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Thus it was that the Newfoundlanders moved off on their own at 9:15 a.m., their objective the first and second line of enemy trenches, some 650 to 900 metres away. In magnificent order, practiced many times before, they moved down the exposed slope towards No Man’s Land, the rear sections waiting until those forward reached the required 40-metre distance ahead. No friendly artillery fire covered the advance. A murderous cross-fire cut across the advancing columns and men began to drop, at first not many but then in large numbers as they approached the first gaps in their own wire. Private Anthony Stacey, who watched the carnage from a forward trench with Lieutenant-Colonel Hadow, stated that “men were mown down in waves,"” and the gaps cut the night before were “a proper trap for our boys as the enemy just set the sights of the machine guns on the gaps in the barbed wire and fired”. Doggedly, the survivors continued on towards The Danger Tree. “The only visible sign that the men knew they were under this terrific fire,” wrote one observer, “was that they all instinctively tucked their chins into an advanced shoulder as they had so often done when fighting their way home against a blizzard in some little outport in far off Newfoundland”. Few advanced beyond it. Stacey recalled that from his vantage point he “could see no moving, but lots of heaps of khaki slumped on the ground”. The few who did get to the German lines were horrified to discover that the week-long...
Every Canada Day I take a moment to think about the hundreds of Newfoundlanders who were killed on The Somme in 1916 so far from home. As irony would have it, Newfoundland was not a part of Canada in 1916, so therefore they were British, however I still value the sacrifice of ancestors of present-day Canadians. To those of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment killed many decades ago, I say; Better Than the Best.