Return to the Somme

As the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme approaches, we walk part of the battlefield across the iconic Mash Valley, visit Ovillers Military Cemetery and walk through Ovillers village to the far end of the valley facing the Pozières Ridge.

Alf Razzell discusses the burial of the dead at Ovillers: A Game of Ghosts.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

As the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme approaches, we find ourselves back in those dusty tracks of Picardy, walking the ground at La Boisselle, Mash Valley and Ovalers, where the Battle of the Somme began more than a century ago. This episode of the Old Front Line will go out a few days from the annual commemoration of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the 1st of July. That terrible day in 1916, almost that midpoint in the Great War, when an army of volunteers, regular soldiers, territorials and men of the new army, Kitchener's army, went over the top on that perfect summer's morning and walked into machine gun oblivion. It was the blackest day of the British Army, with over 57,000 casualties, of which nearly 20,000 were killed in action or died of wounds. And that black, terrible day started a battle, a campaign which came to symbolise the First World War for so many. A battle of contrast, beginning in the sunshine of that July morning and ending... with a snowstorm in November four and a half months later as the battle came to its conclusion. It's a battle that connects many of us to that history, that landscape, and those ordinary men in extraordinary times who were there during the Great War. And at this time of year, my mind is often on the Somme, and I'm sure that's true for many of you listening to this podcast today. There is always something about the Somme for me, not just because I once lived there, not just because it was one of the first battlefields of the Great War that I explored, but there's something about the whole story of the Somme, the men of the Somme who marched there in 1916. And, of course, so many of the veterans that I interviewed back in the 1980s and 90s were veterans of the Somme battle. It was often a starting point in our conversation, often what led me to their door, and something that really, as a subject, the Battle of the Somme, the events of 1916, that has kind of consumed me ever since. And when we visit that landscape of the Somme, today more than a century later, it has all those layers of history that we often speak about in this podcast. From the stories of those men and women and how it affected them, through to the history of regiments and brigades and divisions. through to how the landscape today weaves its way through the journey of the past and the shadows of the past and how the modern landscape its modern layers affect what we find from archaeology through to the iron harvest and of course a subject again very dear to me the natural world the birds and the nature that we find on that landscape today that also echoes to a past because the men in those chalk cut trenches of the Somme, they heard that birdsong too in 1916. So as we approach this anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, I think it's time once more to return to those fields in Picardy. We've been there so often in this podcast and we will continue to do so. The Somme sits in as we've said, at that kind of central point of the Great War. For A.J.P. Taylor, that turning point from the old world to the new world. And that idea for some writers that idealism died on the Somme, and for others it was a battle that only strengthened their resolve to see the fight to the finish and to make that sacrifice worth something. A thousand years from now, historians say, will still be arguing over the Battle of the Somme, its causes, its conduct, what happened in those fields of Picardy, what it meant to generations then, what it means to us now, and what it will mean to those in the future. But for us now, we once more strap on our virtual walking boots and we head to those dusty lanes that take us back to Picardy and across. that landscape of the Battle of the Somme. So where are we and what do we plan to see on this anniversary episode looking at the Somme battlefields? We're standing on the Aubert-Bapaume road with the town of Albert behind us, Bapaume way ahead in the far distance, unseen from where we're standing on the outskirts of the village of La Boiselle. We have two hills behind us, the Tara and Usna Hills, which we've discussed in some recent podcasts, and we're on that Albert-Bapaume road, which again we've looked at in a recent podcast episode. And we're not going to walk it again, but we are going to begin here and look around to what we see as we approach this village of La Boiselle. We're roughly at a kind of a midway point on the line of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. To the north at Gomercourt, where the diversionary attack took place, then from Serre, down through all those villages, from Beaumont-Hamel to Chiappeval and beyond, to where we're standing now, then across to our right, Fricourt and Mamet and Montaubat, where our lines joins, the British lines joined with the French. We're at that rough midway point, and we're going to cut through one of the valleys that came to characterise the experience of the early phase of the Battle of the Somme, And although this is close to the 1st of July anniversary, we won't just look at that one day. We're going to look at some different aspects of Somme history in those first few weeks of the battle that connect us to events of 109 years ago. And what can we see from where we're standing just astride this busy modern road? Well ahead of us is a memorial, a memorial seat to the Tyneside Scottish and the Tyneside Irish, battalions of the Northumberland Fusiliers that formed two brigades of the 34th Division that attacked this ground just to the right of La Boiselle where we're standing and just behind us to our left on that first day of the Battle of the Somme. battalions that have been formed as part of the new army Kitchener's army as it became known because of Lord Kitchener's heavy hand in the raising of these battalions in the early phase of the war he being one of those senior commanders who did not believe the idea that the war would be over by Christmas that it would be a long conflict and they would need to supplement the regulars and the territorials with volunteers so he pushed for the creation of this new army in 1914 wanting a hundred thousand or more men and by the end of that year they got more than a million of which these men from Tyneside were just a part of that vast army that marched off to fight in places like the Western Front in 1915 and then found themselves drawn into the fighting here on the Somme the following year. These two units characterise those communities in Tyneside around Newcastle from a Scottish background and from an Irish background. It was an area of mass immigration from people not just from Scotland and Ireland but from all over the world. It had one of Britain's black communities, for example, and there are photographs of men from the Tyneside battalions showing black soldiers amongst them. So it was a very diverse community in all kinds of ways. but to a degree polarised by this Scottish and Irish identity that then drew these men into these battalions and brought them out to the front line and here at La Boiselle on the first day of the Somme This became their anvil of sacrifice when so many of them became casualties, killed, wounded and missing. And many of the missing lay out on the fields around where we're standing now in the old no man's land for some time until they could be properly buried, creating terrible additional misery for the families of those soldiers wondering what their fate had been. For the Tyneside Brigades, this was their first mission action and their last with that collective identity because the scale of loss was so great though some of these men were wounded and returned to the battalions later in the war they were never really as Tyneside as they had been in the early part of that conflict and it's quite a modest memorial in many ways a stone seat with the badges of the two units with the harp of the Tyneside Irish and and the St Andrew's Cross and the Lion Rampant of the Tyneside Scottish. And when this memorial was unveiled just a few years after the war, it sat isolated on this smashed landscape. The battlefields of the Somme had not really recovered at that point, and there was white chalk as far as the eye could see. The line of the Albert-Bapone Road now recovered, and... the beginnings of a new village. as La Boisselle rose from the ashes of destruction, that destruction that had suffered here throughout the four years of the First World War, from the earliest battles that took place in the fields around it in 1914, when the French clashed with the Germans, through to the underground operations, the war underground, the tunnelling that took place here, with French engineers and British engineers tunnelling under this landscape, and of course German engineers doing exact Exactly the same thing on the other side of No Man's Land, creating this minefield of craters known as the Glory Hole on this side of the village of La Boisselle, and eventually, with the British and tunnelling companies of the Royal Engineers, the creation of two vast mines that would be blown here on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. across to our right, the Loch Naga Crater, named after the trench where the tunnel began, Loch Naga Trench, positions that had once been occupied by the 51st Highland Division, who had named a lot of the positions on this part of the battlefield, and the so-called Wysap Crater, which was just to the left of the Albert Baphome Road, overlooking the neighbouring valley. And La Boiselle was really dominated by two valleys either side of the village, to the right, a long valley heading back towards the next the next village of Contal Maison where there was a German sausage shaped observation balloon that kept popping up to observe the Allied lines and that became known as Sausage Valley and if you have a Sausage Valley you've got to have a Mash Valley as well and the valley to the left hand side of the village from where we're standing now the northern side of La Boiselle that became Mash Valley and the British lines Prior to that, the French lines weave their way through and around and in front of both of these valleys with the Germans occupying the village and holding the high ground beyond it and holding a strange position along the Albert-Bapone Road where they could look down into Mash Valley to the north of the main village itself. So if we'd been standing here on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, we would have seen these two huge eruptions over to our right at roughly... A two o'clock position would have been the Lochmagar mine exploding on the German positions in the forward part of their defences there and then the Weissach mine being exploded in the German positions that ran along the edge of the Albert-Baphome road and potentially looked down into Mash Valley. Both of those mines killed German soldiers. The exact number I suspect we will never know but it's in the tens rather than the hundreds. because these went off in forward positions and the Germans kept most of their troops in reserve and support line positions and were unaffected by the explosion of these two mines. So all those months of tunnelling, all those probably millions of man hours put into it with the collective amount of troops that had been brought in to work on both those mining projects, all of that resulted really in minimal casualties for the Germans. And this became a lesson in the use of these mines so that when the big mining offensive took place at Messines in June of 1917, a different approach was made there. Rather than blow the mines in the forward position to take out the frontline defences, you blow them further into the German defences to take out the biggest amount of the defenders. Because if the trenches were destroyed but the defenders were still intact... the end result was probably always going to be the same. Men would come out of dugouts that had not been affected by the explosion of a mine like this, set up their weapons teams, and mow down the attacking force in the open. So that was a kind of lesson learnt from the use of these two great mines here. And although today, Loch Lugar is the more famous one, in the interwar period, when the road that we're standing on was the main kind of conduit for pilgrims through these battlefields, in that 20s and 30s period in that interwar period the Wysap mine was the better known one because it was just astride this main road just up ahead of us to the left beyond the village cemetery where there's some new build houses now that were subsequently built when the mine crater was filled in which we'll come to in a minute that is where this crater was located And in the 20s and 30s, if you'd come here as an individual, you'd have seen signs for it. You'd have seen a gate to take you into the ground where the crater was located. And because it was just astride the main road, just about every battlefield tour that went through this area in that 1920s, 30s period stopped here. And there are probably thousands, tens of thousands of postcards of it that were sold to pilgrims during that period who came here. Probably a little shop set up in the village to do just that. that or you could buy them in albea and that continued for many many years but once you get to the 1970s the number of people making that pilgrimage making visits to the battlefields was very very small and that led to features on this landscape this changing ever-changing landscape disappearing and amongst them the ysat mine that was filled in by the farmer who saw no one coming here anymore. The fence had collapsed, the gate had fallen off its hinges and the whole site was overgrown because so few people came there anymore. So the crater was filled in and that led to a threat to the neighbouring crater on the other side of the village, Loch Ngar Crater, being filled in as well until Richard Dunning, an English businessman, came there, passionate about the Great War, saw an opportunity to save it And he did, thankfully, for posterity. And when he bought that crater in the 1970s, he could never have known that by the time of the Great War centenary in 2016, hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million visitors, came to see that site during that period. Incredible, really. And it's become... A fixed part of the Somme identity, that culture of the old front line that we often talk about, Loch Nagaal is very much today a part of that. And the importance of the YSAT mine and how that was part of the battlefield culture in the 1920s and 30s, perhaps lesser known, maybe even forgotten. So from here we're going to head up past the memorial seat, continue along the Albay-Abapone Road and then cut across to the left and as we do so we're nearer to the site where the YSAP mine was located and we can see those modern houses there they all went up in the early 2000s the field itself where the crater had been filled in sat there empty for a long long time and you could see this chalk scar on the landscape where the crater had once been and there was talk of building for many many years I mean who would build a house on the site of a former mine crater but eventually I guess as collective memory faded of what that site was people came along and got building permission and built houses there quite what the foundations of those houses are like who knows but they now dwarf that site where that great mine that huge crater once stood and we're going to turn off now to head to the next bit of our battlefield walk which will take us into mash valley coming off the albert bapone road we take a minor road that goes roughly north and goes past the modern civilian cemetery the original one was back where the tineside seat is located that triangular bit of ground was the pre-war civil cemetery for the village of la boisselle And part of the front line went right through there. So it must have been pretty grim for some German and French soldiers in 1914 who were the first ones to dig their trenches through that bit of ground right through the middle of that cemetery. But the modern cemetery is also on the site of some of the tunnels and the mine entrances and I know this because Dominic Xanadie who runs the Tommy Bar up in Pozières went down these in the late 70s early 80s and he still has photographs on display in the cafe which he took in the tunnels beneath this position that led up towards the YSAP mine so that bit of the Somme landscape deep beneath this site is still there but not open to the public and probably Thank you very much. come past that civil cemetery up into what is essentially the opening of mash valley and we look to our right we can see how the ground cuts away across this valley it rises ahead of us and to our right towards the cemetery we can see on the slopes beyond that's oval as military cemetery which we're going to walk to and the further we go up this track and we look back towards the village we see how where the village was located and how the germans sighted their lines along the edge of it running parallel to the Albert Bapaume road gave them a distinct advantage here they could look down onto the valley itself and the road that we're walking on very close to the British front line meant that any troops that came out of here and advanced from any of the forward positions that cut across a bit of an angle across the valley at this point would be seen by anyone in those German defences but of course it didn't matter No one was going to survive the bombardment. No one was going to survive the explosion of the great mines here. All of that would do its job. and the German garrison would be destroyed, and the units that would attack here from the 8th Division, which was a regular division made up of units that had been in the far-flung corners of the British Empire in 1914, brought back to Britain and then formed into this new division, the 8th Division, and then came across to France in November of 1914, occupied the sector in northern France, fought in the Battle of Neu-Chapelle, the first British offensive of the war, in March of 1915, and then in the Battle of Albers Ridge and the diversionary attack for the Battle of Loos in September of that year and then it moved down to the Somme and it was one of those formations that served in this sector in front of villages like La Boiselle in those months nearly nine months leading up to the Somme offensive in 1916 So the units within it and the personnel within those units had been very heavily involved in the build-up to this offensive. They'd worked on new trenches, they'd worked on strengthening the British wire, they'd spent time underground supporting the tunnellers, either taking material up to the mine face or carrying out bags of spoil and chalk that would be scattered further behind the lines in woods or in quarries. They'd seen the build-up to the offensive in all kinds of different ways with the huge amount of artillery and these were men, some of them, who'd fought in those battles of Neu Chapelle and Albers Ridge in the offensive of September 1915 and had seen how some of those early engagements had been plagued by lack of shells for the guns. Here there was no shortage of shells for artillery. That was very clear on the dusty roads of Picardy in the lead up to the Battle of the Somme. Wherever there were guns, there were massive stockpiles of ammunition. So perhaps they kind of felt that there was an inevitability about this battle in a way that they hadn't experienced in previous offensives of the war. Perhaps this really would be the battle that defined the war, ended the war, changed the war, and it would do probably some of all of that in different ways, ways that they probably couldn't imagine. But not everyone saw the possibility Others looked that were clever soldiers that could read a battlefield. They looked at positions out on that battlefield over which they would have to advance. They looked at the definition of the German line, the landscape and how that might affect the outcome of any attack that would be made here. And they weren't all convinced that there would be success. And one of those was the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion of the Middlesex Regiment, part of that 8th Division, Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Sands. He was a regular soldier, an experienced soldier. And he was one of those that when he looked out into no man's land from observation posts or he'd filled glasses, when he looked at the intelligence photographs and the maps, he was worried that the bombardment and the mine and everything else that was planned would simply not be enough to destroy these German defences. And that if they went out into no man's land and the enemy was still there... It could be a bloodbath. He relays those fears to his brigade commander, then his divisional commander, but these were men who were buoyant from the idea of success. They too had seen the problems of the battles of 1915 and saw how the Somme was visibly different in the way preparations were being made and the amount of manpower that was being brought in for this battle was also unprecedented. And Sands was... really advised to not rock the boat, to carry on, and he was a man who'd never refused an order in his life. So at zero hour, 7.30am, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the 1st of July 1916, he led his men out into no man's land as the whistles were blown, and they walked down those slopes through the grass of Mash Valley, straight into his worst fears. A garrison, a defensive garrison that had survived the bombardment, that had survived the explosion of the Wysat mine and laid down heavy fire into his battalion and all of the other battalions that were advancing alongside him. And on that perfect summer's morning of the 1st of July, 673 officers and men of the 2nd Battalion Middlesex Regiment went over the top. And by the end of the day, Perhaps as few as 51 came back unwounded. Amongst the wounded was Sands himself. Almost all of his officers were killed or wounded. The battalion had been destroyed by going into the attack at Mash Valley. And it was something that played on his mind from when he got to the casualty clearing station, I suspect, through to the base hospital, through to the hospital he was treated in in London. And it played him so much that two months afterwards, in September of 1916, he wrote to a fellow officer to say, I've come to London today to take my life. I have never had a moment's peace since July the 1st. And because of those losses in his battalion, his proud battalion, He could not shake that feeling that somehow he should have done more, protested more, rocked the boat more, perhaps more of them would be alive now. And sadly, Colonel Sands shot himself and died in St George's Hospital on the 13th of September 1916, just as his award of the Distinguished Service Order was announced in the London Gazette. Colonel Sands was one of the sadder casualties of the first day of the Battle of the Somme. A phrase I first heard in that documentary from 1976 presented by Leo McKern about the Battle of the Somme and written by Martin Middlebrook and Malcolm Brown and it's something that stayed with me ever since. And every time I come here to this part of Mash Valley just as we walk up the slopes of that road with the valley going across to our right I think of him and his men. And I have a personal connection to one of those men because many years ago in a junk sale I bought two memorial plaques to brothers and one of them, Frederick Montague Ramond, was a regular soldier in the 2nd Middle of Sex, came out in November 1914 and was killed here on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, his brother having been killed at Gallipoli the previous year. It was a place, this corner of the Somme battlefields, where many families were thrown into mourning on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. And a few days later, one of the official photographers came up and photographed Mash Valley. And if you look very carefully at those images where you can see the shape of the YSAT mine very clearly on the slopes of that part of the village of La Boiselle, you can also pick out lots of black dots in no man's land. The shattered bodies of the men of the 8th Division who'd gone over the top there. on the 1st of July 1916. And when we stay on this road it curves slightly and gets to a junction. And if we look to our left, we can look down into the town of Albea. We can see the basilica with its golden figure of Mary and her outstretched arms holding the infant Jesus, a view that the men in the trenches would have had here in 1916, looking back to the shattered basilica and that figure of Mary at that 90-degree angle, the leaning virgin, the golden virgin. And this attack here was fictionalised by Henry Williamson in his book, The Golden Virgin, published as part of his Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight series, and I always think of him and Philip Madison, his character in that series, coming down the slopes of this ridge into the valley that day too. Again, it's those layers of Great War history that we get from war diaries, personal accounts, books like Middlebrooks, and also fiction. like Williamson's too, that weaves the tale of the landscape and opens that landscape up for us and brings new meaning, I think, again, all part of that culture of the old front line. But this was not the only attack into Mash Valley and as we turn right along this road heading towards the military cemetery and get a much clearer view looking across to La Boiselle on our right and the village of Ovalers at the far end of Mash Valley ahead of us, we're in ground where the 12th Eastern Division moved up after the 1st of July. They'd been in reserve on the other side of Albea and were brought up to continue with the offensive here. The attack had been a failure with more than 6,000 casualties on this part of The Battle of Luz fighting over pretty much the same ground, under the same kind of conditions, going over the top, often in broad daylight, straight into the German defences that had caused such heavy losses on the 1st of July. Their attack, particularly on the 7th of July, suffered pretty much a similar fate. with unit after unit being torn apart by German machine gun and shell fire trying to cross this mash valley units like two of the battalions of the Royal Fusiliers the 8th and the 9th Royal Fusiliers the 7th Royal Sussex which of course interests me having researched a lot of the lads from West Sussex which was a big intake of lads from that part of Sussex into the 7th Royal Sussex from Chichester and Bognor and the little villages along that kind of Arran Valley this was a unit that again had seen battled before, but would suffer absolutely catastrophic casualties in trying to cross this ground. And although many of those attacks did sustain critical casualties to the units involved, gradually the German line collapsed here and eventually the village of Ovalers was taken. This is a place where I don't just reflect on those Sussex lads who fell here, although I have researched so many of them, including the medical officer Captain Thompson, who'd been with them from pretty much the beginning and ran out into no man's land during the fighting here on the 7th of July, was tending to the wounded, picking up the wounded, retrieving the wounded, dashing here, there and everywhere until he was eventually killed. Like so many medical officers, not all of them were recognised, not all of them got the VC and bar not all of them were chavasse and Thompson I think possibly was recommended for a Victoria Cross but perhaps it didn't fulfil the criteria or there were not enough witnesses he was posthumously mentioned in dispatches which was the only other thing he could receive as a posthumous award and his body was never found and his name is on the Chapval Memorial to the missing underneath of course the Royal Army Medical Corps rather than the Sussex lads to whom He was attached. But it's not just a dead that I think of when I come to this and so many places along this old front line. These places, so many of them weave into the story of those veterans that I interviewed in the 80s and 90s. And I've mentioned him many times on this podcast before and will no doubt do so again. And that's Alf Rozelle, who served here with the Royal Fusiliers, a man who I interviewed on many occasions, who I got to come down to our Sussex branch. The Battle of Arras Cheerful Sacrifice And Alf also is in that incredible documentary from the 1990s, A Game of Ghosts, which for me will always be the best documentary about veterans of the Great War because it captured them at a time in which I knew so many of them, including Alf and others in that documentary I knew too. And it was a time in which they were old men, but not as old as they were when a mass of public interest suddenly concentrated on veterans in the early 2000s. And by By then, that generation that survived were often confined to wheelchairs, could speak in I guess a degree of a meaningful way about the First World War but nothing like I experienced with those veterans in the 80s and 90s. It was a different period. Those men at that age saw the war differently for all kinds of reasons but could articulate it in perhaps a more meaningful way and it was something that I saw again literally a generation later with those veterans of the Second World War that I travelled with in such great numbers to the battlefields of World War II but I do think of Alf every time I come here and it's nice to see that someone has placed a plaque to Alf in Overla's Military Cemetery because he wasn't just in the battle here that cost so many casualties within his battalion he was one of those detailed to clear it up after the advance had moved forward so the survivors came back into the valley this would have been probably 10 days after the 1st of July the fight has moved forward the battlefield is still covered in the dead it's the summer it's hot I mean you can imagine the rest and the dead need burying and this was probably for Alf one of the worst things that he ever had to do and he speaks about this in such a moving way impactful way in that documentary A Game of Ghosts when they have to go out and go through the pockets of the dead and remove pay books and dog tags and they find the reality of war the reality they know of only too well what artillery fire and machine guns do to the human body and they then have to bury those fragmentary remains of the dead in shell holes and positions on the battlefield. Now, many of those would have eventually ended up in Overland's Military Cemetery, which we're walking towards now. We'll say more about that when they're there. But again, when you look across this landscape, you know wherever you look, you're looking at a vast military cemetery because this landscape still retains much of the dead, many of the dead from both sides. Because Alf relates that it wasn't just British Tommies they were laying to rest on this battlefield. It was the bodies of those who defended the trench around Mash Valley and Ovalers that had to be buried the Germans had to be buried here too and what happened to their graves after the war we can only really surmise because so many German burial sites were not recovered and not moved to proper military cemeteries once the conflict was over so fields of death really these fields around Ovalers and Mash Valley are But a place too with skylarks high above this valley we can perhaps find some hope in the remembrance that we have of those who passed through here in 1916. So we'll continue along the road now and that'll bring us to the front steps of Overla's Military Cemetery. Ovilas or Ovier la Boisselle, the village at this end of the part of Mash Valley where we are, gives name to the cemetery that we've come to now. It's quite a large cemetery on the slope of the rising ground that looks down upon this part of Mash Valley itself. And here are more than 3,500 British and Commonwealth burials from the First World War and some French burials here as well from the fighting and from holding the line here in that early phase of the war in 1914-15. Of the British and Commonwealth burials, two-thirds of them are unidentified. They're unknowns. A regiment, a rank, a year of death, sometimes a date of death is recorded on these headstones, but who they were, will perhaps never know, and their names will be probably on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing, or if they died in the fighting here in 1918, then they'll be on the Pozières Memorial. But men who are part of that vast legion of the missing that so characterises the experience of death in the Great War. And amongst the identified burials that are here, 913 are from Britain, 27 from Canada, 17 are Australian, 7 are South African, 1 is from New Zealand. So that's 965 identified burials out of 3,561. The original burials in this cemetery are in plot one. When you go up the front steps, plot one is a little way in across to your right. And the graves there are slightly staggered and laid out in a different way to the rest of the cemetery, which are graves and burials moved in from the surrounding battlefields and laid out in orderly plots. And plot one is always the place to start in the cemetery, any cemetery of the Great War that's a British and Commonwealth cemetery, because those are almost all the original burials and that gives us a kind of starting point really for the history of this site of commemoration. When we look at the identified graves in the rest of the cemetery there's a very heavy weighting to the fighting here in early July 1916 but there are many others from later periods of the fighting too brought in from this wider Ovier, La Boiselle, Pozières, even towards Courcelette, part of the battlefield. So it's not just a first day of the Battle of the Somme or a Mache Valley cemetery. It covers a bit of a wider period. And plot one was made towards the end of the Battle of the Somme when soldiers from up at the front line, beyond Pozières and the Pozières Ridge and Courcelette were killed in action. They were brought back here for burial there are one or two earlier casualties buried in there and we're going to come to one of those who was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in fact two of them but one of those was found many years later And the other one, I suspect, could well have been found during the later period of the Battle of the Somme when the ground was cleared and bodies were being found even halfway, two-thirds of the way through the fighting and then brought into burial grounds like this for a proper burial. The discovery of the dead wasn't just done by search parties like Alfred Zell's. It could be something that was from a much later period of the fighting when men were sent to dig a new trench, build a trench mortar position or a gun position, whatever it was, and the remains of soldiers were found then. That was all too common. But when we look at that plot one, one of the graves that kind of leaps out at us is Captain John C. Lauder of the 1st 8th Argyle and Southern Highlanders who was killed on the 28th of December 1916 age 25 that name lauder is a name that really leaps out of that headstone because one of the most famous music hall stars singers of the day was sir harry lauder who sang the incredibly popular song of that period keep right on to the end of the road and this captain john lauder is his son His death broke his father. He writes very movingly about it in his book A Minstrel in France, which recounts his experiences of going out to the battlefields to sing to the troops, to entertain the troops, and then coming here to this original plot of burials to visit the cross that marked his son's grave. Many years later, I think in the 80s, this story grew that Captain Lauder was not a very popular officer in the 1st 8th Argyles. I don't know really where that emanated from. from and there were suggestions that he'd been shot by his own men I've never found any evidence of that in any of the documents that I've looked at perhaps there wouldn't be evidence but to follow the kind of trail back to where that story began kind of leaves you in a grey area really so I don't know whether that's something that will ever get to the bottom of but certainly for me the most important part of this is again how we look and how we assess grief and how that affected people during and after the First World War and Harry Lauder really was never the same man again after his son died here in 1916. And in this same plot as I mentioned there's two graves from the first day of the Battle of the Somme that I always come and visit when I come to this cemetery. One of them was found many years afterwards in the 1990s and that's George Nugent of the 22nd Northumberland Fusiliers who died on the 1st of July 1916 aged 28 and was from Newcastle. A British visitor to the who I know very well found his remains close to the lip of the Loch Ngar crater and the commission were called in they found artifacts with him that identified him and he was eventually given a burial here in the presence of surviving family members so he was one of those whose remains as part of that last witness of the great war the landscape still giving up its secrets he was very much part of that story back in the days when perhaps that was more unusual and the inscription that the family chose for his grave I think is particularly impactful and it reads lost found but never forgotten. Buried in this same plot another casualty of the first day of the Battle of the Somme is a soldier of the 8th Battalion King's Own Yorkshire Line Infantry Clem Cunnington. He fell that day aged only 19. I came across his story in Lynne MacDonald's songbook that came out in 1983. I got it that year for my 16th birthday from my grandmother, and I still have that cherished copy that she signed for me. It's a book that really, I think, brought together so much of how I felt about the Somme at that time and continue to feel about the Somme. I was beginning to interview veterans. Her accounts of what she got from interviewing veterans kind of spurred me on to do that even more. But her powerful writing, she was a fantastic writer, Lynne, and the way she wove those soldiers' stories, particularly with that book, is something that I think is what makes it really a classic account of the Great War and a book that if you've never had an opportunity to sit down and read is something that should be the top of your pile really but there are so many stories within it that then prompted me to go out onto those battlefields and follow those stories on the ground and one of them was Clem Cunnington because she tells the story from the point of view of one of his mates Private Ernest Dayton who Dayton was a sniper in the 8th Battalion, King's Own Yorkshire Infantry, and he was actually sent out in advance of the attack of his battalion to be out in no man's land to take out targets of opportunity, they'd be called today, in case some of these Germans had somehow miraculously survived the bombardment, which of course they had. And this is his account of his experience on the first day of the Somme and what happened to his best mate, Clem Cunnington. I thought I was a goner. I didn't think I'd get back. I didn't think I'd ever get back. Lying out there that morning, I was within 25 or 30 yards of the German front line, looking through this telescope sight at the gap in their trench. I could have touched it. I had my finger on the trigger all the time, not moving, and I saw a few of them laid to rest. but it didn't do our lads much good. As soon as they started across, the machine guns opened up. It seemed like hours before they got up to near me, but they kept on coming. I didn't dare move. Those bullets were flying all over the place. It were Maxims they were firing, and they were shooting across each other with this hissing noise as they went past. I didn't turn round, but I heard the noise behind me, and I knew our fellows were coming. Some of them were getting hit, and they were yelling and shouting. But they came on. And when the first wave got up to me, I jumped up. I were in the first row and the first one I saw were my chum, Clem Cunnington. I don't think we'd gone 20 yards when he got hit straight through the breast. Machine gun bullets. He went down. I went down. We got it in the same burst. I got it through the shoulder. I hardly noticed it at the time. I was so wild when I saw that Clem were finished. We'd got orders. Every man for himself and no prisoners. That suited me. After I saw Clem lying there. I got up and picked up my rifle and got through the wire into their trench and straight in front there was this dugout full of jerrys and one big fellow was on the steps facing me. I had this mills bomb. Couldn't use my arm. I pulled the pin with my teeth and flung it down and I was shouting at them. I were that wild. There you are. Bugger yourselves. Share that between you. Then I were off. It was hand-to-hand. I went round one traverse, and there was another, face-to-face. I couldn't fire one-handed, but I could use the bayonet. It was him or me, and I went first. Jab, just like that. It were my job, and from there I went on. Oh, I were wild, seeing poor Clem like that. Ernest Dayton was wounded again shortly afterwards, but somehow he kept on into those German lines before the shattered remains of his battalion withdrew. The 8th Battalion, King's Own Yorkshire Line Infantry lost 21 officers and 518 men that day, one of which, of course, was Clem Cunnington, whose grave is here. And Lynne MacDonald put a picture of his grave in the book, which somehow, certainly for me, and I know quite a few others, acted almost as a magnet to go and visit that grave, and I've been visiting it regularly ever since. Such powerful accounts from these men that people like Lynne MacDonald interviewed, and so much of what they tell us about the experience of war. You're not going to get big arrows on a map from veterans like Ernest Dayton, but you're going to get that experience of war, that essence of war, and what sacrifice and what the death of mates meant to men like him. And when you begin walking beyond this plot one into the wider cemetery, you'll come across a pattern of units that will explain the wider units that pass through here. Battalions from the 8th Division, the 34th Division, quite a few from the battlefield closer to La Boiselle were brought in here for burial, including two of the Tyneside Battalion Commanders and also, of course, many graves from the 12th Eastern Division. A very large number of these are unknown. You can tell, of course, with the Tynesiders that were partially identified from shoulder titles and perhaps cap badges that they are part of those formations that were there at at the beginning of the song, When you look at the cap badges of some of the other units around you, you can pick out the orders of battle of some of the other formations that came this way. But not all of the burials that were originally laid to rest on this battlefield are within this cemetery. And some of those that were buried by the likes of Al-Frazal are not here too. And this jumps on to 1982 because at the back of the cemetery when I first came here, there was a bit of pasture land surrounded by trees and the farmer made a decision to level that and plough it over And he got Yves Foucault, who was my old friend who lived in Pozières, to come up with his metal detector to clear the surface ammunition away for him. And while Yves was working his way across that bit of old pasture, he got a very big reading that was a collective burial of a number of soldiers that had been buried there in 1916. In fact, when the War Graves Commission came up and excavated the site, they found the bodies of 49 British soldiers and two Germans who'd been buried in a big shell hole And you could see by the way the bodies were arranged that they'd been picked up by the epaulets and the boots and swung in there. The bodies were at kind of an angle as they'd been tossed in and covered over with a loose amount of soil which had remained undisturbed for all those decades until 1982. Now, none of them were found with any means of identification. That probably had been removed by whoever buried them, the knows. The cap badges and shoulder titles identified men from the Royal Fusiliers, the Royal Sussex and the Essex Regiment from the 12th Eastern Division, so from the 7th July attack, and some Royal Barks and West Yorkshears from the 8th Division attack on the 1st July. So they were very much the bodies of soldiers, the remains of the fallen from that early phase of the first day of the Somme. Now in the 1980s, when soldiers were found on the battlefields, they were not buried in the the nearest cemetery at that time there were two open cemeteries on the western front for British and Commonwealth burials one in Belgium Cement House Cemetery and one in France and that was Turlington Cemetery up on the coast so all of these burials these 51 burials were taken up and buried in one grave at Turlington with a very unusual headstone and I'll put a picture of that onto the podcast website with some other images connected to this cemetery and that is a unique grave if you go to Turlington if you're along that French coast perhaps going to Wimmera to visit the grave of John McRae the Canadian poet of the Great War who wrote in Flanders Fields or for whatever reason go to Turlington find that grave it is a very unusual one and it links you to this spot here at Ovalers and perhaps even to Alfred Zell or men like him who were burying the dead here in 1916. So we've paid our respects to the fallen here at Overlands Military Cemetery and we're going to go back down those steps onto the road and head on into the village. Coming down into the village of Ovier-la-Boisselle, overlars to the troops who were here in 1916, we're coming into a typical Somme village with some older 1920s buildings rebuilt as part of the reconstruction of this part of Picardy in that post-war period, some more modern buildings. buildings along the road to the right that goes out of the village towards La Boiselle where the German front line was there's a whole line of modern houses there that literally overlook where the German forward positions were it's a quiet village it's largely a depopulated village as many of these some villages are there's no bar there's no shops there are signs to memorials there's a French memorial to Breton troops who were fighting here in 1914 just on the other side of the village to the left of where we are and there is a very big church as you'll find in most of these villages which is perhaps only open a handful of days a year again very common in these small isolated communities not just in the Somme but right across France and we'll see on the village war memorial as we walk through the bulk of the village which doesn't take us long really because it's so small the devastating effects France experience in the Great War just from the perspective of a single village a small rural village like this, and that long list of names listed there. Mortpour-la-France died for France. All those poilus who fell on all those different French battlefields of the Great War, often a long way from this village on the Somme. And on the far side of the village, as we come out of Ovalers, we're looking towards the next bit of ground. The road curves to our right, goes back up towards the structure of Pozières British Cemetery and the Pozières Memorial ahead of us the distinct line of the Pozières reach that highest point of the 1916 battlefield the obelisk of the first Australian division memorial because the Australians are ones that took the village of Pozières in July of 1916 and we're coming into what is essentially the far end the very far end of Mash Valley so this is a the positions over to our right and to our left so up towards Chapval and beyond the other side of La Boisselle over towards Contal Maison all that kind of ground there had to catch up a little bit to kind of not quite straighten the line out but essentially straighten the line out to enable the next phase of the operation to continue here pushing on towards this Pozières Ridge and of course bear in mind that we're now in the second approaching the third week of July of 1916 and this is all ground that should be should have been taken on the very first day, but of course was not. And that meant that unit after unit kind of passed through here. And one that took over from the shattered remains of the 12th Eastern Division, who pulled out of this ground following the capture of the village, following the capture of some of the positions towards a farm that was just out of view on the other side of that bit of the Pozières Ridge, which was Femme de Mouquet, Mucky Farm. The unit that moved in in this ground that we're coming up to now were some battalions of the 48th South Midland Division, a territorial division that had been out since 1915 and had served on different parts of the Somme front, particularly up in the north around Hebutern. On the first day of the Somme, some of its units had been involved in the attack at Serres, the quadrilateral, and some of its Royal Warwick's battalions were now moving up to take over this part of the line. And amongst them was a young officer, Charles Carrington, or Charles Edmonds, as he called him, when he wrote these war memoirs, A Subaltern's War in the 1920s. Now that has been published many times both under that pseudonym Charles Edmonds and then under his own name Charles Carrington. It's a book that's not difficult to find. There was a 1980s paperback version of it that I bought in my local bookshop in Crawley and took with me to the battlefields and travelled with me across that landscape on many, many occasions. because There were two factors, really. A, that it's a fantastic memoir, and B, I met him. Charles Carrington was a member of the Western Front Association, and the first talk that I went to in London in the 1980s as a newly joined young member of the association, Charles Carrington gave the talk, and I went to speak to him and shook his hand. Sadly, I never got an opportunity to go back and interview him, but he was someone that I met on a number of occasions, and what always struck me about him was that he was very different in some respects to many of those early veterans that I met, that he was a very literate man and he could recall his war in a meaningful way and speak about it in a very meaningful way as well. And he had this phrase that he trotted out. I saw him interviewed on television about that time and he said it on there, but he certainly said it at this WFA meeting. He said, no quartermaster ever stole my rum. And that was a favourite saying of his. And what he meant was that the war wasn't all bad. There were lots of memoirs that came out in that interwar period that described the terrible conditions and the pilfering of rations and supplies and everything else. And what he was saying is that his war was very different. He'd enjoyed his war. He'd got a lot from it. He'd experienced some terrible things and seen loss and lost friends. But... It was a war that had meaning for him. And this part of the book, which when I read it again in the preparation for this podcast, I kind of thought this sums him up very, very well. And this is what he says fairly early on in the book. In 1914, I was a very young soldier, so young that I've sometimes wondered whether the whole problem may be summed up by saying that I was a juvenile delinquent who wanted to gang up with the other boys to demonstrate my manhood and to be allowed to indulge a taste for antisocial violence. It would be insincere to exclude this factor and inadequate to overweight it if only because many respectable men, old enough to be my father, fought through the war if if only because I enlisted again in 1939. Better, perhaps, to abstain from arguing and let the story make what effect it can. This is what I thought about it at the time. And then he goes on to tell you what his war was and what I think he means by that statement. A juvenile delinquent let run free across the landscape of the Western Front to fight his war. I mean, it's a very honest account in so many ways. And as we come out of the village of Ovalers and that road bends off to the right, we don't take that. We take a little track just ahead of us past some agricultural hangars and that leads us right out onto the landscape here. The approach, the contour lines leading up to the Pozières Ridge. We can see more clearly Pozières Cemetery and Memorial over to our right and the outskirts of Pozières Village. And this is ground where the Midland Division moved in and these battalions of the Royal Warwicks took over outlined posts here, the odd bit of trench, a lot of connected shell holes, probably a fragmentary line in so many different ways. And he describes it like this. We all found ourselves standing about carelessly on the top for the snipers had been cleared off the oval as crest and we were only visible from the Pozières ridge far away to the right not that we cared if we were visible from Berlin but Pozières was developing troubles of its own the Australians were going in the line there to attack it and as we stood and talked the skyline heaved and smoked throwing up fountains and jets of soil and grey smoke as if it were a dark grey sea breaking heaven on a reef. The bombardment grew thicker and thicker, clouds of smoke sprang up and drifted across its torn groups of trees. The spurts of high explosive rose close together till it seemed that the very contour of the hill must be changed. And in those outpost positions, they held on, not in any great meaningful battle, a counter-attack, a counter-counter-attack, a local operation, call it what you will, but they lost men as a consequence of it. Not on the scale of Mash Valley on the 1st or the 7th of July, but a battalion that took a knocking there and left comrades behind, buried on the battlefield there. and they then had to withdraw through that smashed landscape, that contoured hill being changed forever by the bombardments, and then move back through the village of Ovalers and back beyond. And he describes that in this way. It was then, turning back, that I knew what novelists mean by a stricken field. The western and southern slopes of the village had been comparatively little shelled. That is, a little grass had still room to grow between the shell holes. The village was guarded by tangle after tangle of rusty barbed wire in irregular lines. Among the wire lay rows of car key figures as they had fallen to the machine guns on the crest, thick as the sleepers in the green park on a summer Sunday evening. The simile leapt to my mind at once of flies on a flypaper. I did not know then that twice in the fortnight before our flank attack had a division been held at that wire-encircled hill, and twice it had withered away before the hidden machine guns. The flies were buzzing obscenely over the damp earth, morbid scarlet poppies grew scantily along the white chalk mounds, and the air was tainted with rank explosives and the sticky scents of corruption. It's a fantastic memoir, A Subaltern's War. It's not a forgotten memoir, it doesn't classify to be part of the continuation of that series, that part of this podcast, but it is a book that I think should be on everyone's Somme and Ypres pile, because he covers those two great battles, the experience on the Somme before the 1st of July, the fighting through the battle, up to when the Germans began their withdrawal to the Hindenburg Line in 1917, and then he moves up to take part in the 3rd Battle of Ypres in 1917 it's a remarkable book a book that's so well written that I think you can get so much from it time and time again when you return to it and it's his account my connection to him having shook his hand having met him having heard him talk that always kind of drew me back to it And the experience along this track, for him and men like him, in this valley before the village of Pozières, for men like Charles Carrington, this was a footnote in their war. But he mentions in the book that as they came out of the line, got beyond Overlas, got back towards Albea, as the men who'd not been part of that battle looked at them approaching, they looked as if death had touched them all somehow. It was a footnote in his war, but it was a place... A moment that he never forgot. And when I lived on the Somme, and often came down that Albert-Bapome road on a daily basis, and even now, all these years later, when I travel along that Bapome road, coming up towards Pozières, I always, always find myself looking down into that valley, where we are now, just beyond the village of Ovalers, at the far end of Mash Valley. A turn in the track where once were shell holes and shallow trenches occupied by those lads of the Royal Warwick's Carrington amongst them. It always, always draws me back to that moment in his war and to him. Those criss-cross paths and all those shadows, so many shadows along that old front line. www.oldfrontline.co.uk patreon.com slash old front line or support us on buy me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com slash old front line links to all of these are on our website thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon