HEROISM IN EVOLUTION, 1915–1916 143
was buried or strung by the British Army in 1916), building rail lines, and
creating new roads. The net result was that most formations only got one
week devoted to actual combat training after their arrival in France.^46 By the
summer of 1916 fully 60 percent of the men waiting for the next big push
were the new recruits of the Kitchener Armies.^47
The high command had fallen in love with the destructive power of
artillery and built a tactical doctrine around it. The theory was that if the
artillery preparation of the intended enemy position was intense enough
it would cut all enemy wire, kill the defenders, and destroy their trench
system.^48 To this end ammunition and artillery were accumulated for the
push on the Somme in June 1916 until the British Army boasted 1537 guns
and howitzers, one gun for every 21 yards of enemy front, and a stockpile
of 1,732,873 shells.^49 In coordination with a French offensive these guns
thundered the largest single barrage to date in human history during the
last week in June.^50
The shelling mainly served to alert the Germans where and roughly when
the British were going to attack. While it damaged them, it did not destroy
the enemy trenches or their defenders; in many areas the wire remained
uncut. The staff officers had expected the shell storm to devastate their
opponent.^51 The Germans disabused them of this belief in the single darkest
day in British military history; 120,000 British troops took part in the
opening day of the Battle of the Somme. By nightfall on 1 July 1916 the
BEF had taken almost 60,000 casualties, 20,000 killed outright.^52 Before the
battle wound down in mid-November the British Army absorbed 420,000
casualties. Between them the British and French operations on the Somme
recaptured at most 125 square miles of German lines.^53 They never achieved
the fabled breakthrough.
The Kitchener men soaked up casualties on a scale grand even by Great
War standards. They lost more men in a single day than the entire Battle of
Loos had consumed the previous fall.^54 They were not professionals or even
the semi-professional soldiers of the Territorials, and their reaction to the
stress of combat was markedly different, if the Victoria Cross statistics are
an indicator (Table 7.3). Unlike previous engagements, the percentage of
VCs given for aggressive actsincreasedduring the course of the battle, despite
the mounting casualties.
How could they do it? How could these men, most of whom had no
previous military exposure, endure the hottest fighting the British Army had
seen to date and soak up casualties that made the bloodletting of previous
campaigns pale in comparison, react in such a different way to sustained,
futile operations? Was it an expression of the righteous wrath of the British
lily
(lily)
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