This day in history brought an end to Hell itself.
Across the entire scope of world military history, few battles become synonymous with death incarnate, but one stands paramount over all others: the Battle of the Somme. World War I had been raging since 1914, and in the pre-Somme span of its first two years, more than 7 million total casualties had been suffered between the Allies and the Central powers. Verdun was a prime spot for tragedy, with France alone losing almost 400,000 of their initial 1.2 million soldiers sent. 1 in every 3 French soldiers died at Verdun alone.
The Great War was a watershed moment in world history; the ancient illusion of battlefield honor was brutally severed by the almost incomprehensible amount of mechanized slaughter faced at the front. Men no longer went to war to win glory for their homeland— they went to become fodder.
The Battle of the Somme began on July 1, 1916, to serve as a rescue offensive for the French army on the Western Front. The British planned to launch over one million shells of artillery at the Germans, but did not realize that the German force had concrete bunkers, miles upon miles of barbed wire, and the most lethal weapon to date: the machine gun. July 1st is remembered as the deadliest single day in British military history, losing nearly 20,000 men in the span of a few hours.
The Somme dragged on for another four and a half months, with all efforts being concentrated on pushing the front line into German territory, only to move a mere 6 miles in total at the end. Across all sides, over one million soldiers were killed either by gunfire, artillery, or inhumane trench conditions. The unlucky soldiers who returned home returned as husks of humans: shell-shocked, traumatized, and dead in all but body. The Battle of the Somme single-handedly reshaped how the world viewed war, stripping away valor to reveal the hellscape warfare truly is. Soldiers realized they were not valiant warriors of their homeland, but rather sacrifices made in bulk by bureaucrats far away from the front.
Poet and Somme survivor Siegfried Sassoon wrote about the battle in a letter after his return home, his words ringing throughout time: “I am staring at a sunlit picture of Hell.”
