The Somme
At 7.28 on the morning of 1st July 1916, the week-long artillery barrage which had battered the German lines on a front of 23 miles straddling the River Somme in Picardy reached a final crescendo as a series of nineteen charges dug deep beneath German strongpoints were fired, and then all fell, for a few brief moments, silent. Whistles blew, and the largely green and inadequately trained volunteers of Kitchener's New Armies in the north, and their French allies to the south clambered out of their trenches and walked at measured pace towards the German lines, rifles with fixed bayonets held at high port. By that evening nearly 20,000 of them lay dead in the British sector alone, and another 40,000 were wounded, many of them lying helpless out amongst the carnage of no-man's-land. The Battle of the Somme began with what has oft been described as the blackest day in the history of the British Army. By the time it finally petered out in the bitter cold, mud and squalour of November it had claimed a further 1.2 million dead, wounded and missing, and had etched itself for generations yet to come into the national consciousness of Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Germany and France.
During the course of February and March of 1917, the Germans conducted a skilful fighting withdrawal into the newly prepared and formidable Hindenburg line, some 30 miles to the east, and the old Somme battlefield fell silent. There was little left in the 'devastated zone', bar the broken machinery of war, the pitiless miles of cratered mud, and the graves, thousands upon thousands of them. The once thickly wooded copses were identifiable only by the stark, splintered trunks of shattered trees reaching into the spring sky. The villages and farmsteads had mostly simply disappeared, ground to dust by incessant shelling. Photographs taken at the time show that rough weeds, wildflowers, grasses and self-seeded crops quickly began to soften this tragic, empty stage, growing up amongst the remains of the trenches, dugouts and the crooked, rough-hewn crosses that sprouted everywhere. However, this country was yet to be fought across twice more as the German tide of 1918 reached its high-water mark, remarkably along many of the identical locations and trenchlines, then, five months later, receded for the last time. Then, slowly at first, the land was cleared and repaired, and the villages, farms and hamlets newly rebuilt. By the mid-1920s the surely unimaginable toil of the local inhabitants had wiped a surprising amount of the evidence of that titanic struggle away, and the clearance teams had combed through the field of battle and brought its terrible human harvest into the many formal military cemeteries that now punctuate and render graceful the landscape.
My claim to the heritage of the battle is more modest than many, but undoubtedly common, the name of a far distant uncle etched high up on the white tablets of Lutyens' great arch to the missing at Thiepval. Always drawn by echoes from a childhood steeped in the images of almost featureless landscapes characterised primarily by the meeting of shattered, grey earth with relentlessly open sky, I didn't actually formally visit the battlefield until a dozen or so years ago, and found myself strangely shocked that names such as Mametz, Delville Wood, Bazentin and Beaumont-Hamel represented fields, woods and villages that actually exist in a contemporary reality. It is difficult not to be deeply moved by such a collision of the tangible with the recall of long mythologised mental imagery. The seed of this project was sown, and as I found myself drawn again and again to this gentle, almost innocuous landscape, so did I learn of the extraordinary numbers of poets and writers, since, and sometimes already, famous, who had passed through, and recorded their own experiences of the hell it offered. Sassoon and Graves, pre-war friends, served in the two regular battalions of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, both of which were here. Edmund Blunden recorded his experiences in poetry and prose, both richly moving. J.R.R.Tolkien and A.A.Milne spent variously extended periods in and around respectively Thiepval and Mametz Woods, and their experiences there undoubtedly informed, in very different ways, the books which were one day to make them household names. Figures such as David Jones and Edward Tennant might have been forgotten by posterity but for the quite beautiful prose and poetry which they left, Jones with his extraordinary and scandalously neglected book length prose-poem "In Parenthesis", the painfully young Tennant with his heart-rending letters home to his mother, and the poetry which she, in her grief, published after he was killed. And so many more, from the saintly and much loved priest of the 16th (Irish) Division, through the brilliant eldest son of the Prime Minister, to future radio and television personalities such as Geoffrey Dearmer and Arnold Ridley, the gentle, urologically challenged Private Godfrey of Dad's Army, who witnessed the first tanks in action and was bayoneted at Gueudecourt.
It is through the marriage of their words, so elegant and tragic, with the sometimes uncannily exact locations within the gentle landscapes that we see today, that I seek to pay my modest homage.
During the course of February and March of 1917, the Germans conducted a skilful fighting withdrawal into the newly prepared and formidable Hindenburg line, some 30 miles to the east, and the old Somme battlefield fell silent. There was little left in the 'devastated zone', bar the broken machinery of war, the pitiless miles of cratered mud, and the graves, thousands upon thousands of them. The once thickly wooded copses were identifiable only by the stark, splintered trunks of shattered trees reaching into the spring sky. The villages and farmsteads had mostly simply disappeared, ground to dust by incessant shelling. Photographs taken at the time show that rough weeds, wildflowers, grasses and self-seeded crops quickly began to soften this tragic, empty stage, growing up amongst the remains of the trenches, dugouts and the crooked, rough-hewn crosses that sprouted everywhere. However, this country was yet to be fought across twice more as the German tide of 1918 reached its high-water mark, remarkably along many of the identical locations and trenchlines, then, five months later, receded for the last time. Then, slowly at first, the land was cleared and repaired, and the villages, farms and hamlets newly rebuilt. By the mid-1920s the surely unimaginable toil of the local inhabitants had wiped a surprising amount of the evidence of that titanic struggle away, and the clearance teams had combed through the field of battle and brought its terrible human harvest into the many formal military cemeteries that now punctuate and render graceful the landscape.
My claim to the heritage of the battle is more modest than many, but undoubtedly common, the name of a far distant uncle etched high up on the white tablets of Lutyens' great arch to the missing at Thiepval. Always drawn by echoes from a childhood steeped in the images of almost featureless landscapes characterised primarily by the meeting of shattered, grey earth with relentlessly open sky, I didn't actually formally visit the battlefield until a dozen or so years ago, and found myself strangely shocked that names such as Mametz, Delville Wood, Bazentin and Beaumont-Hamel represented fields, woods and villages that actually exist in a contemporary reality. It is difficult not to be deeply moved by such a collision of the tangible with the recall of long mythologised mental imagery. The seed of this project was sown, and as I found myself drawn again and again to this gentle, almost innocuous landscape, so did I learn of the extraordinary numbers of poets and writers, since, and sometimes already, famous, who had passed through, and recorded their own experiences of the hell it offered. Sassoon and Graves, pre-war friends, served in the two regular battalions of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, both of which were here. Edmund Blunden recorded his experiences in poetry and prose, both richly moving. J.R.R.Tolkien and A.A.Milne spent variously extended periods in and around respectively Thiepval and Mametz Woods, and their experiences there undoubtedly informed, in very different ways, the books which were one day to make them household names. Figures such as David Jones and Edward Tennant might have been forgotten by posterity but for the quite beautiful prose and poetry which they left, Jones with his extraordinary and scandalously neglected book length prose-poem "In Parenthesis", the painfully young Tennant with his heart-rending letters home to his mother, and the poetry which she, in her grief, published after he was killed. And so many more, from the saintly and much loved priest of the 16th (Irish) Division, through the brilliant eldest son of the Prime Minister, to future radio and television personalities such as Geoffrey Dearmer and Arnold Ridley, the gentle, urologically challenged Private Godfrey of Dad's Army, who witnessed the first tanks in action and was bayoneted at Gueudecourt.
It is through the marriage of their words, so elegant and tragic, with the sometimes uncannily exact locations within the gentle landscapes that we see today, that I seek to pay my modest homage.
Return to: The Somme
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Return to: The Somme