First Day on the Somme

On the morning of July 1, 1916, a continuous line of British soldiers climbed out of their trenches and began to walk slowly towards the German lines. Many of them believed that the enemy positions had already been destroyed in the previous artillery bombardment. By the end of the day, the British had suffered 60,000 casualties--one for every eighteen inches of the front. Eminent military historian Martin Middlebrook has drawn on official sources, local newspapers, autobiographies, novels, and poems to write this book and, above all, on the recollections of hundreds of survivors who contribute to a brilliant, horrifying, and intensely moving portrait of war on the front line.