On the hundredth anniversary, thoughts on the Somme, from Charles JohnsonCooke.

On display in one cabinet are a couple of pristine machine guns — one a British “Vickers,” the other its German equivalent. My stomach turns inside out at the sight of them. These are the water-cooled monstrosities that were instrumental in producing the great stasis and all of its horrors. Capable of pushing out 500 rounds per minute (eight per second), it convinced both sides that defense was the safest course.

The machine gun, the British journalist Philip Gibbs observed, afforded its bearers the capacity to construct “not a line but a fortress position.” “No chance,” he noted, “for cavalry!” And yet, though the world’s generals knew from experience in Manchuria, from Thrace, and from the killing fields of the American Civil War just how obsolete established military tactics had been rendered by technological change, for much of the First World War the cavalry was given plenty of chances. Mounted or not, advancing forces at the Somme hewed largely to the techniques of old — failing tragically to overcome the conviction that charging with sufficient gusto would, eventually, lead to a glorious breakthrough. It was thus that the poet Rupert Brooke’s romantic conceptions of some “corner of a foreign field that is forever England” gave way to unlovely reality, and those optimistic volunteers who had followed the Ruritanian glory of all that his sonnets promised were met instead with the full might of the Industrial Revolution. There were few fair fights in the Great War — little chivalry or skill or heroism. There was just boredom, and then attrition. Just factory-style death. Just Siegfried Sassoon’s embittered “continuous roar,” and the apocalyptic collision of impregnable defense with naïve attack. In the days of muskets and cannon, one could reasonably expect to push forward to glory. Now, the lions were fed into the meat grinder with everybody else. When soldiers were brave enough to leave their hiding places, the novelist Sebastian Faulks recorded in Birdsong, “the air turned to lead.”

As I noted on Twitter, I hadn’t realized that the battle started exactly fifty-three years after Gettysburg (this weekend is the 153rd anniversary). As Charles notes, the Civil War, particularly the latter stage, with battles like Cold Harbor, provided hints of the horrors to come.

[Afternoon update]

A modern aerial view of the battlefield.