Understanding the Battle of the Somme
By Professor Mark Connelly, University of Kent
1916 was the tipping point of the ‘Great War’.
So far, the war had been brutal, but there was still the glimpse of a way back, a way out of it all. But 1916 changed everything. The huge battles fought on the eastern and western fronts demanded so much that by the year’s end the war’s own internal logic overtook.
By Christmas 1916, no one could afford to walk away easily without it seeming like a betrayal of the sacrifices so painfully made. In turn, this demonic self-perpetuating motion demanded that each nation key itself up for even more effort, even more sacrifice and plan for a long, long war of unlimited commitment.
The Somme
For Britain and its Empire, the year was dominated by one massive event, the Battle of the Somme fought between 1 July and 18 November. The great struggle started on a blazing July day and ended in the freezing sleet and snow of a bitterly cold winter.
The battle was designed to crash through German lines and end trench stalemate. Supported by the French, the British launched assault after assault, successively wresting small parcels of territory from the Germans.
There were around 650,000 British and French casualties and 434,000 German casualties
During the course of the battle there were around 650,000 British and French casualties and 434,000 German casualties. Military historians have debated the issue ever since, but the general consensus is that the immense effort represented an entente victory as it drew the German army into yet another battle — it was already fighting hard in the east and at Verdun — and it could ill afford this drain on its human and material resources.
Pride and sorrow
At its most basic level, the Somme meant Death stalked the streets of Britain more intently and continually than at any point since the war’s opening. With the deployment of Kitchener’s New Army and its famous ‘pals battalions’ of men drawn from the same streets suffering dreadful losses, Britain experienced mass grief and mass mourning. At times it slipped into mass hysteria.
Across Britain, the blinds of mourning were drawn. Requiring a focus for their grief, people across Britain began erecting war shrines. Here people, especially women, laid flowers and said prayers either in memory of a loved one or as votive offering in the hope of protecting one at the front.
Such rituals were part of a process of understanding and coming to terms with the battle.
The desire to understand was also partially met by newspaper coverage, but in August 1916, a potent new method of mass communication brought home the reality of war in The Battle of the Somme film.
The film caused a sensation. Consisting a vast collection of footage shot up and down the front during the final preparations for the battle and in the immediate aftermath of the first fighting, nothing like it had been seen before.
Bringing the battle home
As with the war shrines, the military activities had a direct impact on the home front: the experience of one cannot be divorced from the other.
Above all else, the Great War was a gunner’s war. It was artillery that made men dig trenches; it was artillery that smashed men’s bodies to pulp; it was artillery that turned no man’s land into a sea of mud.
Feeding the ‘monstrous anger of the guns’ demanded an industrial commitment and in 1916 that burden was increasingly falling on women — many of whom came into the factories to help the war effort.
The Battle of the Somme was titanic on the ground, but it is also the key to a myriad of other histories unfolding hundreds of miles away from the trenches.
