Horror, 1916

...Only by directly confronting the main body of the Germans—that is, fighting in the trenches—could the British and French win the war...

...The Battle of the Somme was Britain's first real experience of modern warfare...

...Alhough I will say that Hart writes with wit and insight as he weaves his material together, Middlebrook's First Day on the Somme is distinguished by the way it integrates the soldiers' stories into a main narrative, and Gilbert is similarly successful...

...The battle comes to life—though much more briefly than in Middlebrook—but so does the campaign and the political pressures on the generals...

...Gilbert easily achieves his modest goal of "perpetuating the memory of those who fought and those who fell...

...The New Army divisions were little trained for the realities of trench-to-trench warfare...

...He vastly overstated the losses the Germans had suffered, but his point was clear: The British Army was killing a lot of Germans...

...Britain's role in the war had been limited by the tiny size of its army—two corps in the field in 1914 compared with France's 21...

...Edward Carson, the attorney general, "suggested that the reason was that in France the losses are incurred in killing Germans...

...By the beginning of the Somme, the number was 168 and 56...

...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...

...Many Somme books are simply updates of the Middlebrook method...

...What remains the best study of this problem, John Keegan's The Face of Battle (1976), devotes a third of its pages to the Battle of the Somme...

...The response from General Haig was that the attack had relieved Verdun and done grievous harm to the German war machine...

...The plans changed radically in February when the Germans attacked at Verdun...

...France was plunged into a life-or-death struggle that consumed her whole army...

...To depict a battle in strategic whole cloth is to miss the essential experience of those who fought...

...Fifty-three of the army's 56 divisions had seen action on the Somme, and the surviving officers and men formed the core of the army that defeated Germany in 1918...

...By May it was feared that, if the German assault continued, France must capitulate...

...The war was dominated by the power of artillery, defensive or offensive...

...Fuller and B.H...

...They sent their battalions into the line with eight or nine officers compared to the 25 standard in the British...

...Even better—and longer, more developed, and much more opinionat-ed—is Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson's The Somme...

...Killing Germans was the essence...

...Historians of the First World War face daunting tasks, thanks both to the complexity of the war and to the immense archives of material...

...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...

...Troop transport and battlefield communication had yet to develop to a level where soldiers on the offensive could exploit the power of their artillery, which was fairly immobile...

...When the Battle of the Somme ended in November 1916, the British army in France had suffered grievous harm, but it had also begun to develop the skills needed to win the war...

...Prior and Wilson have been at this work for a long time...

...The American Civil War and the two world wars, the main examples of industrialized warfare, were multiyear bloodbaths where large numbers of young men had to die before one side was ready to capitulate...

...They were also poorly officered...

...Those who contrast the British experience in the Second World War with the First should note that the blood was shed the second time around by the Soviet Union...

...There remain any number of scholarly debates about the Somme—the two most important are over the generalship of Douglas Haig and the total number of casualties sustained by the Germans—and the best accounts will go to some length to interpret the battle...

...The British commander in chief, Douglas Haig, had been hoping to wait until August to commit his inexperienced army, but succumbed to French pressure for an offensive by July 1. General Brusilov took the Russians onto the attack on June 4, and the Italians struck on August 6. The attack on the Somme would no longer be a French-led offensive with British help, but just the opposite...

...What's most moving in his account is the way he punctuates each part of the narrative with the tale of a single soldier's experience, a short biography that captures a lost life in surviving words...

...The Western Front, as it had deadlocked in 1914, offered offensive possibilities in three sectors: Artois, Champagne, and on the Somme...

...In his memoirs, Churchill implied that attacking on the Western Front was an unnecessary sacrifice, that the huge casualties were predictable and the strategic gains negligible...

...Modern artillery meant that both attacker and defender suffered massive casualties in every attack...

...British artillerymen, moreover, had yet to learn the skill of counter-battery fire— finding and destroying enemy gun emplacements as they begin firing on advancing troops—which meant that many units of the British infantry were shelled continually on July 1. The French troops who attacked that day actually gained all their objectives (six of the 19 Allied divisions in action were French) and only gave up their advance when it became obvious that the British were failing to support them...

...In August 1916, the indefatigable Churchill, back from service in the trenches, circulated a memo to the cabinet attacking the lack of strategic gains from the Somme offensive...

...Rooted in the actions of individual soldiers, it is a deeply moving tale of heroism and horror, and the book to be reading if you ever make a tour of Picardy...

...It was so tragic because of their very incompetence at it...

...The Nazis were defeated in the East...

...War was exponentially brutal from First Manas-sas to Khe Sanh...

...The Germans averaged 5,800 casualties a day in the spring 1918 offensives that brought them so close to victory...

...Such rapid promotion does not lend itself to excellence under fire...

...In the late 1960s, this Lincolnshire farmer developed a keen interest in the battle during a visit to the memorials in Picardy...

...As populations grow and technology advances, war grows more bloody...

...The Somme offensive was the fruit of long preparations...

...Hundreds of thousands immediately volunteered, overwhelming the government's ability to train and equip them...

...Unless one side is disastrously incompetent, as in the German victories in 1866 and 1871, a war between large industrialized nations will be protracted and appallingly bloody...

...He began tracking down survivors and eventually interviewed 546...

...As difficult as it is to mold civilian volunteers into a fighting force, it is far more difficult to produce competent officers and NCOs...

...Four British officers were killed for every German during the Somme campaign...

...The cabinet accepted Haig's final minute as official policy, and it contains a line of immense interest...

...But such fighting could simply not affect the outcome of a war being waged by the power of Germany...

...He brings these individuals to life only to have to notice where, in the large number of Imperial War Graves Commission cemeteries in Picardy, the soldier is remembered...

...The French used experienced troops—infantry and gunners—who knew both how to lay down a creeping barrage, how to attack behind one, and how to silence German guns...

...a generation of young Englishmen sent to their deaths by unthinking, hidebound generals...

...The superiority of German arms could be directly attributed to the more than 100,000 NCOs who formed the core of their standing army, and to a stingy attitude to deploying officers into battle...

...Prior and Wilson are the authors of one of the best books of recent scholarship on the war: Command on the Western Front: The Military Career of Henry Rawlinson 1914-1918 (1991), which Sheffield himself cites, along with Middlebrook, as major influences on his own career choice...

...To believe that the huge death toll of the war was the result of bad generalship is to fail to grasp the essence of industrialized warfare...

...And Britain's military and political leaders certainly knew it...

...In August 1915, at a meeting of the war cabinet, Churchill, after an agonizing discussion over the loss of more than 40,000 men in three weeks at Suvla Bay, had inquired "why the losses incurred in Gallipoli were felt so much more, apparently, than the losses incurred in France...

...The historian must search for some middle ground—or write to such length as to appeal to a readership in the dozens...

...Lansdowne was prescient about how history would judge the battle...

...Their damning critique of Douglas Haig is laid out clearly enough for the reader to judge...

...British industry was not yet capable of producing enough large guns and high-explosive shells to support a large field army...

...The horrors of July 1, 1916—the worst day in the long annals of British arms—lend all the support that is necessary...

...War on all sides would bring the Germans and Austrians to crisis and capitulation...

...But to focus on the experience of the combatants makes for strategically confusing reading: The war's battles were too diffuse to be presented like Waterloo or Omdur-man...

...That the book will, in all likelihood, overshadow two far better accounts is a shame...

...there are both more people to kill and more efficient means of doing so...

...The Somme has a secure place in the collective memory as the representative event of a singularly tragic war...

...The modern literature on the Somme began a little bit earlier, though, with The First Day on the Somme (1971) by Martin Middlebrook...

...Shells ruled the battlefield, and no matter what troops did, they suffered...

...In a four-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...

...Infantry could take any position on the battlefield within their artillery's range, but they could not continue the advance because of the enemy's artillery shelling them from positions their own artillery couldn't yet hit...

...The time had come for Britain, and its huge new army, to bear its share of the fighting and the casualties...

...The volume is newly reissued in Pen & Sword's fabulous Military Classics series, where you can also find Tim Travers's The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front, and the Emergence of Modern War 1900-1918...

...When Britain chose to enter into war with Germany over Belgian neutrality, she entered into a war of attrition...

...Herbert Kitchener, the secretary of state for war, predicted that it would be a long war and began the recruitment of Britain's first mass army...

...These two monographs are the signposts along the way to a new interpretation of the war that arose in the 1990s...

...They are in control of a vast body of material and always seem to have the right document or anecdote at hand...

...It is appalling to think of H.H...

...Keegan got deep into the heart of the fighting experience, while also illuminating every facet of the hard undertaking of making battle intelligible to a reader safe in his chair at home...

...The former two had been tried in 1915—Neuve Chapelle, Festubert, Loos, Vimy Ridge, Main de Massiges, Tahure—at a cost of hundreds of thousands of Allied casualties...

...This butcher's bill was paid for seven miles of occupied French soil...

...Asquith's government—the apogee of Britain's great 19th century—acquiescing in the deaths of tens of thousands of young men, but that's what it did...

...If you look closely at casualties in war since 1860, you will see a steady escalation, in line with industrialization and population growth...

...He felt that the human and material costs of the war were ripping apart the social fabric of the country...

...The Germans knew it, too, and had been fortifying the area since late 1914...

...He has drawn broadly, thanks to his role as the Imperial War Museum's oral historian, but the book is an anthology masquerading as a narrative...

...The French and British would make a full effort on the Western Front, the Russians would attack on their northern front, and the Italians would push forward into the Isonzo against Austria-Hungary...

...Huge archives of interviews, letters, and diaries now exist in England, and the new volumes by both Peter Hart and Martin Gilbert are products of these troves...

...The British fired 1.5 million shells on the German lines, but only about 11,000 had the high-explosive capacity to destroy the deep dugouts in which the Germans hid themselves during the eight-day artillery prelude...

...The material is extraordinary, and I'm grateful to have read every word...

...Over the course of the 141 days of the Somme, the British averaged 2,950 casualties, which was less than they suffered in the Arras campaign in 1917 (4,000) or the war-winning offensive in late 1918 (3,600...

...The only flaw in the book is a disregard for the French part in the Somme campaign, which is mostly ignored...

...Liddell Hart, was first challenged in the 1960s, but 40 years of scholarship has done little to dislodge its place in the popular imagination...

...by Robert Messenger In late 1916, Lord Lansdowne, a former British cabinet minister, circulated a letter to his onetime colleagues calling for a negotiated peace with Germany...

...Hart's book is a weaving together of quotes from ordinary soldiers' memories...

...The commonplace view of their being Robert Messenger is deputy managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly...

...When war broke out, the British Army had 18 brigadiers and six major-generals...

...It's a model of what a serious scholar can do when given a general-interest assignment...

...The tales of their heroism and sacrifice remain mortifying after 90 years...

...Gary Sheffield's The Somme (2003), part of Cassell's Fields of Battle series, is a short interpretive account of the battle that presents a concise narrative and takes stands on most of the issues...

...but it's a browser's book, not a reader's...

...lions led by donkeys," originated in the war memoirs of David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, and the popularizing works of J.F.C...

...That came in 1917...

...He believed there was an "indirect approach" to victory and dreamed of campaigns in the Baltic and the Dardanelles...

...At its best, popular history can translate specialized scholarship into general knowledge...

...The cabinet grasped what we like to forget: that the crux of national warfare in the modern age is accepting the deaths of 120,000 young men in hopes of killing 240,000...

...They had learned how to use heavy artillery and developed trench-to-trench fighting techniques...

...After accepting Haig's minute, the war cabinet assured him "that he might count on full support from home," with the prime minister himself noting that he found the argument "very satisfactory...

...The horrors of the first day of the Somme were caused by a simple insufficiency of heavy artillery...

...After the war, the politicians may have found it expedient to blame the generals, but they ordered up the bloodbaths...

...With Gilbert, readers will struggle to sort out the casualty figures or understand the commanders' difficulties or why troop morale remained high despite the slaughter...

...Our losses in July's fighting totaled about 120,000 more than they would have been, had we not attacked...

...New ground was needed, as the extended artillery duels of battle quickly churned the battlefront to impassibility...

...The British were also woefully deficient with the war's most important weapon: artillery...

...There's a standard cliche about World War I being dominated by the defensive, which is not supported by any evidence...

...No longer would the Allies be going on the offensive to defeat Germany but, instead, to save France...

...In December 1915, with the war entered into its second year, the Allied commanders decided that the best hope of victory lay in concerted attack at the earliest possible moment in 1916...

...The Somme was the logical choice...

...His book based on these meetings is a brilliant evocation of the patterns of the July 1 battle...

...It was a horrible way to learn, but it was an unavoidable step in the defeat of Imperial Germany...

...Sheffield scores on this point by giving the French corps' success on July 1 their due...

...But this is a muddled account of the battle as a whole—hard to fathom on any level other than individual experience—and does nothing that hasn't been done before, and in a fairly prosaic form...