Scott Bennett

The Somme: 'It broke my nerve'

Nineteen-year-old Archie Richards from Cornwall spent two harrowing months inside a tank on the Somme in 1916.

‘It broke my nerve,' he later recalled.

Like many men labelled 'nervy', Richards returned home carrying the invisible wounds of shell shock, struggling to re-enter civilian life.

His condition was poorly understood and pension authorities dealt with claims inconsistently.

Most veterans never sought treatment at all.

This is hardly surprising.

Post-traumatic stress disorder would not be formally recognised as a war-induced illness until the 1980s.

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The hidden camp’s secrets revealed

I stumbled upon this military reenactment on my morning run, in Lucca in Italy last weekend.

It’s part of the Lucca Historiae Fest, a large living-history festival staged around the Renaissance walls and historic centre of Lucca.

The event recreates different periods of Lucca’s 2,000-year history with costumed soldiers, military camps, weapons demonstrations, parades, and battle reenactments ranging back to Roman and medieval eras.

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‘I’d lost all that I had loved’

Katie Morter, a civilian in Manchester, recalls the heartbreak of receiving a letter informing her of her husband's Percy’s death on the Somme.

In July 1916, not long before her baby was due, Katie received a letter from Percy's sergeant, regretfully informing her that Percy had been killed in action at the Somme.

Katie lost a husband who never got the chance to meet his son.

Over 50 years later, Katie vividly recalled her feelings at the time: I’d lost all that I had loved.’

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Italy’s disastrous efforts to carve out a corner of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Europe, inflicted one million dead and another million wounded upon the nation in a he Great War.

The price paid is reflected in the countless memorials dotted around the country.

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The Somme: ‘They vanished into
the smoke’

Charles Carrington enlisted in 1914, and by December 1915 found himself stationed on the Western front between Gommecourt and Serre.

Charles found himself living in a world of mud, noise, and always a few shells away from nervous breakdown.

Here Charles recounts seeing the London Scottish troops going ‘over the top’ during the Battle of the Somme, and vanishing into the smoke.

The London Scottish were caught in devastating artillery and machine-gun fire while trying to hold isolated positions inside the German lines.

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Passchendaele: 'Those unspeakable
months’

Harry Patch, known as the 'Last Tommy', died in 2009, aged 111.

He lived a remarkable life.

By June 1917 Harry was in France.

Two weeks after the Battle of Passchendaele erupted, Harry duly went ‘over the top.’

'Others were just blown to pieces, he remembered. 'It wasn't a case of seeing them with a nice bullet hole in their tunic, far from it, and there I was only 19 years old. I felt sick.’

Harry most vivid memory was of a dying comrade, ripped to shreds by shrapnel, screaming out 'shoot me.’

Moments later, without a revolver being drawn, the man died.

His last word was ‘Mother.’

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A striking relic from the Great War

It’s not a rifle, gr***de or tank, but a pen holder used by the German plenipotentiary to sign the Armistice in 1918.

It was signed on 11 November 1918 in a railway carriage in the Forest of Compiègne near Rethondes, north of Paris.

The simple act of signing the Armistice - the flourish of a pen upon paper - ended the Great War but sowed the seeds for another 20 years later.

The Waterman pen-holder used for the signature of the armistice and manufactured in the United States between 1900 and 1918.

Foch used the lightest one.

German plenipotentiaries used the second, in dark wood.

Both were kept by Foch, then deposited in Musée de l’Armée by the descendants of the Marshal, on 24 April 1981.

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‘The carnage is just indescribable’

Veteran Frank Brent recounted in the 960s his harrowing experience at Pozières, on the Somme, in July 1916.

Over six weeks of the Somme offensive, 23,000 Australian soldiers were killed or wounded to capture a few thousand yards of lunar landscape.

After the battle, poet John Masefield would write that thousands of men were killed on Pozières Ridge, and buried and unburied, and buried and unburied again, until no bit of dust was without a man in it.

Seeing Pozières today, it’s hard to believe that it was ever worth fighting and dying for.

It’s a blur of cottages barely noticeable while one travels along the Bapaume road to more interesting places;

You are left asking, how a battle that resulted in such heavy casualties could be conceived as a victory.

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‘The first wave gets cut down to the last man.’

Private Stanley Brown recounted the chilling warning from troops he was relieving on the Somme.

Soldiers almost certainly sensed they were in it up to their necks as they marched toward the battlefield.

‘Oh don’t worry you will all be skittled,’ one soldier warned 19-year-old Melbourne clerk Private Fred Hocking, who marched toward Pozières.

‘In an attack up there the first wave gets cut down to the last man.’

Private Vic Graham noticed the stink in the air near Pozières.

He then understood what the French peasants meant when they whispered ‘Bo coo Australie, fini Pozières’

It translated roughly to ‘a lot of Australians finished at Pozières’

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I stumbled upon these wilted flowers on a hillside beyond the outskirts of Varenna.

Marble tablets, covered in grime and moss, soon revealed themselves.

They bore the names of partisans massacred in 1945.

On the morning of 8 January, Fascists, pretending there had been a partisan attack, demanded that six previously captured partisans get down from a truck that was transporting them to Como.

After, dismounting, the prisoners were executed.

Ninety years on, have those names faded into obscurity?

Or are their sacrifices still remembered and honoured?

The wilted flowers offer few answers.

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Majorie Grimsby of the Voluntary Aid Detachment recalls her harrowing work at a Casualty Clearing Station during the Great War in France.

'It was just one after another - we didn't really know what we were doing, we were just anxious to put them out of their pain, she recalled.
Initially only fully trained nurses were allowed to serve at the front, but by autumn of 1915, the medical services were so overrun that unpaid volunteers, such as Majorie, were urgently needed.

Majorie's story is recounted in the superb series 'Timeline’.

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