Travel || The Somme

Posted on June 3, 2020

I posted a few weeks ago about the first part of the Battlefields Trip to Ypres, Flanders Fields and Menin Gate. The morning of the 3rd day of the trip, we made the several hours drive to France and settled into our new hostel. Then we headed to the Somme.

The Battle of the Somme in 1916 was one of the bloodiest battles in human history, and the largest battle on the Western Front during WWI. More than 3 million men fought in the Battle of the Somme and 1 million men were killed or wounded. Again, just like in Ypres, the sheer horror of that is absolutely impossible to comprehend.

We visited the Sunken Road (in No Man’s Land) near Beaumont Hamel on the Somme where some of the earliest war footage was filmed. Geoffrey Malins was there with his camera and filmed the 1st Bn Lancashire Fusiliers, most of whom were dead 24 hours after the filming was done. Malins also captured one of first live footage of a landmine exploding at Hawthorn Ridge. You can still walk the Hawthorne crater and it’s pictured below. The land still holds all the scars of battle over 100 years later.

We then visited Thiepval Memorial. It was a memorial I was already familiar with from watching the Centenary celebrations on the BBC a few years ago. Thiepval is dedicated to the missing Commonwealth soldiers of the Somme; approximately 73,000 Commonwealth soldiers have no known grave other than the upper reaches of the River Somme.

The memorial was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and opened in 1932. Lutyens also designed the Cenotaph in Whitehall in London. A visitor’s centre and museum opened in 2004. It’s 43 metres high and the foundations are about 6 metres thick due to extensive wartime tunnelling underneath the memorial.

It’s stark and stunning and unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. The memorial rises like an oppressive giant out of the rolling countryside as a reminder that the history of the land is far from idyllic.