Just after 7:30 on the morning of 1 July 1916, 2nd Lieutenant Charles Edward Burton Bernard of the 10th West Yorkshire Regiment led his men across no man’s land towards the German trenches outside the hamlet of Fricourt in northern France, not far from the River Somme. At first, the battlefield was eerily quiet; days of heavy bombardment by British artillery appeared to have achieved the deadly task of clearing the enemy lines. But then the German soldiers emerged from their bunkers, and the machine gun fire began.
By the time 2nd Lieutenant Bernard reached the second line of German trenches, his platoon had been decimated. He and a handful of men had to take cover in a shell crater. German soldiers quickly returned to the empty trenches that Bernard and his men had crossed earlier in the day, encircling them. The remaining soldiers from the front line fell back, and the expected third wave never materialised; they had been mown down in no man’s land. Finally, Bernard decided to try and make his way back to the British lines. He managed to scramble into one of the German trenches, but there he was captured and made a prisoner of war. His career as an active soldier was over.
The first day of the Battle of the Somme was the bloodiest day in the history of the British army, with almost 60,000 casualties, one-third of them fatal. The 10th West Yorkshire Regiment had the highest number of casualties, losing 22 officers and 688 men. No other British battalion suffered a greater number of losses in a single day during the war. 2nd Lieutenant Bernard was one of only a handful of officers who survived.
Bernard spent the rest of the conflict as a prisoner in various officers’ camps in Germany before being transferred to Holland, finally returning to England after the Armistice was signed in November 1918. Years later, he wrote a memoir of his capture and ensuing captivity. It is an extraordinary document. His harrowing account of the fighting outside Fricourt is particularly fascinating, since so few men who were there lived to tell the tale.
Reported Missing 