Original subtitles

We are the guns...

and your masters

Soar ye, our flashes

Heard ye the scream of our shells in the night

And the shuddering crashes?

Saw ye our work by the roadside?

The shrouded things lying moaning to God that he made them,

The maimed and the dying,

Husbands or sons, fathers or lovers,

We break them, We are the guns!

The time - 7.30am.

The date - July 1st 1916.

The place - Picardy, on the Somme.

The objective...

1. To relieve the pressure on Verdun.

2. To assist our allies in the other theatres of war

by stopping the transfer of German troops from the Western Front.

3. To wear down the strength of the forces opposed to us.

We must aim at knocking out the German armies on the Western Front.

We cannot hope to win until we have defeated the German army.

GERMAN ACCENT: For seven days and nights,

we were under incessant bombardment.

Day and night, the shells - heavy and light ones - came upon us.

Our dugouts crumbled.

They fell upon us.

We had to dig ourselves and our comrades out.

Sometimes we found them suffocated, sometimes smashed to a pulp.

Seven days and seven nights.

Soldiers in the bunkers

became hysterical.

They wanted to run out, and fights developed

to keep them in the comparative safety of our deep bunkers.

Even the rats became hysterical.

They came into our flimsy shelters to seek refuge

from this terrific artillery fire.

Seven days and seven nights, we had nothing to eat, nothing to drink,

but constantly fire - shell after shell

burst upon us.

It was a day of bright sunlight in Picardy.

On a front of 18 miles, 14 British divisions -

150,000 men - rose to assault the German lines.

On their right - five French divisions advanced beside them.

In Galicia, the greatest Russian offensive of the war was just over three weeks old.

In Italy, General Cadorna was preparing a new attack.

This was the 132nd day of the Battle of Verdun.

The French were reeling from the effects of the German phosgene gas.

Yet they had one more offensive shaft in their minds and muscles.

And now, at last, their British allies might give them real support.

July 1st - the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

At 7.30am, the hurricane of shells ceased as suddenly as it had begun.

Our men at once clambered up the steep shafts leading from the dugouts to daylight.

Machine guns were hurriedly placed in position.

A series of extended lines of infantry were seen moving forward from the British trenches.

The first line seemed to continue without end, both right and left. It was followed by a second line,

then a third and fourth. They came on at a steady, easy pace,

as if expecting to find nothing alive in our trenches. "Get ready!" was passed along.

A few moments later, when the leading British line was within 100 yards,

the rattle of machine-gun and rifle fire broke out along the front.

Immediately afterwards, a mass of shell from the German batteries burst among the advancing lines.

Whole sections seemed to fall. The advance rapidly crumbled under hail of shells and bullets.

Finding I was almost alone,

I got down to see where the nearest man was.

Nobody else seemed to be standing.

Then I looked at the German line in front

and could see that the wire in front of me was quite untouched, and it would be impossible to go through.

What is more, the Germans were standing, firing at us, in their front-line trench.

The wire was untouched,

impossible to go through it.

For seven days, the British artillery had paved the way for this assault.

Never had there been so many guns.

Nothing, said General Rawlinson, could exist at the conclusion of the bombardment.

But there were still not enough guns.

Many of them were obsolete. Many shells failed to explode.

And so the infantry found the wire uncut,

the German machine guns ready.

I started crawling towards our lines

and I've never seen so many dead men...

clumped together, as what I saw then.

And I thought to myself, "The world's dead. They're all dead."

Almost everywhere along the 18 miles of front, the story repeated itself.

On the right only, helped by the French advance, which took the Germans by surprise,

men from Lancashire and East Anglia took all their objectives without heavy loss.

Along the rest of the front...

..the British regiments marched to catastrophe.

These were Lord Kitchener's volunteers -

the enthusiastic, physical and spiritual elite of the British race.

This was their first great battle.

There was hardly a regiment that was not there, not a county or city without its tale of loss.

Night fell on a disaster never equalled in the British Army's history.

57,470 officers and men had fallen or were missing.

Over 19,000 were killed or died of wounds.

This was not going to help the Allied cause.

This was not going to relieve Verdun or wear the Germans down.

This was mere massacre.

As the stupefying story unfolded, a vast burden of responsibility fell on the shoulders of one man -

the British commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig.

To this quiet, professional Scottish soldier, one thing had long been clear...

We cannot hope to win until we have defeated the German army.

Fresh divisions replaced the shattered units. Fresh commanders took up the reins.

Fresh plans were drawn up. The Battle of the Somme would go on as Verdun had gone on.

The British might be unskilful, but they were dogged and could learn.

They attacked again.

On July 3rd, General von Below, commanding the German Second Army,

issued an order of the day...

The decisive issue of the war depends on the victory of the 2nd Army on the Somme.

We must win this battle.

Important ground lost in certain places will be recaptured.

For the present, the chief thing is to hold onto our positions at any cost.

I forbid the voluntary evacuation of trenches.

The enemy should have to carve his way over heaps of corpses.

July 11th was the 142nd day of the Battle of Verdun.

General von Falkenhayn, the German Chief of Staff, ordered a strict defensive at Verdun.

This much of what the British Army had set out to do had been accomplished. The Somme remained.

Now there was the question whether Britain's new army, Kitchener's inexperienced volunteers,

could rise above their bloody losses, accept failure and still beat the finest army in the world -

the immensely courageous, professional troops of Germany in their well-prepared positions.

A fortnight had passed since the great catastrophe, yet already a difference was seen.

Now these same, new-army soldiers, the same keen but ignorant young officers,

under the same unskilled staffs,

were going to try one of the most difficult operations of war - a night assembly on the battlefield,

and a dawn attack.

On the night of July 13th,

six brigades were assembled on tapes laid in no-man's-land and formed up -

sometimes as near as 200 yards to the German trenches.

All the time, I was saying to myself, "You're there -

"right in the middle of no-man's-land, and no-one can see you.

"You're going to get away with it. Right into Jerry's trenches before he knows it."

I was smiling away to myself as if I was daft. I really felt we might get away with it.

At 3.20am on July 14th,

the British barrage crashed out at full intensity.

Five minutes later, it lifted from the German front line and the waiting troops rushed in.

The success was complete. A French liaison officer said, "They dared. They won."

This was a very different matter from July 1st.

The new army was beginning to learn. For a brief moment, fresh hope rose.

The impatient cavalry, waiting for the breakthrough which never came,

moved up to the front.

One or two of the guards, as they walked by they shouted out, "When are you bastards coming up here?"

We said, "We'll be up there, mate, don't worry!"

Then a Scotchman comes along and says,

"When are you going to get cracking?" We said, "We'll be there."

But this was the Somme, 1916,

with the German army at the peak of its powers.

The machine guns were still there. The counterattacks beat in.

Now the full meaning of General von Below's order was going to declare itself.

The enemy shall have to carve his way over heaps of corpses.

Now, as the British began to make some progress,

the pattern of the battle emerged.

The Germans counterattacked to seize back every British gain.

Sometimes several times in one day, often successfully. Then another British attack would win it back.

And so it went on.

Every inch of these hills suffered the desolation of shellfire, every inch soaked with blood.

Now the time of endurance began.

Now the whole British Army strained to the battle as the whole French army had strained to Verdun.

For a week in July, the South Africans held Delville Wood.

When they came out of it, they numbered 750 men out of 3,000.

29 officers out of 121.

The Australian 1st Division captured Pozieres at a cost of 5,000 men.

Without doubt, Pozieres was the heaviest...

bloodiest, rottenest stunt that ever the Australians were caught up in.

The carnage is just indescribable.

We were making our attack after the 3rd Brigade had gone through.

We were literally walking over the dead bodies of our cobbers.

The unceasing roar of the Somme bombardments

could be heard and felt on the quiet sectors.

Sometimes, it could even be heard in England.

Division by division, the British were drawn into the battle, replacing shattered formations

until they were exhausted themselves.

We were living like wild animals.

And, in fact, we became wild animals.

The farther we moved up to the front line, we found ourselves scrounging for food,

robbing dead people if they had any rations on them.

And as we heard of the next stunt ahead,

we felt a shiver of exaltation running through us

in the knowledge that, soon again, with rifle, bayonet and Mills bomb,

we would be getting at the stinking bastards who killed our mates.

Dear Louise and children, My darlings, the gods only know if I am writing for the last time.

We have now been two days in the front trenches.

We get nothing to eat or drink and life is almost unendurable.

Here I have given up hope of life.

There really is no possibility that we shall see each other again.

Six German divisions faced the British on July 1st.

By July 16th, 14 divisions had entered the battle.

By the end of July, 18. By the end of August, 30.

The cost of learning to make war in the face of the German army was frightening.

By the beginning of August, the British had lost 6,000 officers, nearly 120,000 men.

The British people had little sense of what was happening.

War correspondents on July 1st shared the universal ignorance.

One of them reported...

The attack which was launched today began well. It is not yet a victory, for victory comes at the end

and this is only the beginning.

But our troops, fighting with very splendid valour,

have swept across the enemy's front trenches, along a great part of the line of attack.

And so after the first day of battle, we may say it is a good day for England and France.

It is a day of promise in this war.

Yet the promise did not seem to be fulfilled.

There were no satisfying leaps forward of pins on maps,

just the endless repetition of the same place names - Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval, Contalmaison,

Guillemont and the rest.

The newspapers began to teach the nation the grim truths of war, as the Army learned them in the field.

The Sheffield Telegraph announced, by degrees, the fate of the local York And Lancasters.

Sheet after sheet of dead and wounded and missing

were in, day after day.

And the first thing, to see the papers,

and see if there was anyone there whom one knew.

It was a very sad time,

because the girls had lost their brothers, the boys had lost their older brothers too,

and everywhere there was a feeling of great sadness.

And somehow, the high hopes that we had had at the beginning seemed dashed.

Streets went into mourning.

Curtains were drawn at window after window in Sheffield.

In other cities, the story was the same.

Slowly, the picture began to emerge for the nation to see, if it wished.

In the Times on July 3rd, the names of 143 fallen officers and 914 soldiers appeared.

On the 24th, there were 600 officers and 5,500 soldiers.

On August 21st, the names took up five full columns.

On the 31st, about the same again.

Thoughtful men grew uneasy.

The historian FS Oliver received a letter from his brother...

The present battle seems the very crudest and most unscientific and senseless kind of pandemonium.

It doesn't seem to be men against men,

but lead and iron against flesh.

Lead and iron are, of course, bound to win.

But as both sides have lead and iron, the destruction of the flesh seems to have no meaning.

The same doubts penetrated through to Government circles.

On July 29th, the CIGS, Sir William Robertson,

reported to Haig...

The powers-that-be are beginning to get a little uneasy in regard to the situation.

The casualties are mounting up, and they are wondering whether we will get a proper return for them.

We will soon have a bill of 200,000 to 300,000 casualties with no very great gains.

Haig replied...

The principle on which we should continue to act is clear -

under no circumstances would it be possible to relax our efforts in this battle

without prejudicing, probably fatally, the offensive of our allies and their hopes of victory.

We must, and we can, maintain our offensive.

August was the ding-dong month.

In Galicia, in Italy, at Verdun - everyone was fighting, everyone must continue.

Steadily, day by day, the Somme was transforming itself into what the Germans called

the material battle - the battle of lead and iron against flesh,

in which the destruction of the flesh seemed to lose all meaning.

An officer wrote... A man seemed to lose his identity as an individual.

Divisions were swallowed up in corps and armies.

From this point of the war, death was not regarded as individual.

Reinforcements would arrive. One never knew their names.

They disappeared so quickly through the dressing stations or to swell the number of little wooden crosses.

The individual man was gone.

This was a battle that the Germans were conscious of not winning.

Their industry had done marvels throughout the war. Their armies were admirably equipped.

But there was a limit.

Now, as British production, backed by American industrial power, reached a zenith,

and every front clamoured for arms and men, the Germans suffered a sense of helplessness.

The loss of ground was of no strategic importance,

but the course of the fighting must not be measured by this. A great loss is in men.

The heavy expenditure of material ate only too deep into the strength of the German army.

The enemy's material superiority didn't fail to have a psychological effect on the German soldier.

General von Gallwitz, commanding the Somme front, issued an order of the day at the beginning of August.

The decisive battle of the war is now being fought on the fields of the Somme.

It must be impressed on every officer and man up to the front line that the fate of our country

is at stake in this battle. The enemy must be prevented from gaining another inch of ground.

His attacks must break against a wall of German breasts.

Yet, inch by inch, the Germans were driven back.

The new armies were gaining experience...slowly.

By the end of August, British losses had reached 196,000 men.

The French had lost over 70,000.

But the war was going seriously for Germany.

On August 27th, Romania joined the Allies.

On August 28th, General Erich von Falkenhayn, the German Chief of Staff, was dismissed.

His 1916 strategy had failed.

Verdun had held, and now the French were passing to the counterattack.

On the Somme, the fate he had predicted for France was happening to Germany.

She was bleeding to death.

Field Marshall von Hindenburg and Staff Officer Erich Ludendorff took over from Falkenhayn.

They did not admire the conditions they found in the west. Hindenburg wrote...

I will not hesitate to admit

that it was only now that I fully realised all that the western armies had done hitherto.

What a thankless task it was for commanders and troops on whom pure defence was imposed,

and who had to renounce the vision of tangible victory.

They were making progress - these men of Britain's new armies.

Ammunition improved, gunnery techniques improved,

the infantry were discovering the tactics of the wearing-out battle.

Brusilov's wonderful offensive was reaching its last spasms of energy.

Romania had come in.

The Italians were preparing their main effort of the year.

One more thrust by the British and French together on the Somme might settle the account.

On August 28th, Joffe told Haig...

A great battle of the whole coalition is going to begin in the first weeks of September.

On August 31st, British GHQ issued an order stating...

The CNC has decided that the attack projected for mid-September is to be planned as a decisive operation,

and all preparations made accordingly.

A decisive operation to knock Germany out of the war.

Every one of the Allies was on the march. There could be no holding back.

And now the material battle was about to bring something special into the British armoury.

Already the British armies on the Somme were using 500 more guns than they had used in July,

despite battle losses. But there was something else.

One day, we were at the wagon lines,

and someone came along and said, "The war's finished.

"Just go about half a mile down the road and look in a field."

He wouldn't tell us why. We went down. There was a crowd.

And there were tanks - things we'd never seen.

As far back as the autumn of 1914,

all through the vain battles of 1915,

now again in the holocausts of 1916,

the combination of barbed wire, machine guns and artillery

proved fatal to the human spirit and to the highest endeavour.

Now, after 18 months of research and experiment,

a new answer was going to be assayed.

We cursed these things, because as they passed the telephone dugout -

we had telephone wires going out from the dugout, radiating like spokes in a bicycle

to the flanks, to the guns and to the infantry at the front -

and these tanks simply came through them and the wires got entangled in the caterpillar wheels.

They dragged these things for miles.

They cut the lot up.

September 15th came - the 77th day.

Canadians, New Zealanders, guards, the county regiments of the line and the French on the right

entered the battle once more.

One stared and stared as if one had lost the power of one's limbs.

The monsters approached slowly,

rolling and swaying.

But they approached - nothing impeded them.

A supernatural force seemed to impel them on.

Someone in the trench said, "The devil's coming."

And the word was passed along the line like wildfire.

In Flers, an infantry officer stood at the extreme point of the British advance.

He walked forward into open country.

The German trenches were empty. He was not even fired at.

I looked round the countryside through the binoculars and saw a German howitzer being limbered up.

I don't remember the number of horses, but I only had one clip of cartridges left

and I didn't do anything about it. Self-preservation made me keep that clip.

I saw the gun trundle towards Guedecourt till they disappeared in a sunken road.

Whether I could have gone to Guedecourt and signed the visitors book in the church, I don't know.

One officer and one clip of cartridges - all that was left of one more bright hope.

The decisive attack had failed,

yet this September fighting in the east, in the south, in the west,

had not been without its results.

Ludendorff wrote...

If the war lasted, our defeat seemed inevitable.

Hindenburg and I were at one in this anxious view of the situation.

Accordingly, the construction had begun in early September of powerful rear positions in the west.

At the end of September, British battle casualties amounted to over 360,000 men and officers.

This was the cost of enthusiasm without experience.

October came - the fighting did not abate.

But autumn brought a new enemy.

Mud - mud which was unique.

It was like walking through caramel.

No-one could struggle through that for a few yards without rest.

Terrible in its clinging consistency, it was the supreme enemy,

paralysing and mocking English and German alike.

Distances were measured not in yards, but in mud.

But as long as men could move, they could attack, defend, counterattack.

Dear Wilhelm, I send you greetings from my grave in the earth.

We shall soon become mad in this awful artillery fire - day and night it goes on without ceasing.

But never has it been so bad as this before.

Then five minutes to go...

then zero hour, and all hell lets loose.

There's our barrage, the Germans' barrage, then over the top we go.

When you get over the top, fear has left you and there is terror.

You don't look...you see.

You don't hear, you listen.

Your nose is filled with fumes and death.

You taste the top of your mouth.

Your weapon and you are one.

A hunter - you're back to the jungle. The veneer of civilisation has dropped away.

You see the line of men, the flare of the shells,

the mist of the November dawn,

and the fumes from the shells.

There's a bursting shell which gives it a dirty-orange colour.

And you see this line, then a gap, you close in and go on.

On November 13th, Beaumont Hamel, attacked on July 1st,

steadfast ever since, fell to the Highlanders.

It was the last of the British attacks of 1916, and this time, the cost was low.

Britain's new army was growing old and wise in battle.

We have had dreadful losses again.

I shall not get leave until we have left the Somme.

But with our losses what they are, this cannot be long, or there will not be a single man left.

The Somme in 1916 alone cost the British Army 415,000 men.

The French lost 195,000.

And they were still attacking at Verdun.

The British, too, had not finished.

On November 19th, as the mud closed in and winter imposed a little silence,

Haig told his Army commanders...

The date at which the 4th, 5th and 3rd armies should aim in making offensive preparations

is February 1st.

Over 80 German divisions passed through the fire of the Somme.

Carefully, the Germans concealed their loss.

They were frank about its effect.

The Somme was the muddy grave of the German field army

and of the faith in the infallibility of German leadership.

Hans is dead, Fritz is dead,

Wilhelm is dead. There are many others.

I am now quite alone in the company.

God grant that we may soon be relieved.

Our losses are dreadful.

This is almost unendurable.

If only peace would come.