Somme Anniversary

dying of his wounds at a casualty clearing station near Albert, a man who sadly found his grave on the Somme. Today is the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, and this is an Old Front Line special, where we look at some aspects of the Somme battlefields, visit some sites, and hear the testimony of a veteran who was there in 1916. Welcome to the Old Front Line, with me, military historian Paul Reid, and let's head... to Picardy.

At 7.30 in the morning on the 1st of July 1916, the whistles blew in the British trenches opposite Gomercourt in the north to Montaubat in the south. At that moment, tens of thousands of men went over the top and moved out into no man's land, mainly at a walking pace, moving towards the German trenches in the big push. This was the battle that would end the war, they believed. But by the end of that day, more than 57,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers had become casualties.

Nearly 20,000 of the men killed in action or had died of wounds. The greatest single loss sustained by the British Army in its entire history. What had gone so tragically wrong? There'd been a seven-day bombardment in the end because the offensive had been postponed due to poor weather. It had literally tipped it down in the trenches in the lead-ups to the attack, many soldiers being soaked to the skin.

During that bombardment, more than one and three-quarter million shells had been fired at the German trenches along that 18-mile front, the biggest British barrage of the war. and the men assembled to take part in the Battle of the Somme had seen the build-up for this barrage, the huge amount of shells everywhere, the guns firing 24 hours a day at the German positions.

And they were told on the eve of the offensive by their commanders that following this bombardment nothing would survive, not even a rat, and all they'd simply have to do was to step out into no man's land walk their way across to the German trenches, capture those positions, walk into the villages beyond and be in the town of Bapaume and Peronne on the eastern edge of the battlefield by nightfall, Berlin potentially by Christmas.

The reality was that despite this tremendous bombardment, the Somme is rolling chalk downland, easy to dig into. and the Germans had constructed their defences here for nearly two years, digging in in the autumn of 1914, following the fluid battles of that year.

The Germans had prepared their defences and dug deep with their dugouts, many of them 30 or 40 feet beneath the battlefield, and the vast majority of the one and three quarter million shells that had been fired by the British bombardment were filled artillery shells, mainly of 18 pounder calibre, And these couldn't penetrate to dugouts 10 feet beneath the surface, let alone 30 or 40 feet. Some dugouts were as much as 80 feet beneath the surface.

So this meant that during this bombardment, during the Trommelfeuer, as the Germans called it, the drum fire of this bombardment, they simply sheltered in these dugouts. And when zero hour came on the 1st of July, and the bombardment lifted and moved on to targets beyond, this gave the Germans the signal they needed that an attack was coming.

They moved up the steps, out into their trenches, trenches that were smashed to bits by shell fire, but the men defending them were still alive, and they set up their machine guns and their rifle teams, and they calmly awaited the arrival of the enemy, the British Tommies, walking across no man's land, and walking into machine gun oblivion. Wave after wave moved forward, Wave after wave was scythed down by the machine gun and then eventually the German artillery fire as the guns spoke.

The Germans reacted quickly to the attack and the Tommies moving slowly across the battlefield could do nothing but take this deadly fire. On most parts of the front, the majority of the casualties were suffered in the first 30 or 40 minutes of the battle. So quickly were these battalions, these proud battalions that had been raised in 1914, so quickly were they destroyed.

We mentioned in the previous podcast at SAIR that quote from John Harris, two years in the making, ten minutes in the destruction. That was our history, and that was true of the POWs at Serre and true of so many battalions that day. The first day of the Battle of the Somme is remembered for men of Kitchener's army, the new army formed by Lord Kitchener in 1914. But there were many Territorials there on the first day of the Somme, and even some regular soldiers.

But they were all volunteers, volunteers to a man. And while we look back and we try to understand that slaughter, these men were not sheep. They had been prepared to put on the line everything that they had, give their all, their most precious thing, their life, for Britain, for the Empire, to defeat an enemy that threatened their way of life. And that decision that so many of them had made in 1914 and 1915 as these battalions were formed, had brought them here to the Somme.

At the close of the 1st of July, there had been very little success on most parts of the battlefield, Here and there a trench captured, an enemy position entered and the Germans pushed back a bit. It was only in the southern sector of the battlefield, between Mametz and Montabat, that any success had been achieved.

Here, where the lines joined closely with the French army, And this was a joint Anglo-French offensive that had been planned at the end of 1915, rudely interrupted by the Battle of Verdun in February 1916, which had taken away a lot of the French forces that had been planned to be used in the offensive on the Somme.

But here in this southern sector, the French troops that were here had a lot of heavy guns, and their guns assisted in the bombardment between those positions of Mametz and Montauban. And there's no disguising that that heavy bombardment played a key role in enabling the troops on that part of the line to reach their objectives. Despite those terrible losses, the British Army had always had a habit of picking itself up off its feet and carrying on. And carrying on it did.

The Battle of the Somme moved on into the summer. Gradually the German line was rolled up. New tactics such as the Creeping Barrage were brought in. At one stage, cavalry was even used, a weapon as old as warfare. But within a couple of months, on the 15th of September 1916, tanks were used for the first time, and the Somme evolved into a modern battle, with modern weapons and modern techniques.

By October, the weather changed, the rains came, turned the battlefield into a quagmire, but the fight continued until it ended in a snowstorm near the Butte d'Orland Corps on the Albert-Bapaume Road on the 18th of November 1916. By that time, the British and Commonwealth forces had lost over 450,000 men on the Somme, killed, wounded and missing, and of that number, 150,000 dead, of which half were missing. they would have no known grave. The Somme was a defining moment in our history.

The historian A.J.P. Taylor later wrote that for him, the 20th century did not begin on the 1st of January 1900, but on the 1st of July 1916. And what he meant by that was that that first day of the Battle of the Somme and all those terrible losses signalled a new type of warfare, industrial warfare, with killing on an industrial scale. and that would characterize much of the rest of the 20th century.

So with that in mind and the defining point that the Somme was in all our history, it's that that we remember and all those men who were there on this anniversary of the battle. We're starting our walk just on the outskirts of the town of Albea Very much at the heart of the British position on the Somme, Albert was the main logistics centre for the troops. Thousands of them marched through there on their way to and from the front line.

It was dominated by a huge church, a basilica, the top of which was the golden statue of Mary with her outstretched arms holding the infant Jesus. It was hit by a shell in early 1915 and hung at a rather precarious angle. It was often referred to as the Leaning Virgin or the Golden Virgin by the troops who were here. And when the Australians came here in the summer of 1916, of course, they had to call it something different. And they called it Fanny Durack.

Fanny Durack was a female Australian Olympic swimmer who got a gold medal at the 1912 Olympics. and the diggers thought that it looked like Fanny Durack diving into a swimming pool. It's been restored now, the original basilica was destroyed in 1918, but as we pass Bapome Post Military Cemetery on the right and turn back to look at Albea, we'll see the modern rebuilt basilica and the clock tower of the town hall. Bapaan Post Cemetery is a cemetery that we'll come to another day.

It connects to some other stories elsewhere on the Somme, although there are two commanding officers of the Tyneside Battalions who we're going to talk about shortly, buried in the cemetery, Lieutenant Colonel Sillery and Lieutenant Colonel Lyle, one half of the Tate and Lyle Sugar family. But we'll press on up to the point where we reach the peak of the hill here. It is in fact two hills. We are on the Tara Usna line, as it was called. Tara Hill to our right Usna Hill to our left.

The positions here in front of La Boisselle and the trenches were renamed by the 51st Highland Division Scottish troops in the summer of 1915 when they took over from the French who'd previously held this part of the line.

We're behind the British front line at this point but we've got a grandstand view down towards the village of La Boisselle beneath us and two valleys to the right and the left of this main road, the D929, the Albea-Bapome road that runs from Albea to the town of Bapome right through the heart of the Somme battlefields.

So two valleys, the one to our right behind the village of La Boisselle in 1915 had a German sausage-shaped observation balloon that kept popping up for a look at the British positions, so that became known as Sausage Valley. And if you have a Sausage Valley, you've got to have a Mash Valley as well. And Mash Valley is the long valley we can see to the left of the village of La Boiselle, leading up to the next village of Ovillers.

The attack on La Boiselle on the first day of the sermon, and beyond it, Sausage Valley, was led by men of the new army in this area, the 34th Division, commanded by Major General Ignaville Williams, Inky Bill, who we spoke about in the previous podcasts His division consisting of two brigades of Northumberland Fusiliers the Tyneside Scottish and the Tyneside Irish and one brigade that consisted of the 15th and 16th Royal Scots recruited in Edinburgh the 10th Battalion of the Lincolnshire

Regiment the Grimsby Chums and the 11th Suffolks the Cambridgeshire Battalion their task was to advance down these slopes through the village beyond to Sausage Valley and continue with the assault towards the village of Pozières others would then pass through them and the advance would continue.

Now we're going to come back to La Boiselle to visit the Loch Nagaal mine crater and if we look to our right we can see an area of scrubland and on a busy day cars and coaches parked around it on the site of the Loch Nagaal memorial. The crater was purchased by Richard Dunning an Englishman in the 1970s to preserve it and it is now one of the most visited locations on the Somme battlefields and very much integral to the Somme story but worthy really of a podcast in its own right.

Our Our focus on this walk is going to be Mash Valley, so we're going to continue down the hill, getting an impression of how important Mash Valley was, come down the hill to a junction in the road, where we'll turn right down a minor road. And there's a little memorial seat here, we haven't quite finished with La Boiselle yet. This is the memorial to the Tyneside Scottish and Irish.

Now, as I mentioned, they were part of the new army, Kitchener's Army, units of the Northumberland Fusiliers, raised in Tyneside in 1914, one entire brigade affiliated to the Scottish community in Tyneside, and one affiliated to the Irish community within Tyneside. These were tough men with tough jobs and from tough backgrounds, and many of them had had tough lives. The motto of the Tyneside Scottish, for example, was as hard as hammers.

So these were men who had joined up in 1914 in response to that call, formed eight battalions from that area, over 8,000 men, and were about, on this day in 1916, were about to take part in their first assault with catastrophic losses, many of the battalions suffering upwards of 80% casualties. The little triangle of ground that is behind this monument was the pre-war civil cemetery of La Boisselle. This was the local graveyard, the local cemetery. And there's no trace of it today.

The new one we're going to walk to a minute. But we'll walk round this triangle across the Albert Bapaume road to where the new cemetery is located continue past that on a minor road that goes north northeast from the Albert Bapaume road until we come out onto an open bit of ground just beyond the edge of the village. If we here then turn to our right we're looking straight down the middle of Mash Valley.

In this area, the trenches of the 34th Division, and on this particular spot, men from the Tyneside Battalions, in this case the Tyneside Scottish, their lines joined up with their neighbouring units, the 8th Division.

This was a regular army division that had been brought together in 1914, made up of battalions that were in the far-flung corners of the British Empire, brought back home and then sent across to France in the autumn of 1914, just as the big battles on the Western Front were coming to a close. It had taken part in the offensives of 1915 at places like Albers Ridge, and then it had come down to take part and take over from the French in this sector, and then participate in the Battle of the Somme.

The units of that division that attacked here on the first day of the Battle of the Somme had the longest distance across no man's land that any battalions had to cross on that day. Where we're standing now on the edge of this road with the village of La Boiselle to our right, if we then look right down the valley ahead of us we can see the village of Ovalers in the distance.

There's a little minor road that links Ovalers with the Albert-Bapone road that we've just come off of and there's a line of modern houses along that road. That's pretty much on the German front line in that area. So where we're standing now is pretty much on the British front line and we can see just how far it is between those two locations close on 750 yards.

Now as a unit attacking here moving down this valley the Germans aren't just ahead of you because the line curves up behind Overland Military Cemetery we can see across to our left so that when you moved into the valley the Germans from those positions could fire down into your flanks into your sides but also to our rights is the line of the and the edge of the village of La Boiselle and this was also part of the German front line so essentially the German positions here formed a bit of a U

shape so that when you went into the valley the Germans could fire at you from straight ahead from your left and also from your right a deadly prospect but of course one and three quarter million shells would be fired at the German lines and nothing would survive not even a rat so it didn't really matter that the positions were built like this because the men of the units that would attack here were told that nothing would survive, that all they'd have to do is to walk straight up this valley,

push on, and follow alongside the Tynesiders as they advanced through Ovalers up towards Pozières. One man who was not entirely convinced by that was Lieutenant Colonel Sandys of the Middlesex Regiment.

He commanded the 2nd Battalion, and in the lead-up to the Battle of Somme, he was to be found in the front-line positions here, looking through Trent periscopes watching the bombardment not entirely convinced that the artillery would do its job he'd seen similar things happen at albers ridge the year before where the bombardment had failed and was uncut wire and german defenders and he feared that the same thing would happen here he relayed his fears to his commanding officer to his brigade

commander but he was told carry on the bombardment will do its job carry on with your orders and on the day it will be as promised a cakewalk you'll just have to walk your way across the battlefield. On the 1st of July he led his men into the attack he blew his whistle he led them over they advanced into Mash Valley and by the close of the day his battalion had lost over 600 officers and men he being one of them he'd been badly wounded.

Recovering from those wounds the events of the 1st of July played heavily on his mind no doubts he played back the things that he'd seen of his men moving forward forward to be cut to pieces by German machine gun fire and he felt that perhaps he should have done more to protest in the lead up to the battle. Could he have saved more lives? Could he have stopped the attack even?

And it played on his mind to such an extent that just over two months after the attack he took his own life while recovering from his wounds. and Colonel Sandys became one of those sadder casualties of the Great War. What happened on those battlefields did not just end as the echo of the guns faded away.

It stayed in the minds of these men on a short-term basis and for those who survived the war on a long-term basis, something that interviewing veterans in the 1980s and 90s I came across frequently. They had no word for PTSD. They would say to me when I went to see them that they'd fought the Battle of the Somme in their beds last night again and it was their very self-effacing way of saying that the war had stayed with them.

So in 1916 for Colonel Sandys what it must have been like to have seen his own battalion torn apart as it was on the first day of the Battle of the Somme we can only but imagine. Just as he was buried in a London cemetery the London Gazette was published announcing the award of the Distinguished Service Order for his bravery in the attack on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Continuing on this road, keeping Mash Valley to our right, we follow it upwards to a crest.

We're looking back to our left. We can see down into the town of Albea and the Basilica. Here we turn right and follow the road along with Mash Valley now on our right again. We can see how the slopes of the village of La Boiselle, the edge of the village, drop down to where they meet the valley floor. And there's a little group of modern houses, quite modern houses there. And up until the 1970s, another of the Somme's mine craters was in that area, the Weissap mine.

Just as a mine had been blown on the front of the 34th Division for their attack on Sausage Valley, the Loch Magar mine, another, had been blown here, the Wysat mine, to assist the attack up Mash Valley. It had taken out some of the German defences, but not the German defenders.

One of the things that we learned from the explosion of these mines on the Somme blowing them in the front line positions, was that this really did not have any effect on eliminating the garrison that defended these positions, a lesson that we would learn for the Battle of Messines the following year. The Wysap Crater was really the original La Boisselle Crater, if you like, in terms of battlefield visitors here in the interwar period. Being located on the main road, it was very easy to visit.

Loch Nagar was down a little side track and difficult for shower bangs of that period to reach only dedicated visitors like some of the veterans who'd fought there made their way down there but many many thousands stopped at the Wysap crater but by the 1970s the veterans were elderly they were old men now and coming to the battlefields was increasingly difficult for them so the level of visitors had faded away to almost nothing and the farmer who owned the ground there thought that the British

had forgotten about the sacrifice in the Great War so he decided decided to fill the crater in. And it was the filling in of that YSAP crater that led to Richard Dunning buying the Loch Nagal crater a year or so later. So the view here has changed a lot. But I've got some photographs that John Giles, the founder of the Western Front Association and author of the Somme then and now, some pictures that he took at that time showing this part of the battlefield.

And I'll put those on the podcast website. Continuing along the road, we reach the cemetery. We go up the steps, past the Cross of Sacrifice, and into where the graves are located. This is Overla's Military Cemetery. This is a large and impressive Somme Cemetery. There are 3,440 burials here, and it looks as if the rows go on almost over the hillside. Of these, 2,480 are unknown, so only one in three of the men buried in this cemetery is a known soldier.

As we come in up the steps and go to our right, we see the grave of Lieutenant Colonel Henniker, with the badge of the Leinster Regiments on his headstone, and I'll put a picture of his grave on the podcast website. He was a long-serving soldier of the regular army. He'd commanded the 20th Northumberland Fusiliers, the first Tyneside Scottish, and on the eve of the Battle of the Somme, he was given command of the 21st.

The next day, he led his men into the attack here at Mash Valley and was killed somewhere in no man's land, leading the remnants of his battalion shattered by that terrible machine gun fire across the Battle field. As we walk up through the cemetery we come to the original plot one. The cemetery in fact was originally made after the Battle of the Somme when this was an area behind the British lines.

Units that were in the front line area around the village of Corselet for example brought some of their dead back here for burial. Captain John Lauder of the Argyll and Southern Harlanders was one of those killed during the winter of 1916-17 after the battle was over. He was the son of Sir Harry Lauder, the famous musical There have been some additional burials to the graves here as well and those are towards the end of this plot and also tucked in between some of the original graves.

George Nugent was a lad from Newcastle whose remains were found by a British visitor on the lip of the Loch Ngar mine crater in the late 1990s and he was reburied here in the presence of his family on the 1st of July 2000. He was identified by his name being engraved on the handle of his cutthroat razor. It was found amongst the equipment that was discovered when the body was unearthed.

Somme, just like all these battlefields, is still giving up its As we return to the front of the cemetery we're looking over Mash Valley and we're seeing the ground in which the attack went in on the 1st of July 1916 on this day in 1916. And as we know Colonel Sandy's battalion made an assault across this ground.

They were on the right, the 2nd Middlesex, in the area just in front of the cemetery and the fact that the battalion advance cut through here was the 2nd Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment and coming up behind both of those in support was the 2nd Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment.

Now these were all regular battalions and there was a nucleus of regular soldiers amongst the officers and men within them but the vast majority of soldiers who fought here with those units on the first day of the Battle of the Somme were men who had joined the army at the beginning of the war. They were Kitchener army recruits and had served with reserve battalions at home and then been transferred out to France as replacements to these long-serving regular battalions on the Western Front.

Their assault over this open ground on the 1st of July with a lot more than rats having survived in the German trenches meant that being fired at from three different sides as they moved into Mash Valley very quickly these three proud battalions were annihilated by machine gun fire. Only about 70 men from these combined battalions reached the German trenches on the far side of Mash Valley.

They occupied about 300 yards of that trench and incredibly held it for two hours until German counterattacks overran their position and push them back. So the assault here that day was a failure. Further attacks went in across Mash Valley on the 3rd and then on the 7th of July new units moved up including the 8th and 9th Royal Fusiliers. Amongst those fusiliers was my old veteran pal Alf Rozelle.

He'd served with them from the beginning of the war, taken part in the Battle of Loos at the end of 1915 and the Hohenzollern Craters in early 1916 and in July 1916 his unit had made an attack through the ground we can see ahead of us here towards the village of Ovalers it had been a successful attack but it cost the battalions both the 8th and 9th Fusiliers very heavily indeed.

One of the grimmest tasks that Alf said that he ever had to perform in the Great War was burying the dead after this action in a number of shell holes in the area around where the assaults had gone in both in front of where the cemetery is now and behind it and he describes in an excellent documentary from the 1990s called A Game of Ghosts, which is available on YouTube. Just how grim that task was, going through the pockets of the dead and seeing the condition that the soldiers were in.

It was something that stayed with him for the rest of his life. And there's a bit of a follow-on story to that, really. In the very first episode of The Old Front Line, I spoke about my old friend, Eve Foucault, who was the War Graves Commission gardener who lived in Pozières.

Now, his friend was a farmer here at Ovillers, and in the 1980s, at the rear of where Overlands Military Cemetery is now there was a little area of pasture land bordered by trees and he decided to tear the trees down and plough that ground up and he asked Eve to come in to use his detector to try and find some of the munitions that were on the surface to make that possible and help him remove them.

In the process they found a mass grave of soldiers who had been buried here during the Battle of the Somme. Eve described how the bodies had been laid on top of each other at different angles and by that he'd assumed that the men had been picked up by their straps and by their boots and swung into the grave and it just covered over with earth. This was the reality of burying so many dead from an attack which had cost such heavy casualties.

And then years later talking to Alf I could really connect these two events up because just as he described burying the dead is just as how Eve described finding them in 1982 they were moved at that stage there were no open cemeteries on the Somme they were moved to the coast to Turlington British Cemetery near Boulogne this was the only open cemetery in France and where all burials were made following the finding of bodies on the battlefields on the French sector of the western front and a

special headstone was erected for these 49 British soldiers and two Germans that were discovered in this shell hole burial and again I'll put a picture of that up on the website so you can see what it looks like the cat badges that were found amongst them there were no means of identifying any of the soldiers but they were the Essex Regiment, the West Yorkshire Regiment the Royal Fusiliers, the Royal Sussex Regiment and the Berkshire Regiment and all of these were units that had taken part in

the assaults on Mash Valley either on the first day of the Battle of the Somme or in the attacks of the 3rd and the 7th of July so it all tied in so it's funny how these stories can be connected together like this I often think that the stories, I don't find the stories, the stories find me. There's no such thing as coincidence when it comes to these things.

So standing here now, we look across Mash Valley, and we can see the village of Ovalers, beyond that, Pozières, and beyond that, Corselettes, and the area towards the end of the Battle of the Somme, all ground for us to walk another day along the old front line. For this Somme anniversary edition of the podcast, I've delved into the papers that I gathered through talking to veterans back in the 1980s and 90s.

And what follows next is an extract from some recordings made with Edmund Gardner Williams, Ted Williams, who was a veteran from Formby who joined the 19th Battalion of the King's Liverpool Regiment, the 3rd Liverpool Powers in 1914. He served in the transport section of the battalion and painted quite a lot of views of the battlefields which he refers to at one point in the recordings.

A little extract from his memoirs that he wrote in the 1960s and some of his paintings appeared in one of the editions of Stand 2 back in the 1980s and that's how I managed to get contact with him and we stayed in correspondence and I went to visit him. He was taken prisoner in the March Offensive of 1918 and spent the last phase of the war in Germany. Cracking old boy and very very lucid in these recordings which I'll play for you now.

The first one describes their early experiences on the Somme in 1915 into early 1916. Then

And I remember going up with the transport the first night and the drivers, of course sitting well up on his big horses, having to duck to escape the burst of machine gun fire that was taking the tiles off just beside him.

The spent bullets and some not-so-spent whistling by, when you found that you weren't being hit by them, they became a kind of accompaniment. You never knew when a shell was going to come, but only rarely were we shelled going up near Connolly Village. The shell may have burst a little while before or something like that. But we never had any casualties, but we still had that creepy feeling of getting up to the line. You never knew when something was going to drop.

And then you got rid of your rations and whatever it is and away for slates as fast as you could.

The wire was not... We were new troops. The artillery were new troops. But the troops said, this is the breakthrough. They fully expected it. The high-ups did. their hopes were not fulfilled by a long chalk. So you had the people who had never been over the top before, people just out there, all ready to go, and they went over the top as if they were on parade. And they went into the machine gun storm.

And by the time that this was painted, There had been nearly 60,000 casualties on the first morning of 1st July 1916. Not so much amongst the Liverpool battalions, although some of them were engaged, but mainly on the western and northern flanks.

Written on the back of it, is just a simple line that says killed in action july the seventeenth nineteen sixteen it's a picture taken in france it has carte postale on it and when i look at it it's a group of officers of the king's own yorkshire light infantry now i looked into this and discovered that an officer had died that day serving with the ninth battalion so this was likely to be men from that battalion and i had a look at their war diary at the then public records office now the

national archives And the incident of this photograph is actually mentioned in the Battalion War Diary. It was taken at a little chateau at La Nouvelle near Corby on the Somme on the 16th of April 1916. And these group photographs, particularly of officers, were arranged in a certain way.

In the front row in particular, I was able to identify almost everyone in it because the chaplain is at one end, the medical officers at the other end, the company commanders, the second in command, the commanding officer, the adjutant and so on. And it ties in with one of the most famous toasts of any battalion that took part in the Battle of the Somme. when the barrage lifts.

Now, again, about tying stories in and how stories find you, there's a book, and I've got it in front of me now, Letters from France by Lancelot Dykes Spicer. It came out in the 1970s. And in the middle of the front row of this photograph is the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lynch. He'd been awarded the DSA for bravery at Luz in 1915, where the battalion had fought, but he was not a popular battalion commander. And Spicer relates the story of what happened.

And all of the people in this are in this photograph. At about 6pm on June 28th 1916 all officers received a summons to go to Battalion HQ for a final drink before going into action. We assembled, glasses were put into our hands, drinks were passed round and we drank quietly to one another. Everyone was naturally feeling strained. The adjutant and the second in command were away on some course, so the acting adjutant, Kay, was in charge. Lynch came into the room and was given a glass.

Kay went up to Haswell, the senior captain, and said quietly to him, I think you should propose the CO's health. I'm damned if I will, said Haswell. I was standing just by and heard the conversation. I don't wish him good health, and I'm not prepared to be insincere on this occasion. You must, said Kay. I won't, said Haswell.

For a few minutes they argued and then Haswell stepped forward and raising his glass said, Gentlemen, I give you the toast of the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry and in particular the 9th Battalion of the Regiment. A slight pause. Gentlemen, when the barrage lifts. We emptied our glasses and were silent. Dramatically Haswell had avoided an unpleasant scene and the toast has never been forgotten. Of those present, 24 went into action next day in the attack on Free Corps. Six were in reserve.

Of the 24, 12 were killed, including Lynch and Haswell. Three died of wounds afterwards, eight were wounded, one slightly, and only one left untouched. Lynch's unpopularity is not entirely explained in Spicer's book, but it leads to that famous phrase, when the barrage lifts, and Spicer himself used to put that as an in memoriam entry into the newspapers every year in memory of the men of his battalion who'd gone into action and fell that day.

And when we look at this group photograph, they're all on there. Colonel Lynch in the middle, Haswell who proposed the toasts, three men in from the front rank from the left. The faces of those men brought together at that moment in time and bound together by that famous phrase, when the barrage lifts. And it's something that I always think of every 1st of July and for many years on the Somme would stand in one of the cemeteries and toast those around me with that phrase.

The bulk of the officers killed with the 9th King's Own Yorkshire Line Infantry that day I buried in Norfolk Cemetery on the Somme, including Colonel Lynch and Haswell himself, and I've stood there a few times and toasted them. So with thoughts of that, we end this special Somme podcast. I hope you found it of interest. We'll stay on the Somme with the podcast this week, and the regular one on Saturday will include a walk in the Newfoundland Park of Beaumont Hamel.

You've been listening to an episode of the Old Front Line with me, military historian Paul Reid. Do take time to subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify or other podcast services. Tell us what you think using the hashtag Old Front Line. Follow me on Twitter at Somcor and have a look at the podcast website www.oldfrontline.co.uk I'll see you next week. on the battlefields of the Great War.