The thunder of the shells filled the British with a promise that would be cruelly betrayed. General Haig had chosen the Somme for the attack in part because it allowed his troops to escape the sodden fields of Flanders. But the very conditions of Picardy that drew his attention also allowed the Germans to dig, which they did, establishing dugouts and shelters in the chalk forty and sixty feet below the torn surface of the earth, impervious even to the shells of the relatively few heavy howitzers the British brought to bear. Unbeknownst to the British, the German soldiers, stunned and afraid, often bleeding from the ears and nose due to the concussive pressure of the shells, quelled in fear of death but quite unprepared to die, hovered deep beneath the ground, awaiting the onslaught.
In the final hour before the attack over a quarter of a million shells fell on the German line. Then came silence, of a sort and only for an instant. A hollow stunned moment as if the ground itself had been given a reprieve. Time stood suspended. The British troops crowded at the base of the scaling ladders could hear the plaintive moaning of the wounded in what remained of the enemy trench, the buzzing of great swarms of flies, the high-pitched screaming of rats, even the sublime singing of birds, larks and morning doves on this misty day that the poet warrior Siegfried Sassoon would later describe as ‘of the kind commonly called heavenly.’ Ashen faces, watches synchronised, a tot of navy rum, a last letter to a loved one pegged to the trench with a knife, a muted prayer and glance at a mate, a half smile certain to be one’s last. The smell in the trench was of fear, and of sweat, blood, vomit, excrement, cordite and the putrescence of cadavers. At precisely 7.30 a.m. shrill piercing whistles signaled the attack. Eleven British divisions, 110,000 men jammed as a single throng in trenches along a thirteen-mile front, struggled to climb out onto the field of battle. At the same moment, from the depths of dugouts of a scale and complexity unknown and unimaginable to the British, the survivors of six German front line divisions raced to the sunlight. In the minute that it took them to reach the parapet, the battle was decided.
Siegfried Sassoon was a witness to the advance, as the men went over the top, formed up and then shoulder to shoulder, burdened by in some cases a hundred pounds of gear, with bayonets fixed, leaned forward to walk into a storm of lead. At 7.45 he saw in a reserve trench men cheering their mates onward as if watching a football match. Two hours later, he wrote, ‘the birds seem bewildered; a lark begins to go up and then flies feebly along, thinking better of it. Others flutter above the trench with querulous cries, weak on the wing.’ At 10.05, he wrote, ‘I am staring at a sunlit picture of Hell, and still the breeze shakes the yellow weeds, and the poppies glow under Crawley Ridge where some shells fell a few minutes ago.’ At 2.30 that afternoon: ‘I could see one man moving his arms up and down as he lay on his side; his face was a crimson patch.’
Of the sixty battalions in the first wave, twenty were utterly destroyed in No Man’s Land. Within the first hour, perhaps the first minutes, there were more than 30,000 dead and wounded. By the end of the day there was not a British soldier alive within the German wire. Not a village had been taken, nor a single major objective achieved. Machine guns cut the men down like scythes slicing through grass. Those few who reached the German front line were incinerated with flamethrowers, blown up by bombs, or riddled with bullets and left condemned to hang on the wire, ‘like crows shot on a dyke,’ until their flesh fell from their bones.
It was the biggest disaster in the history of British arms. The army lacked the ‘clerk power,’ it was said, even to record the names of the dead, which in time would fill 212 pages of a log. Of the wounded there were more than 50,000, a figure that would double by the end of the third day of a battle that would rage for four months. Regiments up and down the line suffered casualty rates of seventy-five per cent. By the end of the morning of 1 July 1916, Kitchener’s Army, forged from the sea of recruits of 1914, was no more. Its soldiers lay in rows, their tunics red with blood. ‘We were two years in the making,’ wrote Private A.V. Pearson of the Leeds Pals, ‘and ten minutes in the destroying.’
The war went on and on until many simply thought that it would go on forever. When at last word of the armistice spread up and down the line on 11 November 1918 it was greeted with relief and jubilation leavened by numb exhaustion, like the slow fading of a long and violent hallucination. The old men who had talked their nations into a war they could not escape had no idea what they had wrought. For the moment, it seemed a tremendous victory. Germany and its allies lay prostrate. Russia was convulsed in upheaval and revolution and France bled white and reeling with losses from which it might never recover as a nation. The British emerged from the conflict with the most powerful army in the world, its navy supreme, its empire enhanced by a surge of colonial acquisitions that would not end until 1935, when it would finally reach its greatest geographical extent. That the war had destroyed the prosperity of a century of progress was not immediately evident to the average civilian still marching to the rhythms of tradition. That it had birthed the nihilism and alienation of a new century was a thought impossible to anticipate.
The truth lay in the numbers. Nearly a million dead in Britain and the dominions alone, some 2.5 million wounded, 40,000 amputees, 60,000 without sight, 2.4 million on disability a decade after the end, including 65,000 men who never recovered from the ‘twilight memory of hell’ that was shell shock. In France, seventy-five per cent of all men and boys between the ages of eighteen and thirty were either killed or wounded in the war. Quite literally an entire generation was sacrificed to the carnage.
The victory had in fact bankrupted Britain. Before the war, the total cost of running the British Empire was roughly £500,000 a day. The war would cost five million pounds a day. Taxes and death duties alone provoked such economic agonies that between 1918 and 1921 a quarter of all English land would change hands. Nothing like it had occurred in Britain since the Norman Conquest.
Robert Graves and T.E. Lawrence famously made a pact never to speak of the war. Words did not exist to describe what they had endured. After the war, John Masefield wrote, one needed a new term for mud, a new word for death. Only the wordless, said Virginia Woolf, ‘are the happy.’ And only those who had fought understood. ‘The man who really endured the war at its worst,’ wrote Siegfried Sassoon, ‘was everlastingly differentiated from everyone but his fellow soldiers.’ Sassoon lived until 1967, but he would never write of anything that occurred after 1920. His six volumes of autobiography are the stories of a life that ended with the war.
For those who survived, life was precious but evanescent. They were not cavalier, but death was no stranger. They had seen so much that death had no hold on them. In the wake of a war that had betrayed the hopes and dreams of a generation, life mattered less than the moments of being alive. When we listen today to the voices of these men, be it in poetry, diaries or letters, all part of the cathartic flood of literature that came forth a decade after the armistice, what we hear is the cadence and reserve of a very different kind of man from any we might know or encounter today. Though the madness of what they endured spawned modernity as we know it, they remained scions of another time, a pre-war era so removed from that of our own as to be utterly inaccessible, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually.
And yet, though the Great War ended nearly a century ago, it retains a powerful hold on our imaginations, not just because of the agonies that the conflict inflicted on so many millions of innocent lives. In what Winston Churchill called the bloodstained century of violence, even greater horrors would unfold. What draws us in is the character of the men who fought and the values they embodied, traits that we admire to this day, if only because they are so rarely encountered in a culture obsessed with self. These, after all, were men of discretion and decorum, a generation unprepared to litter the world with itself, unwilling to yield feelings to analysis, yet individuals so confident in their masculinity that they could speak of love between men without shame, collect butterflies in the dawn, paint watercolours in late morning, discuss Keats and Shelley over lunch and still be prepared to attack the German lines at dusk. They were men the likes of which we will never know again. Their words and deeds will endure as a testament for the ages. And perhaps for us the most amazing thing of all, as Geoff Dyer knows, is that these men were our grandfathers.