The Somme remains the same

© Simon Poulter 2016

I suppose it's the point, that war cemeteries are meant to be pristine, serene gardens of remembrance in contrast to the horrors of battle that created them. Those in the Valley of the Somme are no exception - their calm, perfectly arranged rows of white headstones oddly representative of the carnage unleashed 100 years ago today.

Wars so often have a turning point, either planned or unintential, when events roll back on the trajectory. For the First World War, the Somme Offensive was meant to be just such a turning point, a concerted effort by the French and the British to take on the Imperial German Army and break up their entrenched lines along a 15-mile stretch of northern France near the River Somme.

When the attack came, on July 1, 1916, it would go down in history as one of the bloodiest days in the history of warfare, costing the lives of 19,240 Britain and Commonwealth men on that first day for just the acquisition of three square miles of territory. By November 18, when the Battle of the Somme came to an end, more than a million were dead or wounded on all sides, including 420,000 British, 200,000 French and an estimated 465,000 German. The distance between the frontline on July 1 and on November 18 is just seven miles.

© Simon Poulter 2016

Standing today on the rolling fields where the battle was fought it is, of course, impossible to get a sense of the industrial slaughter that took place over the course of those 141 days, the result of terrible new artillery munitions which didn't just explode, but fragmented, reducing combatants in trenches to bloodied pulps, as well as the new machine guns which literally mowed down soldiers as they were sent over the top. But the 250 military and 150 civilian cemeteries that dot this area of Picardie combine to tell a tragic story of the staggering attrition.

© Simon Poulter 2016

The Commwealth graves, at sites like Thiepval, Albert and Contalmaison, represent the breadth of nationalities drawn into battle from different corners of the world - the 12,000 Australians killed over the course of six weeks fighting for the strategic village of Pozières, as well as the New Zealanders, Canadians, South Africans, Rhodesians and Indians who died for a cause that geographically and politically was not their own but one out of sworn allegiance to a distant monarch. Their graves now sit a long, long way from home.

Throughout the region there are truly humbling sites of remembrance: at Beaumont-Hamel, five miles due north of Albert, is a memorial dedicated to forces of the Dominion of Newfoundland - now part of Canada - which suffered the largest single loss of the battle's first day. 1800 members of a 2000-strong battalion of the Newfoundland a regiment, roughly one in five men from the dominion itself, killed in an unsuccessful assault lasting not much more than 30 minutes.

As you walk up and down the rows of headstones, you pass a mass of nationalities, ages and social backgrounds. There is little hierarchical order - officers lie alongside the enlisted (more junior officers below the rank of major died on the Somme than privates, and the opening day led to the deaths of almost two-thirds of British officers involved). And then you come to those which simply say 'Known Unto God', one of 100,000 graves of those whose identities are not known. At the Memorial to the Missing, at Thiepval, the names of 72,085 British Expeditionary Force soldiers provide some respect for those who were killed but do not have a known grave.

Historians will now agree that Battle of the Somme proved to be a strategic victory for the Allies, that the German trenches were broken up, and the futile intransigence that has come to characterise World War One started to come lose. The cost on that first day of July would be huge, with the largest single day's loss of life for in the British Army's history alone. 

The war itself changed warfare, with the introduction of air power and tanks, weapons of mass destruction. And it also led to a redrawing of the maps of Europe and the Middle East, the political and diplomatic impact of which would resonate through the 20th century, in the Second World War and the Cold War, even the events we are witnessing still today in Syria and Iraq. But if the Somme would be the location of the First World War's turning point, it would be another two years before the Armistice would be signed on November 11, 1918. 

The beginning of the end of the war may have begun in the Somme Valley, but it came at a heavy loss. 100 years on, only the gardens of stone give any sense of the magnitude of that loss, and the bloodshed which occurred over just 125 square miles of Northern France during those four bitter months of 1916.