The HELL of the Somme

The Battle of the Psalm is one of those horrible events in history that everyone knows about, but almost nobody actually understands just how horrible it was. That's because statistics don't show you the real horrors through the eyes of an individual soldier who was there. And the more you look through the eyes of soldiers that were there, the worse it gets. So, some of what you're going to hear, you won't forget easily. Now, like we always do, let's go to where everything began and move from there. By the spring of 1916, the Western Front had been frozen in place for nearly 17 months. After the War of Movement ended, both sides had dug in along a 470 mi long continuous line of fortified trenches. In less than 5 months of the opening campaigns, the armies on the Western Front had suffered nearly 2 million casualties, out of which half a million soldiers were killed. And to make everything only worse, the front lines would barely shift more than 10 mi in either direction for the next 3 years. No one knew how to break this stalemate caused by modern machine guns and artillery used at such a scale for the first time in history and soldiers were just staying there and dying. Before the SO offensive, the British fought no significant battles on their sector of the Western Front, yet still suffered over 100,000 casualties. That is roughly 600 men put out of action every single day due to shelling, sniping, disease, and trench raids. The Som sector specifically was one of the quietest stretches of the entire front. Little fighting had occurred there since 1914 and the troops on both sides had adopted what historians call a live and let live system meaning that soldiers wouldn't shoot if the other side wasn't shooting because by that point they had all pretty much figured out how pointless this war was and they just wanted to make it through alive. But the politicians and military leaders had very different plans as always. Now, before we get into the battle itself, you need to understand who the British soldiers actually were and why they were marching straight into horrors that perhaps could have been avoided. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1914, it didn't have anywhere near the massive conscript army that France and Germany had. Britain had a small, well-trained, professional force, but tiny in numbers compared to the other major powers. Just 3 days after the declaration of war, Kiter, who was the secretary of war, went public and asked for 100,000 volunteers. But what happened next? surprised even him. In just one month, almost 300,000 men signed up. In September 1914 alone, 460,000 men enlisted.