Questions
Trench
warfare and the Battle of the Somme (1916)
Study Sources A-C below and
then answer the questions which follow.
Source A
A modern historian's view
Strategically, the battle of the Somme was an unredeemed defeat.... The Somme set the picture by which future generations saw the First World War: brave helpless soldiers; blundering obstinate generals; nothing achieved. After the Somme men decided the war would go on for ever.
Source: A.J.P. Taylor, The First World War (Penguin, 1963)
Source B
The first day of the Somme - a German view.
The men in the dugouts waited ready, belts full of hand-grenades around them, gripping their rifles ... it was of vital importance to lose not a second in taking up position in the open to meet the British infantry which would advance immediately behind the artillery barrage.
At 7.30 a.m. the hurricane of shells ceased.... Our men at once clambered up the steep shafts leading from the dugouts to daylight and ran ... to the nearest craters. The machine-guns were pulled out of the dugouts and hurriedly placed in position.... As soon as the men were in position, a series of lines were seen moving forward from the British trenches. The first line appeared without end to right and left. It was quickly followed by a second, then a third and fourth ... 'Get ready' was passed along our front from crater to crater.... A few minutes later, when the leading British line was within a hundred yards, the rattle of machinegun and rifle broke out along the whole line of shell holes. Whole sections seemed to fall ... the advance rapidly crumbled under the hail of shells and bullets. All along the line men could be seen throwing up their arms and collapsing, never to move again. Badly wounded rolled about in their agony.
Source: quoted in A.H. Farrar-Hockley, The Somme (Pan/Severn House, 1976)
Source C
Extracts from two poems written by soldiers serving in the British army
(i) If
I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
Rupert Brooke
(ii) What
passing-bells for those who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
Wilfred Owen
(a) How reliable do you
think the following sources of evidence would be if you wanted to use them to
help you write a report about life in the trenches on the western front?
(i) poems written by soldiers who were there (as
in Source C);
(iii) accounts given by soldiers on the front line
(as in Source B)?
