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‘A good kick': The story of the ball that led one of the bloodiest battles in history
One hundred years ago Friday, as the last shells of a week-long bombardment crept off into the fields of northern France, British Army Capt. William P. Nevill kicked a football into no-man’s land.
It was a few minutes after 7:30 am on July 1, 1916, and one of the bloodiest engagements in the history of civilization — the Battle of the Somme — had just begun.
About 110,000 men spread across a 13-mile stretch of front attacked that day. By July 2, 60,000 would be dead or wounded — stretched lifeless over fields of barbed wire or calling out from the depths of shell craters.
Nevill was one of those men. A company commander with the 8th East Surrey Regiment, his story and the story of his company’s four footballs are chronicled in historian Paul Fussell’s seminal work, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” and a website dedicated to Surrey county’s past. A small corner of history, it is a painful reminder of the Great War’s cost and the generation it nearly eradicated.
Prior to the Somme, Nevill had been home in London on leave and bought four footballs — one for each platoon in his company. He offered a prize for the first group that got a ball to the German front line. Fussell writes that kicking a football toward the enemy was a way of showing “sporting spirit” and was first done at the Battle of Loos in 1915.
After a week-long bombardment, the British believed that the German positions would be all but destroyed, their barbed wire severed and the path to victory paved by shrapnel and bodies they would only have to step over. What they didn’t know, however, was that the German troops opposite them were living comfortably, sometimes dozens of feet underground, in ventilated cement shelters as the allied guns pounded away.
Adam Hochschild writes, in his book “To End All Wars,” that almost one in four British shells were duds in that early bombardment, many of which produced large amounts shrapnel, thus doing little to the German earthworks and only severing the barbed wire if they exploded at the right height. Many didn’t.
The battle started with detonation of underground mines placed beneath the German trenches and a creeping barrage that was meant to advance in tandem with the attackers. In reality, the barrage did little and was poorly timed–fading off into the distance long before the advancing soldiers got to the German lines. The British troops were laden with 60 pounds of gear including grenades, bullets, rations and water and Hochschild writes that the soldiers were expected to move forward at 100 yards a minute.
In his book, Fussell cites a survivor’s recollection of the moment the barrage lifted and Nevill’s men began their walk into no-man’s land, lined abreast and with their footballs to the front.
“As the gun-fire died away I saw an infantryman climb onto the parapet into No Man’s Land, beckoning others to follow. As he did so he kicked off a football. A good kick. The ball rose and traveled well towards the German Line. That seemed to be the signal to advance.”
Fifteen days later, a second lieutenant with the 8th East Surreys would write a letter to Nevill’s sister describing her brother in those moments before his company went over the top.
“Five minutes before ‘zero’ hour your brother strolled up in his usual calm way and we shared a last joke before going over. The Company went over the top very well, with Soames and your brother kicking off with the Company footballs.”
The Germans had endured the shelling, and as the barrage lifted they rushed from their dugouts to their sandbagged and camouflaged machine gun nests. The smoke cleared, and as the last of the dirt from the subterranean mines descended back to earth, the British walked forward.
And the men of Nevill’s company kicked their footballs.
When they were within 100 yards the Germans opened up with rifle and machine gun fire. At 550 rounds per-minute their Maxim guns, easily one of the most distinguishable and deadly weapons of the war, proceeded to cut down the lines of advancing British and French forces that would soon become bottlenecked as they tried to advance over the barbed wire.
Nevill was shot in the head during the initial burst and died immediately.
His death was immortalized in a poem written and distributed in the Daily Mail in the weeks that followed.
“On through the hail of slaughter,
Where gallant comrades fall,
Where blood is poured like water,
They drive the trickling ball.
The fear of death before them,
Is but an empty name;
True to the land that bore them,
The SURREYS played the game.”
Three-quarters of the officers attacking that day were killed or wounded, and the advancing Allied forces suffered two casualties for every yard of the front, writes Hochschild.
The 800-man 8th Battalion of the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry was reduced to 80 men and four officers by noon, Fussell writes.
The loss of life was staggering. At night after the first day many of the wounded tried to crawl back to their respective trenches, while in the days that followed the living would stumble upon their dead comrades strewn about the killing fields.
One battalion commander, Lt. Col. E.T.F Sandys lost 500 of his roughly 800 men on that first day. He shot himself in a London hotel room that September, writes Hochschild, just after penning to a fellow officer, “I have never had a moments peace since July 1st.”
Planned as an offensive to relieve German pressure on the battered French forces at Verdun, the Battle of the Somme, also known as the Somme Offensive, would end in November — when rain turned the front into a frigid muddy slog — with the allies gaining a mere seven square miles of ground. It was the first battle of the war that saw the debut of tracked behemoths called tanks and by its end, the French and British forces had suffered around 700,000 dead and wounded. The Germans faired little better, having lost more than 500,000.
With winter the war ground on, claiming tens of thousands of lives for the next two years in battles from France to the deserts of the Middle East to the Italian alps.
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