90 years on, scars of the Somme are still painful

PARIS - Those who fought in the stench, mud and blood of its trenches and are alive today probably number less than the fingers on your hand. Yet numbers only tell a part of a story.

The other part is this: 90 years later, the Battle of the Somme, Western Europe's most murderous land offensive, still causes grief - an ache for the lost generations and anger at the madness of generals.

At 7.30am on July 1, 1916, whistles blew in British and French trenches along a 30km front in Picardy, northern France, after a week-long bombardment in which more than 1.8 million artillery shells pounded the German lines, climaxing with the explosion of huge mines.

Yet the Germans sat out the hellish bombardment in their trenches, and then took to their defences.

The allied infantry stood little chance. Impeded by the rolls of barbed wire in no man's land, they were torn to shreds by enfilading fire from the German machine-gun nests.

On the opening day of the battle, the British recorded 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 men killed.

By the time the ghastly operation was called off on November 18, 1916, Britain and its Dominions had lost 400,000 men, Germany 400,000 and France 200,000.

For a million lives, Field Marshall Douglas Haig - whose statue still stands in Whitehall, London - was able to advance, at the most, 15km.

As 90th anniversary ceremonies on Saturday will prove, the impact of the Somme still reverberates today.

"It seemed at the time that the country would never get over it and it never has," says Lyn Macdonald in her oral history Somme.

French historian Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau says the Somme has become an emblem of national loss and disgust at industrial slaughter.

"Most of the British Army that took part in the offensive were volunteers," says Audoin-Rouzeau.

"There were pals' battalions, essentially battalions of mates. These were people who knew each other, were neighbours, worked in the same factory, sometimes teams of football players who all signed up together."

Thus, when battalions were routinely all but wiped out in the carnage, whole villages and towns lost sons, brothers, fathers and friends.

The bloodletting was also a rite of nationhood for the young Dominions, especially Canada. On the first day of the offensive, a Newfoundland battalion fighting at Beaumont Hamel was wiped out in half an hour.

Just 68 men responded to the rollcall of 790 names the next day.

Saturday's commemoration will start at 7.30am, when the bells of churches in the 60 districts of the battlefield will ring out.

Ten thousand people are expected at the giant memorial at Thiepval for ceremonies attended by Prince Charles, Princess Anne and British Defence Minister Des Browne. It is hoped that 110-year-old Henry Allingham, Britain's oldest man, who repaired aircraft and engines during the battle, will also be there.

French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie and Veterans Affairs Minister Hamlaoui Mekachera are representing France.

Germany will send a delegation, and a German choir will perform a concert dedicated to friendship between peoples.

Local towns and villages are putting on exhibitions, lectures and music, and Britain's Great War Society, an association of enthusiasts, will parade in World War I gear.

In 1917, the British poet John Masefield visited the Somme battlefield, describing it as "a hell of a desolation all round as no words can describe", but declared that one day it would be effaced by nature.

That prediction has come true. Only the cemeteries - 410 of them for the British and Dominion forces alone - and the brooding monument at Thiepval, where the names are engraved of the 73,367 men who died but left no trace - give any sign to the passing traveller that this was the bloodiest killing field of World War I. By car, it takes less than 10 minutes to cross the fields of wheat, sugarbeet and corn where so many men fell.

The battlefield is visited by 200,000 people a year, and the number is rising annually. Many are descendants or relatives of the men who died, but there are also many busloads of British children, brought over to get an idea of the enormity of the place.

Like Auschwitz, the Somme cannot - and should not - be viewed in the abstract.