ARTICLE: Delville Wood, 1916

Yesterday I launched a Somme 1916 tour for next year. We’re really excited about it, because it’s going to be all led by individual stories, but we’ve lined up an unprecedented trio of WW1 authors to guide one single group around the battlefield. There’s me, but more importantly, there is Peter Hart AND we have convinced Richard Van Emden to take to the battlefields and share some of his amazing work too.

Anyway, you can read about that via the link, but today I wanted to share a couple of stories that have never left me. They’re not from the most obvious standpoint of 1st July, and the harrowing casualties suffered from the onset of the Battle of the Somme, but from the ensuing, barbaric weeks that followed…

1st July did not go to plan. That much is obvious. The southern end of the battlefront fared better than the north, and on 14th July valuable progress was made at Bazentin Ridge. It was still a long way from the ludicrously overoptimistic objectives laid out, but it wasn’t nothing. Then, however, things began to drift.

One place would come to define the tireless attempts to press the enemy further back from their second-line positions at the bottom end of the British front. Consisting of about 156 acres of sturdy trees and dense thickets of hazel, Delville Wood was split by grass thoroughfares that had now been named familiarly Buchanan Street, Campbell Street and Haymarket by the Scottish troops in the area. The village of Longueval, another of those reinforced by the enemy, ran right up to the edge of it and made the two combined objectives an incredibly difficult prospect, populated by machine-gun nests and even German artillery pieces that had been wheeled inside.

Delville, or ‘the Devil’s wood’ as it became known, would haunt South Africa. For the dominion troops who had made the long journey to France, the opening months of the war had been spent fighting for modern day Namibia, or combatting internal friction. In the summer of 1915, however, the Union government decided to furnish a force to fight in Europe. Raised largely from those of British extraction, the limited numbers of the white population and the inevitable need to replenish those killed meant that recruitment was limited to a brigade. Four battalions of infantry were duly produced to form it. Loosely speaking, the 1st came from the Cape, the 2nd from Natal and the Orange Free State, the 3rd Transvaal and Rhodesia and the 4th was the South African Scottish.

Twenty-eight years old and the son of a church minister, Ernst Hahn was a bank clerk from Paarl, about 40 miles from Cape Town and the third oldest European settlement in South Africa. He had strong german ancestry, which isn’t a surprise given his name. Born near Riga, his grandfather Carl Hahn had moved to Germany before travelling to South Africa to spread his religion in the 1840s. He had been instrumental in the founding of the Lutheran congregation in Paarl. By the outbreak of war, Ernst’s father had served as the leader of the congregation for some thirty years. Paarl retained very Germanic sensibilities, although his father was liberal in his outlook. Though he tried hard to remain faithful to the local population’s roots in keeping the town’s German school open, he also drew criticism for teaching confirmation classes in English for children not fluent in German. The war caused severe divisions in the community and tensions obviously ran even higher when some of their minister’s five sons began joining the Allied cause early in the war; Ernst’s father was eventually compelled to take a pay cut.

The Hahn Family. We weren’t able to distinguish which of the two elder brothers at the front was Ernst. (With thanks to rememberussa.com)

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