Somme Voices 16

August 1914.

Ireland is on the brink of war - civil war.

Ulster Unionists have armed themselves

to resist Irish home rule.

Nationalists have formed their own army.

Ireland is a tinderbox ready to explode.

But then this happens.

Germany invades Belgium and France.

Two years later, both Unionists and Nationalists

are fighting the Germans on one of the bloodiest battlefields

of the First World War -

the Somme.

100 years on, the families of Irish soldiers on the Somme

relive their experiences

through the personal testimonies of those who were there.

"I have walked right into where the counterattack is coming.

"We're in a death-trap."

"Our rifles was jammed and they couldn't get us,

"so we threw a couple of Mills bombs over,

"and that was the end of them."

I think about how I would have felt,

or the guys in my year at school, how they would have felt.

You would have just felt so scared.

"I never was as light-hearted in all my life,

"and I never was as proud of my countrymen.

"Everyone was so light-hearted

"that all they wanted was to reach the Germans."

These men, first and foremost, had become soldiers

and their job was to kill.

When I talk to my son as he gets older,

and he sees the picture we have of him in our house,

he'll know the courage...of...

-A member of the family.

-..of Uncle Jim.

WHISTLING: Pack Up Your Troubles In Your Old Kit Bag

Nick Starrett and his niece Lauren

are visiting Ballykinlar Army Base in County Down,

one of the training camps for soldiers from Ulster

in the First World War.

The original firing range is still in use today.

Even the remains of some of the practice trenches have survived.

Nick's grandad David trained here.

He was only 16 years old when war broke out.

They opened a recruiting office in the old Town Hall.

My, we almost tore the place to pieces.

At long last, it came my turn to go in.

"Well, boy, what's your age?"

"16 years, sir."

"Under age, son. Next, please."

I could hardly believe I was turned down,

but I spotted a change of staff, so I had another go.

The new officer says, "Name?"

"David Starrett, sir."

"Age?"

"19 years, sir."

My, I had the face of brass.

And it worked.

Like many in the Ulster Division,

David Starrett had signed the Ulster Covenant

in protest against the Home Rule Bill.

Before his enlistment,

he had been training with the Ulster Volunteer Force

to fight Irish self-government.

Now, he and his UVF pals

were eager to demonstrate their loyalty to crown and country.

But not only Unionists volunteered for the British Army.

You wrote an article in the Journal

about 20 years ago, was it?

1996, called "Nationalist Derry's Battle of the Somme."

That's where I found out about my grandfather

and that he had written a letter from the Somme,

because you had that later in the article...

In all of its entirety, nearly.

And my father never passed on any information to me at all

about my grandfather, so I know very little about him.

Eddie's grandfather, Edward Friel,

was a Catholic middle-aged man with a wife, three children,

and a well-paid job as compositor at the Derry Journal,

and yet, he decided to take a pay cut, leave his family

and go to war.

The place where he joined up provides clues to his motivation.

Edward Friel didn't enlist in your local recruiting depot.

He came along by special invitation on December 5th 1914.

The Irish National Volunteers, people associated with them,

were invited to come here, deliberately, to St Columb's Hall.

It is the manifestation

of the grandeur of Catholicism in Derry, right?

-OK.

-So it is deliberately selected for the Irish National Volunteers,

who were largely Catholic...

-Right.

-They enlist under a special Irish Brigade in the Irish Division.

Nationalists who joined the 16th Irish Division

hoped that their support for the British war effort

would ensure Irish home rule after the war.

I would have absolutely no doubt about it that he came here

as a prominent member of the Irish National volunteers,

as an Irish patriot, as an Irish Catholic,

and he had heard and been told by his leaders,

even Bishop McHugh here had told him,

that the issues at stake just weren't home rule for Ireland.

It was the rights of small nations, but even bigger than that,

Christian civilisation was at stake.

That is quite interesting, because in his letter, he says,

"Father O'Connell told us if any of us fell,

"we would die a glorious death.

"He wished he could change places with any man in the Brigade,

"because we knew, if we fell, he would go straight to heaven,

"as we had all received absolution hours before the charge."

This is a devout Catholic

who obviously believes that he is getting absolution,

he is getting a plenary indulgence, and if he is killed,

he is going straight to heaven.

This is somebody who is unifying

both his basic faith and his national belief.

'My name is Jack Christie.

'I was born on February 10th...'

But faith or politics weren't the only motivation for joining up.

CHIRPING

-The budgies in the background...!

-Yes.

At the age of 90,

Jack Christie recorded his recollections of the war.

'I went to Agnes Street Centre...'

This is the first time

that great-grandson John hears Jack's voice.

'..it was about then.

'When I left school, at about 12 years of age,

'I went to work in the old Ulster Spinning Company,

'and I hated it. I hated it.

'It was an awful place,

'working in a spinning mill in those days.

'The reason I'm telling you about this

'is that when I came to join up,

'in no way had it anything to do with patriotism.

'It was simply... Here is an escape route,

'to get out of the mill, for surely life holds more

'than what this mill can offer.'

Imagine going to work at 12.

I couldn't believe that, when I heard that.

-Do you fancy that, John?

-Definitely not. Definitely not.

Struggling to work at 20.

LAUGHTER

He was very honest, wasn't he, about his reasons for going to war?

No pretence.

You know, I've quite this pastoral image

of young men, you know, wanting to fight for Queen and country,

but that wasn't necessarily the case.

It was, "Let's get out of this menial job

"and maybe see a bit of Europe."

I suppose that is very honest, as we've said.

-Yeah.

-It's a lot more real for me.

Both Nationalist and Unionist volunteers trained for about a year.

# ..Ragtime infantry

# We cannot fight, we cannot march

# What earthly use are we...? #

Even though many of them

had been in paramilitary units before the war,

a lot of work was needed to turn them into proper soldiers.

We concentrate on two things at the outset -

knocking the beer and politics out of all ranks

and building up esprit-de-corps in its place, on the one hand,

while on the other, we foster, inculcate, teach and build up

the bloodlust for the discomfiture of the enemy,

without which no war is possible for long, and no victory certain.

This photo shows men of the Ulster Division

on the boat to France in October 1915,

days before many of them would enter the trenches.

The documents at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland

suggest that the division was still not fit for battle.

The archive holds the private correspondence

of Major General Oliver Nugent,

a Unionist from County Cavan with close links to the UVF.

He was appointed commander of the Ulster Division

shortly before they embarked for France.

Relatives of the general meet with Nugent's biographer, Nick Perry.

He has discovered a letter

that reveals what Nugent thought of the Ulster soldiers

when he took over their command.

"I am not too happy about the Ulster Division

"for it cannot be denied that some of them have very little discipline.

"The Belfast Brigade is awful.

"They have absolutely no discipline and their officers are awful.

"I am very much disturbed about them.

"I don't think they are fit for service

"and I should be very sorry to have to trust them."

-That's quite something...

-Yes.

..to have to say, isn't it?

And then he turned it round, so that they became, sort of, famously...

-Yes.

-..aggressive and reliable.

Well, he did. I mean, I...

You're right, this is a key brigade in the division, 107 Brigade.

It was made up of battalions

recruited from working-class areas like the Shankill and Sandy Row,

so they are a pretty tough group,

and they proved later to be outstanding soldiers.

But at this moment, I think

he had real concerns about whether the Brigade would be fit to go

into the trenches and so he decided he had to take drastic action.

Nugent sacked the commander of the Belfast Brigade

and several other officers.

One of the officers who survived the purge was Frank Percy Crozier.

At the start of 1916,

he was confirmed as commander of the West Belfast battalion.

Crozier's granddaughter, Carol Germa,

has travelled from Canada to France

to trace her grandad's actions on the Somme,

together with Nick and Lauren.

Their relative, David Starrett,

was Crozier's batman, or personal assistant.

I never met my grandfather.

He passed before I was born.

But I think my grandfather certainly relied on your grandad a lot.

Shortly after Crozier was made battalion commander,

two of his men deserted.

You've got to imagine, along the fence line, here,

we've got a substantial brick wall, because this was a monastery

and it was surrounded entirely

by a large, high brick wall...

One of the men was a young private by the name of James Crozier.

He was no relation,

but Frank had promised his mother to look after him.

We know Crozier had lined his battalion up

in this sunken row to our right...

On 27th February 1916,

James was taken to these gardens in the town of Mailly-Maillet.

We've got the firing squad directly to your left here.

The sun is behind them

and the prisoner is at his shooting post,

against the bank, there,

with the bank acting as a natural rifle butt,

so virtually in front of us here

is where the execution would have taken place.

"A chap who had been missing some time

"was picked up by the Red Caps near Amiens

"and returned under arrest.

"Then an officer ran from the line under fire,

"and in the sight of his own men.

"The colonel was off the deep end

"for days about both, and few could get anywhere near him.

"Both were tried by field general court martial

"and the man was shot and the officer got off."

"The colonel was more upset than I had ever seen him.

"'To have to shoot one of your own men', he kept saying,

"'a lad who joined voluntarily, had the courage to join up,

"'refused to hide under any excuse to keep out.'"

"'But the officer got a free pardon?' I said.

"And the colonel only repeated the words

"as if he did not quite understand them."

"I arranged that enough spiritous liquor is left beside him

"to sink a ship.

"In the morning at dawn, as he is produced,

"I see he's practically lifeless and quite unconscious.

"He has already been bound with ropes.

"There are hooks on the post.

"We always do things thoroughly in the Rifles.

"He is hooked on

"like dead meat in a butcher's shop.

"The men of the firing party pick up their rifles and,

"on the lowering of the handkerchief by the officer, they fire.

"There is a pause. I wait.

"I see the medical officer examining the victim.

"He makes a sign.

"The subaltern strides forward.

"A single shot rings out.

"Life is now extinct.

"We march back to breakfast while the men of a certain company

"pay their last tribute

"at the graveside of an unfortunate comrade.

"This is war."

I just can't imagine it.

Like, I mean, I think about how I would have felt,

or the guys in my year at school,

how they would have felt if they were in this situation

and, I mean, you would have just felt so scared and...

I don't know whether it was the right thing to do

for someone so young and so scared.

When you're actually there on the battlefield

and worrying about, "Is everybody else

"going to start doing it?", that's when you have to make

those horrible, difficult decisions.

There were no more desertions in Crozier's West Belfast battalion.

Our trenches were in an awful state.

They just had them cut in a rough way, with no duck boards down.

And there was no drainage.

The result was you were going up there up to the knees in mud.

The dugout we were first in had a signpost outside it.

"Welcome to Rat Run Hall." At first, we saw no sign of rats.

But we decided to hang the emergency rations we had brought with us

on a string bag from the roof to stop the rats getting at them.

As it was dark, we noticed shadows moving around the bag,

and then it started to swing.

The rats were clambering over and swinging on the rations,

trying to get at them.

When you were in the dugouts, you were just like rats up there.

You were with the rats, crawling about, out and in,

on your hands and knees.

So, this is Jim's cutlery that he brought to the front with him.

Nice leather. You open it up, and it's a set of silver cutlery.

Oh, yeah. And look what it says here.

-"Joseph Rodgers & Sons, cutlers to Her Majesty."

-It's lovely.

So he's going camping with his cutlery made by the Queen's cutlers.

-He's eating royally.

-Yes, absolutely!

For officers, it was easier to maintain a certain standard of life.

Captain Jim Davidson was general manager of his father's business

in East Belfast, the Sirocco Works,

an international engineering firm.

His life at home was great.

He had a yacht, he had cars, he had a great social life.

He was a keen sportsman. He loved car racing.

And here I am in a ditch in the middle of a war,

and it's such a contrast to his life

and it just seems remarkable that he would choose to be here,

because there were many people in his position

who I'm sure avoided coming to serve.

But he was intent on making the best of it, wasn't he?

We've got this letter where he says...

.."Mother dear, you might stop sending out apples,

"as they don't arrive in very good condition,

"and instead send me an occasional parcel of tinned things.

-"Kippered herring and sausages - Palethorpes..."

-Oh, the brand.

Absolutely. "..also carry very well.

"Would you please tell Malcolmson, when making up the usual parcel,

"to include one tin of Cooper's marmalade instead of sweets

"and to always send a gingerbread cake instead of varying the brand?"

It's like ordering your hamper for Ascot, isn't it? It's incredible.

Even without luxury supplies from home,

some men found that life in the trenches could be tolerable.

'I remember being in a dugout. It was in the side of a hill.

'We were so happy in that dugout.

'And I remember at nights you just lay on the floor, you know?

'But you made yourself comfortable.

'And you had your balaclava helmet you wore on your head

'and you had an empty cigarette tin, and you stuck a candle in there.

'You lit the candle.

'In the quietness, you'd hear the sniper's bullet and machine gun

'rattling, and the odd shell, and I'd think to myself about...

'my comrades...

'And you didn't know what was before you.

'But as long as you were there, you didn't care.'

While the Ulstermen were settling in to trench life,

dramatic events unfolded back at home in Ireland.

Irish Nationalists had split into two factions.

While the moderate National Volunteers supported

the British war effort, a radical minority saw

Britain's difficulty as Ireland's opportunity.

On Easter Monday, a group of radicals staged

a rebellion in Dublin against British rule in Ireland.

When word reached the soldiers in France,

not only the Unionists of the Ulster Division, but also many of

the predominantly Nationalist 16th Irish Division were appalled.

I shall never forget the men's indignation.

They felt they'd been stabbed in the back.

I thought that the insurrection as such was a hopeless gamble.

It should never have happened.

Our men were furious with the Sinn Feiners

and asked to be allowed to go and finish them up.

The Jesuit chaplain Willie Doyle was with the 16th Irish Division

at the time of the Rising.

The originals of over 500 of his letters

have only recently been discovered,

together with several boxes of objects from his war service.

In this box here we have a thing called a maniple.

This is the first time that Willie Doyle's family are shown the find.

..Right or left hand.

And when he's giving absolution or giving High Communion,

he would have worn this.

And also, when he's giving the last rites to a soldier.

-Is that blood?

-It would seem to be blood on the sleeve of it.

More than likely a soldier's blood.

-I was going to say, some poor fella...

-Yeah.

And then there are various items in this box

that would have been taken from the front.

This is his rosary beads, so his own devotion.

It's utterly moving...

..that you're holding the rosaries that he actually used himself.

It's a long time ago.

Yeah. They are...gone through.

-A long way.

-Mm.

In the same week that Dublin was shaken by the Easter Rising,

Father Willie Doyle experienced modern warfare

in its most vicious form.

Near Hulluch, in the north of France,

the Germans launched two gas attacks.

"There they lay, scores of them, in the bottom of the trench,

"in every conceivable posture of human agony...

"..the clothes torn off their bodies in a vain effort to breathe,

"while from end to end of that valley of death came one low,

"unceasing moan from the lips of brave men

"fighting and struggling for life.

"I don't think you will blame me when I tell you

"that more than once the words of absolution stuck in my throat

"and the tears splashed down on the patient, suffering faces

"of my poor boys as I leant down to anoint them.

"One young soldier seized my two hands and covered them with kisses.

"Another looked up and said, 'Oh, Father, I can die happy now.

"'Sure I'm not afraid of death or anything else since I've seen you.'"

It's incredibly powerful to read something like that or to try

to even imagine what they were going through...

..the scale of the horror and the sheer, visceral brutality of it.

This would have been very early on in his chaplaincy,

and it may well have been the first time that he ever experienced

anything of that magnitude.

And this is contemporaneous with the Easter Rising, 1916.

So this is happening in the exact same time,

and this is what his reality is. This is his Sackville Street GPO.

This is where he gains his kind of redemption and sacraments

-and does his best work.

-Right.

30 miles south of Hulluch, the men of the Ulster Division were soon

to face their own baptism of fire.

Along a front 25 miles long, close to one million British

and French troops assembled for a joint offensive at the River Somme.

It was the biggest deployment of British forces in the war so far.

By 1916, the war on the Western Front had reached a stalemate.

The Germans had built elaborate trench fortifications.

The Somme offensive was designed to break through these defences

in what was known as the Big Push.

Several Irish units were to take part in the attack,

such as the 1st and 2nd Royal Dublin Fusiliers

or the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Irish Regiment.

But these were regular army units.

The Ulster Division was to be the only unit of volunteers

from Ireland in the initial assault.

As the day of the attack drew closer,

39-year-old Captain Jim Davidson made a major life decision.

Eileen was the best friend of his sister Kathleen,

and when he was home on leave, Jim confessed his feelings for her.

Back in the trenches, he decided to propose to her.

We thought we had all of Jim's letters,

but I actually found this one two days ago and I was so thrilled,

and it's a letter to

our great-grandmother, Kathleen, who was Jim's sister.

And it's written just a couple of weeks before the Big Push

at the Somme.

And it reads, "Well, dear, it was good of you to write me

"such a sweet letter about my engagement to Eileen.

"I know you realise just how happy I feel about it

"and that I need not say anything more.

"We've been such good pals and know each other so well

"that I think if only the war was safely over

"we could look forward to a very happy future together."

I think, you know, it's extraordinary that he's aware

that they're building up for a major offensive,

and he writes elsewhere in the letters that they weren't

intending to tell anyone about their relationship, particularly,

or to announce an engagement, but something just changed.

He'd had a leave a couple of months before.

And, you know, you start to think about, well, why was that?

What made him do something now

that he was intending to leave till after the war?

I wonder how much being in the trenches focused his mind,

because the tone of his later letters is very different

than the tone of his previous letters,

and it is almost as though he is becoming far more reflective about

himself in a way that simply didn't happen while he was the important

JS Davidson, son of Samuel Davidson, running the Sirocco Works.

Here he is, he's a machine-gun corps captain

-in a war situation who's never sure whether he's coming home.

-Yeah.

He carries on here, "Have had a trying time the last few days.

"One of my best men was killed yesterday.

"I feel his loss very keenly.

"Coming through so many hard times with these men,

"one gets a very deep affection for them."

So he's perhaps feeling that things are getting quite dangerous for him.

You know, he's seeing people who could be him

who have now been killed very quickly

or who have been injured and taken away.

And it's starting to get a bit close to home.

And so, as you say, perhaps that's what meant that

when he was on his last leave and he knows these things are coming,

he wasn't going to hang around any more.

It's time to seize the day.

In preparation for the attack, 3,000 British and French guns

pounded the German lines for seven days and nights,

with more than two and a half million shells.

The Germans had never experienced a bombardment like that.

The fire never stopped. They wanted to be sure of overkill.

Nobody should be alive when their infantry left their trenches.

Soldiers in the bunkers became hysterical.

Even the rats became hysterical.

Seven days and seven nights we had nothing to eat, nothing to drink,

but constantly fire. Shell after shell burst upon us.

In our hearts, we knew only one prayer -

"Lord, relieve us of the pressure inside us.

"Give us battle. Give us victory.

"Lord God, let them come at last."

The Ulster Division was to attack from this wood

near the village of Thiepval

and take five lines of German trenches

over a distance of one and a half miles.

In the night of the 30th of June,

the Ulstermen moved into their forward trenches.

As we entered our trenches, everything was in commotion.

The first thing my platoon had to do was move to the side to allow

the stretcher bearers to pass.

They were carrying boys screaming in pain from shellshock.

Our minds were almost numb with the constant sound

and vibrations of guns firing and shells exploding.

I have no fear of death, no fear at the moment.

I don't yet know what it's like to face death, not yet.

It's only a matter of hours, and then...

Zero hour, the time of the attack, was 7.30.

Disregarding the official battle plan,

General Nugent had ordered the first wave to crawl into no-man's land

while the British artillery barrage kept the Germans in their dugouts.

WHISTLE BLOWS

The tactic paid off.

7.35am. "A" line taken.

There was no organised resistance, one or two Germans seen shooting.

The beggars in those trenches must

have had a horrible time of it during our bombardment.

Most of them put up their hands.

It seemed more like a riot than a battle.

The first batches of prisoners were

so anxious to reach the shelter of our trenches that,

meeting our reinforcing lines coming forward,

were bayonetted by them in the heat of the moment.

7.50am.

German second line captured without much opposition and few casualties.

But not all Germans had lost the will to fight.

There they come, the khaki-yellows.

They are not more than 20 metres in front of our trench,

but no, boys, we are still alive.

The moles come out of their holes.

Machine-gun fire tears holes in their rows.

"Machine guns opened fire on us from Thiepval village.

"'Pit! Pit!' The bullets hit the dry earth all around.

"The shelling onto the wood edge has ceased.

"The men emerge. "Now is the chance", I think to myself.

"They must quicken pace and get diagonally across

"to the sunken road,

"disengaging from each other quickly, company by company."

RIFLE FIRE

There they are, my team.

Given beans, standing and kneeling, they are sending death

and injury into the dense marching wall

and the peasouper fume ahead of us.

Our infantry fire is raging.

It is casting a fine mesh net over no-man's-land

that strangles anything alive.

"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."

"This spirited dash across no-man's-land, carried out

"as if on parade, has cost us

"some 50 dead and 70 disabled.

"The dead no longer count.

"War has no use for dead men. With luck, they will be buried later.

"The wounded try to crawl back to our lines.

"Some are hit again in so doing, but the majority lie out all day -

"sunbaked, parched, uncared for,

"often delirious, and at any rate, in great pain."

In the German trenches, fierce hand-to-hand fighting ensued.

A bunch of Jerries just across from us.

We couldn't shoot them, for our rifles was jammed,

and they couldn't get us,

so we threw a couple of Mills bombs over and that was the end of them.

EXPLOSION

A 9th Inniskilling has got a bullet through his steel hat.

His brain is oozing out of the side of his head

and he's calling for his pal.

"Billy Gray, Billy Gray, will you not come to me?"

In a short time, all is quiet. He's dead.

Somebody got me on the leg, so I made for him, a German,

and I got him, shot him in the face.

Then I tried to walk back and I couldn't. I had been shot.

County Down volunteer captain Jim Davidson

and his machine gun section were in the second line of German trenches.

The second line has lots of bunkers on it.

This is one that is still exposed and has survived reasonably intact.

There is a very large room in there, and there are rooms

off to the right and the left, and tunnels leading right and left.

We know that the soldiers got to the C Line further back from here

early in the day, so why was Jim back here

at the trenches later in the day?

Very, very easy to explain.

The first waves out didn't properly clear a lot of the bunkers.

So Jim is probably involved in what we would term as "mopping up".

Well, I found a newspaper clipping, and in it a young soldier

is describing going into the German trenches to do this mopping up.

He says, "In one of these dugouts, Captain Davidson

"and I found a big Prussian officer and about half a dozen soldiers.

"The captain, who was carrying a bayonet

"he had picked up during the advance,

"called on them to surrender,

"and the soldiers, seeing that I carried a supply of bombs,

"one of which I had ready for throwing,

"promptly held up their hands.

"But the big officer was made of different stuff.

"Raising his automatic pistol,

"he fired point-blank at the captain,

"who immediately closed with him,

"and knocking up his pistol, drove the bayonet into his neck.

"The Prussian staggered back but continued to fire,

"although Captain Davidson stabbed him repeatedly until he fell dead."

So when I first found this newspaper article, I just didn't believe it.

Because it was in accounts, from a little bit later,

only a few months later,

and it just seemed like something out of Boy's Own magazine.

Derring-do and stabbing the Hun and that sort of thing.

But I wonder if there was some truth in it.

How credible do you think this account is?

Is it realistic that these things actually happened in that way?

It is an eyewitness account, a very, very detailed eyewitness account,

I think it is very credible, because he is here as a leader of his men.

-Yes.

-His men are there, they are watching what he's doing.

Extraordinary situations are going to make people do

extraordinary things, and he stepped up to the plate here

and done exactly what he was here for.

I find this amazing, because I grew up seeing pictures of him

around at my grandparents' house, playing in his uniform,

putting on his boots and his hat and some of the souvenirs

he had taken home, from the Germans as well.

To think that he has fought up here, this is where he was,

this potentially down here was the dugout which...that happened.

It's incredible.

How do you feel being here?

JONATHAN LAUGHS

-I don't know. It sends a shiver up the spine, doesn't it?

-Yeah. Yeah.

I can imagine.

To actually be here, to finally be here, that is what it is all about.

Fighting their way through the German trenches,

the Ulstermen captured a key German stronghold, the Schwaben Redoubt.

Only 90 minutes into the attack, some Ulsterman even made it

to the division's final objective - the D line.

It looked like the Germans were close to defeat.

Our company was encircled and the situation was extremely critical.

A few survivors from the company on our right joined us.

They had given everything up for lost.

They had also made many of us lose all hope and fighting spirit.

But the British divisions on either side did not keep up,

leaving the Ulstermen exposed to enemy fire from their flanks.

At midday, the Germans launch counterattacks

supported by their artillery.

I have walked right into where the counterattack is coming,

we are in a deathtrap.

A man is pushed up to the parapet to spot events

and rolls back into the trench again.

He is absolutely peppered with shrapnel.

All of a sudden we were caught by a heavy barrage of 5.9 inch shells.

The one that wounded me killed or wounded about six others.

A wee chap was buried up to his mouth by the shell.

I dug like mad to try and get him out.

The whole time his head was moving from side to side,

and I could hear him repeating the Lord's Prayer over and over again.

He died before I could dig him out.

Casualties were mounting.

-RECORDING:

-'We were carrying stretchers

'for I don't know how many hours without stopping.

'Up and down, up and down. There was no difference,

'you just walked up and down

'sort of in your sleep, you know, half-conscious of what was going on.

'It was a terrible shambles.'

-Mmm.

-'We never again had anything like the casualties, so...'

As the German counterattacks intensified,

some Ulstermen lost the will to fight.

"At that moment, a strong rabble of

"tired, hungry and thirsty stragglers

"approached me from the east.

"I go out to meet them. 'Where are you going?', I ask

"One says one thing, one another.

"They are marched to the water reserve, given a drink

"and hunted back to fight.

"Another, more formidable, party cuts across to the south.

"They mean business. They are damned if they are going to stay.

"It's all up. A young, sprinting subaltern heads them off.

"They push by him. He draws his revolver and threatens them.

"They take no notice. He fires.

"Down drops a British soldier at his feet.

"The effect is instantaneous.

"They turn back to the assistance of their comrades in distress."

I can't imagine being in the position of the person

having to do that shooting.

And obviously that was his duty at that time.

I guess it's the...

It's the discipline of war at that time

that, in order to hold the line,

if he didn't do it, then how many more would follow?

It must have just been so, so, so terrifying,

I mean, to know that you were basically facing death

-on both sides. You didn't have...

-Both sides.

-Yeah.

-Would you rather be...

-Killed by your own?

-Yes, with dishonour, or...

-That's true.

-..by the enemy, with honour.

Question is, I mean...

Your grandfather, my grandfather, we're here...

If you turn the cards around,

would you be prepared to do the same thing that they did?

Probably not.

-We grew up in different times.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

"At 12.40, Jim sends a message to headquarters where he says,

"'I am holding the end of a communication trench in A line

"'with a few bombers and a Lewis gun. We cannot hold much longer.

"'We are being pressed on all sides and ammunition almost finished.'"

Machine-gun Captain Jim Davidson held out in the German trenches,

even though he'd lost most of his men and was shot through the knee.

But when neither reinforcements nor stretcher-bearers arrived,

Jim decided to try and make it back to the British lines.

"We got to the German front-line trench and went down the trench

"about 200 yards to get as much dead ground as possible.

"I tucked the parapet

"and helped the captain up, and had just got through the wire when

"I noticed about a dozen men on my left, a few yards up, retiring.

"Just then, the Germans opened up deadly machine-gun

"and rifle fire on us.

"We'd just got 20 yards from the wire

"when the captain got shot through the head.

"He just fell and never spoke, nor moved. He died instantly.

"There was no hope."

For 500 yards in total, he has spent the entire day

-being incredibly heroic.

-Yeah.

Fighting back and fighting back

and even to the point where he was injured

and refused to leave his post

-initially...

-Yeah.

And then having left his post, trying to make it back,

-he was shot in the head.

-Yeah.

-And so near to safety.

-So near to safety.

-It makes you incredibly proud to think that...

that this is true, and his men respected him

and his men fought with him and his men followed him.

I think everyone who came and served here made that sacrifice,

and getting to know just one person

and how much that meant to our family,

what a sacrifice that was for us, how much was lost,

both in business terms, in personal terms,

and that is still having an impact on our families' lives, and

you multiply that by all the people who gave their lives at this place.

I suppose we're incredibly fortunate,

because of Jim's background and because of the wealth of his family

and because of his prominence and so on,

there is an extraordinary amount of information,

-and how many...

-He was well documented.

-Yeah.

How many families don't have that?

EXPLOSION

Again and again, the Ulster Division sent requests for reinforcements,

but these arrived far too late.

By nightfall, those Ulstermen still holding out in the German lines

were overwhelmed by an all-out attack by fresh German troops.

By the following day, the Germans had retaken all their positions.

The Ulster Division suffered more than 5,000 casualties

with over 2,000 dead,

but no other British unit on the first day of the Somme managed

to break as far into the German lines as General Nugent's men.

"My dearest, the Ulster Division has been too superb for words.

"The whole army is talking of the incomparable gallantry

"shown by officers and men.

"The Ulster Division has proved itself

"and it has indeed borne itself like men.

"I can't describe to you what I feel about them. I didn't believe...

"..men were made who could do such gallant work

"under the conditions of modern war."

It's so touching. They were his military family, weren't they?

He sees the casualties,

over 5,000 of his infantry out of 9,000 in the attack have become

casualties and you see the real emotion in this letter,

when he thinks of the losses, and also the achievement

because it genuinely was an extraordinary achievement.

All those young men.

It took several days before news of the human cost of the battle

reached families at home in Ireland.

A sad, sad day.

Father came home by 11 o'clock train, bringing news that

our darling Jim had been killed on the 1st,

doing his duty with gallantry deserving of the VC,

as Captain Spender wrote father.

I went at once to darling Eileen,

and oh, the cruel blow it was to her.

Can write no more tonight. God help us all to bear this sorrow.

Our darling, darling Jim.

The Ulster Memorial Tower

commemorates the war dead from Ulster.

It was built in 1921

on the very site where the Ulster Division fought.

But only a few miles further east

is another, much smaller, memorial for soldiers from Ireland.

# Viva la, for Ireland's wrong Viva la, for Ireland's right... #

This memorial, in the village of Guillemont,

commemorates the victories of the mostly Nationalist men

of the 16th Irish Division won on the Somme.

The 1st of July was only the first day of an offensive

that would last close to five months.

During this time, the British and French advanced just over six miles,

at a cost of more than a million soldiers

killed or wounded on both sides.

# Viva la, the rose shall fade... #

In early September 1916, men of the 16th Irish Division attacked

the fiercely contested German strongpoint of Guillemont.

Among them was Eddie Friel's grandfather.

"On the minute of 12,

"the major gave the word, 'Come on, the Royal Irish',

"and every man jumped over the parapet with a cheer. It was grand

"to see our brave boys advancing

"with the shells bursting around them in all directions.

"They were falling, but they never wavered.

"They had 3,000 yards to advance to take Guillemont.

"Before our wings were right up,

"our centre companies were sending the prisoners down in hundreds.

"I never was as light-hearted in all my life

"and I never was as proud of my countrymen.

"Each company had two pipers playing behind them as they advanced.

"They played A Nation Once Again, '98 and several other tunes.

"Everyone was so light-hearted

"that all they wanted was to reach the Germans."

I...

I find that paragraph particularly interesting, that...

Why are you so light-hearted at

the prospect of coming out into this wide, open expanse to kill people?

How is it possible to feel light-hearted?

Well, these men, first and foremost, had become soldiers.

And their job was to kill.

That's what they were trained for, it's what they were motivated for.

They'd been at the front for nine months, eight months,

this is the start of September. They knew that the Ulster Division

and the men from the Fountain in Derry and that, who were the UVF,

had already made a name for themselves

and retaken the Schwaben Redoubt on July 1st,

which was just weeks before.

So there was a competitive element to begin with.

Now your chance to prove, how good are you?

-Like going into the boxing ring.

-Sure.

# Viva la, for Ireland's right... #

The Irishmen won a resounding victory at Guillemont.

It earned them a special mention

by the commander of the British forces in France, General Haig.

The Irish regiments participating in the capture of Guillemont

on Sunday behaved with the greatest dash and gallantry,

and took no small share in the success achieved.

Haig's praise was of particular significance.

The Easter Rising had cast doubt

on the loyalties of Catholic Irish troops.

The executions of the leaders of the rebellion

had shifted public opinion in large parts of Ireland

in favour of the rebels and their cause.

Tom Kettle, the company commander with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers

expressed what many Irish soldiers felt.

"These men will go down in history as heroes and martyrs.

"And I will go down, if I go down at all, as a bloody British officer."

Tom Kettle was a former Nationalist MP

and well-known journalist.

Like Edward Friel,

he left his family to fight in the 16th Irish Division.

He was given the option

of taking an administrative role

and he decided, no, he'd stay and, as he called them,

he'd stay with his "beloved Fusiliers".

So he had a loyalty to his men.

What about his family, then, like?

What was his...?

-That's a very good point, Mark.

-It's a very good point.

He made a choice between his family or the men he was with.

-Yeah.

-You know, that's a vital point, Mark, I think,

that this man had a choice.

-Was it his little baby Betty back in Dublin...

-Yeah.

..or was it his Dublin Fusiliers back in France?

In a trench in this field near the village of Guillemont,

Tom Kettle wrote a poem to explain to his daughter

the choice he had made.

"In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown

"To beauty proud as was your mother's prime.

"In that desired, delayed, incredible time

"You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own

"And the dear heart that was your baby's throne

"To dice with death and, oh, they'll give you rhyme and reason.

"Some will call the thing sublime

"And some decry it in a knowing tone.

"So here, while the mad guns curse overhead

"And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor

"Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead

"Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor

"But for a dream, born in a herdsmen's shed

"And for the secret Scripture of the poor."

A few days after Tom wrote his poem for his daughter Betty,

the 16th Irish Division took part in an attack

on the ruins of this village - Ginchy.

Ginchy is only 1,000 yards from Guillemont,

the German strong point that the Irish had just captured.

As troops were moved to the Ginchy front line,

Father Willie Doyle was amongst those crossing the battlefield

of a few days earlier.

"The wounded, at least I hope so, had all been removed.

"But the dead lay there stiff and stark with open, staring eyes,

"just as they had fallen.

"Good God, such a sight!

"I had try to prepare myself for this,

"but all I had read or pictured gave me little idea of the reality.

"Some lay as if they were sleeping quietly,

"others had died in agony

"or had had the life crushed out of them by mortal fear.

"In the bottom of one hole lay a British and a German soldier,

"locked in a deadly embrace.

"Neither had any weapon,

"but they had fought on to the bitter end.

"Another couple seemed to have realised

"that their horrible struggle was none of their making

"and that they were both children of the same god.

"They had died hand in hand, praying for and forgiving one another.

"A third face crossed my eye -

"a tall, strikingly handsome young German,

"not more I should say than 18.

"He lay there calm and peaceful,

"with a smile of happiness on his face,

"as if he had a glimpse of heaven before he died.

"Ah, if only his poor mother could have seen her boy,

"it would have soothed the pain of her broken heart."

In the afternoon of the 9th September,

the Irish attacked over these fields.

Suffering from heavy losses from shellfire,

they fought their way through to the ruins of Ginchy.

"All units were mixed up, but they were all Irishmen.

"They were cheering and cheering and cheering like mad.

"It was hell let loose.

"There was a machinegun playing on us nearby and we all made for it.

"At this moment, we caught our first sight of the Huns.

"Some of them had their hands up,

"others were kneeling and holding their arms out to us.

"To the everlasting good name of the Irish soldiery,

"not one of these Huns,

"some of whom had been engaged in slaughtering our men

"up to the very last moment, was killed.

"I did not see a single instance

"of a prisoner being shot or bayoneted.

"When you remember that our men

"were now worked up to a frenzy of excitement,

"this crowning act of mercy to their foes

"is surely to their eternal credit.

"They could feel pity, even in their rage."

The 16th Irish Division succeeded in capturing Ginchy,

but at a terrible cost.

Half of the attacking force were either killed or wounded.

Among the dead was Tom Kettle.

Edward Friel, too, was killed at Ginchy.

He is one of the 756 Derry men who died in the Great War

and are commemorated on Derry's Diamond War Memorial.

Half of the names on the memorial are from the Protestant community.

The other half were Catholics, like Edward Friel.

BUGLER PLAYS THE LAST POST

But the war dead were commemorated very differently

in the two communities.

Again, we record our feelings of gratitude to the brave men

of the 36th Ulster Division

who, by their glorious conduct in that battle,

made an imperishable name for themselves and our province

and whose heroism will never be forgotten

so long as the British Commonwealth lasts.

The sacrifice of the Ulster Division on the Somme

became a defining event for Northern Irish identity

and is still remembered with great pride in the Unionist community.

In the Republic, it took decades

before Irish soldiers of the First World War

received proper recognition.

-TV REPORTER:

-Pipers from the Irish Army and the Royal Irish Regiment

played as Queen Elizabeth, Mary McAleese and King Albert

approached the tower,

which was officially inaugurated by the Irish president.

An important step was the opening of a cross-border memorial in Belgium -

the Island of Ireland Round Tower and Peace Park in 1998.

Republicans in the North have also begun to honour the war dead.

In 2002, Belfast's first Sinn Fein Lord Mayor

was the first Republican to lay a wreath

at the cenotaph at Belfast City Hall.

100 years after the Battle of the Somme,

political divisions have made way to the recognition

that German shells and bullets didn't discriminate

between Nationalists and Unionists.

They just killed.

I was thinking earlier of Granny.

Our granny, who was five months old when he had his last visit home.

-This tiny little baby.

-Yeah.

I think, if Granny were around,

she'd be incredibly moved that we've been here and we've seen it.

And...her uncle,

-that she got to meet once...

-Mm-hm.

..we're remembering him.

And there's a legacy.

-And that is being passed on.

-Mm.

-My middle name is James...

-Mm-hm.

-..after him.

-Yeah.

And my dad's middle name is James.

-And my son's middle name is James.

-Well, there you are.

And, I mean, when I talk to my son, as he gets older,

and he sees the picture we have of him in our house,

there'll be more realism and he'll know.

And he'll know the courage of, er...

A member of the family.

..of Uncle Jim, I suppose, in what he had to go through.