I’m giving away a copy of Joe Sacco’s The Great War, what NPR called a “panorama of devastation,” an accordian-fold book, 24 feet long, about day one of The Battle of the Somme. Scroll down to enter.

Today is the centenary of the death of Alan Seeger. Seeger was an American poet, an uncle of Pete Seeger and classmate of TS Eliot, who was living in Paris when War broke out on August 4, 1914. Twenty days later, he joined the French Foreign Legion. On July 1, 1916, Seeger entered the Battle of the Somme. He died, aged 28, on the 4^th of July. His final known written words, a letter to a friend before moving up to the Front, are those of a poet to his bones:

I am glad to be going in first wave. If you are in this thing at all it is best to be in to the limit. And this is the supreme experience.

Better known is his poem written sometime before the Somme:

I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade,

When Spring comes back with rustling shade

And apple-blossoms fill the air—

An Egyptian friend, Rif Baer, described Seeger’s end with an appropriately poetic final image:

He answered with a smile. How pale he was! His tall silhouette stood out on the green of the cornfield. He was the tallest man in his section. His head erect, and pride in his eye, I saw him running forward, with bayonet fixed. Soon he disappeared and that was the last time I saw my friend. . . .”

Anyone else remember the fade-out at the final moments of Black-Adder?

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Joe Sacco’s The Great War is a modern Bayeux Tapestry on paper, a detailed panorama of the first day of the Somme battle. To enter my drawing for Joe Sacco’s gorgeous and moving The Great War, pop over here before midnight Monday.

I’m giving away a copy of Joe Sacco’s The Great War, what NPR called a “panorama of devastation,” an accordian-fold book, 24 feet long, about day one of The Battle of the Somme. Scroll down to enter.

One of those who survived that horrific first assault, and who endured the prolonged ghastliness of the months of fighting that followed, was the young JRR Tolkien.

He was sent to France in June 1916, just in time for the Somme. “It was like a death,” he said.

Tolkien spent just a few months at the Front before trench fever sent him home again, weakening him too much to return. He always denied that Lord of the Rings was about the War, but it’s hard to overlook his experiences with the “animal horror” of industrialized death in the mud-soaked trenches with his Dead Marshes, fire-spouting dragons, and dark, death-emitting land of Mordor.

English Poet Laureate John Masefield (who later lived on Boar’s Hill near Oxford, where he raised bees) was a driver with the American Ambulance Field Service during the Somme. He describes one trip to the Front:

The noise of the engine stifles the noise of the shells, but above the engines one shell’s noise is heard; the screech of its rush comes very near, there is a flash ahead, a burst, and the patter of falling fragments. Long afterward, perhaps six seconds afterward, a tiny piece of shell drops upon the ambulance. Another shell bursts behind the car, and another on the road in front; the car goes round the new shell-hole and passes on.

(From Eyewitness to History.)

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Joe Sacco’s The Great War is a modern Bayeux Tapestry on paper, a detailed panorama of the first day of the Somme battle. To enter my drawing for Joe Sacco’s gorgeous and moving The Great War, pop over here before midnight Monday.

I’m giving away a copy of Joe Sacco’s The Great War, what NPR called a “panorama of devastation,” an accordian-fold book, 24 feet long, about day one of The Battle of the Somme. Scroll down to enter.

Those in charge—at least, in charge of the British forces—imagined that the German lines would be pounded soft by a week of heavy shelling, nearly two million shells from the field artillery. They were certain that the wire would be shredded, the ground cleared, the resulting charge would be the first phase of an inexorable march on Berlin.

They were wrong.

The Germans had simply retreated into their deep and permanent shelters (some had glass-fronted cabinets built in) behind a 25-mile long, hundred-foot wide river of barbed wire as thick as a man’s finger, until the cease of shelling told them it was time to come up. On the British side, officers blew their whistles to go over the top. Across from them, on high ground, the German machine guns waited.

Corporal WH Shaw of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers remembered it like this:

Our artillery hadn’t made any impact on those barbed-wire entanglements.   The result was we never got anywhere near the Germans.   Our lads were mown down.   They were just simply slaughtered.   You were either tied down by the shelling or the machine-guns and yet we kept at it, making no impact on the Germans at all.   And those young officers, going ahead, they were picked off like flies.   We tried to go over and it was just impossible.   We were mown down.

Or as General Spears put it:

My memory was seared with the picture of the French and British attacking together on the Somme on July 1^st 1916, the British rigid and slow, advancing as at a military parade in lines which were torn and ripped by the German guns, while the French tactical formations, quick and elastic, secured their objectives with trifling loss.   It had been a terrible spectacle.   As a display of bravery it was magnificent.   As an example of tactics its very memory made me shudder.

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Joe Sacco’s The Great War is a modern Bayeux Tapestry on paper, a detailed panorama of the first day of the Somme battle. To enter my drawing for Joe Sacco’s gorgeous The Great War, pop over here before midnight Monday.

I’m giving away a copy of Joe Sacco’s The Great War, what NPR called a “panorama of devastation,” an accordian-fold book, 24 feet long, about day one of The Battle of the Somme. Scroll down to enter.

The Battle of the Somme began 100 years ago today.

The Great War started on a summer’s day just under two years before, and proved a time for the poets: here was a noble war with clear goals and lofty convictions, a chance to stand up for Right and Home.

It was also a time of a devastating lack of understanding when it came to the vast changes technology had made in the craft of war. Generals trained in an age of cavalry charges and arrayed attacks

found it tragically impossible to understand machine guns, barbed wire, and high explosives, far less mustard gas and tank warfare. A cavalry regiment was standing by when the Somme began, ready to sweep in past the infantry. As if a mounted horse had a chance through the pitted ground of No-Man’s Land.

The Somme began with one of the bloodiest days in history—certainly for the British Army composed largely of newly trained Kitchener’s Army volunteers. They suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, a third of them deaths. And that first day was followed by 140 more, all over the same ground.

Millions died and suffered terrible wounds because of the ill judgment of the military command. Two years in, even the most romantic of poets had to admit, “In moments like these, words are futile.”

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Joe Sacco’s The Great War is a modern Bayeux Tapestry on paper, a detailed panorama of the first day of the Somme battle. If you’d like to enter for my drawing of Joe Sacco’s gorgeous The Great War, pop over here before midnight Monday.