In late May this year I visited the Great War battlefields of northern France on the trail of my grandfather Tom Verrinder, who served with his brother Edgar in the 9th Lancers on the Western Front from 1916 to 1918. I began my visit where my grandfather had his 'initiation into warfare', as he termed it, on the Somme battlefields of 1916. On the first day of the battle, on 1 July, his regiment had been poised with the rest of the cavalry to follow the infantry through the German lines, but when the breakthrough never happened the cavalry were dismounted and used for battlefield clearance - to find wounded men and to bring together and bury the bodies of the fallen.
In a previous blog I wrote about the work of the 9th Lancers dismounted party - ghoulishly termed a 'vulture party' by one officer - in front of Fricourt, where the 10th Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment suffered the highest casualty rate of any British infantry battalion on that morning. 159 of those men were buried together where they fell, in four mass-graves in the former no-man's land. After the war those burials became the site of Fricourt New Cemetery, which also contains men from the 7th East Yorkshires who died here on the first day of the battle.
As I walked out of Fricourt on the first morning of my visit, into no-man's land and towards the cemetery, I was struck by the beauty and tranquillity of the place - not only the cemetery itself, but also the rolling chalk grasslands visible off into the distance, dotted with the woods that were to become such terrible places as the fighting progressed. Taking in the view it was hard to imagine the enormity of the death and destruction that took place here in 1916, but my archaeologist's eye was drawn to the plough soil where the evidence is still there in abundance - the chalk spoil from the trenches, and huge quantities of rusting shell fragments and other debris that litter the fields for miles around. You can see a photograph of some of these artefacts below.
An overlay of the 25 April 1916 British 1:20,000 trench map 62D.NE2 on a satellite image of Fricourt and the fields to the west. In the centre is no-man's land as it existed before 1 July 1916, with the British front line in blue to the left and the German in red to the right. The red blotches where the lines are closest, between the words Red Cottage and Fricourt, are the 'Tamour mines', the craters of which are still visible in the woodland that covers that part of no-man's land today. Fricourt New Cemetery is in no-man's land to the left of the letter R in Red Cottage; the point where I took the photo holding the artefacts looking back towards the cemetery is at the top left of this image where the lane crosses the continuation of the British front line, not shown here but marked on the adjacent trench map (from the National Library of Scotland First World War trench maps website.)
Fricourt New Cemetery, looking south.
The view south from the ridge above Fricourt (at the top of the map in the first image) towards Fricourt New Cemetery, with the Tamour mines area to the left and the village of Fricourt out sight just beyond that. This view encompasses no-man's land from the British front line, to the right, to the German line, to the left, just within the Tamour mines wood. Walking heavily laden down this slope soon after 7.30 am on 1 July, the 10th West Yorks were met by fire from a single German machine gun positioned in the Tamour area. Because this had been a quiet sector before the battle, no-man's land was not yet pockmarked by shell holes and the men had nowhere to take cover. By the end of the day, only 21 men of the battalion had made it back to the British line; 740 had become casualties. Most of the men who were killed died in this field without even having seen their enemy.
Battlefield debris picked up from no-man's land, just outside the British front line looking towards Fricourt New Cemetery (above my forefinger), with the Tamour mines area in the wood beyond, the Bois Francais on the far ridge beyond that and the village of Fricourt to the left. The shell fragments are likely to be from the German barrage that opened up on no-man's land during the morning of 1 July, adding to the carnage among wounded men who had been hit by machine gun fire during the initial assault. The broken British .303 cartridge (easily distinguished from German cartridges by its rimmed base) and the German 7.92 bullet, found where I am standing, are particularly poignant finds - the machine gun in Fricourt would have been aimed to hit men at waist height as they were advancing down the slope, with spent bullets ploughing into the ground about where I am standing.
Fricourt New Cemetery, looking north-west up the slope towards the British line. The gravestones in the front row are of men of the 7th East Yorkshire Regiment; those behind are of the 10th West Yorks. All of these men died at or near this spot on 1 July 1916. The previous two photos were taken from the ridge in the background looking in this direction.