The First Day of the Somme

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In the summer of 1916, an army gathered in Picardie in northern France, an army the likes of which the British had never fielded before. Alongside the men was a gigantic amount of materiel, the stuff of war. Shells, guns, explosives, bullets. The men and the equipment was gathered together in that rolling chalk. downland.

A place not unlike, well, Sussex really, wide fields, villages hidden in the folds of the ground, corpses of trees, sunken roads. In a valley at the southern end of the British Imperial Army was what one soldier described as a kind of muddy stream. It was midsummer, the water levels were low. It was the river Somme. and that muddy trickle would give its name to a battle fought by that army, a battle that began on the first of july nineteen sixteen, a terrible battle in the Somme Basin.

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