Still image from the film The Battle of the Somme showing a staged attack. Believed to be shot before the opening of the battle on 1 July 1916, possibly at a trench mortar school behind the lines. Wikipedia
Washington Examiner: The Battle of the Somme 100 years on
There should be a special name for books about World War One in which World War One doesn't feature. I mean novels such as Ernest Hemingway's Fiesta, Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies and (except for two glancing references) F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Novels, in other words, where the trenches are a constant, brooding, unmentioned horror.
I'd add another classic to that list: J.R.R Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Although Tolkien used to get cross with anyone who suggested that his books were allegorical, he admitted that "the Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme." Tolkien served as a junior officer in that abomination, whose centenary we mark this week.
"Somme," wrote a Prussian veteran afterwards. "The whole history of the world cannot contain a more ghastly word." The first day remains, by some measure, the worst in the history of the British Army: An almost unbelievable 19,200 men were killed.
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WNU Editor: 5 months of fighting .... almost a million killed. No battle in history comes even close to those numbers. On a side note .... it appears that humans have been committing atrocities and war in this part of Europe since the beginning of time .... France unearths bones from 6,000-yr-old Neolithic massacre (AFP).
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