1st JULY, 1916, THE SOMME

1st

JULY,

1916,

THE SOMME

 

After all the dramas

And documentaries,

After all the poetry

And the histories,

That summer morning

Never fails to appal:

The dull intelligence,

The wasted week

Of bombardment;

The Germans safe

In their rolling slopes

Despite the million shells;

Their wire uncut,

Their trenches intact;

The orders still standing

And sixty thousand fallen.

Men sent walking - walking –

Into a hell of fire and metal

And hundreds of thousands more men wasted

In the wasted months before the battle’s end,

When snow drew a shroud over the sludge,

In the dead of the wasted, wilderness winter.

(2012)

This was written in just a few minutes after we had watched BBC TV’s tremendously moving adaptation of Sebastian Faulks’ WWI novel, ‘Birdsong’, the centerpiece of which is his setting of the Battle of the Somme.

In a negative and tragic sense, the history of mankind is the history of war – we just can’t seem to do without it. There is, however, something particularly compelling about the so called ‘Great War’. The Somme represents the top of the arc of the fighting halfway through the conflict. As far as I’m aware, there have never been so many military casualties on a single day of a battle in all history. When it was finally called off in November, 1916, well over a million British, French and German soldiers were dead. The allies had advanced barely five miles in those four and a half months…

The photograph shows the WWI memorial at Bradgate Park, Leics. This poem is my personal cenotaph.