Walking the Somme by Malcolm Gough

It is my extreme pleasure to include a piece from guest contributor, Malcolm Gough – Headmaster of Sutton Valence Preparatory School, Kent, England.

A hundred years since World War One.

A walk through Sanctuary Wood, Somme battlefields.

My current view that history is more effectively understood the more you can see it through the eyes of the participants, is put to the test on a bleak winter’s day as I stand in an old trench in Sanctuary Wood. I look out over an immediate landscape of holes and convolutions made by countless explosions, now a little shallower with time. One solitary tree stands amongst the living, blown off about half way up, its remains long since resisting decay, unlike all the other life that came to an end back then. In my mind’s eye I picture the devastation and carnage around me. And that’s pretty effective.

On to the Somme two hours away, to the south, and Serres where in the middle of ploughed fields stand cemeteries, each one unique as they all are, yet similar in the obvious respect that they contain row upon row of neat white headstones, each one a son, brother or father. The most sobering example of this is far further up the line at Tyne Cot, Paschendale. Here, amongst some twelve thousand others, lies Lieutenant R T W Miles, older brother of the man I mention below.

World War One cemeteries, Some battlefields.

Some rest forever in No Mans Land. As I peer up from the trenches over the fields, for the first time I understand the distances involved, the stark openness that made emergence into machine gun fire so utterly dangerous and, all too often, fatal.

World War One trenches, Somme.

The battlefield that the brave Canadians fought over in what is now called Newfoundland Park stretches before you as you stand at the memorial itself looking down. The topographical scale is large but, there, comprehendable. For me, the remains that arrest me at that site are the resilient little stands still sticking up from the grass around which were wound the barbed wire that was strung across the front of the trenches. As if getting down that hill into murderous fire wasn’t difficult enough…

World War One battlefields, Somme

I had heard about the mining under the trenches and the many large explosions that went off during the major offensives on the Somme. I had heard that some of the bangs could be heard in London. More than an hour from Calais; could that really have been so? Standing on the edge of such a man made crater confirms the awful truth that is was certain to have. The dimensions are volcanic.

Battlefield craters.

But the real understanding comes when standing at the resting place of Lieutenant GR Miles, my travelling companion, Olli’s, great uncle at the Tincourt New British Cemetery. None in his living family have made this particular journey, and it was an honour and privilege to help him find it. This not least because of all of the three members of my own family who had fought, against all statistics and odds, despite being in horrendous fighting, all had returned home, though one was to die a few years later of the bullet that past through his throat. For Olli, this particular journey opens another of research, as we notice that the headstone refers to Lieutenant GR Miles, MC. Olli did not know about the medal; how did he win that?

Walking the battlefields.

Walk the battlefields, walk the history. Think long and deep, admire the bravery and reflect on how you would stack up in similar circumstances. But above all resolve to tell the children to do all they can to curate a world in which culling young men and devastating their families in their milllions can never happen again.