It’s hard to stay decent while trying to pick out nouns and adjectives appropriate to describe the Somme. It more of a campaign than a battle, starting with a bang in July 1916 and ending with a whimper that November. This is something of a debunking book; the conventional wisdom is that stolid British soldiers carrying 66 pound packs went over the top in dressed lines and were cut down in rows by German machine gun fire. The authors contend that many of the attacking units used novel and imaginative infantry tactics, including Lewis gun teams and “bomber” squads, and made as much use as possible of cover, but no imaginable infantry tactics could have worked. The fatal flaw (according to Prior and Wilson) was artillery preparation; the British high command, hoping for a breakthrough with the cavalry corps pouring through “to the green fields beyond”, devoted almost all their artillery to attempts to cut lanes in barbed wire and practically none to counter battery work. The untouched German artillery ignored the front lines and concentrated on approaches and assembly areas (helped by the fact that they held local high ground and therefore had superior observation); as a result some units had 70% casualties before they even reached the front line trenches. It’s contended that this is the origin of the “rows of dead soldiers carrying packs” myth; these were not troops “going over the top” but in the rear on approach marches. The German machine guns may have contributed even so, since they sometimes used them as “indirect fire” weapons.

It didn’t get much better with time, as British generals Haig and Rawlinson learned practically nothing from their mistakes. A few new tactics were introduced: first the barrage in “lifts”, then the “creeping” barrage, then the “bite and hold” tactic (adopted more by default than deliberate planning), but the Germans used new tactics, too: moving their machine teams to shell holes rather than trenches. There were plenty of these to go around; it’s estimated that one shell of 75mm or greater for every square yard of the front. This caused a least one event vaguely similar to astronomers interpreting random Martian craters as “canals”; British aerial photographs misinterpreted a line of water-filled shell holes as a road, resulting in a British artillery team attempting to use it and drowning their mules.

So the bloody carnage just went on and on. Some British units lost 300% casualties (i.e. the entire unit was replaced three times during the battle). Total British killed were about 150000, with another 100000 hurt too badly to fight again. The British always overestimated German casualties, figuring them at 1.25M (!); the actual German casualties were probably about 200000. One of the telling statistics is that of the British casualties, 71 were cavalry.


One flaw in the book is little information about the German side. Analysis on the British side goes all the way from cabinet meetings down to stirring accounts of small unit actions, but there’s nothing for the Germans other than descriptions of defensive positions. The authors also don’t discuss any general history of the war (what happened to get the armies there and what happened afterward) but it’s already a pretty long book.

I wonder if there’s anybody left? If you lied about your age joined the army at 16, you would be 106 now. If you were there and still around all honor you; if not, all honor to your memory, whether you wore khaki or feldgrau. ( )