Head Boy Arthur Wolfe was fresh out of King Edward VI
School, Southampton in May 1915, and was on the beaches and cliffs of Gallipoli
by the autumn. His Science teacher at the school, Owen Hobbs, had also joined
the Royal Naval Division, and their paths would have crossed at Blandford,
where the RNVR trained. Wolfe’s experience of war against the Turks was
relatively short lived. Like so many others in that disastrous campaign, he was
invalided out of the front line with dysentery, and was so ill that he did not
return to active duty for a whole year. By the time he was in France at the end
of 1916, the Battle of the Somme had accounted for many of the faces he would
have been familiar with at Blandford – including Owen Hobbs.
Wolfe and his
colleagues were charged with the task of pushing on towards Miraumont, a
village that the “Big Push” had failed to take in the summer campaign. To the
north, the village of Serre also remained in German hands despite all the men
and high explosives that had been thrown against it, but the fortress village
of Beaumont-Hamel had fallen in the late autumn of 1916. Haig hoped that a move
towards Miraumont would leave the German flanks on both sides of the valley
exposed, so forcing a withdrawal. The Naval Division found the ground still
wrecked from November’s actions, and the trenches needed some reconstruction
work. The artillery had wiped any distinguishing features from the landscape,
so movement at night became doubly difficult. The front line was often just a
series of shell holes occupied by a small group of men. Any activity during the
day, such as movement between shellholes, or further digging, would draw the
inevitable rounds of German artillery. Troops just lay there, frozen and
exposed on the side of the hill above Beaucourt. A little way to the north of
Wolfe’s position, the Manchester Regiment lay in shell holes above Beaumont
Hamel, and 2nd Lt Wilfred Owen used the whole terrible experience for his poem
“Exposure”. The Nelson War Diary makes references to two Germans being shot
when they appeared to be completely lost, and a German mail bag being
recovered, perhaps simply dumped in the wrong place. The Diary states “Enemy
observed at distances varying from 200 to 1000 yards.” For Wolfe and the new
recruits, this was not the landscape they had expected to find.
At the end of January, 1917 the Nelson Battalion had moved
back behind the lines, staying at billets in Forceville. By now, they would
have been aware that there was (another) Big Push coming along, and that they
would be heavily involved. They were issued with new box respirators, and
inspected by the Brigadier on the last day of January. In frosty, bright
conditions, they marched back to Beaucourt, taking up their positions to the
north of the river on the 1st of February. New recruits and veterans alike knew
the score – that no man could expect to come out of two successive Somme battles
without an injury of some sort. Would they strike lucky, and get a “Blighty One”?
The initial objective was the German trench on the ridge above Grandcourt, an
attack launched at 11pm on the 1st of February. Wolfe’s unit was in reserve on
this occasion, with the first wave made up of men from Hawke and Hood
Battalions. The whole attack was to cover a total of less than 500 yards, but
it was to take place over difficult terrain in darkness.
Initially, the attack made quick progress, with the German
first trench taken. There was, however, a German machine gun strongpoint which
caused the first wave some problems. The attackers on the 13th of November had
seen such strongpoints cause terrible casualties (Owen Hobbs included) so
officers attempted to get their units round them. Unfortunately, there was
confusion, and the attacking line lost its direction. The Hood units lost
contact with the advancing Hawke Battalion, and the strongpoint made it
impossible for the Nelson Battalion, now called into the fray, to put some
order into the line by linking up with the Hawke’s left flank. The fighting
became bogged down, with the junction between the Hawke and Nelson units pinned
down by the German machine gunners.
On the 4th February, 1917, Arthur Wolfe was killed in an attack
that finally overpowered the strongpoint. Reports had told HQ that the problem
was being caused by a machine gun in a shell hole, but it transpired that they
had been facing a concrete dug out with a garrison of thirty two men. Wolfe was
one of 24 officers and 647 men killed over the four days in this small corner
of the Somme battlefield. From the time he had arrived in France, he had lasted
just over the average of 6 weeks as a young officer.
Wolfe’s body was described as having been “buried where he
fell”, on the uplands above Grandcourt. His is one of the 73,000 names on the
Thiepval Memorial to the Missing. Sir Edwin Lutyens’ massive open air cathedral
to the lost souls of the Somme dominates the skyline, and it is the first thing
to catch the eye to the south from the fields where Wolfe’s body still lies.
Back home, his old Headmaster James Fewings would have been
grief stricken to hear of the loss of his Head Boy. He resigned from his post at
the end of the war, having spent four years anxiously scouring casualty lists,
and hearing of the news of 50 of his old charges who would never return. He used his final speech as Headmaster to
announce the setting up of a Wolfe Prize. It may well be that for the old man, the
loss of “Snowball” Wolfe was of symbolic importance. The Wolfe Prize, perhaps,
was set up in memory of all those fresh faced young men who marched away.
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