The Somme is a pleasant river that runs through Picardy in northern France, 153 miles to the English Channel. It’s name means tranquility. Given the weather we’ve been having, you wouldn’t mind the chance to lie for a while by a tranquil French river, would you?
Just lie there and dream.
Dream perhaps of this day 100 years ago. You’re 18 years old, one of six pals recruited from your home town in England, all hunkered down together in a soggy trench after a week of rain. The deafening artillery barrage that has been pounding the German lines for six days has finally ceased. Those poppy fields aren’t looking quite so pretty now. And the bad news is that the silence means your cue is imminent.
At 7.30am a whistle blows, quickly followed by another and another, until the whistles are blowing all along the line. Hollow, mournful whistles. Your commanding officer puts his boot on the ladder, shouts a few words of encouragement, climbs one rung and falls back dead, a machine gun bullet through his forehead.
He was 24.
You’re next up the ladder. You don’t know it now but your chances of making it through the day alive are roughly 5 in 6. Your chances of surviving unhurt are little more than 50:50. Nevertheless, duty compels you to climb the ladder, walk forward towards the barbed wire… and hope.
100 years ago today the British Army lost 19,240 men on the first day of the infantry battle on the Somme. It was the worst day of loss in British military history. The Germans lost between 10,000 and 12,000. All told, around 35,000 men were killed between dawn and dusk that day on that notorious battlefield – one death every one-and-a-quarter seconds.
The Somme is a pleasant river whose name means tranquility but it will forever be associated with that infamous day of carnage. And it didn’t end there. The battle was allowed to rumble on for another 140 days, leaving more than a million killed or wounded.
Back home in England, the headmistress of Bournemouth High School for Girls assembled her sixth form and told them. “I have come to tell you a terrible fact. Only one out of 10 of you girls can ever hope to marry… It is a statistical fact. Nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed.”
It’s been a pretty disheartening week, what with one thing and another, and many miserable words have been exchanged, but this week’s word stands as an eternal reminder of just how bad things can get.
“Somme,” said one German soldier, reflecting on that battle. “The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word.”
Proud to contribute words to this video produced by Mindset Communications for the DCMS.
