(For years now I’ve struggled to get to the heart of the experience of the young men who fought the First World War. This will probably be my last piece of writing about that war. It seems to me that the best way to express the essential meaning of their experience – the best way to try to give those young men a voice – is to imagine one British Tommy telling us his story.)
Saturday morning, the First of July, 1916. We British soldiers find ourselves near the Somme River in France.
The ladders are propped against the parapet. I peer through a periscope over the top of our trench.
Our lieutenant tells our sergeant it’s time to go over the top. The sergeant begins yelling: “Step up. Fix bayonets. Steady now, lads. First wave ready. Advance. Over the top!”
As we men go on over, our sergeant tells each of us, “C’mon lad, courage”. When a private hesitates, the sergeant jokes, “C’mon, do you want to live forever?”
I place my hands on the uppermost sandbag. I leap up and out.
The mud is like porridge. “Keep going!” the British officers yell at us. “Keep on! No matter what! Kill the Bosch! Shoot the Huns in the head!”
I know the score: it’s the Germans or us. These thoughts warm my blood. It’s all up to me, and I aim to settle things, to put more Germans beyond the power to harm us.
Shoulder to shoulder, we walk slowly into No Man’s Land. We try to crawl over or under the barbed wire as we use our cutters. I see hundreds of us all messed up on the wire. Dozens around me die there and hang there.
We are exposed, sitting ducks, and what next befalls us befalls us with sudden fury. German machine guns go active. Jerry lets us have it. Jerry lets hell loose on us.
The German gunners fire 450 rounds per minute. They don’t even have to aim. They just fire and we British boys go down in waves.
German gunners rip us to pieces. Cut us to ribbons. Mow down row after row of lads.
Men are dropping right and left. I lay with the dead under the wire. So many of us are clinging to life surrounded by corpses.
I can’t see through the fog. I can’t hear through the hurricane of noise. The land beneath me is trembling and shaking. This battle is ripping the world off its hinges.
I see fellows shot down. Buried alive. Burnt to death with fire cannisters. Soon thousands lay where they’ve fallen, bleeding to death. Moaning, groaning, writhing, crying for help, cursing, shouting, shaking, sobbing, screaming, yelling. Every lad who rises to his feet is shot down again by a German sniper.
After dark, we limp away from the battlefield and we carry away from the line what is left of our company. About sixty men out of our 250 stagger down a dusty road. Each man, his uniform caked in mud and blood, is disheveled and streaked with grime. Each man looks haggard and dazed as he drags and shuffles his body along. Each man’s face is as white as a sheet and his hollow and glassy stare.
We’ve been to Hell and back and remain in shock. Our legs can carry us no further. A lame soldier leads a blinded soldier. One soldier has been horribly mutilated and is immediately loaded onto a wagon by stretcher bearers who are speechless and horror-struck.
Our small band of walking wounded gets into three wagons. We learn on Monday that of the 200,000 men sent into No Man’s Land on Saturday and Sunday, 30,000 were killed and 60,000 were wounded.
Until we came across the Channel, our lives had been blessed. We were fair-haired lads, all smiles, with hopes and dreams for our futures, with plans to shake the world. We had a sense of adventure and a sense of wonder. Our eyes were serene and radiant, our faces glowing, gleaming, eager. All our limbs were intact, we were sane, we were happy, we were whole.
Ever since we got here to the Western Front, we’ve wanted to be noble and strong and brave, to have a soul of iron, to meet the war with dignity, to live our lives worthy of honor.
Through all our suffering, we’ve remained wistful for the happy life of our youth. A simple thing like a bicycle ride through the countryside is now a sublime memory. We ache for home, but home has never felt so far away. Letters from loved ones ease our pain.
Our joys are simple ones. A singing lark or thrush, a wash and a shave, cigarettes or a tobacco pipe, a mug of coffee or tea, a shot of rum, a huddle with biscuits or bread, a breakfast of eggs and bacon and toast with marmalade, a parcel from home with gingerbread, strawberries, chocolate, a tart.
Each of us dreams of the girl whose last letter to us rests on our knee. We reach into our pocket, take out a leather fold, look at and kiss her photo, and tell our fellow Tommies, “she’s waiting for me”.
Year after year, we, Europe’s youth and pride, the pinnacle and promise of human civilization, spend our days and nights in the trenches. We wake up each morning in the ground, in the dirt, in the mud. Down here in the icy, sodden, putrid ditches. Down here with the grime and the slime. Down here with the lice and the rats – huge rats, legions of rats.
Most days the rain sluices down on us. We live in the knee-high water that stinks and we’re soaked, chilled, and wretched. And always, the swarms of flies – flies by the millions.
The thundering noise never stops. Whistling, whipping bullets. Zwiss, zwiss, zwiss. Raging machine guns. Tat-tat-tat, tat-tat-tat. Bursting, exploding shells. Swiing, crash, clang.
The lead and the steel are always flinging toward us. Ammo rains from the sky.
I look at my fellow soldiers, fallen, wounded. One gropes his neck with his finger. One clutches his abdomen with his fist. One grasps his hand over the gash in his forehead. That one is shot in the head. That one is charred. That one’s torso is ripped open, as if by an ax. This one is blind for life. This one is crippled for life. And this one has wounds beyond the skilled work of any surgeon.
And always, everywhere, the dead. The only winner of this war is Death. Death has us by the throat. Death has free run of the place.
So often, we walk a few feet from the bodies. So many corpses. Face down, sprawled out, propped against a tree, piled up, stiff, pale, waxy, cold.
More and more young men, in the prime of their life, go marching into No Man’s Land, never to return. So much promise left on the ash heap, so much potential felled, so much human worth squandered.
The dead, their hair matted with dried blood, were our companions. Those who dropped to the ground and never got back up – we knew them and we loved them.
The Western Front is a slaughterhouse, a Valley of Death, an Inferno. The Battle of the Somme is a Meat Machine, being fed with live men, churning out corpses.
“This hell,” we say. “They have sent us here to die.” It is not a just world. It is not a moral universe.
We have no tears left. We are callous. And yet we still have each other.
We start out curious. “Where you from?” “What did you work at?” “What’s the news?” Some are liked at once. “Clever chap.” “Good man.” And then we are bound by the experiences of war into a rough, protective care.
We share the food in our parcels from home. We share our magazines: Bystander, Burlington, Country Life, Tatler, Punch. We share in games of poker and bridge as we drink and smoke and jibe and laugh and compete to say wise and witty things.
We’ve been robbed of a beautiful and happy way of life. But again and again, we step forward, challenging fate, and we stick at it, vowing to see it through.
And we still love life. In fact, we appreciate the gift of life more than ever. We drain even deeper the cup of life. Many of us hum and sing and remain quietly cheerful.
Through the danger, through the pain, our spirits are lifted into fellowship. Bonds woven with sorrow are woven with kindness. We champion each other’s good. “What I have is yours.”
And maybe that’s all we can teach you. Through all adversity, through the worst experiences life hands you, keep your visceral sense of the value of camaraderie, friendship, kinship. Are you all wounded in some way? Remember that there is nothing more sublime than watching a man help another man who is just a little more wounded than he is.
Your sense of history, place, and character are all weaved together in this piece.
“ Until we came across the Channel, our lives had been blessed. We were fair-haired lads, all smiles, with hopes and dreams for our futures, with plans to shake the world. We had a sense of adventure and a sense of wonder. Our eyes were serene and radiant, our faces glowing, gleaming, eager. All our limbs were intact, we were sane, we were happy, we were whole.
Ever since we got here to the Western Front, we’ve wanted to be noble and strong and brave, to have a soul of iron, to meet the war with dignity, to live our lives worthy of honor.”
Wonderful writing Mike. Very gripping and evocative.