Few politicians in history have been assailed by as many troubles as the British prime minister Herbert Asquith in 1916.
As summer turned to autumn, the Battle of Somme had raged for two months with colossal loss of life and trivial gains. In September the British front line had moved just six kilometres from its start point of July 1st.
Asquith was sickened by the slaughter, yet he, the most powerful man in Britain, could find no way to stop it. “I agree with you about the utter senselessness of war,” he wrote to his wife Margot in that terrible year. “The suggestion that it elevates the character is hideous.”
The British had been defeated and humiliated in Mesopotamia. In Ireland Asquith’s fatal dithering over the fate of the Easter Rising rebels, abdicating responsibility to an effective military dictator in Gen Sir John Maxwell, had permanently sullied the relationship between Britain and Ireland.
Yet, Asquith, despite the strains of office, appeared to be bearing up until September 1916. He had endured so much but could not endure the death of his son Raymond Asquith, who was killed on September 15th, 1916, during the Battle of the Somme.
Burden of war
Death came as readily to Downing Street as it did to the meanest Dublin tenement during the first World War. Indeed, the burden of war fell disproportionately on the British ruling class. One in six British officers died in the war; the proportion among private soldiers was one in eight.
Raymond Asquith is buried in Guillemont Road Station Cemetery in the Somme. There his headstone, no different to any other, bears the inscription: “Small time but in that small most greatly lived this star of England.”
This patch of flat ground between Trones Wood and the village of Guillemont is soaked in Irish blood. It was across the shell-strewn abyss that the 6th Connaught Rangers advanced so bravely during the Battle of Guillemont. The same battlefield has been expertly recreated in a diorama of the Battle of Guillemont created by Boyle Men’s Shed which can be visited at King House in Boyle.
After the 16th (Irish) Division took the village of Guillemont on September 3rd and then Ginchy on September 9th, the British prepared to assault the next German defensive line.
The Battle of Flers-Courcelette is best known as being the first battle in which tanks were introduced.
They had been the big British secret, an instrument of war which could prosecute the full frontal assaults on the Germans without incurring the monstrous casualties. The first tanks were slow, cumbersome and unreliable. They had a brief psychological effect on the startled German defenders, but were otherwise useless in the initial attacks.
Raymond Asquith was 37 when he was killed, old by the standards of the war. He joined up despite the opposition of his family. He was a brilliant scholar turned barrister, and a father of three children. His youngest, a son known as Trim, was born only a few months before his father was killed.
Asquith’s battalion, the 3rd Grenadier Guards, was part of the Guards Division which was positioned in front of Ginchy, “not a village only a hole in the ground”, as one Irish officer who fought there observed.
The division’s target was Lesboeufs, a tiny village at the bottom of a long hill which had been turned into a fortification by the Germans.
The 3rd Grenadier Guards was in the first wave of attack. Asquith had barely emerged from his trenches when he was hit by machine-gun fire. He died of wounds that evening.
His father was informed two days later while playing bridge of his son’s death. Raymond was the oldest of his four sons and his most admired, at least the equal of his father in intelligence and ability, many who knew both of them believed. Margot Asquith recorded in her diary: “Henry (Herbert) sat down on the Chinese armchair, put his head on his arms on the table, and sobbed passionately. I flung my arms round him and sat on his knee, silent.”
He was not the same man again. His successor David Lloyd George observed that the loss of Raymond “came upon him with stunning effect, and he visibly reeled under the blow”.
Asquith carried on for another ten weeks before resigning. He had been British prime minister for eight and a half tumultuous years, a large part of which he had spent unsuccessfully trying to resolve the Irish problem.
The Irish Guards was also involved in the attack on Lesbouefs. The men advanced 800 yards, or the “extreme range of a service rifle”, according to its historian Rudyard Kipling, whose son John died while serving with the Irish Guards in 1915.
The Guards Cemetery on the road to Lesbouefs is full of Irish names, Byrne, Flynn, McGoldrick, Sweeney, Riordan, Murphy and many others. Perhaps the saddest grave in the whole of the Somme belongs to Private John Clarke (21) from Longueville, Mallow, Co Cork.
For years afterwards his widowed mother Kate put a notice in the Cork Examiner on the anniversary of his death. The inscription on Clarke's grave reads: "An only child sadly missed and deeply mourned by his loving mother R.I.P."