The Long Good Friday

Germans marching along the Albert Road, March 1918

BACKS TO THE wall — for the Allies at least. For much of the week, the Germans proceeded to drive them headlong through the killing fields of 1917, and even those of earlier. Enemy eyes feasted on Amiens, rail and communications hub for much of the Allied war effort. If they could dismantle that, the road to the Channel lay open.

The drive to Amiens dictated much of the fighting. On 26th March, the British made a stand north of the Somme, but this was also the day when they lost Albert and Bray. Twenty-four hours later, the Germans reached Sailly-le-Sec, twelve miles from the city walls. In that short time, however, the Allies had confronted the enormity of the challenge they now faced and, at least in administrative terms, reacted accordingly. Generals and statesmen were rushed to a conference on 26th March. Pétain, Haig and CIGS Wilson sat alongside President Poincaré, Prime Minister Clemenceau, and Lord Milner.

By day’s end came an announcement:

General Foch is charged by the British and French Governments with co-ordinating the action of the Allied Armies on the Western Front. He will reach an understanding (il s’entendra) to this effect with the Commanders-in-Chief, who are invited to furnish him with the necessary information.

One of Foch’s immediate plans was to create a general reserve. Time and again, this had been mooted and, time and again, it had failed to happen since Haig and Pétain simply declined to release any divisions to be part of it. It remained to be seen whether this would now change.

The fierce battle seems to have elicited gung-ho as much as despair. The following day, Burgon Bickersteth, wrote home:

…Well, they are exciting times — and I don’t think we are finished yet. The whole manoeuvre is a vindication of the use of the cavalry; now we are getting going in our proper role. Some who were in the trenches are as keen as mustard, having killed any number of Boches and ready now to have a go on their horses.

…I wouldn’t have missed this time for anything. The scenes one witnesses daily are amazing. One afternoon I watched French troops going into action, French cavalry on the flanks — English batteries galloping up and opening fire — German batteries on the hills beyond — villages in flames — dumps being fired by us — the roads a block of horse transport — three German balloons brooding over the whole affair—and shells dropping here and there.

Rather artlessly, he added:

I think of you all constantly. Surely this will be the end of the war.

Burgon Bickersteth

He wished. Back in Britain, the Daily Telegraph had to find a way to let its readers know that, in the course of a single week, the Germans had succeeded in pushing the British back to where the front line had been before the battle of the Somme in 1916 — 20 months and hundreds of thousands of lives previously. On 27th March, it opined:

Never in the world’s history had any field of war known such obstinate and bloody conflict, or such tremendous turns of fortune, as the great tract of torn and devastated country lying between the front as it was then and the front as we held it until six days ago.

The next day, the Germans launched a major attack across a wide front north and south of the Scarpe river, east of Arras. The day after that, they captured Hamel, Mezières and Démuin. The names mean little now but, at the time, every square inch of territory counted.

That day was also Good Friday, Burgon Bickersteth, fighting on the southern flank of Montdidier, noted:

It now turns out that our battalion i.e. the dismounted men of this brigade, put up a magnificent show. A personal letter from the infantry general arrived yesterday, full of thanks for what they did. I only wish I had been with my Machine-Gunners. They got some wonderful targets, one corporal shooting down the road of a village waited till the Boches were about eighty to a hundred yards off and crowding down the road in a mob, and then let off.

He killed fifty in much less time than it takes me to write this sentence. It is all a little difficult to reconcile with Good Friday — a day which of course it has become totally impossible to recognize in any way.

His brother, Julian, a senior Army Chaplain, also wrote home — his words a remarkable synthesis of high-minded piety and patriotism:

The victory remains with us. Our casualties in the battalions who bore the brunt of the fighting are heavy, as had to be expected, but those glorious men know they have not died in vain — at least I hope they know…

Today we mourn the death of one of our bravest doctors, who earned the VC a hundred times, but who had received only the MC with a bar… Quite a few other officers well-known in the Division have ‘gone’ this time and many a humble fellow in the ranks besides. We feel a momentary pang of regret and then turn our attention to other things. We dare not let our minds meditate upon these sorrows, or we simply could not carry on. So what appears as callousness is really only common sense…

At one of our cemeteries, on Easter Eve, I was carrying out several burials, and while waiting for bodies to be prepared I saw three Gunner officers, with their general, carrying one of their officers to his last resting place. It is unusual to see a general lifting a stretcher, but splendid to know that he liked to pay his last respect to one of his subalterns.

Bickersteth’s great decency comes through in every line. The costs of war are addressed, although not its irrationalities or follies. As he makes clear, the exigencies of the present — practical and psychological — ruled that out of court.

But what if one were captured — what if, in the old cliché, for you, kamerad, the war was over? Dr Bernard Gallagher of the US Army, attached to the Gloucestershire Regiment, was captured and spent Good Friday in a cellar attending to the wounded:

A squad of sanitary men came around during the day and I asked the Corporal, who spoke fairly good English, for water, and what he said illustrates the propaganda on both sides. He said there were lots of wells around but he would not dare to drink out of them, ‘Because you cannot tell the English may have poisoned them’.

There were some potatoes in a French house over the cellars and I peeled some and boiled them over a fire made on the floor of the cellar, so that that night each man had one boiled potato and nothing else.

Still no ambulance came up. Luckily, I had a bottle containing a lot of quarter grain morphine tablets with me and was able to give them to the men who were suffering acutely from their wounds. The men were dirty and lousy, of course (including myself).

The cellar was virtually buried by continuous shelling by the British. As the day progressed, however, help arrived:

a machine-gun officer and six or eight men were sent with me, and carts were collected to haul the wounded men. Three or four of them had already died. While we were loading them on carts in the courtyard, shells were dropping all around and I shall never forget that German machine-gun officer. He was very nice and seemed absolutely fearless, for he continued calmly with the work, always smiling…

A decent German, then. This was the sort of nuance which terrified propagandists, but it was an occupational hazard if, as a POW, you found yourself cheek by jowl with the enemy.

General Jack Seely and “Warrior”

The rest of this most unholy of Holy Weeks played itself out in a series of desperate local contests, many frequently degenerating into hand-to-hand fighting. The Canadian Cavalry Brigade, Lord Strathcona’s Horse and the Royal Canadian Dragoons saw this for themselves on 30th March in Moreuil Wood, a key strategic position on the banks of the Ancre. With General Jack Seely in command, on his famous horse, Warrior, the battle which resulted witnessed stout resistance by the 23rd Saxon Division and provoked what has often been dubbed “The Last Great Cavalry Charge”, led by Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew.

Words like élan or éclat get nowhere near the reality of Flowerdew’s cavalrymen powering through lines of German machine-guns, cutting down Germans as they passed, then wheeling round and riding back through the ranks. It also worked: the Germans fled.

The cost was predictably terrible. Some 70% of the riders were wounded or killed, including Flowerdew, who was shot through both thighs, and died the next day. He was awarded a posthumous VC.

Lieutenant Gordon Flowerdew, VC

The new Supreme Allied Commander, Foch, gladly paid tribute:

The Canadian Cavalry by their magnificent attack first held the enemy in check, and then definitely broke their forward march. In great degree, thanks to them, the situation, which was agonising at the beginning of the battle, was restored.

Alfred Munning’s version of the Cavalry Charge at Moreuil Wood

That same day as well, Lieutenant Colonel Feilding of the Connaught Rangers, wrote from hospital — brought there in circumstances he now relayed to his wife:

I hope you got my wire saying that I was safe, in hospital. We have crammed years of life into a week, during which my usual Providence protected me, though the Battalion — indeed the whole Division — is practically gone. Not one of the officers doing duty with the Companies came out of the second day, and, since then, the small remnant left has suffered still further.

I had to leave them on the evening of the 27th — the seventh day of the battle — just as, with a composite party of stragglers, they were holding up the enemy (locally) rather well. I fell and dislocated my left elbow joint while running forward to get the Lewis guns on to a target of retiring Germans.

He made light of it, of course, and headed to the Casualty Clearing Station:

The road, which was being treated as a special target, was littered with dead horses, and was horrible to look at… As we passed through Amiens I noticed marked signs of the heavy bombing the town had received from aeroplanes the night before.

The Casualty Clearing Station which we found at Nampes had moved back with the general retirement, and the tents composing it had barely been pitched when we arrived. The marquees were faintly lighted by wax candles, and were crowded with herds of wounded. The bad cases lay upon stretchers, which almost hid the ground. So numerous were these that it was often necessary to step over one, and the walking wounded packed the gaps and overflowed outside as well. The doctors and nurses, though they must have been half dead with fatigue, worked cheerfully and unceasingly at the highest pressure.

Eventually, he reached Rouen:

And here I am, in №2 Stationary Hospital, where I have slept, practically for three days, waking up only to take food or be chloroformed. I was chloroformed twice before my elbow, which had been out of joint for 72 hours, was got right.

Next day was Easter Sunday. Julian Bickersteth worked hard to take Holy Communion services, cycling two and half miles to do one for the Queen’s Westminsters:

I was particularly anxious to take a service for this battalion, as it was one of the three which had borne the brunt of the fighting on the 28th — and they had always been our best Church battalion. Even now, after very heavy losses, there were 120 communicants.

The call to ecumenism was only infrequently advanced. Contrary to usual practice, Bickersteth invited a Wesleyan chaplain to administer the chalice:

…as there were one or two non-conformists communicating, and he was their own Chaplain attached to this battalion, I felt it was fitting… Non-Conformists and C of E men had fought and died side by side two days before. Surely we were not wrong to kneel together on Easter morning and partake of the same cup.

What of the Americans? On 25th March, Pershing met Pétain at his headquarters at Compiègne and came to “perfect agreement” over the use of American divisions in quiet sectors to release French divisions for deployment on the battle front. The following day, he met General Rawlinson who requested American reserves to fill up the British ranks.

On 28th March, he told Foch:

I have come to tell you that the American people would consider it a great honor for our troops to be engaged in the present battle; I ask you for this in their name and my own. Infantry, artillery, aviation, all that we have, is yours; use it as you wish. More will come, in numbers equal to requirements.

I have come especially to tell you that the American people will be proud to take part in the greatest and finest battle of history.

Yet the French, in particular, seemed reluctant to draw off American strength. Pershing recalled that, having told Pétain his 1st Division was ready for action, Pétain twice replied that they “would see”This was frustrating because, at all levels of the US Army, there was great readiness to engage in the contest. Sergeant Phelps Harding, training at Camp Upton, N.Y., sent a letter to his father, dated 29th March:

…I simply want to tell you that we were secretly, several weeks ago, practically given the preference as to whether we would rather serve here or abroad. That’s what I came into the fight for, and I want to see it through. Don’t tell Mother that I had an opportunity to stay here, for I know that it would make her feel badly that I did not stay.

I am just telling you so that if anything should happen to me you will know that I met the danger of my own free will and with a full knowledge of what to expect in the fighting on the other side. I’m mightily glad I have the chance to go over and do my share — and I know you are glad to have me go.

…we are just about ready to leave, and it is rumoured that we will sail before the week ends…

While the week’s action in the west seemed centred upon the battlefield, civilians in Paris shared fully in some of its dramas. The previous week had seen the city shelled by Kaiser Wilhelm Geschützthe extraordinary long-rang siege gun deployed by the Germans. Now, on Good Friday, 29th March, came fresh tragedy when one of its shells hit the church of Saint-Gervais-et-Saint-Protais in the Marais district, packed for the Good Friday service.

Most of the so-called conventions of war had long ago been broken, and certainly no one side enjoyed a monopoly of awfulness. Still, the sudden and violent deaths of 88 churchgoers, and the maiming of 69 others, all assembled in order to commemorate Christ’s death upon the cross, was an event rich in metaphor. The victims included the beautiful Rose-Marie Ormond, the painter John Singer Sargent’s favourite niece and model.

At least, there was no longer a mystery about the source of such destruction: French aviator, Didier Daurat, had located the gun, hidden in the forest of Coucy.

That same Good Friday, as the bombs fell on Paris, the great composer, Claude Debussy, was laid to rest in Père Lachaise cemetery with only twenty mourners. His death from cancer, on 25th March, aged only 55, had gone almost unnoticed. Such were the times.

Signs that German troops were flagging after such a rapid and exhausting advance were beginning to surface. Edwin Kuhns noted:

At this time, the food got worse… on Easter Sunday, we had nothing except half a loaf of bread per man… Everyone was miserable, as they were so hungry. A comrade brought a joint of horsemeat from a horse that had been killed, which we had to roast, but everyone had only about a quarter of a pound. That was the first horsemeat that I had knowingly eaten. It was very tough, but it tasted good.

After the attacks on 30th March, one regiment of the 18th German Division recorded:

There was little time for preparation, poor artillery support and the English machine guns were so well hidden that they could not be knocked out. [Overall] the power of the attack was exhausted. Spirits sank to zero. The division suffered a reverse the like of which it had not yet experienced.

At the time, however, the British and French felt little other than that they were in the eye of the storm. In response to displays of phenomenal courage and self-sacrifice during the savage fighting between 21st March and 2nd April, 27 Victoria Crosses had been awarded, ten of them posthumously. King George V came over to France himself on 28th March, for three days of intensive glad-handing, visiting as many troops as possible.

King George V and the Royal Benediction

Royal benediction really mattered. On 29th March, his visit to 56 Squadron was, unsurprisingly, mentioned in the letter home sent by a young Canadian pilot, Captain Kenneth Junor:

…the King called on us yesterday; shook hands with us all, and was very nice and ‘chatty’. He told us that he had just awarded McCudden the Victoria Cross — loud cheers! He certainly deserved it. I don’t suppose there is another chap in the army of his age, with such a string of medals — VC, DSO with bar; MC with bar; Military Medal, Star of Mons and Croix de Guerre. It is also the second VC for this squadron — Captain Ball being the other one.

Bless his awe-struck heart. Twenty-one-year-old Junor would only survive a few more weeks before being shot down and killed on 23rd April, the day his Military Cross was announced.

In fact, aerial activity by both sides intensified during Operation Michael. In the face of the German advance, British squadrons were forced to abandon airfields, which, once repaired, came into German use. On 27th March, the RFC crossed enemy lines and

concentrated on low bombing and machine-gunning enemy infantry in the neighbourhood of Cambrai, Bapaume, Péronne and Chaulnes

according to its records.

This kind of combat was up-close and personal. Strafing infantry units required dangerous low-flying and, while highly effective, was diabolically dangerous. Unless one happened to enjoy the spectacle of soldiers screaming in pain, it was also upsetting. Von Richthofen had been expecting this kind of attack and led a vigorous riposte. On 28th March, he shot down his 74th enemy aircraft.

Two days later, RFC Lieutenant Alan Jerrard was awarded the Victoria Cross after shooting down an enemy plane near Mansue, Italy, attacking an enemy aerodrome from 50 feet, and then engaging 19 aircraft, destroying two of them. When eventually forced to land, Jerrard’s Sopwith Camel was riddled with 163 bullet holes. He was taken prisoner, but survived the war.

Fl Lt Alan Jerrard, VC

In the administrative reshuffle which seemed to be one of the motifs of the week, the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service was formally completed on 1st April, and the Royal Air Force came into being.

Britain this week was not a happy place — war alone would have been explanation enough for that. There had recently been a bad-tempered strike of engineers, and not even the present crisis was enough to persuade all of them back to work. But there was, equally, a grim determination, shared apparently by almost everyone, to see through the present crisis. The bad news went further even than France. German U-boats continued their successes against Allied (and neutral) shipping, killing around 200 people. Almost the only glimmer of light in this relentlessly dark canvas came from the Middle East, where British cavalry continued its advance towards Amman. On 26th March in Mesopotamia, the British carried Turkish positions at Khan Baghdadiya on the Euphrates and captured 3,000 prisoners. The British public was too savvy, after all this time, to invest too much hope in one bit of good news. But it helped.

Pte Isaac Rosenberg

Unnoticed at the time, the week’s losses included that of 27- year-old Private Isaac Rosenberg of the Royal Lancashire Regiment, now considered second only to Wilfrid Owen as the leading poet of the Great War. Born into a working-class Jewish family which had emigrated from Lithuania, Rosenberg was also a talented artist who had spent two years at the Slade School of Art. Always in delicate health, he had enlisted in 1915, hoping his mother would benefit from the separation allowance.

He met his death, possibly in close combat, during fighting near the village of Fampoux, and his body was never recovered. May his own words serve as his epitaph:

“Break of Day in the Trenches”

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver — what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe —

Just a little white with the dust.

 

1 Trackbacks & Pingbacks

  1. buy viagra canada

Comments are closed.