For 84
years, Private George Nugent 22/1306 was among the Missing of the Somme,
one of the 70,000 British and Empire whose bodies were never found or
identified after the brutal battles of 1916.
Today, the British Army will
announce that George Nugent is no longer missing. His remains –
discovered by two British tourists beside an old explosion crater 14
months ago – have been identified.
He is to be buried with military
honours beside many of his old comrades on 1 July, the anniversary of his
death, on the most disastrous day suffered by the British Army.
In one sense, Pte Nugent of the
22nd Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers, known as the Third "Tyneside
Scottish", is still a missing person. Despite efforts by the Army and
an informal appeal in the press in north-eastern England, no relatives
have been found.
Today the Army will appeal for
anyone who believes he may be their great-great uncle George or their
great-uncle George – or just conceivably, their uncle George – to come
forward and attend his burial.
Many Service records were destroyed
in the Blitz of the Second World War. The surviving official information
on Pte Nugent is limited. He was unmarried and 28 when he was killed
(probably within minutes of going over the top on the first day of the
Battle of the Somme) and he left two brothers and five sisters.
The chances are that Pte Nugent has
scores of living relatives. The children of his brothers or sisters might
be in their eighties or nineties, his great-nieces and nephews in their
fifties and sixties. Many, perhaps with different surnames, could live
anywhere in Britain or the world.
The Tyneside Scottish were part of
the vast volunteer army, raised by Lord Kitchener in the first months of
the 1914-18 war. Like the "Pals" battalions from industrial
Yorkshire and Lancashire, they were friends and brothers and schoolchums
and workmates who joined up together. At the time, this was considered
good for morale.
But when telegrams of condolence
arrived in droves in the same streets of the same towns after the Somme,
the fatal flaw in the reasoning was sadly obvious,
Like most the 4,000 soldiers in the
original four battalions of the Tyneside Scottish, Pte Nugent was probably
from a Scots family which had moved to the Newcastle area to find work in
the shipyards or mines.
In 1916, the Tyneside Scottish and
Tyneside Irish were to attack the intricate and heavily fortified German
lines, east of the town of Albert. British engineers had tunnelled under
the first line of German trenches and laid mines. The British battalions
were pulled back from their front lines to shelter from the blasts.
Then, on the morning of 1 July, the
mines detonated in two huge earthquakes, and at 7.28am the Tyneside
Scottish went over the top, led by their pipers. The assault was supposed
to be a near-formality. Like most of the meticulous planning for the
Somme, that was a disastrous miscalculation.
As the Tyneside Scottish advanced
at a walk, carrying packs weighing 80lbs and more, they were easy targets
for German machine-gunners, who had used the time to come up from their
second line of trenches. The 1st and 4th Tyneside Scottish battalions were
nearly annihilated.
Remnants of the 2nd and 3rd
battalions – including Pte Nugent's unit – captured a short section of
German line (one of the few "successes" of the day). But Pte
Nugent did not get that far. More than150,000 men died in the Somme
battles raging on for five months, and nearly half of the casualties were
listed as missing in action, the bodies pounded into the mud or shattered
by artillery fire.
Pte Nugent's name appears on the
roll of the Missing of the Somme, on the huge, sombre memorial at Thiepval,
a mile from where he was last seen alive. And little by little, the
scarred soil of Picardy and Flanders is giving up its dead. The remains of
nearly 20 British soldiers are found each year on the Western Front
battlefields in France and Belgium. Not all are identified.
Pte Nugent's remains were
discovered by two middleaged men from Colchester visiting the
battlefields. They found a helmet and a fragment of bone sticking from the
earth, just west of the Lochnagar Crater (marking the site of one of the 1
July explosions) near the village of La Boisselle.
The Commonwealth War Graves'
Commission excavated and found the rest of the skeleton, with fragments of
uniform, including a tunic pocket containing a cut-throat razor. The razor
was inscribed "Private G. Nugent 1306".
The Army required more proof for
formal identity because razors can be lost or borrowed. Then the surviving
information on Pte Nugent's height and boot size was checked by
pathologists against the bones and they matched closely enough to allow
the Army to announce today that they are satisfied Pte Nugent has been
found at last.
From the position of the remains,
he is believed to have been killed in the withering machine-gun fire or in
the incessant shelling before he reached the smoking ruins of the mine
explosions and short of the German lines.
When the surviving Tyneside
Scottish paraded after the first day of the battle, they had lost
three-quarters of their men, killed or wounded. The toll included almost
all their officers, from the colonel down.
The first day of the Somme was the
bloodiest defeat suffered by any army in the First World War. Nearly,
20,000 British and Empire soldiers were killed for minimal gains. The
offensive continued until November (by which time 150,000 British soldiers
had died, as well as 60,000 French and 150,000 Germans).
In five months, the British and
French advanced four and a half miles for no obvious strategic purpose.
The next year the Germans
voluntarily retreated 10 times as far to consolidate behind a stronger
line.
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