The USP of The Somme 1916 – From Both Sides of the Wire (BBC2) is that battlefield archaeologist Peter Barton has used both British and German military archives to reconstruct the offensive, the first day of which was the costliest in the history of the British army – 57,470 casualties, nearly 20,000 deaths. Over a million men would be killed or wounded before the five-month battle was over.
The bare facts are known to everyone. The British were slaughtered in droves because the week-long artillery barrage upon which their commanders’ strategy depended had failed to do anything like the damage to the Germans they assumed it would. And, as they walked with bayonets towards the supposed remaining fragments of the enemy line, they were cut down by machine-gun fire. But you appreciate the horror anew when you hear a German gunner’s account from the time, whose disbelief is still fresh a hundred years on. “We had never seen them walking before,” he wrote. “You didn’t have to aim, just load and reload. If only they had run they would have overmanned us.”
Barton was a very clear, authoritative guide through the various parts of the offensive, its successes and its (predominant) failures. He managed the rare feat of not letting his enthusiasm for his subject obscure the grief and sadness at its heart. And he gave due weight to aspects of the event that customarily get left out of the version we tell ourselves. He laid out, instead, the intelligence the Germans had amassed during their months of intercepting messages amongst British forces, as well as from the fairly easy bamboozling of captured Tommies. It all gave them time to dig in, reinforce and prepare for the attack.
Haig believed God was on his side. His troops would perhaps have preferred more tangible solace; shells that actually exploded, or medical care provided in quantities designed for worst rather than best case scenarios, so that another wave of unnecessary deaths post-battle could have been avoided – but it was very much too late by then. By lunchtime, the determinedly optimistic reports from the frontline had changed in tone and the German counterattack was under way. Objectives were achieved in the south, but, overall, three-quarters failed. The Somme had begun its journey, across a million broken bodies, to becoming a byword for commanders’ hubris and the unassailable pity of war. Lest we forget.
