206647 Pte. Alvin Smith British Army 1/7th Btn Duke of Wellington's West Riding Regiment from:Lothersdale, Yorks (d.17th Sept 1916) From FOR A SHILLING A DAY (Bank House Books)
Private Alvin Smith’s war. Lothersdale, North Yorkshire: This is where it began, in a village where the Smiths had farmed for generations. At Christmas 1915 Alvin Smith, the nineteen-year-old son of farmer Edmund and Sarah Jane Smith was walking with his girlfriend, Amy. The First World War had been raging for more than a year. Alvin’s brother, John (my grandfather), had joined up at the start, but Alvin had been needed to help run Burlington Farm. His dad insisted, it was an embarrassing position, as all the best chaps seemed to be in khaki. It would not take much to make Alvin defy his parents. At Christmas it came.
‘Would you love me if I was a soldier?’ Alvin joked as he walked with Amy.
‘Well,’ teased the pretty eighteen-year-old, in a reply that was to haunt her for the next eighty years, ‘I might respect you a bit more.’
Respect. That did it. Over Christmas dinner with friends and family, Alvin turned to his best pal, Willie Smith, and said, ‘We’d better enjoy this Christmas, Willie, because we probably won’t see the next one.’
‘There was nothing dramatic about the way he said it,’ Amy told me many years later. ‘It was just a statement of fact.’
Alvin and Willie enlisted together on 29 January 1916, as privates in the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment (West Riding). They were innocents in arms, rushed over to France after a frantic few weeks of training to take part in the long-awaited British offensive, which was already being called The Big Push. Soon it would be known by a name that became a byword for slaughter: the Somme.
Thiepval, the Somme: This is where it ended, a placid corner of northern France where the autumn sun blazes down on dry, new-ploughed fields and the potato harvest is piled in tons beside the farm tracks. The scars of the 1916 trenches can still be seen and every year’s ploughing uncovers the ‘iron harvest’ of unexploded shells. A few years ago, walking the route that Private Alvin Smith and his pals followed, I found something white sticking out of the earth bank of a sunken track. As I pulled it, eighteen inches of human thigh bone emerged, a reminder of the carnage on these gentle chalk slopes. In 1916 the Germans held the high ground here, commanding every hill-top and valley slope. The village of Thiepval and the 1,000-yard-long Thiepval Spur, which stuck like a giant finger into the British lines, were bristling with concrete gun emplacements, trenches and deep dugouts, all screened behind vast hedges of barbed wire. Alvin’s battalion, the 1st/7th, was in reserve on the terrible first day of the Somme on 1 July 1916, and was spared the horror that left 20,000 young Britons dead and 40,000 wounded. Alvin’s friend, Willie Smith, was reported killed on 7 July.
The division got its first blooding in an attack on 3 September. It failed wretchedly. The British commander-in-chief, General Sir Douglas Haig, was furious. He wrote scathingly in his diary, ‘The total losses of this division are less than 1,000!’ In the grim arithmetic of the Somme, where every yard was measured in deaths, the West Riding lads were not dying quickly enough. To infuriate the top brass further, some of the division’s troops had failed to salute a visiting general, which probably explains the terse entry in the 1st/7th Battalion’s diary for 8 September: ‘Games before breakfast followed by saluting drill.’ On 15 September another Yorkshire battalion seized German trenches south of Thiepval. Three companies of Alvin’s battalion, about 700 men, moved forward that night to take over the trenches and prepare for another attack. It began, disastrously, at 6pm on Sunday 17 September with a terrible misjudgement. The battalion’s mortars got the range wrong and hit their own trenches, exploding a store of hand grenades. Amid the dead and wounded and the confusion of this ‘friendly fire’ incident, Captain Lupton calmly climbed on to the trench parapet and heroically rallied the men.
The attack was all over in an hour. It was such a success that a general visited the battalion two days later to offer his congratulations. The West Riding lads had advanced 350 yards beyond their objective. In doing so they lost 220 men. The arithmetic of the Somme was working.
They never found Alvin’s body. During a lull in the fighting one of his mates went back for water. When he returned the captured trench had been found by German guns and the occupants blown to shreds. The name of Private Alvin Smith is recorded on the Thiepval Memorial to those who died on the Somme and who have no known grave. There are 73,000 names. A few days after his death, the local newspaper in Yorkshire recorded: ‘He was well known in the village and district and was highly esteemed by all who knew him. He was a well-built youth, of a pleasant and cheerful disposition.’
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