Express & Star

1916. The Somme - 'Such High Hopes'.

With 420,000 British casualties, The Somme was a massacre. On the first day alone 60,000 fell, 20,000 of them dead. Almost two thirds of all officers to die during the battle fell on that first day in July 1916.

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Wolverhampton's Basil Houle lived to tell the tale.

Basil Houle was a child of Imperial Britain, the son of a London solicitor and a chorister at St George's Chapel, Windsor. In 1910 he sang at the funeral of Edward VII and at the Coronation of George V and Queen Mary. Four years later the First World War broke out and young Basil, with millions of others, joined the mad rush to the colours.

"I was seventeen but I told them I was eighteen," he recalls at his home in Tettenhall, Wolverhampton. "I couldn't get in quickly enough. Our only worry was that the war might be over by the time we got there!"

By the end of 1915, Rifleman 2012 Houle of the 1st London Rifle Brigade was in trenches in Belgium. It was hardly the war he had imagined.

"We did two weeks on, two weeks off in the trenches. You just sat there on the fire step with your feet in water and went to sleep. I never even fired a shot."

But things soon changed. He became a sniper and his unit, part of 56th (London) Division, moved to the gentle downland near the River Somme in northern France. They began training for the biggest British offensive of the war. The aim was to destroy the formidable German defences with artillery fire. Then the British forces, including the untried youngsters of Kitchener's New Army, would simply walk forward and seize the trenches. If all went well, the war could be over in weeks. Basil Houle recalls the optimism as his battalion, loaded with weapons, signposts, barbed wire and ladders, endlessly rehearsed its moves over practice trenches miles behind the lines. The Battle of the Somme was heralded by a week-long artillery bombardment. The young soldiers watched in amazement as millions of shells crashed down on the German lines a few hundred yards away.

Troops fix their bayonets as they prepare to go over the top.

"I wasn't a bit frightened. Why should we be? We hadn't seen anything to be apprehensive about. Why, on the night before the attack I just sat on the back of the trench and watched the shelling."

At 7.30am on Saturday, July 1, the whistles blew and along the 18-mile front 100,000 soldiers climbed out of their trenches and advanced. The 56th was at the far north of the battle in a diversionary attack on a German position at Gommecourt Wood. It was reckoned to be the best Territorial division in the battle and fought well, capturing all the German front-line trenches.

"We dug ourselves in, the sunshine came out and it was a beautiful morning. We more or less lay there sunbathing. There was a lot of firing further down the line but not much near us."

But in their tiny sector, Rifleman Houle and his pals had no idea of the catastrophe around them. Despite the bombardment, despite the promises of the generals, the defenders were not wiped out. As the British advanced they were mown down in waves by German machine guns and shells. The British attacks to the left and right of the London Division faded away. The inevitable German counter-attack followed.

"Suddenly we could see the Germans moving up the trenches towards us. I shot one and he went down shouting. Another one looked round and I got him in the back. I got so mad and excited, I could have killed the Kaiser and everybody else. But they came back and absolutely showered us with bombs so we all scrambled back towards our own lines."

As he moved back, Basil Houle was hit by shrapnel from a British shell. Paralysed and exhausted, he dragged himself into a shell hole. To escape the bullets he had to lie on a dead body, "the most horrible experience of my life". As darkness fell he was spotted by a German soldier and carried into captivity. After a spell in hospital he was put to work in a German coal mine for the rest of the war.

"It all started with such high hopes. But everything was so badly organised. Looking back, I realise that if I hadn't been captured I would not be here today."

He is almost certainly right. Basil Houle's 1st London Rifle Brigade numbered 800 men at dawn on July 1, 1916. By the end of the day 572 were dead, wounded or missing. Other battalions suffered even worse fates, the Accrington Pals losing 585, the Newfoundland Regiment 684 and the 10th West Yorkshires 710. British casualties totalled 60,000. It was the worst single day in our military history. In the space of eight hours the British Army suffered more casualties than in the Crimean, Boer and Korean wars combined. No battle in history had such a shattering effect on Britain. The cream of towns and cities was wiped out in the first day of the Somme. Yorkshire suffered 9,000 killed, Lancashire 6,000, London 5,500, Birmingham more than 1,000 and so on. Hardly a family was untouched by the disaster.

"After the war was over I took part in a march through London with my regiment. There was not a single, solitary soul that I knew. God knows what happened to the rest."

Interview from June 1986

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