‘creeping barrage’, a curtain of fire that advanced steadily some fifty yards ahead of the infantry, forcing the defenders to keep their heads well and truly down. However, that meant a degree of communication and control quite beyond the British army’s capacity at this time. Telephone and radio were liable to break down, carrier pigeons were inadequate, and the barrage had to be directed by an observation officer, perched, a very obvious target, in a tree or on a tall building. But the army’s learning curve was in any case still in its early stages. Haig’s artillery expert was moved in at the last minute, expected to share his office with two other men, and allowed no reference manuals, let alone any of the foreign literature on the subject. The British manual gave the game away when it grandly stated that ‘accuracy is a new demand in this war’. But the infantry themselves were also hardly trained, and (as with the French in 1914) were expected only to perform the simplest of tactics – advancing in rigid long lines, officers striding out front. A final problem lay with the ministry of munitions: it still produced shrapnel, which exploded in the air above a defensive position, scattering projectiles, maybe useful for cutting barbed wire but not against the deep dug-outs that the Germans were now constructing as a matter of course. There was not enough high-explosive shell, which exploded on or just after impact (special fuses could delay the explosion for some seconds as the shell buried itself, which did real damage to barbed wire). A further problem was amateurishness in managing trains: a jam, eighteen miles long, between Amiens and Abbeville, was not sorted out until the usual peppery Scotsman arrived and sacked everyone responsible.
The British bombardment began on 24 June, just as the lastGerman effort at Verdun was ebbing away, and went on for a week: the expectation being that everything would be wrecked. But 400 heavy guns and 1,000 field guns were not enough to deal with a defensive system of three miles’ depth and twenty miles’ length. The fact of its start gave the Germans ample warning of an attack, and it churned the front line into mud that was often quite impassable. The Germans on their ridges had dug very deeply, lining the defences with concrete, and these systems were not knocked out at all: the artillery was still active, and there were lines of machine guns to deal with the ‘waves’ of infantry that emerged from the British trenches on 1 July, the officers sometimes kicking footballs to inspire confidence. The names on the war memorials of Eton and Oxford and Cambridge and Edinburgh go on and on (to the credit of New College, Oxford, and Trinity, Cambridge, they include German and Hungarian names). On that day, there were 20,000 British dead, the worst disaster in the whole of British military history. There were 37,000 other casualties, and there was almost no gain at all – on the right, at Mametz, a section of the German front line was taken, but elsewhere, nothing. The French, to the south-east, overran the entire front line and advanced towards the second line, but they employed many more guns per mile of front, and their tactics had been learned in the hard school of Verdun.
The fact was that breakthrough, as imagined by Haig, was not possible, short of utterly crushing artillery weight, and even then there were severe limits. Between early July and November, necessity sometimes imposed itself on Haig, and when it did he confined himself to well-prepared local actions, with a very limited objective. Accordingly, there were small successes now and then. Thus on 14 July there was a well-managed advance on a limited front by the South Africans, but then cavalry came up and got nowhere. In the first phase, in July and August, there were narrow-front, uncoordinated operations attractingenemy gunnery – losses higher than on the first day, and not much more to show for it. There
The British bombardment began on 24 June, just as the lastGerman effort at Verdun was ebbing away, and went on for a week: the expectation being that everything would be wrecked. But 400 heavy guns and 1,000 field guns were not enough to deal with a defensive system of three miles’ depth and twenty miles’ length. The fact of its start gave the Germans ample warning of an attack, and it churned the front line into mud that was often quite impassable. The Germans on their ridges had dug very deeply, lining the defences with concrete, and these systems were not knocked out at all: the artillery was still active, and there were lines of machine guns to deal with the ‘waves’ of infantry that emerged from the British trenches on 1 July, the officers sometimes kicking footballs to inspire confidence. The names on the war memorials of Eton and Oxford and Cambridge and Edinburgh go on and on (to the credit of New College, Oxford, and Trinity, Cambridge, they include German and Hungarian names). On that day, there were 20,000 British dead, the worst disaster in the whole of British military history. There were 37,000 other casualties, and there was almost no gain at all – on the right, at Mametz, a section of the German front line was taken, but elsewhere, nothing. The French, to the south-east, overran the entire front line and advanced towards the second line, but they employed many more guns per mile of front, and their tactics had been learned in the hard school of Verdun.
The fact was that breakthrough, as imagined by Haig, was not possible, short of utterly crushing artillery weight, and even then there were severe limits. Between early July and November, necessity sometimes imposed itself on Haig, and when it did he confined himself to well-prepared local actions, with a very limited objective. Accordingly, there were small successes now and then. Thus on 14 July there was a well-managed advance on a limited front by the South Africans, but then cavalry came up and got nowhere. In the first phase, in July and August, there were narrow-front, uncoordinated operations attractingenemy gunnery – losses higher than on the first day, and not much more to show for it. There
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