The Somme War Walks

The First World War was so terrible that it haunts us, even 80 years on.

Of all its battles, something is especially dreadful about the Somme.

Its first day was the bloodiest in British history.

The battle was fought from a bright July to a bitter November.

On average, 3 lives were lost for every 12 inches of ground gained.

It's easy to understand why, when you walk over the uplands above the River Somme.

These open, rolling slopes were swept by machine guns and shellfire.

The lethal evidence of war still lies in the fields of the Somme.

A bomb disposal team is on standby to collect what the ploughs turn up.

Last year it was 90 tons, and this year will be much the same.

One and three quarter million shells were fired by the British

in the first week of the campaign.

A third of them didn't explode and lie here still.

IN FRENCH:

It's all right for the professionals to handle these shells, but the public should leave them well alone.

Like the best French wines,

fused explosive doesn't travel well.

The best place to start a tour of the Somme is Albert.

80 years ago, it was just 4 miles behind the British front line,

and was transformed from a sleepy market town into a transit camp for the army.

The Germans shelled the town's basilica because it was an artillery spotting post.

Virgin Mary fell from her pedestal.

80 years later, she's back on top.

The town's fortunes have risen with her. Albert has finally profited from the war - as a tourist centre.

This is a very big church for a very small town.

Albert had been a pilgrimage centre in the Middle Ages, but somehow it never quite caught on.

In 1916, though, there were British pilgrims here aplenty.

Some were marching along this road, going up to the front line only a couple of miles away.

Others came out of the line hunting for omelettes, chips and vin blanc.

I think I'll follow their example!

# Oh, oh, oh, it's a lovely war!

# What do we want with eggs and ham?

# When we've got plum and apple jam... #

One of the pleasures of a town like Albert is ogling the patisserie.

Sticky delights were an impossible dream to soldiers going up to the line in 1916.

They lived on things like bully beef, McConachie's meat stew, hardtack biscuits,

and ever-present plum and apple jam.

This Roman road slashes across the battlefield.

It runs ten miles from Albert, held by the British, to Bapaume, in German hands.

The British hoped to clear this relatively easily

and push on to Bapaume to use their cavalry.

It turned out to be the longest ten miles in British military history.

By early 1916,

the war had fossilised into a line from Switzerland to the North Sea.

Britain and France planned to advance,

but the French were attacked at Verdun, so Britain led the offensive.

This preserved trench gives a good feel for what trenches were like in 1916.

They were dug zigzag, with bays and traverses, to prevent a shell burst from going all the way along.

They'd have been deeper then, and men would have walked on duckboards in the bottom to try and keep dry.

To see the enemy, they'd step up onto a fire step...and look over.

The British planned to smash their way out of the trench war.

They gathered 1,500 guns of every calibre.

The week-long bombardment before the attack was the most awesome in the history of war up to that time.

The Western Front was laced with barbed wire. There were great belts of it in front of the trenches,

strung between these pickets, which are still some of the most durable features of the landscape.

The British bombardment had been designed to cut the German wire.

But too much of it remained intact.

News that the wire wasn't being cut quickly reached the British command. But the reports were largely ignored.

The attack timetable overruled reality, and bombardment continued.

Professor Westmann was a German medical officer in the front line.

-GERMAN ACCENT:

-Seven days and seven nights.

Soldiers in the bunkers became hysterical.

They wanted to run out

and fights developed to keep them in the comparative safety of our deep bunkers.

We had nothing to eat and nothing to drink,

but constantly shell after shell burst upon us.

The sound and fury of the guns drove many to the edge of despair.

But it didn't kill them.

Most British shells were absolutely no use against deep German dugouts.

They were immaculately prepared, supported with timber, and some even had wood panelling.

This one has collapsed, 80 years after it was first dug, after years of having tractors driven over it.

The British didn't rely on guns alone.

The Somme was a scene of underground war. As a prelude to the assault,

the British dug tunnels to lay 19 mines beneath key German strong points.

Today, their craters still scar the landscape.

This is the largest of them - Lochnagar Crater.

It took 66,000lbs of explosive to make this hole.

Most of the mines were blown at 7.28, 2 minutes before the main attack began,

in what was then the largest ever man-made sound.

They killed hundreds of Germans, but they didn't solve the infantry's real problems.

The mines only dealt with a small part of the German defences.

They also signalled that the attack, long expected, was about to begin.

When the British advanced, the guns fired onto German reserve positions,

allowing front-line troops to leave their bunkers.

Machine gunners crawled out of the bunkers,

dirty, full of blood from the blood of their fallen comrades,

and opened up terrific fire.

This piece of precision machinery

meant death for thousands of British soldiers that bright summer's morning.

It's the German 1908 machine gun. Although it's heavy -

it takes two men to comfortably lift it - the Germans had plenty of time to get it up from their bunkers

and set it up in the wreckage of trenches or in shell holes.

It has a range of over 2,000 yards,

and in country like this the machine gun is king.

'Amateur historian Bill Turner knows the Somme better than most.

'He has a passionate interest in the Accrington Pals,'

a battalion of volunteers raised in Lancashire in 1914.

The Accringtons were recruited by the town's Lord Mayor in response to Lord Kitchener's call for men.

There were dozens of similar battalions waiting in the Somme trenches on 1st July, 1916.

They believed their country needed them. They also believed in the preparations made by high command.

Bill, there's not much left of it, but this was the front-line trench form which the Accringtons attacked.

Yes, it was indeed.

The Charlie company were at this end of the trench, and it was the starting point for the whole attack.

-What sort of men were they?

-Oh, they represented the community.

They were miners, engineers, textile workers, office workers, shop assistants,

young boys who should have been at home with their mothers.

There were family men who had several children.

-What did they expect from the battle of the Somme?

-I think they thought

it would be the turning point.

All they'd enlisted and trained for would culminate in the battle, ending the war.

The Accringtons were on the northern flank of the main British attack.

All along the 18-mile front,

the first wave of 60,000 men was waiting for the signal to go.

The morning of July 1st was clear and bright.

The sun glinted off tin triangles the troops wore on their backs so planes could track their progress.

They were already tired by the time they got this far.

Thank you.

Yes, they would be exhausted.

They'd travelled seven miles overnight. They were heavily laden.

-What sort of things were they carrying?

-They had full pack on.

Some would have a shovel, some a pick.

The intention was not so much to attack.

They would be going across, really, to consolidate the German trenches,

hopefully destroyed by shellfire.

We did think that when the time came, there would be nothing alive when we went over there.

We'd never been over. We didn't know what to expect. We looked forward to it!

We expected that when we did go over the top, we would find it just a cakewalk.

As soon as men left the trenches, they came under fire.

They were trying to get through the gaps in the wire and the German fire concentrated on those gaps.

The four lines never really got off to a start from here on.

The attack had really failed.

The German machine gunners had our line taped to an inch,

and our fellas, they just went down

like sickled grain.

We got halfway across and then the two machine guns found us.

The air was full of bullets. One went between my fingers.

The bullet's there before you know. Then you see the bleeding and feel the pain in your leg.

Not a living soldier was to be seen.

There was dead and dying all over the place.

This is as far as many of them got -

just 100 yards from the front line.

Almost 600 of the 720-strong battalion

were killed or wounded in just 20 minutes.

Today, the cemeteries run along the British front line,

where so many soldiers were killed before they'd even seen their enemy.

20 minutes' brisk walk from where the Accringtons went over the top,

the Lancashire Fusiliers were waiting their turn.

Overnight, they'd crept into a sunken lane in no-man's-land, 100 yards from the Germans.

An army cameraman filmed them in the lane before they left its shelter.

They were shelled just after first light. But at 7.30, whistles blew and they went over the top.

There were German machine guns in the wood edge, more on the far slope.

At this range, the gunners could scarcely miss.

The attackers were stopped dead as soon as they crossed the lip of the sunken road.

A few wounded survivors crashed back into it. Corporal George Ashurst tells us what it was like.

"Picking myself up and looking round, my God, what a sight. The whole road was strewn with dead and dying men.

"Some were talking deliriously, others calling for help and water."

The Fusiliers' commanding officer, Colonel Martin Magniac, was here.

He sent a message to headquarters, telling them what had happened.

"I tried two advances. Both failed. We are mown down by machine-gun fire and only get a few yards beyond road.

"If you wish, I will of course attack."

Brigade HQ cancelled the next attack, but, tragically, Magniac had already ordered his reserve forward.

Only one officer and three men got even this far.

Along two-thirds of the British front line, the story was the same.

Confused reports came back, and fresh troops were thrown in to reinforce failure.

Only in the south did some divisions reach their objectives,

and speedy German counter-attacks made some gains difficult to hold.

Some attackers were killed outright.

Others were hit and took refuge in shell holes like this.

They carried field dressings.

These were really pads of gauze with cords to tie them on -

pathetically inadequate for many wounds.

Some wounded managed to crawl back to British lines after dark. Others were dragged to safety by mates.

But many simply bled to death here.

Often, they were in shell holes like this for days.

'The luckier ones made their way to field dressing stations, sometimes in ruined houses near the front.

'One was in the cellar of a house in Auchonvillers.

'It's now owned by a British woman, Avril Williams.'

-Hello, how are you?

-Hello. Come in.

I've come to see your wonderful cellar, if I may.

-Avril, this was a dressing station in 1916.

-Mm-hm.

-How do you know?

Because of the graffiti that was left. It shows stretcher-bearers.

There's one here - J Gay, 1st 4th Ox/Bucks.

-There's a carved stretcher-bearer in the stone, so it had to be a stretcher-bearers' post.

-Let's look.

Down here we have a signalman, JE Hargreaves, 1918, Oswaldtwistle.

And there's his flags. It's the only 1918 one we have.

-Have you found anything else down here?

-Yes. Lots of bits and pieces.

We found bullets of all countries.

Buttons. We found coins - English.

This was on the floor, obviously to stop them sinking in the mud.

We found two cap badges. That's the Canterburies'.

-They retook Auchonvillers in 1918.

-Yes.

And then we found these - morphine.

-We found seven.

-It's a morphine ampoule?

-Mm-hm.

-How was that administered?

Apparently, it was too big a dose for one person,

so as the stretcher-bearers brought the injured up...

If they had no chance, and they were in terrible pain, they went along the line pushing a little in.

-Pushing it in?

-They'd take off the top and put it into a needle. They were huge needles.

They'd go along, injecting as they went, to ease the pain and get them on their way.

By nightfall on the 1st of July, the British army had suffered 57,000 casualties,

about half the men who'd taken part in the attack.

Many were from the Pals' battalions.

Men from the same streets and factories who'd joined up together had died together. In return,

they'd taken a few miles of German front line - more a devil's bargain

than the breakthrough Britain had hoped for.

But the Battle of the Somme was just beginning.

It took two days for the full scale of the disaster to filter through to British commanders.

It was longer still before the British public realised what had happened.

But there were sections of the line where gains could be exploited.

Kitchener's volunteer army had been terribly bloodied, but it had learnt lessons. Over the coming months,

thousands more British soldiers were poured into the struggle, until more than a million had been committed.

In war, it's often the simplest things that work best.

Many British commanders had learnt from the 1st of July

and argued that a night attack would make those German machine guns much less effective.

On the night of 13th-14th July,

British troops assembled in a valley at the foot of the German-held ridge.

They were guided into position by thousands of yards of white tape,

laboriously surveyed in by map and compass.

The infantry waited in no-man's-land

while a lightning bombardment hit German positions, then they attacked.

In the darkness, the German machine gunners were blind

and the British were able to get through the wire with few casualties. The attack was a success.

Throughout July, the British crept on inch by bloody inch.

But they were stalled here

for much of the summer.

These Somme woods are still gashed by trench systems and speckled by shell holes.

In summer 1916, they were full of undergrowth. British shelling had felled trees, to worsen the tangle.

They were ideal nests for their German defenders.

Each of the Somme woods had its own mythology. Mametz Wood had bitter memories for the 38th Welsh Division.

Delville Wood was known with reason as Devil's Wood.

And then there was High Wood, ghastly by day, ghostly by night - the rottenest place on the Somme.

If the woods proved a nightmare,

the heavily fortified villages and hamlets were no better.

Some of the heaviest fighting on the Somme took place along the Roman road from Albert to Bapaume.

The villages today show few signs of the intensity of the fighting.

But every cellar was a strong point, every open courtyard a deathtrap.

There's evidence enough stacked in one front garden -

thousands of shrapnel shells fired by the British in an attempt to dislodge resolute German defenders.

Pozieres, on the Roman road in the very centre of the battlefield,

was reduced to stinking rubble by bombardments in July and August.

All this was built up after the war.

It's typical of the ghastly slogging match that the Somme had now become

that it took the Australians, newly arrived on this front, 23,000 men to take this village.

Many Australians were deeply disillusioned.

One wrote that he'd had enough of British staff, methods and bungling.

The growing infantry casualties on the Somme were becoming intolerable.

The British desperately needed something that could blunt the devastating power of the machine gun.

They pinned hopes on a lumbering hunk of metal almost as dangerous to its drivers as to the enemy.

Early on the morning of the 15th of September, tanks went into action here for the first time ever.

The first was used to clear a German trench on the edge of Delville Wood.

Four in High Wood fared badly amongst tree stumps.

Many more swayed and clattered over this bare, open crest behind me,

making for the village of Flers.

A British pilot looked down on the scene and said,

"A tank is walking up the main street of Flers with the British army cheering behind it."

But the cheers faded as the tanks proved themselves to be too slow and mechanically unreliable

to make the war-winning breakthrough.

Heavy autumn rains turned the chalky soil of the Somme into a quagmire.

The dream of a breakthrough became as distant as the memory of summer.

The battle squelched to a halt in November, with the British still short of Bapaume.

They were dug in on these bare ridges, with the wind keening across.

All around, a landscape of wrecked tanks and corpses.

Life in these trenches was close to unbearable.

It was two miles to carry stretcher cases to the nearest light railway.

The army was losing 1,000 men a week with frostbite and trench foot.

The Thiepval memorial dominates the skyline of the Somme.

On it are inscribed more than 70,000 names.

These are the men who have no known graves.

These great pillars are a monument

to the old world of brass bands and cricket fields, pithead cottages and broad acres.

Among the writers, artists and musicians commemorated here is George Butterworth,

whose music and songs have become an epitaph to the lost age.

Those whose bodies WERE recovered lie in 188 British and Commonwealth cemeteries throughout the region.

It's impossible to visit the Somme without being struck by the sheer scale of the human sacrifice.

Some of these soldiers died in July, expecting a quick breakthrough.

Others died in a muddy slog that went on till November.

Even now, historians still argue about what it all achieved.

The Allies had suffered over 600,000 casualties, the Germans perhaps more.

But the British army had lost something else - its innocence.

It had lost its belief that the power of patriotism and the human spirit

could triumph over the machine gun and the shell.