At all costs (1986)

From the July 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

A favourite expression among the High Command on both sides of the conflict in 1916 was, "at all costs". Falkenhayn, the German commander-in-chief, ordered that Verdun must be taken, and Joffre ordered that it must be defended, "at all costs". Haig was to use the expression later, in the Battle of the Somme, and it was to come up again and again. A position must be held, or a wood must be captured, again at all costs. It was a change from the usual "regardless of losses", but it meant the same thing. The cost was certainly paid, but not by the people who issued the orders. 

This month brings the 70th anniversary of one of the bloodiest days in British history, the first day of the Somme. On Saturday 1 July 1916, some twenty thousand men died, This would represent the entire male population of a sizeable town. Thirty thousand more were wounded, many of them maimed for life. This was just the first day — the Battle of the Somme lasted from 1 July until 18 November when, bogged down in mud and exhaustion, it was finally called off. By that time one million, two hundred thousand men — British, French and German — were dead or maimed; the British total was over half a million. 

The use of the word battle to describe what was in fact a long campaign illustrates just how out of date the ideas of military strategists were. Until the middle of the last century battles, on however large a scale, lasted only a day, sometimes only a few hours. Even in the mid 19th century, as at Gettysburg, they lasted only two or three days. The Somme lasted over four months and during that time at least twelve massive engagements, that in any other age would have been called battles, took place. It was the same attitude that sent masses of men in waves against machine guns and modern artillery, as though against muzzle loading muskets. Nowhere was this more obvious than on the first day of the Somme. No doubt the anniversary will be marked by TV programmes, some of which will be critical of the whole ghastly mess up and there will be ceremonies. But not many of the survivors remain, time having taken most of those the German machine guns missed, 

Germany opened the war on the Western Front with a massive attack on France and Belgium. In an attempt to repeat their victory of 1870, they poured a million and a half men into a great sweep to encircle Paris and knock France out of the war. They failed, and the war settled down into a static affair, with trenches extending from the North Sea to the Swiss border. But Germany had achieved great advantages. Their front line, apart from a small quiet section near the Swiss border, ran entirely through conquered territory. Thus all the destruction was away from their own borders and the coal mines and factories of Belgium and Northern France were at their disposal. Because the line was in foreign territory they were prepared to make strategic withdrawals to more favourable ground and there construct strong defences. But for the French army fighting on their own territory, public opinion would not allow any further losses, This was the theory that Falkenhayn was working on, when in early 1916 he decided on a mass attack on Verdun. He calculated that the French would never give the place up and he could "bleed the French army white". 

So in February 1916 a massive attack was launched on Verdun, a small town surrounded by forts. These the French, by a massive miscalculation, had stripped of their guns to use elsewhere. The logical thing for the French to do was to abandon the place and withdraw to a more easily defended line. But as with the British at Ypres in Belgium, Verdun had become more than a town. It had been built up by mass propaganda as a symbol of French resistance, which must be held at all costs. The battle raged right through until 18 December. The French army was indeed bled white but German losses were as great. Falkenhayn was sacked as a result, but this was no consolation for the seven hundred thousand dead. It was to relieve the pressure on the French at Verdun that the Somme offensive was launched. 

The Somme battle marked a watershed in the general attitude to the war. Until then the wild hysteria with which the outbreak of war had been greeted still persisted. It was from 1 July 1916 that war weariness began and to this period belong the bitter war poems and the cynical war songs of the front line soldier. During early 1916 attempts were made to end the war with a compromise peace. Germany, realising that its gamble had failed, made several attempts to call it off. It was becoming obvious that the cost to the participants was outstripping the gains. But modem war is such that it can be fought only if the whole population is involved and this requires massive propaganda. Once having got the masses into a belligerent frame of mind it is difficult to get them out of it. After all, if the enemy are monsters who must be stopped at all costs, committing every type of barbarity, it is difficult to suddenly suggest a compromise peace instead of totally defeating them, 

Before the outbreak of the 1914/18 war, many people believed that it could be prevented by a general strike across the frontiers. This was however a pipe dream, for having no knowledge of the system under which they lived, or how it worked, the workers could not accept such action. Instead they cheered in the streets. In 1914 Britain was the only European power not to have conscription. Its army, although highly efficient, was small, even when reinforced by reservists and territorials. A call went out, spearheaded by the famous poster showing Kitchener's pointing finger. A hundred thousand volunteers were asked for, and over a million responded. In some cases private individuals or organisations raised unofficial companies that were later absorbed into the army. One practice was to form regiments of "Pals", in which men from a factory or mine or sometimes a street or club joined together in one company. This was to have a devastating effect when a battalion was almost wiped out and whole areas were flooded with the dreaded telegrams. It took two years to weld this mass of volunteers into an army and they were ready just in time for the Somme. 

The battle took place in Picardy in Northern France — an area of chalk hills, resembling parts of Wiltshire and Hampshire and crossed by the River Somme. It was an area of beechwoods and sunken roads but also of wide open downland, the hardest possible type of country to storm across, devoid of cover of any kind. This area had been a quiet part of the line, where battle weary troops had been sent for recuperation. The main reason it was chosen for the attack was that, as the British and French lines joined at this point, it could be a joint effort. This was as much for propaganda reasons as any other. The overall plan was to punch a hole in the German lines and then pour cavalry through to roll up the German lines. Large forces of cavalry were kept in the rear for this purpose but it was an impractical dream, which died on the Somme. The new cavalry, the tank. was only in its infancy and was slow and lumbering. 

The main obsession of the high command was that artillery alone would do the trick. And by this time modern artillery had become devastating. The amount of high explosive used during the war was enormous, but the hopes that were placed on it were exaggerated. It was believed that the effect of a prolonged bombardment would so shatter the defenders that they would be unable to resist and the infantry would have a walk-over. But the Germans had constructed strong dugouts and defences that were able to withstand the bombardment. For days the German lines were pounded and a large number of massive mines were exploded under the enemy lines. The Allied commanders believed that this had destroyed the defenders but when the barrage stopped, the German soldiers emerged from their dugouts and set up their machine guns. It was against this that the British troops were sent, each soldier carrying a heavy pack that slowed movement, told to advance at a walk. They were mowed down in lines. 

After the battle was over the Germans withdrew to a new prepared position, the Hindenburg line. It took a long time for the truth about July 1 to reach the British public but when it did it was to have long-lasting effects. 

The Battle of the Somme has now passed into capitalism's bloody history and the area where it was fought is restored, apart from the cemeteries and, in a few places, the shell holes which are covered in grass. But capitalism is still with us and wars still rage across the world. And so many workers, across the world still do not understand the system that kills them. 

Les Dale

Day of Remembrance For What? (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Early on the morning of July 1 1916 the barrage which had been crashing down upon the German lines on the Somme lifted and, in a short eerie silence, waves of British soldiers left their trenches and began to. walk across No Man's Land. They had been told to do that — to walk across because the guns would have cut all the wire, wiped out all the defences, killed all the Germans. They had only to walk across and wait for hot food from the field kitchens which would be rapidly following them. 

It was not like that at all; before the day was out something like twenty thousand of the men who had climbed out of their trenches in such optimism in the morning had been killed. The battle dragged on for same weeks more, eventually to be disguised in history as a general's blunder, as if the "correct" decisions had any more to recommend them, as if it were better to kill twenty thousand German workers than the same number of British. 

The First World War was a succession of such horrors, marking out like grisly milestones the long road of murder among the deadlocked trenches. To the people on both sides who, drunk with patriotism, had cheered the start of the war, the slaughter was a shock they could barely absorb. They had gone to fight in such heroic style; now there was only the mud and the guns and the rats and lice —and finally, all too often, a line in the casualty lists. The war reached out beyond new frontiers of terror, with the aerial bombardment of civilians, There had been nothing before to prepare the workers for this sudden experience of total war. 

For decades afterwards Europe lived in a state of shock, a massive grief and bewilderment that the frantic response to the war propaganda — the songs, the posters, the white feathers — could have contributed to this. At the same time as the war had spawned more powerful weapons to smash human bodies it had also developed better medical services to patch up and send them back onto the streets in wheelchairs, on crutches, or to keep them only part alive in perpetual hospital. There were political dangers in this situation and to avert it something had to seem to be done to redeem the many promises to make the land fit for such heroes to live in. 

This was all happening in an atmosphere of deep disillusionment, Post war Britain, unexceptionally, was a country of unemployment, bitter poverty and cynicism. Disabled ex-servicemen who were naive enough to expect same recompense for what they had suffered found instead that their claims for pensions were met with delay, muddle, niggardliness and sometimes blank refusal. Those who had come through the war in one piece tacked themselves onto the end of their local dole queue. This is the story of one man, whose unit was badly cut up in machine gun fire on July 1 1916: 

When I was out of work, I had to go before a Means Test Panel. There was a very fat lady on the Panel, cuddling a Pekinese on her lap. She said, "We've all got to pull our belts in a hole or two these days." I was fed up and told her, "Your words belie your appearance. That bloody dog's had more to eat today than I've had." There was a lot of argument and it ended in a row. My chair went over; papers and inkwells went flying and the dog was yapping and squealing. I was charged with common assault and got three months in Wormwood Scrubs. (The First Day on the Somme — Martin Middlebrook.) 

Such men often found their way into one or other of the organizations which were springing up with the aim of fighting the case of the ex-servicemen. At first these split on political lines, with one linking with the TUC and another - the grandly titled Comrades of the War - attracting ex-officers and therefore considered fit for a good Tory patriot to join. There was some rivalry between the organizations, which did not inspire any confidence in their ability to improve matters, as Europe slid into the first slump of the post-war years. 

It was to stem this despair, to sell the ex-servicemen the idea that there was more to the life of a returned hero than the dole queue and the Means Test, that a movement began to unite the opposing organizations. Leader of this movement was none other than Douglas Haig, the general who had organised that slaughter in July 1916, a man famous for his trust in God and who was ready to blame his soldiers for not being able to survive a simple walk across No Man's Land. Haig was still, then, wallowing in the glamour of the super returned warrior; for organizing the killing of all those men he had received a title and £100,000. He supported the move for unity among the ex-servicemen because he hoped this would be a stabilizing influence which would avert what he saw as the threat of social revolution. In May 1921 the British Legion was formed. 

The Legion declared — as it had to — that it was non-political, politics being associated with nasty squabbling over sectional interests at the cost of humane rescue work. It is not surprising, though, that they saw no inconsistency in adopting distinctly political attitudes — their patriotism, their servile royalism (they have always been unable to refer to any aristocrat without stringing out the full title and when mentioning royalty they never miss a Royal Highness or a Majesty), their assumption that capitalism is basically a decent society with just one or two problems which any well-intentioned person can sort out. 

In the General Strike the Legion advised its members " ... to come forward once more and offer their services in any way that may be needed by the authorities." This caused something of a row, since many of the strikers were ex-servicemen who had been driven into it by desperation at the conditions they had faced when they came back from the war. "Non-political" attitudes were also evident when the Legion sent a delegation to Germany in 1935. They saw the concentration camp at Dachau, where the Nazis were holding their political prisoners, and then they had a "quiet family supper" with Gestapo chief Himmler who was, they thought, "...an unassuming man anxious to do his best for his country." 

The first Poppy Day was in 1921, with the Legion hesitant about its chances of success, However it pulled in so much money that a year later the Legion were making the flowers themselves. They now have a factory in Richmond, Surrey, where disabled ex-servicemen turn out something like forty million of the flowers each year. Selling the poppies is the Legion's main source of income. 

Between the wars the effect of Poppy Day was immense. To begin with, it was always on the anniversary of Armistice Day — November 11, which often meant that the working day was interrupted by the two minutes' silence. Schools, factories, transport, offices — they all marked the occasion in this way and the sombre ritual became established. It was very powerful and it was no unusual sight, to see people in tears as the maroons sent out their melancholy booms into the cold mists of a November morning. 

But since the Second World War the occasion has been moved to the first Sunday in November, which has deprived it of much of its effect but which means that there is the minimum interruption of the steady exploitation of workers, ex-servicemen and all. As Poppy Day has declined, the British Legion has felt itself losing some of its relevance, its style of patriotism as much of a joke as Colonel Blimp, (There is, alas, no evidence that current attitudes are any less patriotic than those they have modified, that there is no longer a well of patriotism waiting to be tapped by the appropriate war propaganda, at the appropriate time.) But the Legion was slow to grasp this; it continued to live in its heyday of the Thirties. When eventually realization dawned, they made frantic efforts to catch up, with a campaign bearing all the signs of having been designed by a slick advertising agency. 

The collecting boxes were revamped into the plastic age, a dolly bird showed her legs beneath a tray of poppies and the slogan Wear Your Poppy With Pride was coined, aimed at the doubters who were wondering whether a CND march was a better use of their time. Last November the Cambridge University Rag Day decided to cut the Legion out of their list, on the grounds that it was an "unpopular charity with the students". At the time the Daily Telegraph, in a check on British universities, found this attitude to be widespread; the British Legion, with its image of old soldiers, has been replaced by more trendy appeals for community action trust funds. 

There was some anger in the Legion at this slight, which probably confirmed many members in their prejudices against the alleged laziness and ingratitude of students and there must have been many a call, over the glasses of bitter at local British Legion clubs, for the re-introduction of conscription to shorten these students' hair and teach them to act like men. They need not have worried for, in whatever shape, the ethos of rehabilitation lives on, with its implicit support for capitalism. This ethos interprets the casualties of capitalism as unfortunate, unavoidable accidents who, after the event, need to be patched up and helped to cope with their disabilities. It is difficult to imagine a more insidious bolster to capitalism than this avoidance of reality. For capitalism is not a succession of accidents; wars are not mistakes and poverty is only one segment of the many in capitalism's mosaic of social malaise. There are numerous organizations wearily trying to deal with separate problems in isolation from their common basis. They make appeals, they sell their paper flags and flowers and they claim their successes. They are convinced that they appeal to something they call our better nature when in reality they are a persuasion to avoid the issue. 

There were poppies growing in the fields of Flanders when the war started in 1914 and they clung on as the devastation became complete; they were in the ground and poking out of the soil of the trenches when the men went over the top that day in July 1916. But there is more to it than the popular symbolism, for the poppy is the colour of blood and it has its association with opiates. Those who buy a poppy are helping the workers to deaden their senses to the facts. War is not to be remembered with pride; it is to be feared and hated. Capitalism kills workers in their millions, then lays them out in regimented cemeteries, raises huge monuments to tell us they are dead. And all this to protect the position of the ruling class, to keep in being the very society which ensures the next bloodbath.

Ivan

1918 – Winners And Losers (2014)

From the August 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few years after the Armistice some comfortably charitable ladies in Scotland had the idea of setting up a factory to provide paid employment suitable for disabled ex-soldiers – to make imitation poppies. One of them was Dorothy Maude Vivian, second daughter of the third Lord Vivian and maid of honour to Queen Alexandria, recently ennobled into the Countess Haig, wife of Field Marshall Douglas Haig who, as commander of the British Army in France, had planned so many of the disastrous battlefield episodes which had left so many dead or needing charity through being physically wrecked. Throughout the year the poppies flowed out, each bearing in its black centre spot the initials HF standing for the charity's name of the Haig Fund. Which may have done something to persuade the commander that, as far as his reputation went, it had all been worthwhile.

Somme

Haig achieved his ambition to replace Sir John French as commander of the BEF in France in 1916, after a long campaign of intrigue and character denigration. He installed himself in a château near Montreuil – a small, agreeable town where his officers could ease the stress of commanding the thousands of British soldiers in the trenches by visiting their club where a subscription of five francs ensured them three good meals and afternoon tea each day and access to vintage claret and burgundy at prices far lower than those in Paris or London. Haig's immediate concern was to implement the decisions of the joint conference at Chantilly, to launch a series of devastating Allied attacks across the trench line to drive the German army into subjection. This was to be tested in the Battle of the Somme, lasting from 1 July 1916 until November. Before the reality of the casualties emerged that battle was represented as a proud example of British valour and fortitude which would crucially re-arrange the shape of the Western Front and so the future of the war. It turned out to be a gruesome failure costing thousands of lives but bringing little significant change.

Enthusiasm

The conferring overlords at Chantilly were not, of course, distracted by any contributions from the people whose lives were for disposal – the Allied soldiers who would be ordered out of their trenches to face the storm of bullets and shells in order to kill as many of the enemy as possible before putting the rest to flight. All over Britain – as in Germany, France and the rest – there was a powerful surge in enthusiasm for the war and a restless ambition to get into military uniform and into the front line as soon as possible. An example of the war, and of Haig's reaction to the fate of the soldiers, was the 49th. Division of the West Yorkshire Regiment who on 3 September 1916 were ordered to attack a heavily fortified area which included the infamous Triangle and the Pope's Nose. Those troops were supposed to be resting before going over the top but in the event they had to spend their waking time dragging ammunition and reserve rations for miles up to the dumps near the front. Their condition was such that one of their sergeants said his platoon's normal strength of 33 was reduced to 'eighteen decrepit old men'. The result was, then, predictable. Of the 350 men who attacked in the first wave on that day 244 were killed or wounded. Haig's view of the incident was that those men '...did not really attack and some men did not follow their officers ... I had occasion a fortnight ago to call the attention of the Army and Corps Commanders ...to the lack of smartness, and slackness of one of its Battalions in the matter of saluting when I was motoring through the village where it was billeted. I expressed my opinion that such men were too sleepy to fight well, etc.'

Three Brothers

Deep within that murderous confusion were the Bright brothers, three proud Cockneys who had become hardened soldiers during the Boer War; this account of them is compiled from their own memories and that of their sister Maud, who was both proud and fearful of them. The eldest was Bill, a sergeant; there is a photograph of him in the splendour of his uniform with riding breeches, spurs and peaked cap with its regimental badge. He stands erect before the studio forest, wide-eyed at the camera. What they would have called A Fine Figure Of A Man. There are no known photographs of the other two, Jim and Fred, but they were also out there. On 16 September 1916 Bill was blown to bits, probably in a trench. His men said they knew it was him because among the other remains they found his identity tag. His name is on the Memorial at Thiepval – one of those 'Who Have No Known Grave'.

Trench Raid

When Jim was told about his brother's death his immediate, insistent reaction was that he had to take part in that night's trench raid which was planned to slip across No Mans' Land and bring back a couple of Germans for interrogation about the enemy's strength, origins, plans. With the rest of the men Jim went silently across and as he dropped into the opposite trench a young German soldier appeared – 'not much more than a kid' was how he described him – holding trembling hands aloft and whispering 'Kamerad'. It must have been obvious that this 'kid' would have been only too ready to answer any questions put to him later by a British officer but Jim did not let that divert him. 'I'll give you Kamerad you bastard' he snarled as he sank his knife into the young body again and again. It is not known whether Jim stayed in that enemy trench long enough to appreciate that conditions there were much better than those he had to endure. What is known is that he wrote to Maud 'I am up to my knees in mud and I am lousy. Please send me some clean socks and underwear'. During the later Battle of Paschendaele he was himself taken prisoner (but not knifed). He then spent the rest of the war being cruelly worked in a salt mine in Germany, which left him with permanent damage to his lungs so that in the next war he could only wheeze his life out in a small, dingy room in the East End while the Luftwaffe bombed as he lay dying.

Fred's story was different. A previous record of insubordination to an officer had led to him being thrown out of the Army – 'dishonourable discharge' he pointedly labelled it – which caused his application to join up again in 1914 to be rejected until the British Army's losses were such as to cause a lowering of standards. So he joined the other two in the trenches, until an exploding shell or a burst from a machine gun tore out the muscle in his left arm and sent him back to civilian life. However serious, the wound did not stop him starting a boxing club where the local lads could be taught by him in what he primly called 'the noble art'. It also did not stop him getting into a fight in the docks in which he lost the sight of an eye.

Chaotic

It was rather different in the higher levels. Late in August 1914, during the chaotic retreat from Mons, Chief of Staff General Sir Archibald Murray responded to the news that the BEF was in imminent danger of being overwhelmed by the advancing Germans by passing into a faint. Any private soldier who behaved in that way might well have been dragged before a Court Martial and perhaps executed for cowardice. However Murray, as a high ranking officer, had to be treated differently. His indisposition was remedied by feeding him a pint of champagne. Years after the war, one of Haig's generals remembered Major General Sir Henry Wilson as an 'Out-and-out crook. Never did a stroke of work. Sat in his office writing to his lady friends in high places'. In the same style, Haig himself was ready to contemptuously sneer at those who were supposed to be his staunch allies, writing to Dorothy Vivian as early as September 1914 that: ''The French are most unreliable. One cannot believe a word they say as a rule'. And later, on the same theme, 'They are truly a race of usurers!'

Viscountcy

After the Armistice an immediate question for the British government was how Haig should be rewarded for his time in charge of the British forces on the Western Front. The first attempt at this was to arrange a great victory parade in London and to suggest that he shared the fifth carriage with Foch, Clemenceau and Orlando. Haig did not think much of this: 'I have no intention of taking part in any triumphal ride with Foch and a pack of foreigners, merely to add to L G's importance and help him in his election campaign'. He also rejected an offer of a viscountcy, on the grounds that the same title had previously been offered to Field Marshal Sir John French, the officer he had deposed and who had been sacked – to Haig's satisfaction – for being incompetent. Eventually, more to his taste, he was made Earl Haig of Bemersyde with a subsidiary viscountcy and barony, an estate in Scotland and a grant to allow him to live in the style these titles demanded. There was however another problem; Haig asked for £250,000 as appropriate to his achievements in arranging all that slaughter but Parliament disagreed and limited his reward to £100,000.

A different type of heroism, of endurance in the face of exposure and deprivation, was demanded of the men returning from Flanders. One of these was Wally Crosby, the boyfriend of Maud the long-suffering sister of the three Bright brothers. When the war began Walter, who had a well-paid, secure job in a sawmill tried to join up – how else would he have faced the Bright family? But he was rejected until 1917 when he was ordered to report to a boat train at Victoria Station which would take him to France. Before he went he and Maud married in a local Registry Office. This was not due to the anxious couple being bound by any deep affection but because they hoped that if Wally was Killed On Active Service Maud would qualify for a war widow's pension which would be significantly more that the sweatshop wage she was getting from her job in a Shoreditch dress factory.

Survival

But Wally survived; and when he was demobilised and went to the saw mill to ask for his old job back he was told that it had been taken by an eager young civilian soon after he had left for the boat train. Thus it was that Wally and Maud resigned themselves to a 'peacetime' life of relentless poverty, made sharper and deeper as they produced a batch of children. Wally, one of the survivors of that dread turmoil which is now being glorified by the ruling class, descended into an underpaid road-digging labourer; between the two World Wars he was unable to find a job lasting him more than a week or two. For him and his family there was no triumph but only bitter frustration and despair. Meanwhile their leaders gathered at Versailles in what was called a Peace Conference except that its primary task was to re-arrange the national borders to prepare for the next conflagration. In that process the people of Germany were subjected to such privation as to persuade them that their best hope was in a cruelly repressive state. And as the poppies, with their reminders of Haig and his works, flowed from the factories the children were being born who would grow into the warriors – the trained killers – of the next war.

Ivan

The Battle of the Somme (2006)

From the August 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

The recent 90th anniversary of the human tragedy of the Somme saw the politicians, the churches and the organisations charged with remembrance giving history a makeover.

The Allied warlords planned a massive assault set for mid-summer 1916. The offensive was to be carried through by the combined Allied armies and was intended to break through the German lines on the Western, Eastern and Italian fronts imposing a defeat of such magnitude on Germany as to bring a speedy end to the First World War.

 Doubtless it all worked out well for the generals and marshals as they threw clay representatives of thousands of human beings into homicidal battle against one another on the sands table. But battles are not won on sands tables and in the early spring of 1916 the Germans spoiled the plot by opening up a massive assault against the French city of Verdun which absorbed French divisions planned into the attack on the Western Front at the Somme.

 In the week before the 1st of July Allied artillery carried out a ceaseless bombardment of German positions on a five mile stretch of the front. In all they fired 1.6 million shells but many of the British shells failed to explode and the German fortifications not only proved largely resistant to the shelling but also provided subterranean tunnelling where soldiers could take refuge from the bombardment.

 Such was the confidence of the British Command that an enervated German line would crumble before the ferocity of a massed attack that they ordered their 11 divisions to walk steadily across No-Man's- Land towards the German fortifications. At 7.30 hours on July 1st the men arose out of their entrenchments in response to the blowing of whistles and proceeded to walk towards their objectives.

 Immediately they were confronted with a deadly fusillade from German machine-guns. Like lemmings they offered their bodies like blades of grass before a scythe; wave after wave of them, the cared prodigy of wives and mothers learning the falsehood of patriotism or paying the price for volunteering away from poverty or the dull, hum-drum meanness of wage slavery. 60,000 of them fell that day, 20,000 dead, the rest flawed statistics.

 The chaplains were busy intoning their prayers to a remorseless god and the generals, too, were brutal and remorseless for it didn't stop; it continued the next day and for four more months. In October the torrential rains came changing the blood-soaked ground into a quagmire where putrefying human flesh mingled with the mud and obstructed men as they were striven to further slaughter. When this single phase of the hellish conflict was exhausted in mid- November those designated as 'British' were 420,000 fewer while the French lost 195,00 men and the Germans over 600,000. There were no generals killed or wounded and the Allied forces had advanced 5 miles over wasted, barren land.

 The Somme, Passendale, Salonika, Suvla Bay, names of strange places that became prominent in the lexicon of war and its brutalities. 'Lions led by donkeys' was the popular alibi for the monstrous slaughter and the ineptitude of warlords like the British Somme commander, Earl Haig becamethe focus of bitter criticism and sick jokes.

 There was no poetry now in the killing; the avalanche of stereotyped telegrams expressing official regret at the death of a husband or son began to speak louder than the xenophobic vapourings of politicians and the media and officialdom may well have been haunted by the thought that workers turned soldiers might catch on to the duality of their exploitation and the brutally obvious fact that a social system that required periodic bloodletting was fatally flawed.

 Time has accounted for those who survived the battle; those who ploughed through the detritus of decaying human flesh and wept for dead comrades. If you were a tourist from Mars attending the Somme commemoration the vital question you might want to ask is why were millions of men, men of no property and no financial interests, men who had never met those they were now told were their enemies and with whom they did not share a language that would allow them to curse at one another, why were they killing? Why were they dying?

 The answer is that they were fighting over markets and the political and economic appurtenances of trade; that war was, and is, simply a logical extension of a brutally competitive system of social organisation predicted on profit and ongoing expansion; a system that dominated their lives, took away their human dignity and reduced them to the status of wage slaves and cannon fodder.

So the question must be avoided at all costs; capitalism's obsequious apologists, its politicians, its beholden clergy and media hacks will change the script: Tell the fools how brave they were and how proud they should be; that'll keep them happy to the next time. "Give a benediction, bless them with a prayer, And tell them how the son of God was longing to be there!" In the circumstances of the conflict bravery is a empty virtue; an abuse of language that must surely add insult to injury.

Richard Montague