Keegan on the Somme Battlefield

An excerpt from The First World War

The first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, was to be an awful demonstration of that truth. Its reality remains evident today to anyone who returns to the centre of the Somme battlefield at Thiepval, near the memorial to the 36th Ulster Division, and glances north and south down the old front line. The view northward is particularly poignant. Along it, at intervals of a few hundred yards, runs a line of the Commonwealth War Grave Commission's beautiful garden cemeteries, ablaze near the anniversary of the battle with rose and wisteria blossom, white Portland stone of headstones and memorial crosses gleaming in the sun. The farthest, on the ridge near Beaumont Hamel, contains graves of the regular 4th Division, the nearest, in the valley of the Ancre, the Somme's little tributary, those of the Kitchener 32nd division.A few, like those of the Ulster Division, stand a little forward of the rest, and mark the furthest limit of advance. The majority stand on the front line or in no man's land just outside the German wire. The soldiers who died there were later buried where they had fallen. Thus the cemeteries are a map of the battle. The map tells a simple and terrible story. The men of the Fourth Army, the majority citizen volunteers going into action for the first time, rose from the trenches at zero hour, advanced in steady formation, were almost everywhere checked by uncut barbed wire and were shot down. Five divisions of the seventeen attacking entered the German positions. The infantry of the remainder were stopped in no man's land.

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Last revised: January 23, 2000.