The 90th anniversary of the start of the battle of the Somme falls on 1 July. Several books mark it; it made a scar on the nation’s memory that is still severe, and it is still often called the day when the army suffered its worst casualties. Strictly, this is not true, for General Perceval in Singapore surrendered 80,000 men to a smaller force of Japanese on 15 February 1942. But on 1 July 1916 the army did suffer its worst total of dead on a single day: 19,240, and nearly 40,000 more were wounded or went missing. It was the first major action in which Kitchener’s new armies fought; whole battalions of ‘Pals’ from northern industrial towns were almost wiped out.
There is an unhappy mismatch between the view military historians nowadays take of the battle and the picture of it which is held in popular memory and regularly perpetuated in the news media. School-teaching in England now normally includes a spell on the British effort on the western front in France and Flanders in 1914-18, which — based on the poems of Sassoon and Owen and the prose of Blunden and Graves, all of them admirably literary icons — presents it as a story of glum heroes marching forward to be massacred to no good end. It was all a great deal more complicated than that; try explaining that to a school teacher who has just taken your class to see Oh, What a Lovely War!
Christopher Duffy has written a most original, illuminating book about the Somme, based on study of the ground and research among German army archives; he presents the battle as the Germans saw it, through the British prisoners they captured and interrogated.

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