The Somme Quotes

“They waited in position, bayonets fixed, on the morning of July 1st, and listened to the mines go, on schedule at 7.25 a.m. In the distant village of Fricourt, the church bell rang clamorously as the tower collapsed.

The weird sound unnerved the men as they waited in their trench, as if the clanging of the bell were the terrible gabble of their own mute fear. Then the whistle went, and they surged forward, over the top into a world of noise.

There was no logic that carried Perceval Lucas forth as he ran on those strong, lean legs of his; no discernible path that had taken him from his garden by the stream at Rackham Cottage to one of the bloodiest battles in human history, there on the upper reaches of the River Somme.

The following morning, his company entered the village square, and kicked away, underfoot, the stone fragments of saints. The church was a smoking stump, and they saw that its bell-tower had crushed two houses as it fell. Cows wandered the streets, mad and fevered with not having been milked.”
― Alison MacLeod

“Springtime flatters this part of the Somme countryside, undramatic with its flat fields and scattered villages. The largest object for miles, dominating the shallow depression of the Ancre, is the Thriepval Memorial. You approach the park down a long avenue, past lawns carefully tended and set in a girdle of trees. The massive triple arch of dark-red brick, each leg of the arch four piers deep, each pier with its four high panels of dun-coloured marble on which the names of the dead are engraves, is, for all its height, a squat, graceless thing.

There is not another soul in sight, and no sound. From the plinth you look down long rows of white crosses and plain headstones on the far side of the memorial; some say inconnu, others 'A Sodier of the Great War'. Beyond them, beyond this enclosure, the lush countryside meanders to its low horizon.

The dead are listed by regiment, then by rank and then alphabetically - nothing disordered here. This dismal monumentalism, a confirmation rather than a denial of the mindset which led to such slaughter in the first place, though the architect intended no irony. The monument was raised by the power of the state as a piece of political theatre extravagant enough to be seen from miles and years away, as it was by my father when he passed on the Bapaume Road in the summer of 1944.”
― Walter Perrie, Roads That Move: A Journey through Eastern Europe