The ground they took was measured in yards rather than miles, and they had to cede much of it back almost immediately in the face of determined German counterattacks. And before sunset 19,240 British men had been killed and 38,231 more wounded or captured, an attrition rate of almost 50 percent. The Allied command hoped that a weeklong bombardment had shredded the barbed wire in front of the troops. That attack 100 years ago was the long-awaited “Big Push”-the beginning of the Somme Offensive and the quest to crack open the Western Front of World War I. “Through the sustained uproar the tap and rattle of machine guns could be identified but except for the whistle of bullets no retaliation came our way until a few 5.9 shells shook the roof of our dugout.” He sat “deafened and stupefied by the seismic state of affairs,” and when a friend of his tried to light a cigarette, “the match flame staggered crazily.”Īnd at 7:30, some 120,000 troops of the British Expeditionary Force rose out of their trenches and headed across no man’s land toward the German lines. “For more than forty minutes the air vibrated and the earth rocked and shuddered,” he wrote. At 6:45 the British began their final bombardment. This second lieutenant in the Royal Welch Fusiliers and his brother officers breakfasted at 6 a.m., “unwashed and apprehensive,” using an empty ammunition box for a table. “On July 1st the weather, after an early mist, was of the kind commonly called heavenly,” the poet and author Siegfried Sassoon recalled of that Saturday morning in northeastern France.
0 kommentar(er)
