Nations are often incapable of imagining their own defeat. Thus Germany was not beaten in the first world war, but “overwhelmed” by sheer weight of numbers. Poison gas, starvation, shell fire and machine-guns had left thousands of Germans dead; yet Germany’s myth of having been “stabbed in the back” by unwanted foreign elements was an expedient way of rebuilding national identity in the wake of the 1914-1918 catastrophe. At what cost? Germans, British and French of all backgrounds were implicated in the carnage of Ypres, the Marne and the Somme. The “war to end all wars” changed Europe for good.
Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s history of the Somme is published to coincide with the battle’s centenary on 1 July 2016. Running to over 600 pages, it contains an abundance of new material yielded from archives, libraries and Red Cross files across western Europe. The author’s combination of thoughtful analysis with first-hand testimony from army soldiers, cameramen and diarists lends a gritty immediacy. The battle (fought in France on both sides of the river Somme) left thousands of casualties decomposing in the mud. The stench was not as disturbing as what was found inside the bodies. There was “a rat’s nest in the cage of each [man’s] chest”, a British lieutenant remembered, and “when you touched a body, the rats just poured out…” By the time the Somme’s last shot was fired in November 1916, more than 1 million men had been killed or wounded. It remains the bloodiest battle in the history of western Europe.
Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, became synonymous with the carnage and perceived futility of the entire war. Sebag-Montefiore does not exonerate him from blame (“Haig’s ignorance concerning the use of artillery was astonishing”), but he points out that his “big push” into occupied France was not without success, as it halted the German forces at Verdun and led, ultimately, to the final, successful November offensive.
Nevertheless, the Somme heralded a new age of atrocity and diminished individual responsibility for it. Politicians, generals and ideologues, by delegating unpleasantness down a chain of command, were able to ignore the moral consequences of their work. Haig’s insistence that his infantrymen went “over the top” in the teeth of German fire showed a disregard for his men’s lives. Allied casualties on the first day alone (1 July 1916) were the worst in the history of the British army, with more than 19,000 dead and 57,470 wounded. Blinded and disabled British servicemen meanwhile arrived in London at Waterloo station with the blood and mud still caked on their gaiters; the carnage of Europe was thus brought into the heart of the British capital.
Franco-British hopes of a swift exit were encouraged, on 15 September 1916, by the introduction of lumbering, metal-plated killing machines that continually broke down in the autumn rains. For every 100 yards the tanks gained on German-held ground, 1,000 allied lives were extinguished. Finally, after five months of deadlock, Haig called an end to the mass slaughter. The allies had advanced only 10 miles; German casualties were between 500,000-700,000.
Yet Germany’s downfall would soon bring its own kind of posthumous victory, as the German far-right cast the nation as a Christ-like victim exalted by foreign attack. As a consequence of the fear-ridden, uncertain times in Europe during the war, spiritualism and other low-church cults flourished. According to Sebag-Montefiore, Haig’s sister Henrietta was pleased to announce that her dead brother George had got in touch via a psychic medium. (George wanted Haig to know that God was letting Napoleon “advise” him on battle strategy.) Phoney psychics were quick to cheat the grief-stricken with messages from the war dead. Arthur Conan Doyle, notoriously, had been contacted by his son Kingsley after he died of Spanish influenza complicated by a neck wound sustained on the Somme. (The writer’s two-volume History of Spiritualism, published in 1926, called for a new science of the paranormal in post-Somme Britain.)
Sebag-Montefiore commends the Canadian and Anzac infantrymen who made headway on the Somme, even if a number of them were shot at dawn for desertion. The author’s own great-grandfather, Cecil Sebag-Montefiore, we learn, took his own life after serving with the Royal Engineers on the western front. Possibly he was suffering from shellshock and what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder.
This book, though exhaustively researched, shows signs of hasty composition in the rush to meet the centenary deadline. Cliches (“fever pitch”, “blotted his copybook”, “comfort zone”) and clunky constructions abound. For all that, Somme: Into the Breach is a solid addition to the commemorative literature of 2014-2018.
Somme: Into the Breach is published by Viking (£25). Click here to buy it for £20.50
