By October, after three months of continual fighting and with the weather steadily deteriorating, the battlefield and the communication routes leading to it were steadily becoming submerged under a sea of mud.  Roads broke up and disappeared.  The guns of the Royal Artillery sank under their own weight and sank still further when those that could be fired were fired.  And through it all, somehow, laboured the soldiers who even now were being entreated by their officers to push on to the next objective.

 

On October 1^st, in the Fourth Army area, the battle for The Le Transloy Ridges began, launched in the area of Le Sars and Beaucourt-l’Abbaye.  Four days later, all the objectives had been taken and the divisions of the Fourth Army prepared themselves for the main attack that would begin on the 7^th.

 

Waiting in the trench, his boots soaked through with mud and water, 27 year old Rifleman Henry Saunders of the 12^th London Regiment (The Rangers), waited for the order to go over the top.  Along with the 1/14^th Londons (London Scottish) and the 1/4^th Londons, Henry and his comrades in the 1/12^th Londons would head for the line of German trenches between 100 and 500 yards in front of them.  Their Brigade, the 168^th, was on the extreme right of the British advance.  To their left were Londoners (the 1/1^st Londons and 1/7^th Middlesex) from the 167^th Brigade; to their right were the French.  At 1.45pm the signal to advance was given and The London Scottish moved off, capturing the southern group of gun pits and the southern end of Hazy Trench 200 yards further on.  Two minutes later, the 1/4^th Londons set off, followed two minutes after them by Saunders and the men of the 1/12^th Londons.  Of all the objectives for the advancing battalions of the 168^th Brigade, the objective for the 1/12^th Londons  - Dewdrop Trench - was closest of all.  It was so close in fact that to shell it with conventional artillery would have put the British troops at risk.  Instead, it had been bombarded by Stokes mortars.  It was no good.  Both the 1/4^th Londons and the 1/12^th Londons were held up in front of their objectives by well-aimed machine gun fire.  The attack, like so many before, had foundered.  Henry Saunders was killed outright and his body would never be found.  In time his name would be properly commemorated on the huge memorial to the missing at Thiepval and at the foot of the village war memorial at Chailey.  For now though, his officer began the task of writing to the next of kin of all those men who had died and in time a letter would duly be delivered to Henry’s father at Fir Tree Cottage, Newick. 

 

About a mile to the north, Private Wigston of the regular 4^th Worcestershire Regiment would also be in action at Gueudecourt. The 4^th Worcesters had been in Burma when war was declared and by the time the battalion arrived at Avonmouth it was already February 1915.  Other battalions from the British Empire’s Far East outposts, were also struggling home and all of them would shortly be formed into the 29^th Division; the very last of the British Army’s regular divisions.  A territorial battalion – the 1/5^th Royal Scots – was also assigned to the division and  barely had it been formed than it was sent out to Gallipoli, taking part in the landings in April 1915, staying for the evacuation in February 1916 and sustaining 34,000 casualties during its ill-fated time there. 

 

Arriving on the Western Front in March 1916, the division had suffered huge losses on 1^st July when it attacked towards Beaumont Hamel.  The 4^th Worcesters, part of the reserve 88^th Brigade that day, had been held back with the 2^nd Hampshires whilst the two leading battalions – the 1^st Essex and 1^st Newfoundland – had been sent forward.  Advancing across open ground, the men had been cut down before they had barely breached the British wire.   The two battalions sustained almost 1,000 casualties alone, with the Newfoundlanders suffering nearly 700 killed, wounded and missing.  Learning of the fate of the two battalions, Major-General de Lisle, commanding the Division, ordered that no more troops should be sent forward.  Wigston and his comrades in the 4^th Worcesters had been spared but the division had suffered such tremendous losses on that one day that it was incapacitated from further action until October 1916.

By now, as a result of the capture of Flers on the 15^th September, the British line had advanced as far as Gueudecourt and to add to their troubles, the British troops waiting to continue their advance had another enemy to contend with, the weather.  On the 10^th October, the 88^th Brigade was attached to the 12^th Division which had already suffered heavily in a failed attack on the 7^th, losing 40 officers and 1300 other ranks.  “The state of the country, including the roads, was deplorable, and the rain in October made it, in fact, deplorable” recorded the 12^th Division’s historians some years later.  “The rain was so incessant that the ground became a quagmire, and even artillery limbers could not get across open country, and shells were taken up by pack horses, which often sank in over their hocks.  On two occasions men were found drowned in the thick mud in shell holes.  Probably worn out with fatigue, they stumbled in and were unable to get out again.”

On October 12^th, The Newfoundland Regiment and 1^st Essex, the two battalions which had been practically decimated on July 1^st, were in the vanguard of an assault on a German position north east of Gueudecourt named Hilt Trench in which they captured two officers and 120 men.  The 1^st Essex had moved on to Grease Trench but were withdrawn later in the day when their left flank was exposed.  The Newfoundlanders though, clung on, bombing along the portion of Hilt Trench they held and erecting a barricade. 

Six days later, during which time the division had inched forward, consolidating their positions, repairing dug-outs and communication trenches and capturing some German gun pits into the bargain, the division assaulted again.  This time, the 2^nd Hampshires and 4^th Worcesters were the leading battalions and, with the rain pouring down and the ground a quagmire, the attack was pressed home successfully, all objectives being gained and held.

 

“The Worcestershires,” reported Colonel Stair Gillon after the war, “had some lively hand-to-hand scrapping, and took pretty heavy toll of the enemy.  Their left flank being in the air owing to the failure of the other troops, they had to make a defensive flank back to our regained starting point, which they successfully held and beat off various local counter-attacks.”  He continued, “A yarn, which I believe to be true, as it was told to me the day after the battle, illustrates the German character well, and also the coolness of our men.  A private of the Worcestershires was told off to take back on his own eight German prisoners.  He went off quietly but when he got about half way back he met a strongish party of Germans who had not been mopped up.  He wasn’t put out at all, and started to fire on them, and got his prisoners to load spare rifles for him, of which there were several lying about, so that he could keep up rapid fire!  The prisoners carried out his order like lambs, one of them also being instructed to roll a cigarette for the firer, which was also done.  The German party was finally routed and the soldier brought his eight prisoners in safely.”

 

Private Wigston though, would play no further part in the battle.  Having escaped the slaughter of July 1^st he had been wounded in his left leg.  Dutifully, he would later recall this detail in Nurse Oliver’s book.

 

Oswald Hitter, another soldier destined for Beechlands, was wounded for the first time, four days after Private Wigston.   A Suffolk man born in Lowestoft in 1891 and still living and working there as a hairdresser when war was declared, Hitter had responded to Kitchener’s call and attested on 7^th September 1914.  Three days later he was posted to the 10^th Essex which was forming in Shorncliffe.  In October the battalion had moved to Colchester and it was here, wrote Lt Col Banks and Capt R A Chell after the war, that the battalion found its spiritual home.

 

“It was not merely that the ancient town was a friendly home country for the regiment”, they wrote, “nor that the place was full of memories and traditions of the famous regular units in whose steps we were seeking to follow.  But in its benign atmosphere the conglomeration of human flotsam which emergency had thrown together, first gained that corporate spirit that soldiers know as ‘esprit de corps’”.

 

Much later, finding themselves in un-named trenches near Maricourt in France, the men had immediately named them after well known Colchester landmarks like ‘Long Wyre Street’, ‘Lexden Road’ and ‘Abbey Fields’.

 

The battalion was comprised of men from a variety of backgrounds spread over a wide geographical area.  Men from sleepy Suffolk and Norfolk villages who until recently had laboured in the fields or fished off the East Anglian coast and who hardly knew what city life was like, found themselves flung together with East-Enders from Walthamstow, Stratford, Canning Town, Leytonstone and Bethnal Green.  What united them was their reason for enlisting in the first place and, regional differences aside, all were proud to class themselves as Kitchener’s men.

 

The 10^th Essex formed part of the 53^rd Brigade of the 18^th (Eastern) Division, and like many divisions then forming, its total unpreparedness for war was remarkable. Writing in 1938, Major A F Becke would compare the recruits de-training around Colchester to “a football excursion crowd”: large bodies of men who knew no discipline and were unaccompanied by officers or NCOs.  Officers meeting the trains as they drew up at the platforms simply gathered the men together and then marched the excited crowds to the encampments steadily dotting the Essex / Suffolk border.  The food was coarse, canteens non existent and general supplies woefully inadequate.  Men drilled in their civilian suits and the shoes they had arrived in.  When their shoes wore out they turned to slow marching on grass.  Nights were cold, tents crowded and blankets a scarce commodity.  Blue uniforms and forage caps arrived after a short time but khaki uniforms were in such short supply as to allow only one per platoon.

 

In November 1914, Hitter was appointed Lance-Corporal and the following July, with the battalion preparing to embark for France he was promoted to full Corporal and appointed unpaid Lance Sergeant at the same time.  He also took time to write his Will, leaving everything to his mother, Mrs Laura Hitter of “Sunnycote”, Reedham, Norfolk.

 

On 25^th July 1915, the battalion set sail for France, arriving the following morning.  Now, 15 months on, the 18^th Division had been in the thick of the Somme fighting since the opening day.  Hitter, by now a Sergeant, had survived unscathed thus far, but the 10^th Essex already bore little resemblance to the battalion which had arrived in France.  In the previous three months, 24 officer and 516 other rank reinforcements had been absorbed, and nine officers and 195 other ranks had become casualties.  “Truly”, remarked Chell and Banks, “’The Original Tenth’ had about come to an end.”

 

Worse was to follow.  South of the River Ancre, Regina Trench was still in enemy hands and the 53^rd Brigade was ordered to take it.  On 17^th October, the 10^th Essex had taken over the Front Line trenches from the 8^th Suffolks but not before a bomb from a German aeroplane had knocked out a platoon of men from A Company.  By 11:30am, the relief had been completed and while the British artillery concentrated its fire on the barbed wire in front of Regina trench, the men in the front line set to digging and deepening the assembly trenches.  Relieved by the 8^th Suffolk two days later, the attack was postponed due to the poor condition of the ground and it was decided that the two battalions would go on holding the line by 48 hour shifts, with each battalion to be ready to make an attack on the first favourable day.  By such an arbitrary decision were men’s fates decided.

 

At 2.30am on the morning of the 21^st, with the 10^th Essex holding the line, the order was given to move up to battalion positions. At 12.06pm the barrage had been launched and by 12.20pm an artillery observer was reporting that the leading troops had entered Regina Trench.  Ten minutes later the first prisoners were trickling back and by 4.30pm, the Divisional Commander, Major General F I Maxse, was congratulating the men on a job well done.

 

Only two companies, ‘B’ and ‘C’ were used in the attack and very few casualties were suffered in the actual assault.  Sergeant Oswald Hitter in ‘D’ Company had watched as the barrage fell on Regina Trench and had helped to usher in some of the hundred plus German prisoners who streamed back to the British positions.  The advance had been small, just 250 yards, and the gains just one trench but the fighting had been no less bloody.  One 10^th Essex man, finding himself disarmed in the struggle in Regina Trench went for the German who was threatening him with a bayonet, seized him by the neck with his bare hands and throttled him.  For the Germans too, it was an important position and over the next 48 hours they let the men of the 10^th Essex know just how importantly they regarded it.  In enfilade from enemy guns in Loupart Wood, the battalion suffered six officers wounded, 18 Other Ranks killed, 96 wounded, six shell shocked and 19 missing.  Hitter was one of the 96 wounded, taking some shrapnel in his right knee although not sufficiently serious to hospitalise him.  A week later he was wounded again, this time by a gunshot wound to the face.  Again, the wound was not serious enough for him to be shipped back to England.

 

Meanwhile, the troops tried to make the best of their hard won positions.  Many years later, Horace Ham of the 16th Middlesex, would describe the scene:

 

“The water and mud were waist high.  Jerry had buried some of his dead in the parapets and there were German arms hanging out and Geman dead hanging out.  The trench was so bad that I, being the biggest man in the section, used to have to wade along round to where they used to dish out the rations and fetch the rations for the day.  The rations used to come up in little sacks with a loaf of bread at the bottom and machonochie rations and odds and ends in it.  By the time you got your bread all the outside was watery and wet and by the time you cut it away there wasn’t much left. That was for eight of you.”

 

Regina Trench was an unforgettable experience and months later, by now a Company Quarter Master Sergeant, Hitter would add his entry in Nurse Oliver’s book.  “Wounded twice on the Somme.  Oct 1916” he would write, but his presence at Beechlands and subsequent convalescence was as the result of an altogether more mundane and un-heroic nature.  Hitter was recovering from an operation for boils.

 

On the same day that Hitter was wounded on the Somme for the first time, Private Angus McKenzie of the 1/5^th Seaforth Highlanders (51st Highland Division), was wounded at Beaumont Hamel.  By now, the conditions that the troops were living in had deteriorated to such a degree that every day, several hundred men from the division were set to work repairing the trenches which rain and frost had conspired to break down.

“For two days the most stupendous efforts marked our attempt to neutralise the bad effects of the weather,” wrote Captain Robert Ross at the time.  “Working parties on a huge scale were demanded and supplied.  The main ‘up’ trench… needed constant attention.  The sides demanded propping.  The floors required countless duckboards.  Sumps were necessary everywhere to collect and drain away the water, flowing so naturally into the man-made ditches.  At the same time the artillery hammered unceasingly at the German defences, giving the enemy no rest, now surprising the working parties, now pounding the wire, now switching on to troops who were supposed to be resting in the rear.”

 

The 51^st would later capture Beaumont Hamel but that was still a month away and in the meantime, as the troops prepared for the next assault, life in the line went on much as normal.  Private Mckenzie was wounded on a patrol.  They had relieved the 6^th Seaforths that day, “a fairly quiet’ one according to the battalion diarist but the patrol had been surprised by Germans in a sap.  The Germans had opened fire, killing one man and wounding two others.  A fourth man was missing believed killed.  Angus McKenzie headed back towards the rear.

 

Private Robert Mearns Hobbs was another Scottish Somme casualty and, like Herbert Maginnis, a Cameronian.  Unlike Maginnis though, this was already the third year of fighting that Hobbs had seen.  Born in Maryhill, Glasgow, the son of John and Ann Hobbs, Robert had joined the Territorial Force before the war and had immediately volunteered for overseas’ service when the men in his battalion had been asked to do so.  The 1/5^th Scottish Rifles had sailed from Southampton on November 4^th, arriving at Havre the following day.  Those first couple of months in the trenches had been fairly quiet and on Christmas Day some of the men in the forward trenches had even met with the Germans in No Man’s Land and exchanged souvenirs.

 

1914 though seemed another world away and now Hobbs was back in England having been wounded on The Somme.  Although it is uncertain exactly where and when Hobbs was wounded, his battalion had been in the thick of the fighting at High Wood on the 19th and 20th July, attacking into the wood and then being repulsed by heavy German resistance.  Just one officer and 198 men paraded for the roll call in Mametz Wood afterwards, the battalion’s casualties numbering 18 officers and 389 men. 

 

Presented with Nurse Oliver’s album, Hobbs left two entries.  The first was a crayon drawing of a blind girl leaning against a rock and staring out to sea as the sun dipped below the horizon.  The second was a verse adapted for the occasion and it summed up how a lot of the men felt; this habit of putting on a brave face and laughing things off when actually there was really not that very much either to look forward to or laugh off.  Earlier that month the soldiers at Beechlands had put on a concert at The Reading Room to raise funds for the British Red Cross’s ‘Our Day’ Collection.  They had raised a total of £10 and then repeated the performance at Beechlands for those who had been unable to leave their beds.  The day had been a great success and in total Chailey had contributed the grand sum of £10, 12 shillings, one penny and one farthing to the £167 12 shillings raised at Lewes and surrounding villages.  It had all been a great success but while they were enjoying the festivities – and in some cases playing an active role in them – their friends back with their regiments were being shot at and shelled in waterlogged trenches.  Pretty soon too, some of the convalescent soldiers at Beechlands would be swapping their hospital blues for khaki again and going back out to fight.  The contrast between the two environments could not have been greater but how could you explain that to the nice nurse with her album of wounded soldier entries?  Robert Hobbs set to work with his pen and in careful script, wrote the 16 line verse which summed up pretty much how he felt.  He signed it simply, RMH 1916.