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.
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.
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