
The First Day on the Somme: 1 July 1916 (Paperback)
Martin Middlebrook (author)- 5+ in stock
The soldiers receive the best service a historian can provide: their story is told in their own words - Guardian
'For some reason nothing seemed to happen to us at first; we strolled along as though walking in a park. Then, suddenly, we were in the midst of a storm of machine-gun bullets and I saw men beginning to twirl round and fall in all kinds of curious ways'
On 1 July 1916, a continous line of British soldiers climbed out from the trenches of the Somme into No Man's Land and began to walk towards dug-in German troops armed with machine-guns. By the end of the day there were more than 60,000 British casualties - a third of them fatal.
Martin Middlebrook's now-classic account of the blackest day in the history of the British army draws on official sources from the time, and on the words of hundreds of survivors: normal men, many of them volunteers, who found themselves thrown into a scene of unparalleled tragedy and horror.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780141981604
Number of pages: 448
Weight: 349 g
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 26 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
A particularly vivid and personal narrative * Times Literary Supplement *
Pioneering and hauntingly eloquent -- Peter Parker * Spectator *
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