July 1, 2007
The Somme Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:55 PM EST John Steele Gordon posted about an item in today’s newspaper: “Today’s Times obituary page has another entry in the ‘In Memoriam’ section that refers to a far larger tragedy, one that began 91 years ago today. It reads: “The British Expeditionary Force
The Somme
1 July 1916
0730-2130 hours
54,000 KIA/WIA” The Somme was a ghastly ordeal for the British Army, especially the first day; many of July 1’s 19,240 British fatalities may have occurred in the first minutes of that day. The Battle of the Somme has come to stand for absolutely futile slaughter, but over the last generation, British specialist historians of the First World War have come to understand that the Somme was also a ghastly ordeal for the German Army, which thought it had come close to being destroyed there (one German officer described the battle as “the muddy grave of the German field arm,” and something like his opinion was common among Germans who fought on the Somme). The first hours were the worst, but the battle lasted until mid-November, with few if any other moments of it resembling that first day. A significant school of thought now considers the battle’s long-run effects a crucial victory in a merciless war of attrition, a war Britain won, an outcome for which we should be grateful. This is not an indisputable view, but it is a respectable one, although almost unknown outside of specialist circles. Most of what non-specialists think they know about the Western Front of the First World War consists of a generalization extending the first and unrepresentative hours of the battle to the whole of the war; there is also a case that what most modern Europeans (and many Americans) think of war generally is a projected universalization of the first day of the Somme. Some of the British historians who have developed the new view are John Terraine, Gary Sheffield, and Brian Bond. Terraine’s best essays on the subject are contained within his The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti-Myths of War, 1861-1945; Sheffield’s most relevant book is simply titled The Somme; and a brilliant short essay by Bond is The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History. Bond describes what he and other specialists now think happened on the Western Front, what he thinks ordinary people (including other academics) instead believe, and why he thinks that startling discrepancy developed. It is a very impressive little book. It has just come into paperback, and while it will run the buyer $20 for 138 pages, I think Bond’s heretical, irascible, and very learned essay, originally three lectures given at Cambridge, is very much worth the money.
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