A Soldier's Tale

The Battle of Aubers Ridge, fought on May 9, 1915, was an unmitigated disaster for the British Army on the Western Front. Aimed at supporting a larger French offensive to the south, the attack intended to capture a vital piece of slightly elevated ground, the 'Ridge,' which gave the German defenders excellent observation over the flat, water-logged plains of Artois.

Instead, the assault became a scene of concentrated slaughter. The British, operating under a flawed plan and with insufficient resources, launched an attack that was doomed from the start. A brief and ineffective artillery bombardment failed to cut the German barbed wire or damage their fortified breastworks, and importantly, it lost the vital element of surprise.

When the British infantry went 'over the top' at 5:30 am, they found themselves completely exposed on level ground. German machine-gunners, largely untouched by the British shelling, opened a devastating crossfire, cutting down the attacking waves with precision. For the few who survived the dash to no-man's-land, they were often trapped in front of uncut barbed wire, isolated and unable to advance or retreat. By the end of the day, the British had suffered over 11,000 casualties—one of the highest rates of the entire war in relative terms—all for no tactical gain.

Albert Money was a soldier with the King's Royal Rifle Corps (KRRC), a regiment that was heavily involved in the northern prong of the two-pronged British attack.

For soldiers like Albert Money, the Battle of Aubers Ridge was not a glorious charge, but a terrifying and futile ordeal, remembered for its scale of loss and the clarity of its failure. His tale, like many others, serves as a powerful reminder of the human cost of the First World War and the tragic reality of some of its most mismanaged actions.

This book is a 9000 word first-person account by British Army Private Albert Money of his experiences in the Battle of the Aubers Ridge, one of the bloodiest and most futile battles of World War 1. Seriously wounded by machine gun fire, he spent hours in No-man's land in a muddy ditch surrounded by the dead and dying, eventually crawling back to the British trenches. At the end of the battle, 11,000 British dead. Territory gained, not a single inch.

This is Albert's unfiltered account: the chaotic weeks at Fort Lytton, the forty-thousand-troop convoy threading through waters stalked by the German cruiser Emden, the bitter French winter of 1915, and the daily arithmetic of trench warfare — ten men lost on a quiet day, thirty on a bad one. Albert records it all with the matter-of-fact cadence of a man writing in field conditions, journal balanced on a cold knee, words rationed because there is always more to survive before there is time to describe it.

The book reaches its devastating centre at the Battle of Aubers Ridge on 9th May 1915 — a single day in which British forces lost more than ten thousand men against reinforced German positions in a campaign that gained no ground whatsoever. Albert's account of those hours is extraordinary in its detail and restraint: the rum distributed at five in the morning, the young lad of seventeen spinning around with a grim smile as he was hit, the anonymous Black Watch soldier who crossed open ground under fire and carried Albert to safety, then went back for four more. I am sorry I did not ask his name, Albert recalls.

Shot through the hip and unable to move his leg, Albert lay in a waterproof sheet among the dead for eighteen hours before the stretchers came. He survived. Six of the twelve men in his section did not.