Slaughter on the Somme

Last week I went to a talk at the National library at which three librarianas talked about their projects. One of them, Peter Ireland, talked about William Clachan, a New Zealand soldier who fought at the Battle of the Somme and was later killed in Malawi, Africa. In a letter to his mother, Clachan describes the battle. On 15 September, 1916, at 6.20 am 6000 men went over the top, that is, emerged from the trenches and rushed towards the German lines. Eight minutes later, faced with German machine gun fire, 600 were dead, 1200 wounded or missing. He describes the line of men all emerging from the trenches simultaneous and mowed down in a line. The man who gave the order to charge faced an enormous moral responsibility. He was probably never called to account. The battle was the brainchild of the British Commander in Chief, Sir Douglas Haig. To him the hundreds of thousands of men at his disposal were like toy soldiers. He could move them here, he could move them there. The enemy line won't budge throw a few more thousand men at it. No one counted the value of lives lost. This kind of thinking was also reflected in Clachan's letter. He mentioned that his barman was shot, that a lance corporal was killed, but to him they were just bodies, rank and number. They had no names, let alone family, lives left behind. In total, there were 618,257 Allied and 434,500 German casualties. The allies gained 12 km of ground. Haig was loaded with honours and medals, and was buried in 1928 amid great pomp and ceremony, but historians of recent times considered him the worst general of the First World War, someone mired in old strategic thinking. Blaming generals for their folly may be justifiable, but at the root, blame the idea of nations fighting nations, throwing vast resources at murdering each other. It was Napoleon who created the idea of a national army, the Grand Army. At the Battle of Borodino there were 250,000 troops involved and there were 70,000 casualties. There were 850,000 Axis causalities and 1,129,619 Soviet causalities at the Battle of Stalingrad. The damage these huge encounters did to the survivors and the collective memories of the combatant nations is incalculable. With the advances in technology and the consequent rethinking of military strategy it is unlikely that there will ever be such great battles again. At the root of the tragedy is the thinking of the casualties as nameless soldiers, the 'lance-corporal', the 'batman', the poor bugger who copped the bullet.