NFT: Centenary of the First Day of the Somme is tomorrow

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulkes, which unfolds against the backdrop of the Somme, both pre-war, the house in Amiens is nestled close to the river, and then as war begins, Stephen goes off to fight in the battle and becomes a tunneler. Grim reading

its a subject that gets such short shrift over here because our part in the war was limited but it's still very important subject matter. And fascinating in that it serves as such a delineation between the modern age and its antecedent.

In comment 13015385 Dunedin81 said:

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its a subject that gets such short shrift over here because our part in the war was limited but it's still very important subject matter. And fascinating in that it serves as such a delineation between the modern age and its antecedent.

It's true, and such a fine line between our (American) distance from it, before the Lusitania and the Zimmerman Telegram's backdrop made it real. WW was quite stubborn in his belief that it could all be sorted out if the main actors would just behave themselves.

Just north of the border, in Canada, it's quite different: at Halifax's Museum of the Atlantic (?), an entire portion of the permanent exhibit is given over to the explosion of the Mont Blanc in the Dartmouth Channel, the ship fully laden--in New York harbor--with explosives, in the hold and volatile oils on the decks--collided with the Iwo, leveling a good third of the city, 1917. Crews and help of all kinds, esp. from Massachusetts, as well as NY. Canada was very war conscious at the time because, of course, of British ties and wartime strategy in the Atlantic, with German Wolf Fleets marauding commercial shipping. But the Atlantic has been very convenient for US indifference, pretending that our stakes are different.

Tuchman has been brilliant in that era, with The Proud Tower and of course The Guns of August. Even with the benefit of an historian's hindsight, it's difficult to imagine that pols over here could bury their heads.

Calls to mind, perhaps, what is happening in the 21st....

Artillery killed more soldiers than any other weapon for the first time. I all thought it was machine guns because of what you see and hear on TV.

1916 by Motorhead, which was written about the Somme. A beautiful, elegiac song.

The scale of the carnage is so outsized that it's really difficult to truly grasp. Close to 20,000 men killed in one day of battle? That's more than twice the number of Americans killed in the Revolution, almost 10% of the total KIAs suffered by both sides in five years of fighting the Civil War, 40% of the Americans killed in WWI, two-thirds the American KIAs of Korea, about 40% of the Americans killed in Vietnam, and almost twice as many KIA as the US has lost in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.
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The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

Shane McGowan is one of my favorites but he is definitely an acquired taste.
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had a commemorative segment on the Battle of the Somme this evening, the nearly 20,000 Brits who lost their lives in just the beginning, almost a million dead throughout the life of the battle....

An honor guard of family of those who died in a rotating 24 hour vigil...beyond words....

We entered that war. And please don't tell me about the Lusitania.