Zero Hour: A Novel of the Somme

By Iain Gale

The unforgettable story behind the most destructive day in British military history...

June, 1916: The Great War is locked in stalemate, deep lines of trenches and barbed wire carved into the French countryside.

Sitting in an occupied chateau, General von Soden knows that something cataclysmic is coming. The British have been shelling for days and he is badly under-resourced and outnumbered. A frontal assault is surely imminent, but he has spent two years building an extraordinary series of defences for just that day...

Amidst the bombardment the British troops are preparing for the attack. Geoffrey Malins, with his cinematograph, Noel Hodgson writing poetry in his hut, Siegfried Sassoon observing the enemy, Sir Douglas Haig at HQ, waiting for the chance of glory...

As the battle lines muster, the full ferocity of war will be unleashed. For those on the Front, as for those in the wider world, nothing will ever be the same again.

Based on true stories, cinematic in scope and built around a huge cast, this is a blistering, unforgettable novel that brings home the brutality of war, perfect for fans of Rory Clements, Ben Macintyre and Robert Harris.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781788632287

Iain Gale

Iain Gale has strong Scottish and military roots. He is editor of the magazine of the National Trust for Scotland and lives in Edinburgh with his family.

Book preview

Zero Hour

Iain Gale

Canelo

‘Somme. The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word.’

Friedrich Steinbrecher, German officer, killed in action, 1917

Author’s Note

This is a novel. But, there again, it is not. This book aims not to tell the story of one or two people, but to offer a wider view of several cataclysmic days which shaped the fate of a generation.

All of the people in this book, with a couple of minor exceptions, are real individuals. All of the stories are true, all of the characters real.

From general to private soldier, their words and thoughts, as given in these pages, although not literally transcribed have been adapted from memoirs, diaries and letters, and wherever possible the words they speak are those they used at the time. A small amount of dialogue has been invented where necessary, but I have endeavoured to keep this to a minimum, for the sake of authenticity.

To write such a book is somewhat complex. As a novelist one is able to manipulate the movements of characters to suit the plot. As a historian, the plot (or as close to the truth of a ‘plot’ as we can get) is everything. So I have been restricted and, no matter how much, as a novelist, I might have wanted my characters to behave in one way, history dictated that they would not. What I have attempted to do is to somehow see inside their souls. To try to understand something more about these extraordinary men who, with such uncommon bravery and loyalty, not least to one another, strove against all odds to survive and even triumph in a world of unimaginable horror.

Part 1

Chapter 1

25th June 1916

The little town of Bapaume lay quiet in the late June rain, which had been falling for three days now. Across the countryside of Artois and Picardy a dense fog hugged the contours of every hill in what at first sight appeared to be a flat landscape. But soldiers knew this country’s slopes – its highs and lows, its dips and ridges – and they knew too just how lethal they could be.

For countless centuries the river Somme had flowed through this fertile land, from its mouth in the north at St Valery, down through Abbeville and Amiens, to Péronne, gently eroding the region’s chalky soil into a mile-wide valley. On the north bank of the river, here in its central plain, lay another valley, that of a tributary, the Ancre. And between the two rivers ran a ridge dotted with villages, whose names, known only to their inhabitants for the last millennium, were soon to become miserably familiar to many thousands in other villages, towns and cities far away: Pozières, Bazentin-le-Petit, Longueval, Morval, Beaucourt, Serre and Thiepval. Behind this ridge, on another plateau of its own, lay the town of Bapaume.

The town sat at a crossroads – perhaps the most important crossroads in the whole of northern France – and so for centuries, with its commanding high ground, Bapaume had been the key to controlling all the land for miles around. Here in 1870 the imperilled French army of Napoleon III had defeated a belligerent Prussian invader in one of their rare victories of that miserable, short-lived war.

Now, however, the tables were turned, and since September 1914 Bapaume had been a town under German occupation. One of the first acts of the invader this time had been to tear down the statue of General Faidherbe, victor of that battle of 1870. Now, throughout its cobbled streets, while many of the shops and restaurants still stood as they had for decades, German sentries in spike-topped pickelhaube guarded the major buildings. Signs in German stood at junctions pointing the way, painted in black on white in the heavy, angular Fraktur typeface that seemed more than anything to declare so emphatically that this place had now been absorbed into the Kaiserreich. The same signs directed the thousands of German soldiers who passed almost daily through the crossroads of the ancient town. Up the roads they tramped, following the signs, towards the ruined villages that now formed their army’s front line, towards the farms and the abandoned factories and the châteaux, and towards the places which, for many, would be the last they would ever know.

Chief among those soldiers was their leader, General Franz Ludwig Freiherr von Soden, commander of the 26th Infantry Division of the German Army in France, the Deutsches Heer. Soden commanded four huge infantry regiments in two brigades, along with their attached cavalry and artillery. A force of more than 17,000 men, Württembergers like him, from southern Germany, stationed along five miles of trenches and strongpoints, running from Serre in the north down to Ovillers in the south.

Since April, von Soden and his men had waited for the attack that they knew was bound to come from the Allies dug in opposite them, across no man’s land, beyond the wire. Waited for the great Allied offensive that had been designed to sweep the scourge of ‘the Hun’ from France and perhaps even from the face of the earth. And still they waited, on this wet and misty June morning, as all around them, in the sleepy town and across the deserted farmyards of an ancient land, the cockerels began to crow. It was dawn on 27 June 1916.

Chapter 2

25th June 1916

Seated in his headquarters at the modest Château de Biefvillers, in the pretty village of the same name, a little to the north-west of XIV Corps headquarters at Bapaume, ten miles behind the front line, General Soden shook his head. He stood up quickly, pushing back the gilded dining chair from the long mahogany table, which for the last two years had acted as his office desk, and pushed away the large and well-worn map of the front that lay before him.

Soden did not need maps now. It was too late for maps. He was becoming impatient. He took a final gulp of his coffee, grimaced at its bitterness, and with care replaced the pretty Sèvres porcelain cup on its saucer.

He had grown to like this house – so very French, so charming, with its shutters and hanging tapestries and ornate, wrought-iron balconies. Of course it was far from what he was used to at home. But in time of war, well, everyone had to suffer a little, didn’t they?

Franz von Soden looked every bit the Prussian officer. Determined of face and with a square-set, muscular build, he sported the characteristic moustache of the Prussian officer class, beneath a head as bald as Bismarck’s. But for weeks Soden had not been himself. His aide, Fischer, had noticed it some time ago. The slight stoop, the strain in the eyes and the tenseness were not usual. Soden knew it too. He was out of sorts. He was hardly surprised, all too aware of the burden that lay with him.

General Below might command the army and General Stein the Corps, but when the attack came, it would be he, Soden, the divisional commander, the senior officer closest to the front line, who would decide the outcome. A British breakthrough here would be catastrophic. Perhaps it might even bring the end of the war.

For a moment he thought about the reality of what that would mean. Of what it would mean to him to go home: the joy of seeing his darling Amelie and their five daughters, but in equal measure the horror of returning to Germany in such a way. It would mean defeat for the army and the loss of all for which they had fought and suffered these last two years. And that was unthinkable. So now it all lay in his hands.

But why his hands, he wondered? And why now? He was an old man, wasn’t he? Soden had celebrated his sixtieth birthday here in the château just a month ago, and since then everything had seemed to go wrong. He should not really have even been here. Hadn’t he retired five years ago after more than forty years in uniform?

The army had been his life. From volunteering as a boy with the Württemberg Grenadiers in 1873, he had been quickly commissioned, and by 1886 found himself with the General Staff in Berlin. Then, chief of staff to the 26th Infantry Division, he had been given his own battalion in 1898. The greatest accolade, though, had been his appointment in 1910 as Generalleutnant and commander of the 26th. Naturally he had been recalled at the outbreak of war. They all had: even old Max von Boehn, at the age of sixty-three.

Soden and his men had begun their war down in the Vosges, and then almost two years ago had been moved up here to ‘the quiet sector’, a place of lush green fields and pastoral idylls. A place where, back from the lines, some of the population remained behind to serve in the estaminets and keep the Feldgrauen happy, and give at least a semblance of normality. The quiet Somme. He smiled and shook his head. Quiet? Not any more. There hadn’t been a moment’s quiet here for the past four days.

And now, as the British shells continued to batter out their thunderous tattoo and to turn the fields to a wilderness and the villages to ruins, it fell to Soden to do his best to defend the greatest part of the Somme front. He was an old man. But the part of him that was still young kept whispering that, surely, this was what he had been meant to do? That this had been his fate all along. His destiny.

With his duty as always to the fore, he had managed to maintain the strength of his sector. His two brigade HQs had survived, while so many others had been dismantled: 51st Brigade was deployed to the north of the Ancre river and 52nd Brigade to its south. Both were well in front of his own divisional HQ, with each of their two regimental HQs in the second or third line of the front.

Soden liked to have his commanders around him. The army, it was true, was split in two, between the officers who actually fought the war and the staff. And for the first time in the history of warfare, that staff, far behind the line, were able, thanks to the telephone system that ran so well, to ensure that their will would be done. It would have been different, of course, had they been attacking. But sitting here on the defensive, as they had been for two years, there was no threat to communications. The wires, like their dugouts, kitchens and sleeping quarters, were firmly sunk beneath the ground.

Yes, Soden was satisfied that his command and control were second to none. Besides which, they had a new young staff officer. Losberg had arrived early in the new year as chief of staff of the Second Army. A favourite of the Kaiser, he was General Below’s man. And it was said that he always got what he wanted. Losberg’s word was God and Soden had hoped that he might even have the ear of General Falkenhayn. But that had proved just one hope too much.

There was also a new artillery commander, and for him Soden had very real hopes. He had personally requested General Maur’s transfer from the Russian front, and to his surprise, for once his wish had been granted. Maur had established his HQ close to Soden’s, at Grévillers. And he had immediately reorganised the artillery into three groups, hidden on the reverse of the Pozières ridge. It was masterly. Now, at a given signal, any or all of his massive batteries could deliver catastrophic firepower on one of the numbered squares on the army’s master map.

How, wondered Soden, could any living being survive such a bombardment? The minute the British left their trenches they would be obliterated. And yet… Something troubled him. Once again his mind went back to a conversation he had had with Below.

It had been many weeks since he had first spoken to his superior and expressed his concerns. General der Infanterie Fritz von Below, three years his senior, had listened attentively. But ultimately he had little to offer but words:

‘My dear Soden, while I fully understand what you need, I simply don’t have it. I have no men to spare. They are being used on other fronts. As you well know. Russia. Verdun. I simply have nothing to give you.’

That was it.

And what had their superior Falkenhayn reportedly replied to the Kaiser himself, when asked how Soden would manage if the suspected British attack did materialise on the Somme front? Soden smiled to himself as he recalled what Below had told him of Falkenhayn’s words:

‘I trust that the old Grenadier will hold his position.’

Just that, nothing more.

Trust. But what use was trust without reinforcements? Still, whatever came their way, he would do his best; his duty as a true soldier of the Kaiserreich.

Chapter 3

25th June 1916

In his small office, which had until two years ago been the château’s little eating parlour, close to the grand dining room, the general’s aide, Hauptmann Hans Fischer, read again the official morning report from the Second Army, a copy of which a contact of his at Below’s HQ always managed to get to him – once it had been sent to Falkenhayn at the High Command This morning it summed up his thoughts and those of many of his fellow junior officers. The attack was coming, and it seemed to be heading straight for them, but no one was quite sure when. He read on:

Enemy activity opposite XIV Reserve Corps and XVII Army Corps resembles, ever more closely, tactics of wearing down and attrition. It must be assumed that the bombardment, which has now lasted for five days, and which from time to time increases to drumfire, before reducing to calmer, observed fire by the heaviest calibre weapons on different parts of our positions, will continue for some time. The enemy’s gas tactics, which are being aided by the prevailing west winds, of releasing constantly repeated small clouds of gas, is aimed also at gradual attrition. Because of technical mistakes, the enemy has so far achieved little.

It is a different matter with the artillery. The enormous enemy superiority in heavy and long-range batteries, which the Army has so far been unable to counter, is proving very painful. Our artillery would have been adequate to respond to an assault launched after a one-day heavy bombardment of our trenches. Because of the procedure which he has adopted, the enemy is in a position to flatten our positions and smash our dugouts through the application of days of fire with 280- and 300-millimetre guns. This means that our infantry is suffering heavy losses day after day, whilst the enemy is able to preserve his manpower. His main forces, which outnumber our infantry many times over, are for the time being probably outside the beaten area of our guns, or protected by overhead cover, which our heavy field howitzers cannot penetrate; whilst the few 210-millimetre heavy howitzers are nowhere near sufficient to cover a 45- to 50-kilometre frontage.

The general was not going to like this, thought Fischer, but he must most certainly read it. There was too much intrigue among the staff and Fischer was unfailingly loyal to Soden, doing whatever he could to bring him news from Corps and Army headquarters. Intelligence was everything.

He picked up the report and walked from his office down the short, wood-panelled corridor. Entering the dining room, he found Soden standing with his back to the early morning fire, which his soldier servant had just lit in the room’s huge, canopied hearth. Fischer smiled and nodded, handing the paper to the general.

‘Morning report, sir.’

He would divert Soden with breakfast. Fischer wondered what the kitchens might manage this morning. Sausages, certainly, and bacon and perhaps some of that good choucroute? Turning on his heel, he left the room as Soden began to read.

The general’s face grew expressionless. Grey. Weary. After a few minutes he moved to his chair and sat down, slumping.

He perused the paper again. Many times over, he thought. Many times. In private, Below had mentioned a factor of ten to one. Ten to one. My God, it was unthinkable. They were outnumbered ten to one. Why was Falkenhayn being so stubborn? The man knew the potential disaster. He must send reinforcements, surely?

And in that moment Soden knew in his heart what was to befall them. Just what Falkenhayn’s pig-headed refusal to deploy any reserves would mean. Even if they were spared in the first attack, whenever it came, after this merciless bombardment he knew what they would be up against. His men were doomed to suffer in their shell holes and trenches for months, perhaps years. And God alone knew how many of them would die. His men, Württemberg men, whom he had led in peacetime before leading them to war. His men.

He knew their names, their faces, their families, triumphs and tragedies. And already he had lost so many of them. He had seen a report yesterday from the Oberst of the 99th, telling him that on one day alone it had been reckoned that the British guns had dropped 10,000 shells on his regiment’s sector.

Fischer knocked at the door.

‘Shall I tell them to bring breakfast now, sir?’

Soden shook his head. ‘Not just yet. In a minute. Take a memo, Hans. General order to all ranks of the 26th Division.’

Fischer pulled a pencil and notebook from his tunic. ‘Sir?’

‘Begin. All the care and work which has been invested in the development of our positions will be put to a test of strength during the coming days.’

He paused.

‘Now it is a matter of holding fast, courageously sticking it out, each of us doing our duty, not shrinking from sacrifice and strenuous effort, so that, victorious, we will throw back the enemy.’

Another pause. Longer this time. Fischer looked at him. Soden seemed momentarily unsure. Then he began again, more loudly.

‘Each one of us must realise that the ground for which we have fought bloody battles must without fail be held. No British or French soldiers may push their way unpunished into our lines. I know that in this conviction I share the view of all ranks of the division and I face the coming events with complete confidence.’

He stopped again and stared straight at Fischer.

‘Our battle cry will be, With God for Kaiser and Fatherland! Sign it from me.’

Soden sat back in his chair and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

‘Well, Fischer, what do you think?’

‘It’s good, sir. Very good, I think. The men will be fired up.’

‘I hope so. That should do it. If not, then we’re all dead men.’

Chapter 4

26th June 1916

Hans Fischer knew that his commander had done all that he could. They had worked closely together now for some months and he had watched Soden’s every move with interest and admiration.

Soden had been tireless in his efforts to protect his men from the moment they had arrived here at the end of 1914, just three months after the beginning of this war. The war the Kaiser had assured them all would be over before the leaves fell. They had all known that wouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t be over until Germany won.

That, Fischer knew as well as anyone, could only happen when Germany was strong enough and the Allies weak enough for them to advance through the enemy and take Paris, as they had thought they might two years ago. But first, he knew, the Allies would try another offensive. Verdun had not worked. And it had become evident that when it came, the attack must come here. And so Fischer had watched as Soden battled against time to finish the defences.

The general had made it his mission to do everything possible to create the most impenetrable defensive network in the history of warfare. He had not been impressed by the rudimentary trenches into which they had marched on arrival. Dugouts were simply not deep enough, and trench walls low or collapsing. In many cases, where shelters had been simply dug into the clay walls of the trenches just below the parapet and filled with straw, the defenders would be raised so high that they presented sitting targets.

And as for the drainage, it was non-existent. They had both recoiled at finding in the trenches and fire bays accumulations of stinking urine, and in the trenches leading to the latrines great piles of human faeces. It would not do. Apart from anything else, it was un-German.

Soden had issued the first general orders regarding the defences in November 1914. Detail was his watchword. Fischer had added each element as it was conceived.

The bright white ‘spoil’ created by the digging of new trenches would be concealed using turf and brown earth. All communication trenches must be at least 1.7 metres deep and all trenches, without exception, were to be lined with bricks.

That, thought Fischer, while such a labour over the months, would hardly be a problem for them now, when every village in their front lines had been reduced by the British shelling to nothing more than piles of rubble.

Gradually Soden had increased the tempo. Dugouts on the surface were to have top covers of up to a metre thick wherever possible.

The wire was clearly too low in many places. Every opportunity was to be taken to raise it to one metre during foggy weather or at night. The current one was inadequate. Fresh supplies of barbed wire, chain-link fencing, knife rests and other materiel were to be immediately available, so that any gaps might be instantly closed and to prevent the enemy getting anywhere close to the forward trenches.

Along with hygiene and sufficient cover, communication was the third vital component of a successful defensive position. All advanced listening posts were now linked to the main position by deep communication trenches. As it had become clear that alarm shots would not be heard above the noise of enemy fire, Soden ensured that listening posts were linked to their company HQs by means of bell pulls.

At every trench junction, signposts would be erected indicating clearly what trench lay where and where it led, and maps would be updated and issued to all company commanders. All positions were to be marked on these, ensuring that every officer would recognise sub-unit boundaries between companies and battalions. In this way, as they waited for the British, Soden’s men became experts in the exact arcs of fire which, while doing the maximum damage to an attacker, would not endanger neighbouring troops.

That first trench inspection of November 1914 had been replicated every day since. Their daily routine was tiring and unstintingly thorough, as Soden, with Fischer, made it his personal business to tour every position in his division’s defences.

And if was tiring for them, thought Fischer, what must it have been like for the men, the poor sods who had to carry through Soden’s orders? Working often through the night, following a day of shelling, the ordinary soldiers of every battalion, under the supervision of engineers, had created what was a first-class trench system: kilometres long and with an extraordinary depth and density of lines. They had created dugouts for every battalion, field kitchens, aid posts and mortar pits. In two years every piece of ground had been transformed into a fortress.

Last July, tacit approval for what Soden was doing had come from General Below. It had not been exactly a compliment. He pointed out that the deep dugouts meant it would be hard for the defenders to get to the fire step before the enemy arrived at the trench. In order to prevent this, the entrances to dugouts were to be widened and each dugout was to have two entrances.

He was typically bullish about hiding in the dugouts. It was not the way of the German soldier. A depth of three metres was, he said, ‘quite sufficient to provide protection from a direct hit of up to 155-millimetre calibre’. If the men were warned in time, they would make it to the surface to confront the enemy. A wide variety of means might be employed in order to raise the alarm: bells, drums, voice tubes, shouting down, and so on.

Of course, that had been when the French were their enemy in the opposite trenches. And then on one day last July everything had changed. The artillery barrage to which they had grown accustomed became somehow different. Sure enough, within days a shell casing was found. This was no French 75mm gun, but a British round. British artillery had taken over from the French.

By August 1915 it was clear to every man in the trenches that it was not just the French artillery that had gone. British rifle rounds had been found in one of the redoubts and khaki-coloured uniforms had been spotted. There could be no doubt now. The British infantry were over there, in full force.

In the high command the generals had tried to interpret the move and wondered how on earth the British had managed to find enough men to relieve the French.

And as the Kaiser’s warrior generals deliberated, Soden, back at the front and supervising his men in the trenches and dugouts, had continued his work, now with Below’s full approval.

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Meanwhile, at the High Command, General Below himself had continued to lobby his superiors.

On 11 June he had reported the presence of large tented areas south of Albert, but north of the Somme, and heavy traffic on the Amiens–Rosières railway. There were new networks of trenches too in several places astride the Roye–Montdidier railway.

General Falkenhayn was immoveable. For a year, he explained once again, as a tired father explains something to an inquisitive child, ever since the Verdun plan, his plan, had come into being, the Schwerpunkt, the centre of gravity for the western front, had been moved.

Schwerpunkt, thought Below, was the very essence of German military thinking. The focus on which everything hung. And with its move to Verdun, Below’s command had been stripped of resources, starved to fuel Falkenhayn’s terrible offensive which the commanding general had declared would ‘bleed the French white’.

Falkenhayn had stated quite bluntly that there would not be a British attack on the Somme. Below recalled their conversation. Falkenhayn had again shaken his head.

‘I tell you, General, as I told Generalleutnant von Kuhl, the British will take over parts of the French front to release French forces. But they certainly will not send troops to Verdun and they will not attack.’

It had been only a few days later, of course, that Below’s intelligence officers had begun to pick up indicators to the contrary. And along with the British plans had come information about the vast new army they had created with which to carry it out. An army of volunteers. He smirked. Volunteers.

Armed with this knowledge, Below had suggested to Falkenhayn that they might themselves attack the British in a pre-emptive strike.

‘If we can launch a thrust north of the Somme in the next few weeks, it is quite possible that we may pre-empt the British offensive and ruin their plans. They’re amateurs. Boys.’

Again all he received in reply had been an abrupt ‘No’. The Schwerpunkt would not be compromised. It would remain at Verdun.

So now it was no use. Now it was too late. He knew that the forces opposite him were of limited value. Perhaps they would simply fail. This new army of the British had had no training and certainly had no experience. The artillery, though, were good enough. Hadn’t they proved that in the past week?

Below knew that the full weight of the attack would fall upon Soden’s division. Poor Soden. He hadn’t quite managed to rise as fast as the rest of them, had he? Hadn’t quite achieved the rank he might have – should have – deserved. And now here he was, back from retirement and about to have unleashed upon his command everything that the British could muster. He wondered how deep the dugouts really were and poured himself another glass of schnapps.

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Hans Fischer, standing alone in the dining room at the Château de Biefvillers, could