The Lost Tommies. Ross Coulthart

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      PLATE 123 Royal Artillery soldiers pose with what appears to be a 6-inch howitzer on a Vignacourt street during winter on the Western Front. The wooden-spoked wheels were often fitted with girdles to get the gun over mud. One of the British Army’s most important weapons during the war, these guns fired 22.4 million rounds on the Western Front.

      In late December 1915 Haig agreed with French General Joffre that 1916 would be the year that France and Britain mounted a joint offensive at the point where their two armies met in the middle of the Western Front, on the Somme. The Allied lines along this section of the Western Front – beautiful lush countryside of rolling green hills and chalky soil – had been relatively quiet since 1914 and the Germans had exploited the calm to massively reinforce their own lines, building huge underground bunkers, burying communications cables and creating arcs of fire with machine guns and barbed wire which made crossing no man’s land towards their lines a near-suicidal undertaking. Facing them were twenty relatively less well-prepared Allied divisions – most of them the New Army British recruits, the patriotic citizens who had rushed to join the Pals battalions – and there was a small number of regular army units. There were also the territorials, who had only been in France for six months; this meant that most of the Allied infantry had little or no experience of combat at all.

      General Haig transformed the thirty kilometres west of the Somme front lines into a massive armed camp, building new roads and railway lines, artillery emplacements and shell dumps, that would provide the support for the massive infantry attack. Even at Vignacourt, a brand-new casualty clearing station was being built and, as the soldiers caroused in the estaminets and restaurants of Vignacourt and nearby Amiens’s red light district, all knew there was hell to pay on the horizon.

      Haig’s plan was to break the German lines by levelling their front lines with a massive bombardment in the week before the attack. Nineteen British and three French divisions would then advance across no man’s land in the expectation that the enemy would be so shattered that barbed wire could be cut and their trench lines seized, allowing them to advance into the open country behind. As John Keegan explains, Haig and his advisers were so confident of the impact of their artillery that ‘… they had decided not to allow the inexperienced infantry to advance by the tried and tested means of “fire and movement”, when some lay down to cover with rifle volleys the advance of the rest, but to keep them moving forward upright and in straight lines’.⁴ The advancing troops would walk straight across with a creeping barrage of artillery falling ahead of them, which was designed to keep the Germans out of their parapets before the Allies were on top of them. But, as history records, the coming attack would prove to be an unmitigated disaster; all the Allied expectations would be dashed in a dreadful and bloody carnage of machine-gun- and shellfire. And, as Keegan comments, the generals should have known: ‘The simple truth of 1914–1918 trench warfare is that the massing of large numbers of soldiers unprotected by anything but cloth uniforms, however they were trained, however equipped, against large masses of other soldiers, protected by earthworks and barbed wire and provided with rapid-fire weapons, was bound to result in very heavy casualties among the attackers.’⁵

      As will be evident in the following photographs, what makes them so special is their intimacy and humour. Madame Thuillier took many of the portraits and perhaps it was the sight of her beautiful face that sparked a smile from the weary men straight from the trenches. It is the very special humanity and humour of the Thuillier pictures, their normality at a time when so many of these young men went off to their deaths, that makes them so distinctive. Perhaps these soldiers realized their chances of surviving this war unscathed were remote and that this was a last opportunity to send a photograph back home.

      PLATE 124 These three soldiers from an unidentified regiment wear identity bracelets on their wrists. The flags on the sleeve of the private in the middle show he is a qualified signaller. His friends hold the rank chevrons of a corporal (the soldier on the left) and lance corporal.

      Most of the photographs are of British soldiers and a few airmen, Scots in their kilts and English, Welsh and Irish regiments. But there were also Indians, Nepalese and a host of other nationalities from across the British Empire. For one brief, horrific moment in history they were all thrust together into a brutal, ghastly killing maw only a short distance from the ordinary daily life of this small French country town. And when those soldiers came to rest, recuperate and nurse their wounds before they returned to the front lines, Vignacourt was where they relaxed and tried to forget the war.

      PLATE 125 The service caps on the ground represent several famous British regiments: (left to right) Essex, Royal Berkshire, Suffolk (two caps) and Norfolk.

      During research for this book, the common and frequently voiced refrain from descendants of First World War veterans is how little their fathers or grandfathers ever spoke about their experiences on the Western Front. Sebastian Faulks described this conspiracy of silence admirably in his historical novel Birdsong through his fictional character Captain Stephen Wraysford, writing of his time on the Western Front:

      No child or future generation will ever know what СКАЧАТЬ