Joshua Levine - Forgotten Voices of the Somme

There is an ineluctable poignancy to the battlefield of the Somme, althoughtime has healed most of the damage that man inflicted on this rollingdownland. Those little villages that meant so much in 1916 have reverted tosomnolent type; broadleaved trees have replaced their shattered predecessorsin big woods like Mametz and Delville, and the Albert-Bapaume road stillslashes busily across the battlefield. The Somme meanders its gentle way justsouth of the British sector, and its tributary, the little Ancre, curls in behindthe old front line just west of the Thiepval ridge, crowned by the memoriallisting over 70,000 men missing on the Somme between the arrival of theBritish Third Army in the sector in July 1915 and March 20, 1918, the eve ofthe great German offensive.

The visitor to the Somme needs real determination not to have his interestwholly fixed by the cemeteries and scattered across these hauntedacres, for they help chart the impact of the most costly battle in Britishhistory. Its first day was the army's bloodiest, and the total of 415,000British casualties to which must be added the 200,000 French and upwardsof 600,000 German make it one of the deadliest battles in world history.However, the memorials post-date the battle, and it is all too easy to let themdetract from the militarily crucial details of the landscape (a gentle declivityhere, a concave slope there) which meant so much to men who lived and diedupon it. What matters is less the view from Thiepval memorial than the viewof Thiepval ridge from the uplands across the Ancre, whence British artilleryobservers did their best to batter German trenches before the first attack onJuly 1, 1916. To understand the microterrain of the Somme we must, in ourmind's eye, strip the landscape of precisely those symbols which give it suchan enduring appeal.

In very much the same way it is easy to study the Somme through the thickprism of hindsight, and to superimpose our own view on its events, just as wehave planted our own memorials on the landscape upon which it was fought.The great strength of this remarkable book is that it tells the story of theSomme in the words not of professional historians, but of the men who foughtthe battle. These men came from a world in which 'you could get nicely drunkon a shilling', farm work went on from 'four o'clock in the morning to seveno'clock at night', many families got through the week by pawning belongingson Monday mornings, and village policemen spanked naughty boys. Manyyoung men were 'full of patriotism and the Boy's Own Paper', and came from abackground where they had had 'a certain amount of discipline' so that armylife was less of a shock. Several of the 'Pals' battalions, formed in response toLord Kitchener's appeal for volunteers in August 1914, were filled with 'asplendid lot of men... university students, doctors, dentists, opticians,solicitors, accountants, bank officials, works directors, schoolmasters, shopowners, town hall staff, post office staff you name it'.

Neither patriotism nor the strong bonds forged within units made menimmune to the shocks of war. One was struck by seeing a convoy of woundedleaving Rouen as he arrived, and another saw 'a mangled body blown to bitson a sack' on his first trip to the front, and a third remembered the jam-likeconsistency of the French corpses that made up the rear wall of his trench.Some remembered the weight they carried in battle 'I could have been amule... not a human being' and others the sheer impatience 'browned offwith the waiting' of wanting to get on with the attack. One officer suggestedthat most people had a breaking point, although there were a few actuallywho '