A long lifetime later, what one elderly man still remembered was the nightingales. He was a young lieutenant in the front trench when he heard them, inexplicably, amid the desolation of mud and barbed wire. They sang from late evening until 4am, when they were silenced by an immense artillery barrage.
What happened next is indelibly etched in our national memory. At 7.30 am on 1 July 1916, the Battle of the Somme began when the barrage lifted, and the British infantry, 13 divisions strong, left their trenches and marched towards the German lines. The enemy’s machine guns were supposed to have been knocked out by artillery, which proved to be untrue. By the end of the day, 19,240 British soldiers lay dead. Most had been killed within the first two hours.
Today the centenary was marked by Radio 4 with two minutes’ silence at 7.30, while a ceremony was held at Thiepval, where Edwin Lutyens’ vast monument to the missing solders of the Somme stands. It was attended by royalty and both David Cameron and François Hollande – a meeting with obvious ironies at present. The archbishop of Canterbury said that the carnage represented a “catastrophic political failure”. He might have had more recent failures in mind.
Also at Thiepval was Marine Le Pen, the leader of the far-right Front National, who wants the French to emulate Brexit. Nigel Farage wasn’t there, but on television last Monday he could be seen, fresh from victory in the referendum, stalking around the Somme battlefield – and making a statement of some kind about the dangers of European entanglement.
When the war began in August 1914, Great Britain was then the only major power without a conscript army, but hundreds of thousands of young men joined up in a great flush of enthusiasm, driven by patriotism and revulsion at German brutality. University freshmen became platoon commanders; boys from the mean streets of mill towns queued to enlist: “Those long uneven lines | Standing as patiently | As if they were stretched outside | The Oval or Villa Park,” in Philip Larkin’s words.
Battalions raised for what was called the New Army were attached to existing regiments, but units gave themselves nicknames from their hometowns, which are still heartbreaking: the Accrington Pals, the Glasgow Boys’ Brigade, the Belfast Young Citizens, the Barnsley Pals. Those pals joined up together, they trained together, they went into battle together, and they died together. The details are mind-numbing even now. That morning the Accrington Pals numbered some 700. Within half an hour, 235 men had been killed and 350 wounded.
This was the war of poets and PBI – the poor bloody infantry. The educated officer-poets Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, bitterly mourned what Owen called “these who die as cattle”, while the PBI left their wonderful songs, replete with English irony: “We are Fred Karno’s army, the ragtime infantry. We cannot fight, we cannot shoot, no bloody use are we.” No army has ever so mocked itself, or so refuted that mockery with its unflinching courage in the face of death.
Another battle has raged ever since, over the strategy of Sir Douglas Haig, the British commander-in-chief. One of his fiercest critics at the time wasn’t a postwar radical, but none other than Churchill. He was out of office, after his humiliating resignation the previous year when he took the blame for the Gallipoli debacle, and then his quixotic period of expiation that spring serving as a battalion commander on the western front.
On 1 August, exactly a month after the battle began, Churchill privately circulated a scalding memorandum to other political leaders. “We know that the whole front against us is firmly held,” he wrote. Any element of surprise in the attack had been “wholly lacking”, and we had allowed the Germans to defend “on the cheap”. Churchill brutally concluded that “in personnel the results of the operation have been disastrous, in terrain they have been absolutely barren,” and that, all in all, “the British offensive per se has been a great failure”.
A quarter of a century later, Churchill was leading his country in another great war, and he knew that no British troops should ever again make the same awful sacrifice. That was why he dragged his feet as long as he could over an invasion of northern Europe, to American frustration. After one meeting, when Churchill had again tried to postpone the invasion, a senior British army officer explained to one of those frustrated Americans: “You are arguing with the Somme.”
But the outcome was awkward. We conveniently thought that there was no repeat of the carnage of the western front, but there was. It was in the east, with the Somme and Verdun this time called Stalingrad and Kursk. Germany was defeated by the Red Army suffering enormous casualties; and, at the war’s end, Stalin took eastern Europe as his reward.
And today? However ambivalent the British, from Churchill onwards, have been about the whole project that became the European Union, they could scarcely repudiate its original inspiration, which was to avoid another terrible war. Even Farage can scarcely claim that inspiration was wrong, or the Accrington Pals died needlessly for European “federalism”.
If nightingales are ever heard in England, they’ve come here as migrants from Europe, and in the summer of 1916 the sound of guns could be heard in Kent from across the Channel.
Churchill may have said in 1953 that “we are with” the Europeans, “but not of them”. But it was he who had more truly said just before the first world war that, like it or not: “Europe is where the weather comes from.” What else did the Somme demonstrate?
