The Somme

Sometimes you’d be forgiven for thinking that the battle of the Somme took place on 1st July 1916, and that was it. But of course, it wasn’t. It wasn’t even a battle in the traditional sense of a great clashing of armies lasting at most several days, but a five month long struggle that finally petered out in the November of the coldest winter for forty years with the capture of Beaumont Hamel, one of the objectives of the first day.

It’s a battle that has drifted inexorably out of living memory, with none of its survivors still living, but we are lucky to have numerous first hand accounts, written, audio and filmed, from contemporaneous diaries to accounts published/filmed in the last few years. Attitudes towards it as an event have varied over the years, Dan Todman has an interesting article on the BBC History site here.

When it comes to choosing a book to start off with we are spoilt for choice; do we choose Martin Middlebrook’s 1971 classic The First Day onthe Somme, or the indefatigueable Lyn MacDonald’s Somme? Or do we go for something more recent, that doesn’t focus quite so much on day one, almost forgetting the following five months? If we choose to do the latter, then Peter Hart’s 2005 book The Somme, with its meticulous analysis is well worth a look. Starting with the political background to the battle – why it took place where and when it did in the form it did, to how events transpired over the ensuing months. For the reader not familiar with the landscape there are excellent maps and a strong emphasis on first hand accounts. It’s a massive book – the new paperback edition is 626 pages, so it’s not a quick read, but Hart’s text is nevertheless very readable.

A much more informed review than I am capable of is available from The Long Long Trail, here.

Some links from the BBC
The Somme: it’s place in British history.
Rethinking the Somme

I spy: Secrets of the Rue St Roche, Janet Morgan (2004)

I don’t know that this is necessarily a book that I would have bought, but I was given it as a present, and it proved an extremely interesting read. We don’t tend to think of spies and the Great War as going together, they are something that belong far more to WW2 in the popular imagination. And yet the British security services, MI5 and MI6 had their origins during the Great War. In this book, Janet Morgan documents an intelligence operation based in Paris during the latter part of the Great War, geared towards gaining advance knowledge of German troop movements, and thus of any potential planned advances.

The operation began with the serendipitous meeting of a middle aged Luxemburger with the head of the Paris operation in the spring of 1917. This lady lived near the massive rail junction in Luxemburg city, and the intelligence officer realised that if they could find a way for the information to get out of occupied Luxemburg, they would have vital intelligence that could help them win the war. It certainly stopped them losing it. After many false starts the operation finally got going in early 1918, just before the German March offensive.

It’s not so much a history, as I suppose, narrative non-fiction. It’s written as a story, which seems somehow less authoritative. Or perhaps I’m just used to my history in dull, dusty tomes. I enjoyed the insight into a largely forgotten area of the war, and it was well written, so I can’t complain on that front.

Last Gasp – Prisoners of the Kaiser, Richard van Emden (2000)

Van Emden seems to have spent the last few years rushing around interviewing the last Great War veterans before they died for a series of books on the subject. This is not to say these are not good books – they are certainly informative, and they reflect a general desire to secure first hand testimony before it is too late.

It’s an interesting book, useful as a starting point for further research. Rather than follow each contributor from start to finish, or describe the aftermath of particular battles, it is structured to cover chronological topics – capture (whenever, and wherever that may have been), behind enemy lines, surviving in a prison camp etc.
This is a topic that is not covered so extensively as others in all the forests of Great War related material, and it’s good to see such an accessible book on the subject.

The book was based on a Channel 4 documentary of the same name, which unfortunately I don’t recall seeing. As a result of the documentary there was a flutter of interest in the mainstream press, and this site republishes an article from the Guardian, which took on some of the issues in the documentary.

For further reading, there is some interesting discussion on the subject in this forum thread, discussing POW conditions, and this one, discussing British POW attire.

Deserters in No Man’s Land

I first came across this legend when I read the Monocled Mutineer about fifteen years ago, where mention was made of deserters hiding out in the country round Etaples. James Hayward's Myths & Legends of the First World War mentions the story, albeit briefly. He quotes Osbert Sitwell, who claimed that the story there were bands of deserters of all nationalities, hiding out in parts of the front line, existing by brigandage and scrounging was widely believed by the troops. Heyward also quotes from a 1920 memoir which mentions a story about the abandoned Somme battlefield told in 1917, he ends his discussion with the note that the story formed the basis of the 1985 novel No Man's Land by Reginald Hill.

But it appeared in fiction long before that. The novel, Behind the Lines, by WF Morris (1930), published in the States as The Strange Case of Gunner Rawley, makes use of the idea for much of its plot. I'll discuss the book in more detail in another post.

It's a pity Hayward didn't do more than just mention the story in passing, because of course the usual end is that after the war the authorities rounded them up and shot or gassed them all. Urban myth, or was there perhaps more than a little truth in it?