Return to the Somme

I’ve walked these grassy fields before, that warm and humid day,
When artillery had wiped away the green,
They told us that our guns had made the Germans run away,
 And had swept the bloody hilltops nearly clean,
So in lengthy lines we formed as we climbed our last ascent,
 With our pals we had enlisted with beside,
Then we charged the line of Huns, hiding with their heavy guns,
 …And close to twenty thousand of us died[1].
The artillery had raged for hours and beat upon the ground,
 But not the high explosive kind was used,
But to crack their hardened trench, they launched the fragmentation round[2],
 With the obvious conclusions that ensued,
For they must have realized that the shots were ineffective,
 And something much less futile must be tried,
But General Haig, he didn’t know, till the death toll came to grow,
 …And that’s how twenty thousand of us died.
The veterans of the early war, they all are dead and done,
 And row by row their crosses line the grass,
At the battlefields you’ve read about from Flanders to Verdun,
 That are littered by the stench of blood and brass,
But Lord Kitch’ner has a fix for this, a unit made of “pals,” [3]
 That walk within plain sight and never hide,
So there was no use to train, all those men who would be slain,
 …And that’s why twenty thousand of us died.
So the guns blazed on and hardly scratched the hardened, covered trench,
 While the Germans waited patiently inside,
And the British troops formed up in lines where our lines met the French,
 In a slow formation several miles wide,
But think about the shocking scene the Germans must have seen,
 As the line advanced upon them like a tide,
So they crawled out through the wire, set machine guns up to fire,
 …And that’s when twenty thousand of us died.
But today you’d never know a battle raged here long ago,
 You’d never think men came here just to kill,
The stains of blood were covered when the grass began to grow,
 And the beauty has returned upon the hill,
Although over a million died before this battle ended,
The mistakes of that first day we cannot hide,
And we won’t forget that day, and the price we had to pay,
…On that day that twenty thousand of us died.

[1] While over 1.5 million would eventually become casualties at the Somme, this is in reference to the first day, 1 July 1916, when the British Army would suffer 57,470 casualties, to include 19,240 dead.

[2] Due to experience learned from the First and Second Battle of Ypres, the British believed fragmentation rounds were far more effective than high explosive rounds and shifted their production capabilities to match this thought.At the Somme, they would prove ineffective against hardened German bunkers atop the hill.

[3] Lord Kitchener’s “New Army”, sometimes called “Pal Battalions” were units comprised of friends who could enlist together and be promised to remain in the same unit throughout the war.These new recruits, who lacked much of the training of the regular army, were taught to march in straight, long lines to advance against the German front, believing that Britain’s superior artillery would be enough to create a breakthrough.