The bombardment had been going for seven days.
Seven days and nights of continuous artillery fire — the sound so constant that it stopped being sound and became instead a kind of weather, a pressure in the chest, a ringing in the skull that you woke into each morning and carried into sleep each night. By the end of the week, some of the lads had stopped flinching at the individual shells and just sat with their eyes slightly unfocused, somewhere else.
We had been told the wire would be cut. We had been told the German dugouts would be destroyed, their machine guns silenced, their defenders shattered into something that could not resist. We had been told the bombardment was so thorough that we would walk across No Man's Land. Walk. That was the word the officers used. The plan required walking.
I am twenty-two years old. I joined the Pals Battalion with my brother and eight men from our street in Hull. We trained together for a year. I am telling you this so you understand the kind of army we were: not professionals, not men who had chosen soldiering, but volunteers who had answered a call and found ourselves in France with rifles and insufficient information about what was going to happen at 7:30 on the morning of July the first, 1916.
The Morning
They gave us breakfast before the attack — bacon and bread and tea, which seems impossible now, a kindness so ordinary against what was coming. We ate. We checked our equipment. We wrote letters in some cases, or the men who could write wrote letters for the men who couldn't. My brother Clifford asked me to tell our mum that he had not been afraid. I told him he could tell her himself this evening. He looked at me and said: "Right." In the particular way he said "Right" when he did not believe what I had said.
At 7:20 the mine went off under Hawthorn Ridge.
I had been told to expect it — a mine, tunneled under the German front line, filled with sixty thousand pounds of ammonal — but nothing prepares you for a landscape that simply rises and ceases to be what it was. A column of earth and chalk went up perhaps two hundred feet. The sound reached us a fraction after the sight: a blow to the chest, then a roar, then a rain of falling debris that went on for thirty seconds.
The plan was to attack when the mine went off. Instead, the mine had been detonated ten minutes early — no one ever fully explained why — and the German survivors of the explosion, who should have been too shocked to fight, had ten minutes to emerge from their deep dugouts and reach their machine gun positions before our whistles blew.
Zero Hour
At 7:28 our artillery lifted from the German front line to their rear positions — the signal for the infantry to advance. At 7:30 the whistles blew along two miles of front.
I climbed the ladder. This is the physical fact: a wooden ladder, roughly made, in a chalk trench. I climbed it. At the top I straightened up and began to walk north-east across the grass of No Man's Land toward the German wire.
The German machine guns opened in the first thirty seconds.
The sound a machine gun makes when it is firing at you is different from the sound it makes in training or from a distance. Up close it is more like tearing — a ripping of fabric across the air, followed by the impacts, which you do not hear individually but feel as a kind of disturbance in the space around you, a sudden terrible rearrangement of men who were standing and are now not.
The wire had not been cut.
I say this plainly because it was the fact that determined everything that followed. The seven days of bombardment had failed to cut the wire in front of our sector. The men reached it — those who reached it — and bunched up along it, looking for gaps, and the machine guns found them there.
What I Saw
I was hit in the upper left arm within the first two minutes. A graze — the kind that bleeds dramatically and hurts enormously but leaves the arm functional. I went down from the shock of it, and lying in the grass I stayed down, because the men around me who had stayed upright were falling.
From the ground, I watched the attack fail.
I am trying to be accurate and I cannot be entirely accurate because what happened across those fields on that morning is too large for any one pair of eyes. What I saw was this: men I had trained with and eaten with for a year, men whose names I knew and whose families I knew something of, falling in a pattern that had no pattern, stopping and sitting down and not getting up, bunching at the wire and being cut to pieces there, falling so quickly that the number became meaningless — not twenty, not fifty, but a continuous arithmetic of loss that surpassed what numbers are for.
I saw the Sergeant-Major of B Company walk toward the German line for two hundred yards before he was hit. He did not run, did not crouch. He walked, as per the orders. He walked as though the machine guns were an administrative obstacle that deliberate movement might overcome. I do not know what he was thinking. Perhaps he had made a decision about what kind of man he was going to be for the last minutes of his life. I have thought about him many times.
The Crawling Back
I lay in the grass until afternoon. Beside me a man named Davies from Swansea died slowly over about two hours, talking for the first hour, then quieter, then not talking. I held his hand. There was nothing else I could do.
I crawled back to the British lines after nightfall, using the sounds of the German patrols to navigate. My arm had stiffened. The grass was wet. I passed many men on the way back, some of them moving and some of them not.
My brother Clifford did not come back that evening. He did not come back the next day. His name is on the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, which lists 72,000 men whose remains were never found or identified. He is one of 72,000. This is the arithmetic of that day: not individual tragedies but a scale that defeats individual counting.
The Battle of the Somme continued for another 141 days. By the time it ended in November 1916, there had been over a million casualties on both sides. The furthest advance was seven miles.
Narrator's note: Thomas Arkwright is fictional. The tactical details — the failed wire-cutting, the deep German dugouts, the Hawthorn mine detonation ten minutes early, the 57,470 casualties — are documented in military records and in John Keegan's The Face of Battle (1976) and Lyn Macdonald's Somme (1983).