At the Battle of the Somme, heroism was not confined to ordinary soldiers
The Somme - From Defeat to Victory BBC1
Prince Charles told those assembled at the recent commemoration ceremony in France that his wife had lost three great-uncles in the Battle of the Somme and that he had lost one. I, too, can play that game. My father was born on 30 June 1916. The next day, he thinks (90-year-old memories are fallible), his uncle Arthur was among nearly 20,000 British soldiers killed in northern France, bequeathing his day-old nephew his name. With 125,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers dead by November, there can be few British families who cannot make a similar connection, and there is, I am afraid to admit, a not entirely displeasing frisson to be had from it.
There is also something strangely comfy about watching televised military history. I have a strong childhood memory of sitting in front of a fire in my grandmother's sitting room, and enjoying the stately melancholy of the BBC's still unsurpassed Great War. My father's parents refused to talk of 1914-18. Two generations on, with Poppy Day growing bigger annually, we seem to speak of it at any opportunity.
So, I was prepared either to hate The Somme - From Defeat to Victory (2 July, 8pm) or to hate myself for enjoying it. But the programme was excellently judged popular history that told the story from a number of perspectives. Primarily, we followed a group of friends who had known each other from a church in Salford and had volunteered for the 16th Lancashire Fusiliers (one of the so-called "Pals' battalions") at the start of the war. We met them first playing football behind the front line, awaiting the big push: Thomas Mellor, a travelling salesman, Walter Fiddes, a shop assistant, and their corporal, Stephen Sharples. It could have looked like a student production of Journey's End, but the dramatisations were so grey and low-key that they mingled easily with the wartime footage. (Although no image was more telling than the real one of an injured, shell-shocked soldier being helped to smoke a cigarette back in his trench.) By the end of 1 July, the three men were dead and we were confronted by their real faces in their obituaries in the local paper, to which their captain, Thomas Tweed, another Salfordian, wrote a letter of gut-wrenching self-recrimination.
They were the kind of heroes we expect to find lionised but, for once, we were encouraged to appreciate the bravery of some of their superiors, too. True, we met one representative donkey: Lt General Sir Thomas Moreland, who, from a treehouse three miles away, equipped with nothing more than a telescope and a telegraph that did not work, refused to change the battle plan long after it was plain that the first two assaults had failed disastrously. In compensation there was Lt Colonel Frank Maxwell, a maverick who insisted on going over the top with his men. Maxwell acknowledged that the German soldiers fought "most stubbornly and bravely" and we got to know some of them too, in particular a group of Westphalians led by Corporal Hinkel, whose inexplicable war cry was "Give 'em beans".
The documentary flattered and, to some degree, misled the viewer by promising revisionism: "The generals who sent wave after wave of men to their death," intoned the narrator Alisdair Simpson, "have been condemned as callous donkeys but there was much more to the Somme than senseless slaughter. It was on the Somme that the British army learned to defeat their German enemy." The preliminary bombardments that had failed in June (the programme needed to explain more than it did how the Germans protected themselves in their fortified concrete bunkers) were replaced by the tactic of a "creeping barrage" whereby troops moved in under the cover of shell fire. Tanks were deployed on the Somme for the first time in history; officers on the ground were allowed to make tactical decisions; Moreland and his ilk were quietly sidelined.
The above, actually, is received wisdom among historians. The writer-director Detlef Siebert was justified, however, in assuming that it would be news to most viewers, who may not even have known that the Battle of the Somme was, eventually, an Allied victory, and an important one. The Somme - From Defeat to Victory had a different song to sing from Baldrick's in the final Blackadder Goes Forth: "Hear the words I sing/War's a horrid thing/But still I sing, sing, sing/ Ding-a-ling, a-ling." Our relatives were not as stupid as we thought. It was a correction long overdue.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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