Albert, France – The first day’s objective of the young British lads who climbed from their trenches and struck off across the poppy-flecked fields of Picardy was the farm town of Bapaume, about 10 miles away.
They never made it. Not on that day. Not on the second day. Nor on any day of the battle of the Somme, which raged across this landscape from July 1, 1916, until the two armies, exhausted, stopped their fighting in the campaign five months later.
The British launched the assault from the Somme River valley. The Germans were entrenched on ridges to the north, in deep redoubts, flayed copses and fortified villages.
The British officers had visions of a fine summer stroll. They would “prance into the Hun trenches,” one predicted. The artillery barrage that preceded the attack was so furious – 3,500 shells a minute, historian Martin Gilbert reckons – it could be heard back in England.
The officers blew their whistles at 7:30 on a fine summer morning, and 60,000 boys of Empire strolled into no-man’s land. An hour later, half of that first wave lay wounded, mangled, dying or dead.
In some places, the British big guns and howitzers had done the job: tearing holes in barbed wire, collapsing enemy trenches, filling the Germans with shock and awe.
But, otherwise, the British aim was off, or the enemy dugouts deeper than expected. When the artillery barrage lifted, the Germans gunners emerged from fortified holes, hauled their cheap, efficient Maxim machine guns onto the parapets and went about their work.
His pals were “mown down like meadow grass,” one British corporal recalled. By the end of the day, Gilbert calculates, the British had suffered 45,000 casualties. It was the bloodiest single day of battle in the war to end all wars.
The Germans counter attacked, and British gunners took their turn as reapers. By November, the British had lost 96,000 and the French 51,000, and 164,000 Germans had died. The British offensive had moved the lines a little more than 6 miles; they were still 3 miles short of Bapaume, the first day’s objective.
It is fashionable, in some circles in the nation’s capital, to speak with a cynical complacency – bordering on satisfaction – about the cost in American lives in Iraq. The lost promise of a few thousand U.S. soldiers and Marines is a cheap price to pay, the realists say, for oil and democracy in the Middle East. Far more was spent at Gettysburg or Okinawa or, not far from here, by Gen. Pershing’s doughboys in the groves of the Argonne forest.
In 1916, the British military and political leaders strove to put a similar spin on the battle of the Somme. It devastated the German officer corps, the allied generals argued, and relieved the pressure on Verdun, where 650,000 sons of Germany and France were sacrificed that summer in another grisly war of attrition.
In those two battles, in five months, Gilbert writes, it was an average of more than 6,600 men killed every day – or more than 277 every hour, nearly five men every minute.
Much of the land around Verdun exists as it was in 1916. The woods have returned, and a canopy of leaf and branch shelters the crumbling concrete forts and the spooky, pitted moonscape of no-man’s land. On the hillsides, and in the shallow traces of the trenches, each hard rainstorm reveals shrapnel, bullets or bone.
The scene at the Somme is different. Farmers have recaptured the landscape. Villages are rebuilt. Fields of gold wrap the once-awful rise toward Thiep val, the Schwaben Redoubt, and the Delville Wood. In every corner and nook, the silent cemeteries honor the dead. On the roadsides, amid the thistles, red poppies bloom.
Yet the plows still disturb dud shells and other ordnance. Roadside museums sell little bags of spent cartridges, bullets and the tarnished brass buttons that are all that remain of the lads of Belfast, Newfoundland or London.
“This land here costs 20 lives a foot that summer,” says Dick Diver, the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “Tender is the Night” on a postwar tour of the Somme.
“See that little stream – we could walk to it in two minutes,” Diver tells his lover. “It took the British a month to walk to it – a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs.”
“No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation,” Fitzgerald wrote, in 1933. “This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties.”
Fitzgerald was wrong, of course. Of the two great wars in the 20th century, the first did turn out to be the stroll. He underrated man’s talent at manufacturing sureties.
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday. Comment at the Washington and the West blog (denverpostbloghouse.com/ washington) or contact him at jfarrell@denverpost.com.
