The Magazine

Horror, 1916

The price of victory in mechanized war.

Oct 30, 2006, Vol. 12, No. 07 • By ROBERT MESSENGER
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The Somme

Heroism and Horror in

the First World War

by Martin Gilbert

Henry Holt, 332 pp., $27.50

The Somme

by Peter Hart

Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 502 pp., $32.95

The Somme

by Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson

Yale, 368 pp., $35

In late 1916, Lord Lansdowne, a former British cabinet minister, circulated a letter to his onetime colleagues calling for a negotiated peace with Germany. He felt that the human and material costs of the war were ripping apart the social fabric of the country. Lansdowne was dismissed by most of his colleagues as a tired old man, yet his was a logical reaction to results of the just-ended Battle of the Somme. In a f our-month campaign, 419,654 British soldiers were killed or wounded, along with nearly 200,000 French, in and around the Somme River in northern France. This butcher's bill was paid for seven miles of occupied French soil.

Lansdowne was prescient about how history would judge the battle. The Somme has a secure place in the collective memory as the representative event of a singularly tragic war; a generation of young Englishmen sent to their deaths by unthinking, hidebound generals. The horrors of July 1, 1916--the worst day in the long annals of British arms--lend all the support that is necessary. On that first day of the battle, 19,240 British soldiers were killed and another 38,230 were wounded. The troops were newly volunteered from all parts of the empire, and raw, when they were sent over the top at 7:30 that sunny Saturday morning.

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