quiet period leading up to the Battle of the Somme in the southern states Somme Offensive By 1917 he'd risen from private at the beginning of the war to become battalion commander of the 16th Manchester's and during the Third Battle of Ypres he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for bravery including a reconnaissance close to Sanctuary Wood at the opening stage of Third Ypres where they broke through the German lines. But his war reached its pinnacle in many respects on the 21st of March 1918 when his battalion was holding the aptly named Manchester Hill directly looking into the city of St Quentin. Now Manchester Hill got its name not from his battalion but from the 2nd Battalion of the Manchester Regiment which at that time had included Wilfred Owen amongst its ranks, the war poet when they had captured this ground in the advance to the Hindenburg Line in early 1917 A period of the war very few people know about but now of course popularised with the recent 1917 movie. And so the capture of this position then had named the hill as Manchester Hill but here on the 21st of March 1918 the Manchester Powells were defending it. Now many of the strong points like this held out against these German attacks despite the bombardments, despite the huge amount of artillery that the Germans employed and despite the favourable weather for them were with thick fog enabling their men to advance but eventually all of these positions were overrun they ran out of ammunition they ran out of the will to stand on any longer because of the huge casualties that had been suffered and in the afternoon of the 21st of March Elstob's positions were overrun by the Germans. Now, during that day, he had been wounded multiple times. At one point, a shell blast had blown him through the air, but he carried on, and he was last seen fighting in desperate hand-to-hand fighting at the point of the bayonet, and witnesses reported that once they saw Elstob killed, their will to carry on pretty much diminished, and the position surrendered. Elstob's body, no doubt buried by the Germans on the spot, was never found, and he is one of those nearly 15,000 men commemorated here on the Pozières Memorial to the Missing. For his bravery that day, Elstob was awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross. The medal is now on display at the Museum of the Manchester Regiment. Leaving Pozières British Cemetery we continue with our walk down the Albert Bapaume Road into the outskirts of the village of Pozières and here turning left we come into the area around the first Australian Division Memorial. The 1st Australian Division were, in many respects, the original ANZACs. These are the original recruits into the Australian Imperial Force following Australia's call to arms in 1914. These are the men who fought at Gallipoli in the original landings, on the high ground above and at Lone Pine, and served throughout the campaign until their evacuation, having suffered very heavy losses in the fighting there. The division was made up to strength in Egypt before it moved to the Western Front and it took over a series of nursery sectors around Armentiers in northern France to learn about the day-to-day activities of trench warfare on the Western Front and how that differed to their experience at Gallipoli. And then they moved down to the Somme. And in the attack at Pozières, on the 23rd, 24th of July, the village itself was taken in a single day. A night attack took the outlying area of the German defences, and then by the next day, the Australians had pushed them back to the other side of the village and held against counter-attacks. But beyond the village were the strongest positions. The OG lines, the old German lines around the Pozières windmill, and the Ferme de Mouquet, Mucky Farm, or Moucau Farm, over on the left flank. And this became the area of fighting for the Australians, their fields of glory, their fields of sacrifice for much of the rest of the Battle of the Somme. The 1st Australian Division alone suffered an incredible 5,285 casualties in the fighting at Pozières, so it saw its virtual destruction again. and it then moved on to fight in other sectors of the Western Front later in the war. The memorial was originally flanked by two German 77mm field guns, and they appear on quite a lot of the interwar photographs of this memorial, but they appear to have been taken off for scrap in the Second World War by the occupying German forces, so they're not here today. And when you read the little booklet, Where the Australians Rest, which was a publication made by the Australian government in the early 1900s, to be given to the next of kin of every Australian soldier who had died in the war. It says there that the area around the memorial was originally intended to be an Australian memorial park but for some reason that never happened because aside from the memorial here and the cemetery that we've just visited, in the trees to our right was a massive German bunker, the Gibraltar bunker. Now there's a lot of misinformation about this bunker. A lot of people think that the name Gibraltar relates to Hanoverian regiments who wore the battle honour of Gibraltar as cuff titles on their uniforms, harking back to their service as members of the King's German Legion in the Napoleonic Wars. But it was simply to do with the fact that this huge concrete edifice looked like the rock of Gibraltar and could be seen for quite some distance, and that's how it got its name. The bunker was never incorporated into any form of park and a decision was made at some point to dispose of it because the upper section of the bunker was blown to pieces by high explosive sometime in the interwar period. But the lower section remained and it remained hidden until the 1980s and I was over on the Somme when they began to excavate that and they dug out what was in effect a reinforced cellar of a house so the Germans had built this bunker not separately but actually on top of an existing structure and incorporated a building that probably dated back to the 18th century by the design of the cellar. incorporated that into their defensive structure. So what we see today is concrete reinforcements of that cellar and bits of the old original cellar combined. But this was the lower part, probably the entranceway into this bunker. Now it wasn't really a machine gun bunker, it was probably a headquarters bunker and an observation bunker because even today when you're on top of this bank you can see right across to Possier Cemetery where you've just come from And beyond that, to the far end of Mash Valley, the village of Ovalers, over to your left towards La Boiselle, and on a good day you can clearly see the spire of the Basilica in Albert, which of course in 1916 was behind the British line. So this was an important location. Pozières sits on some of the highest ground of the 1916 Somme battlefields. So there's quite a lot to explore here. And this was an area on the outskirts of the village, separate from the main village itself. So we'll continue with our journey down the Albert-Bapaume road into the rebuilt pozières. And of course, as we come into a village like this on the Somme, we have to remember that we are now in what was once the Zone Rouge, the Red Zone. And to qualify to be part of the Red Zone, you had to be a community that had suffered a minimum of 80% destruction. Now, most of these villages here on the Somme suffered total destruction, complete destruction. utter destruction there was absolutely nothing left of them the soldier writer Ernst Junger said in his memoir Storm of Steel that very often you only realise that you were coming into a place where a village had been because the colour of the earth changed and that earth discoloured by brick dust and stone and chalk dust where buildings had once stood such was the level of the destruction seen in this total war of 1960 These industrial scale bombardments that characterised much of the fighting on the Somme and really turned the whole balance of the war towards that type of warfare as the war moved on. So what we see today is a 1920s reconstruction. In the 30 odd years that I've been coming to the Somme, There's been a lot of building here, so we see some modern structures as well. But very soon as we come into the heart of the village, we see a long line of buildings, including what is now the La Tommy Bar. And these are the post-war constructed houses. There are one or two bits of provisional housing still left in Pozières. These are the buildings that were put up immediately after the war for the civilian population to live in. And very few of these survive now, but there is examples of a couple of them in the village of Pozières. The La Tommy Bar it's an amazing place Dominic Xanady who runs it I've known him for as long as I've been visiting the Somme an incredible individual who's set up museum after museum helped recover the dead in so many places on the Somme battlefields a truly honourable decent man and his cafe is always worth going into to see what the latest finds are all about and also to have a good explore of his collection and his trench reconstructed trench in the back garden We'll continue with our little walk through the village, we're going to turn left at the main crossroads If we carried straight on, it would take us to the far side of the village. If we turn right here, it would take us down towards Contal Maison on the southern part of the Somme battlefield. But we're going to turn left and we're going to head up the Rue de Tchapval, which goes obviously in the direction of Tchapval, the next village. Now, many of you come down this road will probably have seen the little garden on the right-hand side with an advert for Dominique's La Tommy Barre. And also a big pile of shells in the garden. And this was the home of two friends of mine, Eve and Christian Foucault. Eve was a Commonwealth War Graves Commission gardener who joined the commission in 1947, his first job. was to work in London Cemetery Extension at High Wood, burying the dead from the Second World War. And he remembered that many of the First War graves in that cemetery were still wooden crosses then. They actually, on the eve of the Second War, had not been replaced by headstones, and that only happened in the post-World War II period. He then went on to work in many of the cemeteries on the Somme. When he worked for the Commission, generally cemeteries had their own gardener who lived local Eve's time What he would do, he'd go to work, he'd take his sandwich with him, his casse crue, and prepared for him by Christiane. And at lunchtime, he'd hop over the cemetery wall and he'd go walking in the fields. And he acquired this incredible collection of Great Wall material that was found simply by walking the battlefields. And he used to have a private museum in his house. Now, I met him... on my second or third visit to the Somme battlefields in the early 1980s and him and Christian became really to me almost like my French grandparents they were very very good to me over many years particularly when I lived on the Somme battlefield. Yves sadly passed away in 1997 he'd worked for an incredible number of years for the War Graves Commission and Pozières British Cemetery where we started this walk I always think of him when I go in there because as you come down the main steps you look to your right there is the gardeners facilities in the corner there and there's a little stovepipe chimney coming out the top and that was something that he put in when when he was a gardener there so they had a little bit of heat and something to brew a bit of coffee on Eve passed away but his legacy lives on. Christiane's wife is still there and many of you may well have come across her. She's always very kind to visitors and people knock on her door and she shows them the shells that are in the garden and that sort of contact with the locals over the years is something that's always been very important to me and I know many people who visit the battlefields. The battlefields are places where people live and it's important to get to know the locals and see what their perspective of it is and very often they have so much to tell you and and you can learn so much from them. So we'll continue with our little journey to the outskirts of Pozières now. We come out of the village. The civilian cemetery is on the left-hand side. Australian troops fought through that in July of 1916. There are some terrible accounts of soldiers digging in around the cemetery and the tremendous bombardments, unearthing the civilian graves and throwing the remains all over the positions that were held by Australian troops. Over the open fields to our right is where the OG lines were, the old German lines were, the strong German defence. where there was fighting that continued throughout July into August and into early September of 1916 when the Canadians then took over and this became their sector in the push to the next village of Courcelette but the road then bends and continues up to a high point where we can look back towards ovalers to our left and mash valley and beyond to our bear and to our right across the fields we can see a little isolated farm and this is the the ferm de mouquet mouquet farm mucky farm moucal farm it has many names and the australian attacks really faltered against this after the capture of posiers village it was a very strong position it was intertwined with all sorts of tunnels and positions which meant the germans could go to ground very very easily which they did and attack after attack broke against this position the farm would often be captured the Germans would pop up behind the attackers and then the attack would would break down when the Australians moved out of here in in early 19 September 1916 they handed over to the Canadians Canadian units from the first Canadian division took over this sector and they found that just by holding the ground They suffered in some cases as many casualties as they had suffered in the Second Battle of Ypres in April and May of 1915 and that was without making any serious attacks. The Canadian Mounted Rifles had an attempt to take the farm on the 15th of September 1916 in the Battle of Fleurs-Courcelette but that ended with mixed results. It was only taken eventually by British troops from the 11th Northern Division and by that stage this whole area was just one vast crater zone. of shell craters. Absolutely nothing was left of the farm. I once knew someone who was born in this farm before the Great War. He was only a child when the war broke out, Michel van den Drish. He's the cousin of the van den Drishers who live there now. And his father was a tenant farmer who'd rented the farm from Michel Gance, who was the mayor of Courcelette. And they'd farmed it for quite a few years since the turn of the century. Michel van den Drisch said to me that when they returned after the war they spent the first week trying to figure out where the farm had been it had just been reduced to dust and eventually they figured it out for a while they lived in an old army nissen huts with just a big pot boiler stove to keep them warm in the winter and the main area of the farm wasn't really rebuilt until 1923-24 that was very common in the Somme area part of their land they left to pasture and if you look at the area around the the quarry you can still see particularly in the winter months the traces of the shell holes that characterize this destroyed absolutely obliterated part of the of the Somme battlefield so again like I say talking to the locals it's often a way into some of these hidden aspects of the First World War that we don't readily see in the books From Mouquet Farm we can continue along this road and ahead of us on the next ridge is the huge red brick and Portland stone Lutyens Memorial at Tjapval, the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing. But that's a story for another day and another podcast. One of the regular features I want to include on the old front line is about Great War objects. Now, I know this is a podcast and you can't see these objects, but we can discuss some of them, we can talk about them, I can post some photographs of them on Twitter, and occasionally you'll be able to hear them. So I thought I'd start with something like that, and we're going to start today with a Great War whistle. Now whistles for me, the sound of a whistle, is a very evocative noise of the First World War. The whistle I've got with me today is like an old police whistle made by Hudson& Co in Birmingham and stamped 1914. I rescued this from the back of a junk shop somewhere in Sussex, probably Brighton, many, many years ago. It has a little leather lanyard on it where it fixes to a sand brown belt. it's broken and i often wonder was this tugged off in a hurry or is it simply worn away objects like this are so powerful in many respects they take us back to the first world war and the sound of this one which is an officer's whistle that would be used to give a command but also to signal the start of an attack. And so it would be blown by an officer standing there in a trench surrounded by the men of his platoon or company waiting for his order to advance. On the centenary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, on the 1st of July 2016, I blew this whistle at zero hour, 100 years after the men went over the top on the Somme that day. It's quite a powerful thing to do. And I'm going to blow it for you now. So if you're listening on headphones You might want to turn the volume down a little bit. I won't blow it quite as powerfully as I normally do, but nevertheless it will make a bit of a sound. So here it is. This is the sound that this whistle would have made when pressed to the lips of an officer and blown just as they're about to go over the top in the Great War. So, quite something, quite something. And when I was in Gallipoli a few years ago, we made a program about Gallipoli, the first D-Day for BBC Time Watch. And one of the Commonwealth War Games Commission gardeners there, during his time working on the cemeteries, had found quite a few objects. There'd been a serious fire at Gallipoli some years ago, and it cleared some of the scrub away and exposed some of the objects left behind from the First World War. And it included one of these whistles, dated 1915. And I remember holding it as we discussed this and wondering what had happened to the young officer who'd had that in his hands. Had he been killed? Had he been wounded? Had he survived Gallipoli? We'll never know. But like I say, objects like this, they are incredibly powerful links back to that time. And we'll feature some more on the podcast in due course. Along the old front line.