TOM MORGAN'S SOMME DIARY - PART 6

THIEPVAL, GOMMECOURT

Leaving Mansell Copse, I visited many other sites and memorials of this Southern part of the Somme Battlefield. This diary doesn't mention them all; I had, at the outset, a clear view of how its sections would be written to follow each other and I have managed to keep to the original plan. If I were to write about every interesting or moving place which I visited, then the diary would run and run.

I left Mametz and headed back for the Albert-Bapaume Road, crossing it near Pozieres and passing the rebuilt Mouquet Farm on the right. This short journey took me through an area which saw heavy fighting, and there are many cemeteries here. Not all of them are immediately visible from the road, but the Commonwealth War Graves Commission signposts point them all out.

In 1914, a British Red Cross unit was sent out to France, under the direction of the brilliant Fabian Ware. He and his groups of enthusiastic colleagues, too old to join the army, had offered to serve their country's war effort in this humanitarian way. They helped tend the wounded, prepared lists of German prisoners for despatch to the organisation's HQ in Geneva, and so on. Ware noticed that there was no real organisation within the army for the burial of the dead, and so his unit took on this responsibility also, within the area of their immediate activities. Eventually, Ware and his little unit came to work almost exclusively on burials, and they had soon produced a well-organised cemetery near Bethune. It occurred to Ware, however, that although he had buried many of the fallen and marked their graves with names, he had not produced any list or record of these burials. The graves were there, but hardly anyone knew it. Thinking about the whole of the fighting area, Ware realised that there must have already been thousands of isolated, unrecorded burials. Ware was a doer and a motivator and he determined to do something about this state of affairs. He explained and persuaded. Where he found opposition from one authority, he circumvented it and got the support of a higher one. Eventually, with officer's rank to guarantee co-operation form the various Army Commanders, Ware found himself the head of the Army's Graves Registration Unit.

From this simple beginning, grew the Imperial War Graves Commission, with Ware as Director. The commission's work is apparent everywhere on the Somme. There are about 150,000 graves in 242 cemeteries in the Somme area. But not all of the fallen have graves. 73,357 men from the United Kingdom still lie undiscovered. These are the Missing and they have their memorial at:

THIEPVAL

The village is a very, very small community, but the Memorial which stands near the site of the old pre-war Chateau is huge - the largest of the Memorials to the Missing of the Western front both in terms of its size and the numbers commemorated. It was also the last to be built. The memorial is made of brick and stone, a massive construction of arches and piers, giving dozens of wall-surfaces to contain the carved, seemingly endless list of names.

It was evening when I arrived, and I was quite alone, which was fitting really, because I had come here to look for just one name among the tens of thousands, and after a long search through the many volumes of the memorial register, I found it. On Pier 6, Face B of the Memorial was the name of Pte. Tom Harper, of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, who died on 16 September, 1916, aged 20.

A promise, made to no-one in particular except myself, had been kept.

For as many years as I can remember, I have visited my town war memorial in the week before November 11th. There is always a small "Field of Remembrance" - a small area marked out in the grass near the memorial and here people stick the little wooden crosses which the Royal British Legion sell at this time of year. I began as a small boy, accompanying my uncle when he placed a cross in memory of his son, killed in action in France, 1940. After my uncle died, I carried on the tradition. There was always a cross placed among all the others and written on it were the words "In memory of my brother, Tom Harper, died in France, 1916." Every year I looked for a cross in memory of Tom Harper and every year there was one, until 1988. When November 10th came and no cross had appeared, I placed one there myself and have done so each year since. Now I had visited Tom Harper's memorial which, although his name occupies only a tiny part of it, is visible for miles around, from many parts of the Somme Battlefields.

The Memorial was built on the high ground behind the German front line trenches which were attacked on 1st July, 1916, by the 16th Northumberland Fusiliers. It was designed to contain the names of all the United Kingdom Missing between 1915, when British units first arrived on the Somme, and the German withdrawal of 1917, but there are a few exceptions to this rule because the Memorial contains the names of about 850 South Africans and one soldier from the 1st Battalion, the West India Regiment - a Regiment which never served on the Western Front during the war. The explanation is that in August, 1914, when war was declared with Germany, there was one young officer at home on sick leave from India.  This was Lieutenant Frederick Harvey King, whose home was in Hendon, London. Lieut. King volunteered for immediate service overseas and was not returned to his own regiment, but was attached to the 2nd. Battalion Duke of Wellington's (West Riding) Regiment and he was serving with this battalion when he was killed on 12th October, 1916,  near Guedecourt, aged 27.

As the work of building the Memorial was in progress, in the late 1920s and early 30s, it was decided to commemorate also the joint effort made on the Somme by British and French forces. So on the lower ground beyond the memorial, on the side where the attack on Thiepval took place, a joint Anglo-French cemetery was laid out. This contains the graves of 300 French and 300 British soldiers. The bodies were brought here from all over the Somme during one of the last great battlefield searches and the majority of the British burials are unidentified. Ironically, this process of bringing in bodies for burial here had already happened in reverse, for when the land for the memorial was being cleared, the contractors were given leave to remove several small battlefield cemeteries, and so the fallen of Thiepval were moveout into cemeteries in other areas.

Photo © Lucy Morgan, 1997

The cemetery stands on the site of the German front-line trench of 1st July, 1916. This is where another of those memorable little events, recorded by Martin Middlebrook in his "First Day on the Somme" took place; this is where the German defenders, seeing their enemy's attack faltering, climbed up onto their parapet, and taunted the British, calling them to come on.

As I had been looking for Tom Harper's name on the Memorial, I had noticed that there had been some maintenance work going on. Some of the stone blocks forming the faces of the piers into which the names are carved, had become weathered and parts of them had had to be removed. I could see how this had been done. The weathered blocks had been cut into vertical sections using an angle-grinder, and then the sections, about an inch wide, had been chiselled out. In other places

I could see places chiselled out ready to take new blocks, and there were also new, bare blocks set into place, waiting to be carved. As I walked around the memorial on my way back to my car, I caught site of a pile of snow-white stone lying among the trees surrounding the site. These were the broken-up strips of stone, cut away from the sections under repair. I found a piece with just one unbroken letter on it - a "T."   T for Tom Harper. T for Tom Morgan. T for Thiepval. I brought it home.

By the time I got back to the car, it was about 7 p.m. but still light. I drove to the left, through the village of Thiepval, and on to the Ulster Memorial Tower. From here the road swung left, becoming what the men of 1916 called Mill Road, running down to the marshy valley of the Ancre, and on towards Beaumont Hamel.

LOST IN THE TRENCHES

I stopped off at my camper for a bite to eat and a coffee. I had already travelled over a great part of the Somme on this day, beginning with Bapaume and Morchies, on to Albert, to the villages of the Southern Sector, to Thiepval and back home. Now I had one more journey planned. This was a late-evening visit to Gommecourt, before it got dark.

Gommecourt village lay inside the German lines, which followed the line of the western boundary of the Chateau. This was the part of the front which had been the home of the 46th (North Midland Division) for some time. They had not been brought in to the area specially to take part in the 1st July attack, as they were already there, based around Fonquevillers, to the North-West of Gommecourt. The plan was for a joint attack on the village, the 46th Division attacking from the North, and the 58th (London) Division from the South. The idea was to attack from either side of the village, with the two divisions linking up behind it. The Midlanders to the North did not get very far. It was the same old story - machine guns opened fire on the advancing troops and the German wire was as far as any of them got. To the South, however, the Londoners did very well, and got into and well beyond the German front-line trenches in quite good time, where they waited for the Northern arm of the attack to make contact. This contact, of course, never came, in spite of a renewed attempt from the North during the afternoon. Eventually, the Southern successes were all lost as the men in the German trenches gave up their positions and retired to their starting-points. The losses caused by the attack on Gommecourt were very heavy, and yet the whole attack was perhaps unnecessary, as it was a deliberate diversion, designed to make the Germans believe that the main thrust of the Somme attack was to be launched here.

For weeks, the commanders of the attacking divisions had been ordered to make their preparations as obvious as possible. They did this well, but the secret was never passed on to the men. The Germans were suitably deceived, and a strong force was ready to repel the attack which, they believed, was obviously coming in this sector. This alone meant that the deceit has succeeded. The attack itself could just have been a token one, to continue the deception for an hour or so. Why a continuation of a failed attack was ordered in this sector in the afternoon, I will never know.

I drove to Fonquevillers, which my fellow townsmen usually referred to as "Fonky Bleedin' Villas" and on to the edge of the Gommecourt Park, the land belonging to the chateau, which created the salient into the British lines which the double attack was supposed to bite off and swallow. Here, at Gommecourt Wood New Cemetery, were the graves of my local territorial battalion members buried in the middle of the No-Man's Land where they fell. I sat and looked at the cemetery register, looking for the names men of my local battalion, hoping to identify, from personal details furnished by their nest-of-kin, which of them came from my town. In this I was unsuccessful, for most of the men from the South Staffordshire Regiment had no family details provided by their relatives, and I found only one positive identification from the cemetery register.

By the time I had checked all 739 register entries, it was getting dark and I decided to set off for home at Beaumont Hamel. Along the road from the cemetery, was the dark shape of the trees of the chateau grounds, and I knew that the German front line trenches were still to be found around the perimeter of the wood. But, as the men of the 46th Division had failed to reach Gommecourt, just a few hundred yards along this road, I decided that I would not allow myself to reach the village either, and so I set off to return the way I had come.

The signposting of French roads is excellent, even in these quite remote villages, so it was entirely my own fault that I took a wrong turning somewhere, and found myself lost. Night had fallen now, and no features were visible beyond the road ahead, picked out by my headlights. There were no stars visible to gauge my direction, and I followed roads through villages I had never heard of. At one point, the white stone portico of a cemetery appeared out of the darkness, startling me. I guessed the direction I was looking for and did my best to follow it, but to no avail. I had a map with me, but the light in my car was not strong enough to let me read it properly. In this part of France, villages are very close together and I pinned my hopes on the possibility that eventually I would reach a village I knew, but this did not happen. Eventually, I found myself on a straight road, with no lights anywhere in sight. I drove along this road for about ten minutes, without passing through any village, and decided to turn back the way I had come.

I felt like the soldiers whose accounts I had read - those who for one reason or another had been compelled to make a journey along the trench-lines by night and had subsequently got quite lost. All orientation was gone, and I had no idea where I was. I took turnings here and there, but never saw any village or feature which I recognised. After about half an hour I passed the same cemetery portico which I had seen earlier, travelling in the same direction as before. I was tired and my mind was swimming. I had almost decided to drive in what I thought was the same direction for as long as it took to reach a sizeable town, when I came upon a telephone-box. The light there made it possible to read my map, and I learned that I had travelled far to the North-East of Gommecourt. I had reached the distant back-areas of 1916.

On the cover of my map, I wrote down the names of the villages through which I would have to pass to reach "home" and from then on, the journey was an easier one. But I think that in those 30 or 45 minutes, I felt as lost and helpless as any 1916 man.

Copyright © Tom Morgan, July, 1996

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