I've been reading Paul Reed's study of the struggle for control of the village of Combles, France, during the battle of the Somme. "Combles" makes for grim reading. By 1916, the village had been under German occupation for two years. The German Army, steamrollering across Picardy, had finally been halted by the French on the Somme. Stalemate ensued. The front lines were handed over to the British in the Fall of 1915 and the war of attrition began in earnest.
Many of the British soldiers who contested this tiny, bloody patch of rural France were from the London Regiment. When war was declared, in 1914, the British Army could muster only 250,000 men, compared to approximately five million in the German Army. Volunteer or Territorial units were swiftly formed in Britain. Some of them volunteered to serve overseas. Like many other geographically based regiments, the "London" had a distinctly local flavor. Men from the same street, factory, school, club, or church often joined up together. Many of them served together, and died together.
The London Regiment, though never at full strength, was supposed to have 28 battalions bearing such evocative names as: the London Rifle Brigade (5th), the Post Office Rifles (8th), the London Scottish (14th), and the Artist's Rifles (28th). Class distinctions differentiated the battalions at first, but these distinctions tended to disappear as units were decimated, merged, and re-formed.
Near Combles, two small areas of woodland were fought over inch by inch. Leuze Wood ("Lousy Wood") and Bouleaux Wood ("Bully Wood") soon could not boast a standing tree between them. The land was taken, lost, and retaken. Bodies were buried in the mud, only to be exhumed by subsequent bombardments. Young men in their prime were subjected to appalling conditions, then sent to their deaths. Hundreds of lives were lost seeking control of twenty yards of dirt. When the Kensingtons and the London Scottish moved up to take over from the Royal Irish Fusiliers, they saw that the whole battlefield was covered by the remains of the dead.
"The ground just over the ridge of Death Valley was scattered with the Irish dead, mainly young fellows who appeared to have been killed by concussion, tiny streaks of blood having from their ears and noses. Others had been killed by machine gun and shrapnel fire... One middle aged Irishman was sitting upright in a shell hole, one side of his head shining pink, where half his scalp had been torn off... at Wedge Wood... this trench was full of German dead, Prussian Guards. For some particular reason they were minus their tunics, wearing new white vests. The bodies were lying several deep, and we had to walk over them in order to proceed along the trench."
After several weeks of fighting the British unleashed their secret weapon, the tanks of the Heavy Branch Machine Gun Corps. This was the first time that the lumbering behemoths would be used in military history. Although, initially, they spread panic among the Germans, they were not an unqualified success. As with just about everything else, the tanks became stuck in the mud.
"The field of battle was a field of mud; the resting area of the division was a field of mud; the roads and tracks were rivers of mud; anyone can paint a picture of the Battle of the Somme provided that he can paint miles of mud. And the Army had simply blasted its way forward so that the shell holes cut one another in the mud."
On September 26, 1916 Combles fell to men of the 56th (London) Division. It would be more accurate to say that was was left of the village fell into British hands. Almost every building had been destroyed. The church had been flattened, the town hall had disappeared, the railway station ceased to exist. Only the catacombs, stretching beneath the buildings, providing refuge for its defenders, remained relatively unscathed.
One young private, Stuart Dolden of the London Scottish, was glad to get out of the place where so many of his comrades had died. His abiding memory was of the mud.
"We were all filled with unbounding joy when we realised that at last our backs had been turned on the Somme, and all its horrors and miseries. The one outstanding feature of the Somme was the mud. Living with it around one, day and night, seemed to tap one's vitality. We had already experienced severe shelling, trenches and all the incidences of warfare on other sectors of the line, and so it became more a question of degree, but after our trip to the Somme I realised what a truly demoralising affect mere mud could have."
The village was retaken, briefly, by the Germans in March of 1918, but returned to Allied hands later that same year.
* * * * * * *
There is an immediacy to the story of Combles that transcends the years. The absolute horror that is war is not shown on maps with colored arrows for the movement of troops. War must be studied through the experience of those who struggled through the mud. There are lessons to be learned, even from a Lousy Wood, somewhere in France.
