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Back to work (from home) @I_W_M after a long and strange period on furlough. And on 1 July, no less – a date that always makes me think of the First World War, being the first day of the Battle of the #Somme in 1916.
A favourite image. 34th Div attack nr La Boisselle. Tall weeds of high summer. Dug earth of a trench. Iron stakes for barbed wire. Men pick their way through, carrying rifles at the slope and trail. Distinctive silhouettes. Distant smoke, bare trees. Q 51
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205071231
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205071231
For me, the Somme anniversary makes me think of 2008, when I visited the Somme with a group from IWM and the @AWMemorial. A deeply memorable trip, not least for @PeterHart1915 reading George Ashurst’s memories of 1 July 1916, while we were all gathered in the Sunken Lane.
You can hear Ashurst’s (22-reel) oral history interview with Pete here. His Somme memories begin in Reel 14. https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80009658
An extract from Ashurst in Reel 15, as printed in Pete's book The Somme, which is a great source for eyewitness accounts.
This joint 2008 Anglo-Australian trip was filmed for ABC’s Four Corners series – so somewhere in their archives is a shot of me in the Sunken Lane, looking (I like to think) serious and thoughtful, while listening to Pete read Ashurst’s memories. https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/the-great-history-war/8953072
The Sunken Lane is a part of the battlefield which has become very widely known, because it features in Geoffrey Malins’ footage of the battle. Two still, IWM FLM 1672 and 1673.
Malins’ footage shows troops within mins of going over the top. Many will shortly become casualties. Some stare at the camera, others seem relaxed. A mortar man wipes his mortar with a cloth, over and over. Trying to distract himself, or just making sure everything's in order?
This footage, with its intense immediacy and the fact that it can be located to within yards of where it was shot, gives the sunken lane a unique atmosphere. Here it is on Google Earth - the wooded track in the foreground - with village of Beaumont Hamel in the distance.
It’s a place where the past, and the Somme battle, feels both very near and very far away – few things bring you back to the present than the sound of gigantic Airbus Beluga transports flying in and out of the nearby aircraft factory. (Pic WikiCommons – Markus3 – CC-By-SA 3.0
The sunken lane is a place that been shown to audiences repeatedly over the years, from the BBC’s The Great War series in the 1960s and in lavish colour in Peter Jackson/IWM’s They Shall Not Grow Old – it pops up twice in this trailer alone.
The faces of the men in the sunken lane have become accidental icons – in a similar way to the men in this photo, and especially the man seated on the left, who appeared in The Great War’s title sequence. IWM Q 1
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205193964
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205193964
A few years after this trip I found myself working on IWM’s First World War Galleries, and was once again thinking about the Somme battle, and visiting the battlefield again.
I found that, after reading accounts of the battle, and then walking the ground, you experience the place in a strange way – partly the fields, hedgerows, trees that you see around you, and partly the historical narrative of what happened there before.
Delville Wood was a particularly strong case of this – manicured lawns, but also, among the trees, humpy-bumpy ground suggesting craters that have been allowed to remain. IWM Q 1259.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205193131
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205193131
Walking through the wood in 2013, dazzled by carpets of bluebells, it became increasingly difficult to imagine the furious bayonet-and-grenade fighting that went on among these trees.
By coincidence, one of the literally bloodiest objects in IWM’s Galleries comes from Delville Wood – a jacket worn by Lt Harold Cope of 7th Bn Border Regiment, wounded there 7 Aug. A sleeve of his bloodied jacket was cut off as he received aid.
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30099475
https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30099475
During the course of one trip to the Somme, I was fortunate to witness an ongoing archaeological excavation at La Boisselle by the sadly no longer active @LaBoisselleProj . Extraordinarily, I happened to visit not long after a body had been found.
As a pathologist worked on the find site, I was able to see the remains of British soldier, lying where he had fallen, a century before. As I looked, I tried to think of some an appropriate reaction. In the end, all I could think of was a sympathetic ‘bad luck, chum’.
I was so pleased to hear later that these men were later identified by DNA testing. He was a member of the Essex Regiment killed in 1915 by the explosion of a German mine.
http://www.laboisselleproject.com/2016/09/08/british-first-world-war-soldiers-identified-through-dna-testing/
http://www.laboisselleproject.com/2016/09/08/british-first-world-war-soldiers-identified-through-dna-testing/
They were later laid to rest with military honours. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-37701909
I set out on this thread without a specific message in mind, and more to mark the anniversary with a momentary reflection. The Somme is an events I find endlessly fascinating, the battlefield beguiling. For an IWM curator, 1 July seems an apt date to be returning to work.
