Forgotten Voices of the Somme by Joshua Levine

separated at intervals – that is to say three or four men in a little column, and then a few yards away another little column, and a few yards away another little column. In 1914 and 1915 they had advanced in shoulder-to-shoulder line. As the result of the casualties which occurred from the enemy machine-gun fire, these different formations were taken up to avoid the great casualties.
    Private William Holbrook
    4th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers
    They had taken photographs of the German trenches on the Somme that we had to take, and we were taken to the coast near Calais, and we dug the trenches exactly as they were in the photographs, and practised attacking them for ten days. There was barbed wire in front of them.
    Private Tom Bracey
    9th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers
    We had a mock-up battlefield. The trouble was that we were all concentrating on one point. All these men attacking one trench. But when we came to the actual attack, you couldn't do that. There was barbed wire and artillery fire, and it wasn't like the practices.
    Lieutenant Norman Dillon
    14th Battalion, Northumberland Fusiliers (attached to 178th Tunnelling Company, Royal Engineers)
    I was attached to a tunnelling company, digging mines for the Somme offensive. What I did with them was to listen . That meant sitting down in the bowels of the earth, in front of the village of Fricourt . You had to listen to what the Germans were doing. You had to outsmart them. You could easily hear people tapping away long distance through the chalk. If they were making an explosive chamber to put the charge in, you could hear a much more hollow sound and then, following that, you would hear the sinister sliding of bags of explosive into the chamber, and following that, you got out . . . if you could . . . otherwise there would have been no following that . . .
    There was someone listening twenty-four hours a day. It was vital to know what the Germans were doing. If you didn't, you lost track of the whole operation. It wasn't very pleasant work. Tunnelling companies lost a great number of people with a very high casualty rate. But one was young, and took it all in one's stride. And at least you were under cover, and out of the range of shellfire.
    When I was on relief duty, the Germans blew a small mine, which killed an officer and two men. That was one of the accepted risks. It was all right in the mine shafts. There was a primitive form of ventilation from the surface – a man blowing a bellows down a long pipe leading under the chalk. There was
    very little support needed, so we didn't need lots of props holding the roof up. The tunnels were about three feet high by two feet wide.
    The unit was commanded by a relation of the Duke of Wellington, a very nice chap called Wellesley , who was killed in a stupid way while souvenir hunting, when he tried to pull a rifle grenade to pieces and it blew up in his face. The men of the company were miners. They did the digging. No troops came in to help. The earth had to be carried out in sandbags, because any noise of a truck trundling would give away the situation at once. They brought out all the spoil themselves. Morale was very high amongst the tunnelling company, strangely enough. One of the strangest things was that we were supplied with very nice little 21/4 horsepower twin-engined Douglas motorbikes . Why they were supplied to a tunnelling company, I have not the least idea. I can only assume that the authorities considered the tunnelling companies certain death to belong to, so their morale might improve if they had a motorbike with which to get out of the line and have a drink. I certainly considered it pretty risky. You were bound to feel that death was around the corner.
    Sergeant Charles Quinnell
    9th Battalion, Royal Fusiliers
    The miners were a rough lot but, by God, they were brave men. They used to mooch into the trench. They had a rifle but they didn't know how to fire it; they weren't supposed to, they were just