All our yesterdays

1 July – 18 November 1916

Battle of the Somme

Chapter One

The land around was terraced with massed batteries and howitzers. Their crews laboured at the ranks of glistening steel barrels, stripped to the waist. They fed them glumly and methodically, as in a universal factory where overtime was compulsory for a greater output of death, which nobody wanted. The machinery had been set going, and the men were its slaves. They could not stop. The engines compelled them to continue as they had begun. They were being broken on the wheels they had started. The wheels and science of the age of machines had taken charge of their inventors, and were grinding them and their earth into powder, for the increase of the flies. Work did not finish at sunset. Night was in abey¬ ance. Darkness was an intermittent day; it was tremulous with an incessant flaring and glittering, and the very clouds flushed phantom-like with the red reflections of earth’s sinister activities. It was the battle of the Somme. Giant automata hammered ponderously on the old hori¬ zon, breaking it up. The earth sparked and flashed under their poundings. They hammered with a violence so rapid that you knew only soulless bodies of steel could be so powerful and tireless, so blind to ruin, so unheeding of the dismay of listeners. You had a dread that evil had been freed. It was beyond control now, leaping huge malignant rapine over corn-lands, orchards, and altars, turning the ancient establishment of prudent peace into dust and cor¬ ruption.

Chapter Four

Attrition had been achieved. Yet the people at home, whose street lamps were funereal at night, shrouded and ominous, whose food was poor and allotted in measured doses, and to whom a fair heaven by day was a sign that they might die after supper through bombs from the stars, could not understand why the triumph of their cause should be tardy when it was just. We began to repine for our customary ways. We wanted the lights to go up. We still wanted victory, but now we also wanted peace. It was therefore natural for us to suspect that treachery was about, secret and devious, never to be seen but always at work, and that it obstructed our honest path with cruel hindrances. Something was wrong, yet we knew we were right, and this sense of our virtue made us suspicious of others, and especially of men whose opinions were different. We sought for a solid body to punish for the dreads which were invisible but unescapa- ble. Now, too, the lists of the slain were not published, and for a reason which was graver than the scarcity of printing-paper; and yet we surely knew, without being told, that the shadow of the battles of the Somme was of a nature that no radiant May morning of a better year could ever lift. We faced a world that had an aspect changed and obdurate, that would have a future we could not guess; even our standard roses would never bring summer in the old way; and life faltered within us. We began to surmise that the world we had known, which was fair, had gone the way of Eden and youth, and that it would not return. It was even said by some men, so accustomed to the attrition of the battleline that they feared the engine had struck once and would strike no more, that God was dead.

Chapter Four

These young Englishmen joked allusively of their part in the war, as though accidentally they had got mixed up in a perfectly absurd affair with which they had no per¬ sonal concern, but from which they could not get free, for an unexplained reason. I had failed to notice the fact, but they did not refer to the past. I was with them last when the Somme affair was losing its go, and knew they were most of the survivors of the officers of that battalion. That was why I blundered and asked after one man. They acted politely then, as though an ignorant visitor may, while meaning no harm, infringe a rule of the house.

Chapter Six

Not with morning. For at our chateau, the Olympians, who held the thunderbolts and were destiny to us, used to meet. Sir Douglas Haig and his generals, not one of them less than a commander of a corps, came at appointed days to ordinate and fashion earthquakes. A salon of our house was theirs, its doors impressively insulated with green baize, because there are some things the gods de¬ cide to do which it is better for us not to know too soon. It was in that chamber, next to our common room, that the conception took place which afterwards was called the war of attrition, though its first hopeful name was the battle of the Somme. And there the resplendent ones might be, their cars majestic in the forecourt, any morning