A summer day in France

One hundred years ago today the British Army impaled itself upon the idea that if you only throw more infantrymen at entrenched machine gun emplacements, you’ll achieve a breakthrough in a war of stagnation. 

The assault had been planned for months, conceived in part as a means to offer relief for the French at Verdun, a meatgrinder if ever there was one. It was preceded by a week-long artillery barrage; seven days of heavy guns spewing shells that were meant to have destroyed the bulk of the German frontline soldiers, and to have terrorized the survivors.

It failed.

The first day of the Battle of the Somme cost the Brits 58,000 casualties (almost 20,000 of them dead), but won no breakthrough. Neither did it break through the dense crania of the British generals. The new commander, Sir Douglas Haig, remained boneheaded to his death, which unfortunately came long after the Armistice in 1918.

(Generals typically were not in danger of injuries, unless they fell off their polo ponies or slipped on the floor of the officers’ mess at châteaux several miles behind the lines.)

No, wave after wave of Tommies went over the top from 1 July to 18 November without enough land to grow a decent crop of corn changing hands. The ground was churned to sludge by unbelievable numbers of artillery bombardments; farmers are still turning up unexploded shells as they tend their fields. The hard-baked summer ground turned to rivers of mud in autumn rain, and then to frozen wasteland in winter as the casualties mounted by an order of magnitude. In the end the butcher’s bill ran to 420,000 British, 200,000 French and 500,000 Germans dead, missing and; wounded.

At Beaumont-Hamel, the Newfoundland Regiment was almost completely wiped out, a catastrophic loss to the province. Even today, as Canadians celebrate Canada Day, to Newfoundlanders, it's Memorial Day.

The province bought 75 acres at the site and preserve it as a memorial to their loss.

Time-travelers from today visiting the trenches and looking up from their mobile devices (on account of no signal) might be astonished to learn that even after the appalling statistics from the Somme and Verdun, the war would continue for 28 more months before the combatant nations finally called a halt to the carnage.

So pause a moment and think of the day when the sun truly began to set on the British Empire, and consider the tens of thousands of men who’ve rested along the battle line for the past hundred years.