Book Review: "The First Day on the Somme" by Martin Middlebrook

There's something about well-researched books that really attracts me to some nonfiction stuff but I have to say, this book seems just completely obsessive. The author takes a look at the horrors of the very first day of the Battle of the Somme. It's a chunky book and so, we can only assume that it's going to be packed with information and story. And as you can imagine we are correct in believing that. There's lots of names in this book and so you probably want to keep track of them somewhere. I would say that if you're not into the Battle of the Somme then you can imagine this book won't be interesting to you - but seriously, who is not interested in that absolute shit show?

The feeling of inevitability is almost constant in this book because of its focus on the first day alone. The eyewitness accounts are people who survived the nightmare of the Somme. The author tracks everything from the men on the front line to the preparations for battle, from the planning to the troop movements. There's so much detail in this book, it feels almost like it was broken down to the minute. Letters, accounts, diary entries and more detail the way in which soldiers would share cigarettes and jokes as coping mechanisms all the way to the sound of birds in comparison to the sound of bombs. It must have been so horrible to just watch your friends completely disappear under a spray of bullets from a machine gun.

There was definitely a sense of misplaced optimism coming from the commanding officers who were putting these young men on the front line. They definitely went all in on the assumption that the Germans would be too exhausted to actually fight well and so, they'd obliterate the army in the first week. Headquarter optimism definitely was not what the front line men were feeling though, knowing full well that the people in the offices were really miscalculating things. This made me really upset because there wasn't really anything these soldiers could do but simply walk into their own deaths knowing they were going to die. They weren't allowed to question or refuse, they just simply had to go ahead.

Well as we all know, the plans that the British commanding officers had all failed, everything went to shit so quickly it is actually unreal. The British artillery was of poor quality and the Germans had created plenty of dugouts to protect themselves. When the British troops therefore advanced, the German gunmen emerged and opened fire on the British. It just reads as something genuinely terrifying - more terrifying than any horror movie ever made.

The heavy packs of the soldiers slowed them down as they tried to climb across ground. Lines of infantry therefore become easy targets when they move slower. Many of them were killed before even reaching the Germans and the survivors described the battlefield literally being littered with corpses. Many soldiers carried on with their duty even though they had horrifying wounds and yet, some were in the midst of it, becoming trapped between or under the dead and injured for what seemed like forever.

One of the hardest things to read was that there were men who volunteered together with groups of them coming from the same workplaces and towns and when they were killed on the front line there were entire streets that were just left empty and many of the families lost an entire generation of men. It is genuinely horrifying what kind of a terrible ripple effect this had on the rest of Britain, so many people died.

This was quite a heavy read and I don't recommend just trying to tackle it without breaks. It's quite graphic and when you remember that everything in this book actually happened it makes it even more upsetting. It may not have been an entire disaster from a war perspective but in terms of human life, it definitely was. Strategies were made, assumptions were falsely believed and thus, the loss of life was terrible. Telephone wires, destroyed by shellfire and runners killed carrying messages means that there were even problems on the communication side. At every single level, there were issues.