The Battle of the Somme

The Brexit vote shocked many around the world. For a Brit like myself, and certainly for my father’s generation, memories of the 20th century remind us of a fractured world and the deep cultural awareness that Europe has only been a “union” for 70 short years. A far longer history of division, bitterness and warfare predates the European Union. July 1, commemorated a more terrible name — The Somme — and an example of European hatred in a centennial season of quite tragic proportion. July 1 marked the 100th anniversary of the start of the four-month Battle of the Somme in central France.

Over the past few months memories of World War I — The Great War, as originally termed — have been haunting Western Europe. These have nothing to do with the current vulnerability of the European Union, but about a century-old memory of carnage — and its personal family narratives — that reached an epic scale in the spring of 1916.

Two years of trench warfare had brought both the Western Allies and the Central Powers to the recognition that something different was needed to break the inertia and stalemate on the Western Front and to create a decisive victory. The German Gen. Falkenhayn was the first to play his hand. In February of 1916 Falkenhayn focused his attention on the symbolic fort city of Verdun to draw the French into a defense that would, in this plan and stated aim, “bleed France white.” He knew the French would never relinquish the militarily insignificant ancient fort city of Verdun. It had been surrendered to the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War of 1872 and the French had sworn “never again.” In the ensuing Battle of Verdun 750,000 men died and another 1 million were casualties.

Moreover, Verdun gave birth to another name in the history of warfare and popular zeitgeist — the Somme. To stem the genocide, the British were persuaded to open a front north of Verdun at the Somme, a meandering river region of low hills, to draw the German offensive away from Verdun and thus relieve the desperate French. On July 1, 1916, the Battle of the Somme began with British and Empire troops (Ireland, Canada, Newfoundland, India, Australia, New Zealand) going “over the top” across a 20 mile front at 7 a.m. By nightfall that first day, 21,000 British were dead and a further 40,000 casualties — the worst casualty rate in a single day in global military history. By October of 1916 when autumn rains entrenched the armies in stasis and mud, 650,000 men were dead and an additional 800,000 were casualties from the Battle of the Somme.

The names “Verdun” and “Somme” became eponymous for a whole generation of cannon fodder that my grandfather “Pops” was part of. They still today are emblematic names that sum up human catastrophe at its most obscene and death at its most hideous and vile. The enormous Monument to the Missing on the fields of the Somme includes the names of 100,000 missing British alone, who simply vanished from history without trace. I have been thankful lifelong that my Pops was not one of the recorded dead or missing. After four years of active service he returned from the hell that was Flanders and lived a long life, with no wish to verbalize his war experiences. My great-great-uncle Walter Gower did not fare so well. He died at the young age of 23 at the second battle of Ypres some miles north of the Somme. On the 100th anniversary of his passing in April 2015, my father and I laid a wreath on his grave in a quiet Belgian cemetery on the edge of an undulating countryside, where the poppies still grow.

At the end of the Battle of Verdun the obliterated fort city of Verdun remained in French hands symbolically. At the end of the Battle of the Somme, the British had advanced two kilometers. The great breakthrough never happened. The Great War was to continue for another two and a half years. By spring 1917 the war was truly global and the United States was dragged into its destruction and as a participating combatant in a piece of human history that has never embraced such painful catastrophe — until its continuation 20 years later in World War II.

This story was originally published July 7, 2016 at 6:16 PM with the headline "The Battle of the Somme."