Battle of the Somme, 1916

The British army had shelled the German lines for a week and believed the wire would be cut and the defenders dead. At half past seven on the morning of 1 July 1916 the infantry climbed out and walked forward across open ground, many of them in the Pals battalions raised by promising that friends and neighbours who enlisted together would serve together. The wire was largely uncut and the defenders were in deep dugouts. Nineteen thousand two hundred and forty British soldiers were killed that day and some forty thousand wounded — the worst day in the history of the British army — and whole towns lost their young men in a single morning.

The battle went on for four and a half months and moved the line about ten kilometres. Estimates of total casualties on all sides run to well over a million. The Thiepval memorial carries the names of more than seventy-two thousand British and South African men who died in the Somme sector and have no known grave; the number is so large that the architect had to design sixteen piers to hold it. Bodies are still recovered from the fields most years and buried with a service.