The significance of the Somme
Many young troops arriving at the trenches had little knowledge of the world outside their hometowns, and only rudimentary military training
Imperial War Museum (Q11743)
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The Battle of the Somme is the most memorable battle of the First World War. From the massacres of the first day to the muddy quagmire of the end of the offensive, the event symbolises the whole war on the Western Front. Although historians still argue about the battle, the public image of the Somme is one of unmitigated horror – it sums up the ghastly reality of trench war.
Death of youth
For the British, the Battle of the Somme was the mother of all First World War battles. The first day was a massacre – the worst casualties in British military history. For this reason alone, the event has a grim significance: on 1 July 1916, 21,392 men were killed, 35,493 wounded and 585 taken prisoner.
In such statistics, the word 'men' is used but actually most of the soldiers were youths, aged between 18 and 22. It was not uncommon for younger boys, aged 16 or 17, to volunteer to join the army and there were even some 14- and 15-year-olds. The youth of many of those involved helps explain why so many died.
When these boys arrived at the Western Front in 1916, they were not experienced professional soldiers but inexperienced newcomers who didn't really know how to fight. They'd had some training but not enough to prepare them for the reality of battle. And because they were so young, their loss was even more keenly felt by their families and friends in Britain.
The Somme was the first battle that showed British civilians how a whole generation of young people could be killed in battle. One of its legacies is the idea of the 'Lost Generation' – the youth of Britain wiped out by the war.
The reality of war
The horror of this battle inspired the survivors to tell civilians the truth about what had happened. As well as the war poetry, such as Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War (1928), the postwar years saw many books that spoke of the awful reality of war to a large public.
Autobiographical books – such as Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That (1929) and Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), as well as the German Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) – all told of the horror of trench warfare. They helped to spread the idea that the Battle of the Somme was a hell on earth.
In 1916, a popular song, 'The Roses of Picardy', written by Frederick E Weatherley with music by Haydn Wood, tried to gloss over the realities of war by using sentimental lyrics:
Roses are shining in Picardy,
In the hush of the silvery dew.
Roses are flowering in Picardy,
But there's never a rose like you!
But even this could not ignore the fact of death:
And the roses will die with the summertime,
And our hearts may be far apart,
But there's one rose that dies not in Picardy!
'Tis the rose that I keep in my heart!