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prologue: the last Morning the Somme, Saturday, 1 July 1916. In the early hours of what promises to be a fine summer morning, three officers of the 9th Battalion, the Devonshire regiment, are standing on the firestep of their assembly trench, scanning the horizon. But this is no ordinary morning. As they watch the bombardment of Mametz village on the hill facing their position, the noise level is beyond imagining. the air around them screams and vibrates from the shells passing overhead, and the ground throbs beneath their feet. enemy shells are falling too in retaliation, but the three are safe for the moment. the incoming shells are ranged precisely on their front line, some 250 yards from where they now stand, every sense tuned to the trenches across the valley. If the bombardment does its work they might stand a chance. If not, in less than an hour’s time they must advance at walking pace across open ground swept by enemy machine guns from two, maybe three sides. less than an hour. they have anticipated this moment for weeks. two days ago lieutenant William Noel Hodgson’s acceptance of his own imminent death was voiced in a poem, ‘Before Action’, published in Cecil Chesterton’s weekly paper The New Witness. He used a pen name, but those close to him at home will know that the words are his. And Captain Duncan Martin beside him on the firestep, scanning the German trenches through field glasses, knows every hill and fold and danger point as only a man can know who has shaped the landscape in plasticene with his hands, making a relief model to be used in preparation for the battle. For the last week all the officers of 7th Division have pored over the model at Brigade Headquarters. Now Martin can only hope he was wrong in predicting that his own battalion will have to cross no man’s land at its most dangerous point. too late now, though, to worry. time to lead. So he and Hodgson and Second lieutenant Freeland jump back into the trench and sit on the firestep eating the sandwiches they were issued with last night. It will encourage the men to see them look so unconcerned. they are still there, talking and laughing, when a runner comes from headquarters: the Co has sent for Mr Hodgson. So he leaves his friends and makes his way up the crowded trench. Before long the others also make a move. time is ticking on now and there are things they must do. He will see rowan Freeland once more after he leaves headquarters. He asks him for help when he finds that the rum ration has been handed out and his bombing sections have missed it. Have Freeland’s platoon any to spare? No, their ration was short, but Freeland goes round the other platoons in his
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2 Before Action company, then the other companies, trying to scrounge some rum for the bombers. Disappointed, he returns to his platoon. He and Noel Hodgson will never meet again. With Duncan Martin, Freeland will be in the first line to go over, Hodgson and his bombers in the second. At precisely 7.27am, three minutes before the advance begins on the rest of the British front line, the whistles blow and the 9th Devons climb out of their assembly trenches and begin to move forward. And the machine guns open fire.
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130 Before Action officers who came through were very popular with the men. I was plastered with mud. My tunic badly torn with wire, my fingers very tender from crawling on the ground, and my beard terrific.’21 Finally, at 2.30am on 30 September, their relief came and they began the march back through vermelles and Noyelles towards rest billets in Beuvry, just east of Béthune. they were still marching at dawn, dirty, dishevelled, exhausted, but alive, and the clean air, the rustling trees and the early bird song had a new clarity and sharpness. Noel Hodgson found a poem forming in his mind – as he often did on the march. What he took from that first experience of battle, apart from the sheer joy of living, was a deepened appreciation of the men around him; a new understanding of the very best that humanity could be, born in the very worst of circumstances: Back To Rest (Composed while marching to Rest Camp after severe fighting at Loos) A leaping wind from England, The skies without a stain, Clean cut against the morning Slim poplars after rain, The foolish noise of sparrows And starlings in a wood – After the grime of battle We know that these are good.
Death whining down from Heaven, Death roaring from the ground, Death stinking in the nostril, Death shrill in every sound, Doubting we charged and conquered – Hopeless we struck and stood. Now when the fight is ended We know that it was good.
We that have seen the strongest Cry like a beaten child, The sanest eyes unholy, The cleanest hands defiled, We that have known the heart blood Less than the lees of wine, We that have seen men broken, We know man is divine.
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168 Before Action into a listening post injuring three men, one of whom later died. It was a warning of worse to come. the Devons left the trenches on Friday, 14 April for rest billets at Bray-surSomme, a few miles to the south. Harold rayner rejoined them there after two months in hospital and was posted back to C Company. the rest was not entirely restful: they had still to send working parties in the line, and at first the weather was disappointing. later it brightened. one morning Duncan Martin and John
The road to Bray (by John Upcott).
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‘Before Action’, April – June 1916 169
Horse lines in Bray (by John Upcott).
Upcott rode out on the downs, ‘with such clouds as you only get in April & the Somme marshes sparkling far below’.5 And Noel Hodgson had hills to climb and the sort of conditions he loved: ‘a peculiarly spring sunshine, a vintage sunshine, dry and stimulating, drenched the hills. Infinitely distant in the clear heavens, no larger and no louder than silver dragon-flies, had flown the ’planes. . . and now peace seemed to fall with the dusk like a mantle upon the tired slopes under an opaline sky.’ this passage sets the scene for one of his trench sketches, ‘the raid’, surely based on the events of Wednesday, 19 April, when the peace of what had been ‘an unnecessarily perfect day’ was shattered at dusk by the sounds of a violent bombardment on the British lines around Mansel Copse. the 2nd Borders were in the trenches, but as the 9th Devons in Bray were
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170 Before Action
John Upcott’s drawing of Bray Church in April 1916.
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The Hodgsons on the steps of the vicarage in Berwick-upon-Tweed: Henry, Hal, Arthur, Stella and Penelope. The fidget in front of his mother, scarcely more than a blur, is Noel, probably taken in about 1900.
The family home for most of Noel Hodgson’s life on the defensive wall at Berwick. The photograph above was taken in the doorway, left. In the Hodgsons’ time there would have been thirteen guns in the saluting bay by the wall.
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Noel and Stella in about 1901.
Stella (‘Star’) in 1909.
Durham School in the early 1900s; School House is on the left. (Durham School Archives)
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Noel Hodgson in the summer of 1914, and a postcard from his holiday diary showing the Black Sail Pass, one of his favourite routes.
So much change in a few months: ‘with love Bill, Dec 1914’, and (right) one of his pin-ups, Great Gable. The card shows part of his ‘Farewell Walk; up the Styhead Pass (bottom of the picture, climbing left to right) and from there to the summit.
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Hodgson in training with a Vickers gun. Behind him is Bertram Glossop.
Hodgson and Hinshelwood outside their bivouac tent at the farm on the road to Robecq.
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‘Before Action’, April – June 1916 171 ordered to stand to, John Upcott’s thoughts went straight to Harold rayner, who was up with a working party. rayner was probably Hodgson’s ‘subaltern of impressionable mind’, through whose eyes we see the horror of the bombardment. one moment he is enjoying the evening’s peace and quoting the Aeneid to himself, the next: ‘Death, in every degree of horror, sudden and unseen, with a voice of unbearable violence, took men up and dashed them lifeless, bags of blood and bone, upon their comrades . . . . The subaltern was flung upon his back by the first salvo, and picked himself up from a débris of earth and timber. His hands he noticed were bloody, and the idea “I am hit” occurred to him. Then he noticed that he was alone in the wrecked bay. The sentry had disappeared, and looking at the ruin from which he had crawled, he realised whence the blood had come. ‘He walked round the traverse, and found one man firing frenziedly to his front, while all that remained of another was pitifully attempting to bandage a shattered leg with a field dressing. He said afterwards that the act of checking the man from wasting ammunition alone helped him to retain his reason. Certainly one of the most startling features of the horror known as a heavy bombardment is that men will carry out the rules of “the book” and find comfort from so doing, though death is taking both the calm and the distraught equally.’
In the real world as in Hodgson’s sketch, the bombardment was only the prelude to a raid on the front line. A German raiding party about twenty strong had made their way unseen into the hollow below the copse. In places the wire had been cut; in others the force of the explosions had thrown it clean over the trench. At about 8.15pm the barrage lifted onto the support trenches and the raiders attempted to enter the front line. repulsed at the corner of Mansel Copse, they were successful further up the slope and got away leaving three officers and sixty-two men dead or wounded, and a further eight missing. Harold rayner was unhurt, but several of his working party were injured. It was a serious affair. Serious enough to warrant a formal enquiry at brigade level, though all concerned were found to have done everything that could be expected, and were praised for their actions. the commanding officer of the 2nd Borders was adamant that the missing men had not been taken prisoner, and the enquiry agreed. But the bombardment had undone weeks of work on the trenches; when the 9th Devons took over on Good Friday, 21 April, all the digging had to be done again. John Upcott, taking over the copse section of the line, was asked to dig for the missing men. ‘The state of my trench line passes all conception,’ he wrote:
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172 Before Action ‘The whole line had been blown in during the raid, except for a few square yards at the corner, where the line bends back round Mansel Copse. The rain of the last two days has turned the loosened soil into a pulp; one wades along them knee deep in liquid mud – literally. I hold nearly 400 yards of line & it takes me well over an hour to get from one end to the other, so slowly can one move in this morass.’
It worried him that there was so little wire left in front, but rewiring could only be done safely in the brief window of darkness before the moon rose. on the night of 23/24 April a small German patrol spotted one of his wiring parties and followed them back to the trench unnoticed. they hid by the parapet until the wiring party dispersed; then slipped quietly into the trench and captured the first sentry they found, while two of his companions ran for help and the other was knocked out. By the time anyone could reach the place, raiders and sentry were gone. ‘There will be the devil of a row about this’, Upcott noted in his diary, and he was right. Major Milne sent for all his company commanders the next day, ‘me in particular. . . . I got what I expected, but of course he has had it hot from the Brigadier’. the companies in the front line were ordered to put two officers and all their men on duty at night in future, cooks and orderlies included; to have every fire bay manned with double sentry groups (which in C Company’s case required more men than John Upcott actually had, and exposed the entire company to enfilade fire from German positions on the right). And all four companies were ordered to send out wiring parties to rewire the whole front that night. putting so many men into no man’s land increased the risk of attracting enemy fire, but without adequate wiring the trenches were too vulnerable. It was a ‘grisly’ night, John Upcott said. the Germans were expecting wiring parties and began shooting and putting flares up as soon as the Devons entered no man’s land. Frank Wollocombe was shot in the shoulder – ‘It felt like a hard bang with a round thing. . . I wasn’t quite sure if I was wounded or if some stone had hit me.’6 Six other men were wounded and one killed. He came from C Company; when they realised he was missing, Harold rayner went out under fire to look for him and brought him in, but ‘He was dead, poor chap, shot through the mouth. One of the jolliest chaps in No 12.’7 private John Martin from Bow in Devon, aged nineteen, was buried just over the hill in what is now the Citadel New Military Cemetery. the next night was grim too, with an aborted enemy raid and even more casualties from the bombardment that came with it – eighteen, with two dead: ‘one sentry group just above Mansel Copse had got a shell right among them, a sergeant of A Company killed, amongst others, & most of the rest wounded. Beyond this point the trench was very badly damaged, with dead & wounded lying in the bottom. . . . Shells kept whistling through the half light, shaking the
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‘Before Action’, April – June 1916 173 ground with the violence of their explosions & filling the trench with reeking smoke.’ John Upcott’s men bore the brunt of it – not for nothing was the line of trenches running through Mansel Copse known as ‘Blood Alley’ – and after four days with no more than four hours sleep, he was so exhausted he fell asleep standing up. When the battalion was relieved a few hours later he had to be left sleeping in the doctor’s bed in Wellington redoubt, because he was in no fit state to move. In their two spells in the Mansel Copse trenches the 9th Devons had learned a lot about the ground over which they were to attack. they had experienced its dangers, most of which arose from the lie of the land itself, with its rises and hollows and steep wooded banks, and its vulnerability to enemy observers on three sides. Being based at headquarters Noel Hodgson was cut off from the routine of holding the front line. If a raid had broken through in force his bombers would have come into their own, and some were positioned in the front line trenches in case. But for him, apart from supervising the bombing sections, the main tasks were getting to know the ground and overseeing the building of bomb stores. the bombers had their own agenda, and when Frank Wollocombe was taken to Wellington redoubt to have his wound dressed he found Hodgson there talking to two other bombing officers, Second lieutenant prynne from his own Headquarters Company and Charles Cecil thompson, now part of the Brigade Bombing Company. But in and around Battalion HQ there was never any shortage of other jobs that needed doing. Sometimes Noel acted as
Grovetown camp in April 1916. It was at Grovetown that Captain Martin’s model was on display for the last ten days before the Battle of the Somme. (Sketch by John Upcott)
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176 Before Action
John Upcott’s sketch of Treux Wood, 12 May 1916.
at the foot of the hill . . . lies the little village of Treux, its gardens pink & white with blossom. Beyond flows the little Ancre between its poplar trees; across the valley the blue downs with ribbon-like roads zig-zagging up them; far away on the horizon one can see with glasses the distant trenches & watch the white puffs of smoke by day & the flash of guns by night – the sight of which just gives sufficient contrast to our present bliss.’ their first full day was a Sunday, and ernest Crosse held an outdoor service in the wood. It was an easter service, to make up for their miserable easter spent in the line. that afternoon – the last of comparative freedom before the serious business of training began – was damp, but undaunted, Hodgson, Upcott and Duncan Martin set out on a mission, ‘ostensibly to look for a parade ground,’ John Upcott said, ‘in reality to take tea in the little château at Heilly, which is kept for officers by two French girls of a beauty reported to be surpassing.’ later he added a note in his diary, ‘The ride was ripping. We didn’t get very wet; the tea was reasonable & one of the girls really pretty. They are refugees from Liège & this was their holiday house. We walked all around the garden, round which the little Ancre goes singing on its way to join the Somme. Tomorrow work begins; intensive training in the attack— 8 hours a day. So I shall be busy.’ they would all be busy, but the chance to relax in untouched countryside,
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184 Before Action was the last. ‘Ascension Morning’ appeared in the paper on 22 June; if he had written or completed ‘Before Action’ in this new sector of trenches between 11 and 20 June it could easily have reached Cecil Chesterton in time for publication on the 29th: his February trench sketches show how fast a turn-around of material was possible. He might even have requested publication that day, the day the battle was due to start. the poem was, in effect, his farewell letter. In it he took the conventions of lyric poetry, the sunrises and sunsets and beauties of nature, the lovely cadences of language he handled so well; he took his memories and hopes and set them down in front of the machine guns he knew would be waiting. He did not ask for a way out. All he said, very simply, was ‘I’m not a soldier, I’m too young for this, but I will go through with it,’ and that resolve struck a chord with readers in his own time that has never ceased to resonate. Before Action
By all the glories of the day And the cool evening’s benison, By that last sunset touch that lay Upon the hills when day was done, By beauty lavishly outpoured And blessings carelessly received, By all the days that I have lived Make me a soldier, Lord.
By all of all man’s hopes and fears, And all the wonders poets sing, The laughter of unclouded years, And every sad and lovely thing; By the romantic ages stored With high endeavour that was his, By all his mad catastrophes Make me a man, O Lord.
I, that on my familiar hill, Saw with uncomprehending eyes A hundred of thy sunsets spill Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice, Ere the sun swings his noonday sword Must say good-bye to all of this;– By all delights that I shall miss Help me to die, O Lord.