Battle of The Somme

[rgraham666]

If you check the writings of the generals at the time before the war you'll see that they did expect such a slaughter. Maybe not so extreme, but they did expect the casualties to be high.

And they accepted it. It was a perfectly rational way to wage war. Everything was planned, to the pound and the minute. Schedules were made and followed, regardless of the consequences. Like all modern men of reason, the generals believed that they could impose their beliefs on reality. And when reality refused to cooperate, reality was at fault for not conforming to the plan.

To give an example, after the war Foch was asked what was learned from it. He replied, "The war demonstrated that in order to win we needed to have a goal, a plan and a method." He then rephrased what he had just said, "The war demonstrated the need for the command to have a goal, a plan and a method." In other words, he took out winning. Winning was a secondary consideration for these people. Structure, logic and power were more important.

Also after the war, Haig personally chose the people to write the official history. Guess who came out smelling like a rose? And Haig ordered the destruction of many records that might have reflected badly on him.

These people weren't generals, they were technocrats, courtiers.

And millions paid the price for their incompetence.

 

[hotchkiss]

Never a truer word said Mr 666.

 

[OnHarry]

The Soldier
Rupert Brooke

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

A poem made more poignant by the fact that Rupert Brooke died in the trenches in 1915.

The battle of the Somme was one of many stupid battles in that war. A german General writing a hundred years earlier told anyone who would listen you can't win a modern war by staying in one place with a seige mentality, to win a war you had to be mobile and keep the ability to move.

One of the greates t tragedies of the Somme was the first day of the battle, when the Royal Newfoundland Regiment from that island went over the top with in excess of 700 officers and other ranks. The next day there wwere less than a hundred alive.

However since many of the young men were from very small fishing outports in what was then a British colony and they were they only young men in many of those outports, many of the towns started to die that day as well, as there were no longer any young men to carry on the fishery. There is I believe a seperate monument to them on the site of the battle.