the Somme
Picardy's bloody waterway
The Somme is a river in northern France, but the name evokes the Battle of the Somme (1916), one of the bloodiest engagements of World War I.
Over four months, more than a million soldiers were killed or wounded for minimal territorial gain.
The Somme has become shorthand for catastrophic military loss and the futility of trench warfare.
- battleArmed military engagement
- trenchLong narrow excavation
- WWIFirst global conflict
- 1916World War One's middle
- offensiveCausing displeasure or attack-oriented
going over · France · river · Picardy · slaughter · mud · barbed wire · no man's land · artillery · casualties · Western Front · infantry · shell · crater · poppies · war poets · memorial · massacre
- Ireland WWIEaster Rising, Gallipoli, Western Front, war dead, Irish nationalism
- WWI BattlesVerdun, Ypres, Marne, Hundred Days, Givenchy
- WWI LiteratureIn Flanders Fields, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, war poetry, shell shock
warfare methodology
the Sommeblitzkrieg
Fast, overwhelming military campaign
lightning war · surgical strike · mobile warfare · decisive battle · Austerlitz