In my ongoing obsession with books related to the First World War, I just finished Peter Hart’s “The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front.”
The book is dense, perhaps providing more detail about the senseless slaughter of 1916 than most people would need. But its real value is in the fact that Hart took accounts of people who survived the bloodshed and wove them into the linear telling of the tale. The first-hand accounts are horrifying, and it’s very difficult to imagine how the troops endured the nightmare that was trench warfare.
While providing account after account of how horrible the fighting was, Hart debunks some of the mythology that has emerged. People often refer to the “millions” of British troops killed during the war and that “the flower of British manhood had been slaughtered.” In truth, Britain suffered about 900,000 casualties during the war, both killed and wounded. And while that’s a horrific number, it doesn’t entirely line up with some of the hyperbole that has emerged after the fact.
Hart points out the bungling that occurred among the military leadership in the war, but he notes Sir Douglas Haig and his senior staff were doing the best they could with the political hand they were dealt. There are countless examples in the book of officers screwing up and wasting lives as a result, but Hart argues that if the Allies were going to win the war, there was a brutal, bloody price that had to be paid.
So who’s to blame for the carnage? Hart points to society itself. In a passage early in the book, he explains:
“The political imperatives of defending the bloated empire, the endemic racism and the all-embracing casual assumption of moral superiority of the age, the overwhelming reliance on blunt threats to achieve what might have been better achieved by subtle diplomacy — these were all part of the British heritage in 1914. … Amidst the ceaseless jockeying of the old European Continental and Imperial powers, additionally complicated by the remorseless rise of the militaristic new German Empire, conflict was inevitable and in truth no one did much to avoid a war that was easily portrayed as a crusade.”
Those words ring eerily familiar …
Perhaps one of the oddest things I found in the book was the use of soccer balls during offensives. Initially, the officers actually debated if it would be a good idea to let the men kick soccer balls as they advanced. Finally, it’s agreed that it’s OK, as long as the men don’t break rank to chase the balls. They were to kick the balls only as they encountered them during the advance …