The facts of the battle are indisputable. The attack on July 1st, 1916, saw the worst day in British military history. An intense week-long artillery bombardment had failed to destroy the German barbed wire in front of most of the German front line. Most British troops were ordered to walk toward the enemy trenches and were cut down by machine gun and artillery fire. By the end of that terrible day, 57, 940 British soldiers were casualties, of which 19, 240 were dead. Half of these men were killed and wounded in the first hour of the battle. One man fell for about every 18 inches of the attack frontage. The Battle of the Somme continued for 141 days, ending on November 18. On average, 893 men died on each of those days; the total of Allied and German casualties came to about 1000 000. The Allied front line advanced five miles. By contrast, the British military serving in Afghanistan from 1st January, 2006, to 31st March, 2013 suffered 454 dead and 2, 116 wounded and injured.
Statistics are cold and impersonal; Middlebrook's book brings us the voices, thoughts and feelings of the men who fought and died on that day. A recent Daily Mail article, which features many of the men mentioned in Middlebrook's book, gives one such example: At 0400 hours...
"Many soldiers start writing last letters home. Second Lieutenant Ronald Grundy, 19, of the Middlesex Regiment tells his mother, ‘Please always look on the bright side. Only 5 per cent of the army is killed.’ He will be shot in the throat by a sniper at 7.30am (H-Hour)".
There are many such poignant moments in Middlebrook's book taken from the duration of the battle, but perhaps the most affecting statements are those of some of the men who survived July 1st, 1916 and, luckily, the rest of the war. Here are a couple:
"It was pure bloody murder. Douglas Haig should have been hung, drawn and quartered for what he did on the Somme. The cream of British manhood was shattered in less than six hours" - Pte. P. Smith, Border Regiment.
"More than anything I hated to see war-crippled men standing in the gutter selling matches...I'd never fight for my country again" - Pte. F. W. A. Turner, Sherwood Foresters.
The post-war bitterness of these survivors is understandable - and I have every sympathy for it. However, we have to take into account the fact that not all ex-servicemen from WW1 felt this way. Lyn MacDonald, who wrote some excellent books about the conflict, said in one of her prefaces that many veterans felt hurt by the view of them as dupes and donkeys - although some agreed with it. Nevertheless, the slaughter of the Somme's first day has become emblematic of the prevailing view of WW1, depicted and expressed in "Oh, What a Lovely War", the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and "Blackadder Goes Forth".
I have a lot of sympathy with this view, but am concerned that it has become, for many people, an unchallengeable orthodoxy. Two historians who have expressed an alternative point of view, Professor Gary Sheffield and Dan Snow, have been greeted with near-violent hostility. So what have they said? Sheffield wrote a book called "Forgotten Victory", in which he advanced the view that the Somme was part of a necessary "learning curve" that the British Army went through to adapt to modern warfare, and led on to the "year of victories" in 1918. Snow simply pointed out that the British generals, like those of all other armies, were plagued by poor communications and needed to be located in a safe central position. He also, in 2014, debunked what he saw as 10 myths about WW1 (see link). For this, he received a good deal of abuse (and some vigorous criticism, bordering on invective). While Private Smith, quoted above, might have had no respect for Douglas Haig, the fact remains that when Haig died, in 1928, 12000 ex-servicemen travelled to Scotland to line the route of his funeral procession. The writing of history should never become the preserve of emotionalism and intolerance.
And yet - on Friday, when we remember the sacrifice of so many who died on the Somme, we must remember it as the human tragedy that it was. As my contribution to the commemoration of the Somme battle, I have donated a short poem by me on the back of a British Legion laminated poppy that will be planted among others along the route to the Thiepval Visitors' Centre, on the old Somme battlefield. I have 19, 240 good reasons for doing so. Here is the poem:
Lines
Written for the Somme Battle Centenary
On
the fire step,
First
of July.
Birds
soar,
Bullets fly.
Men
fall,
Widows
cry.
Grief
and glory
Never
die.
I've heard the 'learning curve' argument several times on the radio this week, and I'm not persuaded by it. To accept it, you have to believe that the mass slaughter was a price that had to be paid so that supposedly professional military leaders could learn how to do their jobs properly. Improving your tactics at such an awful cost during a conflict, the purpose of which people at the time had difficulty explaining, is not a commendable achievement. At best, it can only be described as marginally less disastrous.
ReplyDeleteI take a different view : the generals were criminally culpable for undertaking an task that they were manifestly unfit to perform. The most stupid example of this was when the Americans joined the war in 1917. By this time the Allies had finally learnt that full frontal attacks upon entrenched positions was pointless and bloody. American generals just thought this was defeatist talk by spineless Brits, and persisted in doing exactly the same all over again at a terrible, but entirely predictable, cost.
I regard every death in the First World War as an unnecessary waste because the war had no real purpose; the soldiers at the time didn't know what they were fighting and dying for. Furthermore, it completely disrupted Europe with four empires falling, causing countries to be embroiled in revolutions which continued the bloodshed for years afterwards.
The biggest legacy of the First World War was that it led directly to the Second World War in which 55 million perished. Robert Graves said as much in Goodbye To All That, published in 1929, in which he wrote that he and his wife Nancy had viewed the Versailles Treaty of 1919 with horror, concluding that it would lead to another war.
If today's political leaders could learn lessons from war, particularly its utter futility, then there could be some lasting good, but they never do. Blair and Bush did not anticipate that their invasion of Iraq would lead to the current problems in the Near East with Daesh, civil wars and the refugee crisis. Against all the evidence, our leaders persist in thinking that a war can be surgically precise; they ignore the fact that there are always some consequences that can be foreseen, and refuse even to consider that there are many that cannot. This is the same thinking as 102 years ago when everyone thought the war would be all over by Christmas and then it would be back to business as usual.
“War is organized murder and nothing else.” - Harry Patch.