Book description
On 1 July, 1916, a continous line of British soldiers climbed out
from the trenches of the Somme into No Man's Land and began to walk
slowly towards dug-in German troops armed with machine-guns and
defended by thick barbed wire. By the end of that day, as old tactics
were met by the reality of modern warfare, there had been more than
60,000 British casualties - a third of them fatalities.
Martin Middlebrook's classic account of the blackest day in the
history of the British army draws on official sources, local
newspapers, autobiographies, novels and poems from the time. Most
importantly, it also takes in the accounts of hundreds of survivors:
normal men, many of them volunteers, who found themselves thrown into
a scene of unparalleled tragedy and horror. Compelling and intensely
moving, it describes the true events behind the sacrifice of a
generation of young men - killed as much by the folly of their
commanders as by the bullets of their enemies.
Martin Middlebrook is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and
the author of many important books on military history including THE
KAISER'S BATTLE - MARCH 1918 , THE FALKLANDS WAR - 1982.
