100 years on, a royal salute for the lost heroes of the Somme
THE death toll was in the thousands before Britain had even come down for breakfast. Over in northern France, a hundred years ago this morning, the ‘Big Push’ was under way in what would become the greatest disaster in our military history.
Last night, the Queen and other members of the Royal Family attended vigils and twilight services on either side of the Channel ahead of today’s centenary commemorations for the Battle of the Somme.
Few of those along that 20-mile battlefront a century back would get much sleep before going in to action. They had spent the night marching into position, praying, writing letters and waiting for the end of a terrifying artillery bombardment which was supposed to make the Battle of the Somme a walkover.
In the event, more than 20,000 men would die on the first day of a battle which would last 141 days and cost a million lives on both sides.
Last night, thoughts turned to the final hours before the dreaded 7.30am whistle.
‘This evening, we seek to recall the experience of those waiting to go into battle,’ the Dean of Westminster, Dr John Hall, told the congregation at Westminster Abbey, where the Queen and Prince Philip attended a short service ahead of an all-night vigil at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.
Members of the Armed Forces took turns to mount a 15-minute watch over this most sacred of spots. It was the first all-night vigil at the Abbey since the Cuban Missile crisis 50 years ago.
There were equally poignant scenes on the battlefield itself. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry joined a 10pm vigil at the Thiepval Memorial to the 72,000 Allied soldiers who died at the Somme and have no known grave. Think of an entire Cup Final crowd missing in action. The name of every single one of them is engraved on this, the largest Commonwealth war memorial in the world.
Earlier, the royal party had climbed to the top of the memorial for a panoramic view of the battlefield.
The Duke read out a passage written for the occasion by author Sebastian Faulks.
‘By the end of the First of July the British Army had sustained almost 60,000 casualties, of whom nearly one third had died,’ said the Duke. ‘We lost the flower of a generation; and in the years to come it sometimes seemed that with them a sense of vital optimism had disappeared for ever from British life. It was in many ways the saddest day in the long story of our nation.’
Prince Harry recited Before Action, a beautiful poem by a young Lieutenant WN Hodgson of the Devonshire Regiment. ‘By all the days that I have lived, make me a soldier, Lord... By all delights that I shall miss, help me to die, O Lord.’ Hodgson would fall later that day.
Acontingent of today’s servicemen and women read out some of the heartbreaking letters penned during those agonising hours before battle. ‘I do not want to die,’ Captain Charles May of the Manchester Regiment wrote to his wife. ‘If it be that I am to go, I am ready. But the thought that I may never see you or our darling baby again turns my stomach to water. My one consolation is the happiness that has been ours.’ He, too, would not survive the day.
Today, services will be held across Britain. Here in a corner of rural France which will forever be known simply as ‘the Somme’, thousands of descendants have come to pay their respects at a series of events great and small.
Many will trek up a muddy farm track outside the village of Serre to Sheffield Memorial Park. It’s a wooded patch of holy ground, still full of shell holes, which was bought by Sheffield council in 1927 in memory of the vast numbers from the North of England who fell here. It has since become a homage to all those ‘Pals’ battalions’ decimated that day.
Today a new memorial will be unveiled to the Barnsley Pals, just a few yards away from those of the Accrington Pals, the Chorley Pals, the Burnley Pals...
Today’s first service will be at what the French call La Boisselle and the Brits call the Lochnagar Crater. Two minutes before the whistle blew that fateful morning, tons of high explosives were detonated beneath enemy lines after months of secret tunnelling. It killed hundreds of Germans and left a meteorite-sized hole in the ground 300ft across and 60ft deep.
This morning, at 7.28am, 2,000 people will hold hands around its rim. Among them will be Mick Fellows, 81, from Nottingham. His father, Harry, went into action that day nearby with the Northumberland Fusiliers and lived to tell the tale. It was 70 years before Harry would even talk about it. ‘He remembered the ground trembling so hard in his trench that one or two men broke their legs,’ he says.
Mick has come armed with the poem which his father wrote about it all. It will be recited this morning. But he won’t be reading it himself. ‘I still can’t get through it. It’s too emotional,’ he explained.
Even a century on, the shadow of the Somme haunts us still.