1916 - Background to the scheme

By the summer of 1916, after the experience of nearly two years of industrialised fighting, 'enthusiasm',  for the war diminished. A widespread change of mood occurred in which a spirit of patient endurance became an important element. The theme of a perceived change in the nature of the war was one which was shared by many contemporary writers and observers.

Edmund Blunden's ominous comments on the introduction of steel shrapnel helmets for use by his unit, 11th (1st Southdown) Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, just prior to its involvement in the Somme offensive indicate, in typically restrained and oblique language, how the scale and fundamental character of the war was changing:

"Steel helmets now became the rule; their ugly useful discomfort supplanting our friendly soft caps...The dethronement of the soft cap clearly symbolized the change that was coming over the war, the induration from a personal crusade into a vast machine of violence." (Undertones of War', London Cobden Sanderson, 1928, p74)

Blunden's intimations of disquiet proved well founded. Posterity has come to regard the Somme offensive, and especially its calamitous opening day, as symbolic of the wastefulness and 'futility' of British First World War combat experience. Recorded photographically, the appalling conditions in which much of the later winter fighting took place have become seminal images of the aberrant nature of Western Front trench warfare. The grotesque contrast between effort expended, in terms of casualties, and effective achievement, territorial gains, has made the campaign highly contentious. Conceived, in part, as an attempt to distract German attention from the French at Verdun, the British effort on the Somme resulted in losses in manpower on a scale unimaginable in the optimistic days of August 1914. The disquieting image of a gruesome leering skeleton, personification of Death, vigorously pumping the lifeblood of Europe's manhood into a scorched and ruined earth, used by Walther Eberbach in his satirical medallion 'Verdun die Weltblutpumpe' was as relevant to British military experience in Picardy in the summer of 1916 as it was to the ordeals of the massive conscript armies of France and Germany.

The British failure to breach the German lines of 1 July inevitably led to a strategy of attrition. A vital aspect of the change in the nature of the war was, from the British perspective, the pledging of an alliance by the deliberate trading of losses. Despite the sanguine official claims made on behalf of the Somme offensive its real achievement from a civilian perspective was to near universalise the experience of mourning for households and communities throughout Britain and the Empire.