The 1st of July 1916
was the bloodiest day in British military history. Nearly 20,000 British and
colonial troops lost their lives in an offensive that marked the beginning of
the bloodiest battle the world had ever seen. By the end of this first day, the
British forces had suffered over 57,000 casualties; more than the number of
casualties seen in the entirety of the Crimean and Boer Wars. By November 19th
of that same year there had been around 420,000 casualties on the British side,
200,000 French and an estimated 465,000 German dead and injured. The Somme saw
the first use of tanks on the battlefield, the first widespread issuing of
steel helmets to all front-line soldiers, and the continued use of machine
guns, chemical weapons, and increasingly-accurate artillery intended to beat
the enemy into submission. In 141 days, around 1.5 million people were
casualties and the British advanced a grand total of 7 miles. This was brutal,
bloody, futile, modern war.
100 years after the most infamous
battle in modern history, photojournalist Jonathan Eastland retraces the
footsteps of the soldiers who gave their lives in the muddy fields in order to
tell the story of a land shaped by blood. His book, The Somme: Exploring a War Torn Landscape, captures the natural
beauty of the river after which the battle was named, and of the surrounding
landscape. On viewing the pictures, we are reminded that the now century-old violence
left its mark on the region, in some cases permanently changing the geography
of the land. Sprawling fields are punctuated by mass grave sites. Pillboxes
that survived the artillery bombardment remain standing at the roadside. Caves once dug as trenches now act as homes for local wildlife. The
annual harvest in the region still reveals thousands of shells, some
unexploded, presenting a major risk to local farmers and requiring removal (the
Amiens bomb unit, responsible for bomb clearance in the region, estimates it
will take another 500 years before the Somme is bomb-free). A century later and
the Somme still lives with the consequences of war.
The sheer scale of the death and
destruction of the Somme is both horrifying and awe-inspiring. In the author’s
own words, looking over one of the war cemeteries on a brilliant summer
afternoon “it was difficult to distinguish an individual gravestone from the
whole uniform mass of gleaming white” (p7). However, closer inspection reveals
the names of the dead on each of the individual gravestones. One photo shows the
Villers-Bretonneux memorial to the missing: “Billingsly, B. L.; Black, J. F.;
Blain, N. G. H.; Bongers, H. J...” and so on. The uniform mass of gleaming
white is comprised of the remains of
hundreds of thousands, stretching to millions, of young men who lost their
lives in a battle that very literally also changed the shape of the earth
beneath their feet.
It is easy for us to forget about
individual humanity when thinking about conflict on this grand scale. A number
like 1.5 million is impossible to comprehend, and so we often do not even try. 20
years after the war to end all wars much of the horror was consigned to
history, and so we did it all over again. Even more young men were
sent to die in the fields of France and around the world, and this time they
took even more civilians and non-combatants with them as our capacity to kill each
other grew exponentially. Today, as with the conscripts of World War One, the
majority of the casualties of war are those who did not ask for it and do not
stand to gain from it. We cannot afford to allow the horrors of conflict to be
forgotten. We cannot afford to dehumanise the experience of warfare, and to
think solely in terms of numbers of dead or of miles gained or lost.
All told, over 20,000 people lost
their lives on the first day of one battle of one war over 100 years ago. There
have been many more wars since and many, many more have died. The Battle of the
Somme ushered in this new century of modern conflict that destroyed lives all
over the globe.
The Somme: Exploring a War Torn Landscape reflects on how this one
battle has affected the development and collective history of the region in
which it raged. It is important to reflect not only on the battle itself, but
its long-term ramifications and the 100 years of history that were written
after it. Do we want the next 100 years to look the same?
