Lyn MacDonald - Somme

Lyn MacDonald's Somme was the third of her books on World War One, drawing on her huge and detailed collection of reminisances and memoires of former soldiers. Like the first, They Called It Passchendaele, which told the story of the Third Battle of Ypres, it is an unflinching account of the brutality of trench warfare. Somme however, deals with the most famous of the bloodbaths of the Western Front. MacDonald starts with the meticulous, detailed and finely tuned battle plan that would see millions of shells fired at the German trenches, followed by coordinated attacks timed to the second. British troops would carry mirrors and flags so that their generals could track their victorious march. The reality was a blood bath. The detailed instructions gave no room for flexibility on the ground. As the Germans took out the first over the top, following troops had no idea what to do, as their objectives were not even close. As Sergeant Jim Myer's of the Machine Gun Corps recalled:

The biggest mistake that was made on manoeuvres and training was that we were never told what to do in case of failure. All this time we'd gone backwards and forwards, training, doing it over and over again like clockwork and then when we had to advance, when it came to the bit, we didn't know what to do! Nothing seemed to be arranged in case of failure.

Thousands, upon thousands, died. MacDonald's interviewees tell the stories of individual tragedy, and bravery. Of the groups of "Pals", from the same village, factory, industry, even sports teams, who died together. The survivors left shocked and demoralised by what they had seen. Corporal Harry Shaw, of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, summed up that first attack:

Whatever was gained, it wasn't worth the price that the men had paid to gain that advantage. It was no advantage to anybody. It was just sheer bloody murder. That's the only words you can use for it.

Most of the accounts MacDonald draws on are of front line troops. But a great strength of the book is that it gives a sense of the scale of the undertaking. She includes the voices and accounts of people who drove the ambulances, salvaged broken equipment for recycling into more shells and guns, and the people who laid roads, cooked food and reported for the press. But it is the horror of the front, the chaos of battle and the sheer bloody uselessness of the high command that will stay with the reader. The Battle for High Wood will stick with me, as troops captured and area, only to see it slip from the grasp as their Generals ordered in cavalry that took a whole day to arrive. The thousands who died in the follow up should never have died there.

Somme is not a detailed history of the battle. At times its hard to follow events, or even grasp the scale of particular attacks. The pictures are also unclear to me. But this is not a book to be read for detailed accounts. This is the human story of the slaughter of Kitchener's Army, "shipping clerks, errand-boys, stevedores, railway porters, grocers' assistants, postmen". 

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Macdonald - Passchendaele: The Story of the Third Battle of Ypres 1917
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Zurbrugg - Not Our War
Romains - Verdun