The transmission of the following article was delayed by weather conditions in Dorset, England. Through the wonders of television we can choose to view the heartaches of Coronation Street or listen and view the weeping women mourning their dead in some newsworthy minor slaughter area, but never can we share the anguish or the pain for, with a turn of the switch or a page, it is a tut, tut, tut and back to the MCD-free eggs and bacon. Up to 1914 war had always been fought as a theatre of pain. And in that 1914 war this was still the textbook order of battle, and in 1916 the cavalry were still watering their horses ready for the charge into open ground. And the machine guns were there.
All decisions relating to the mass movements of animals and humans are political decisions.
Slice the salami where thou wilt, no matter how we debase the language, the slaughter on the Somme was a political decision. The German staff in the war of attrition decided to attack Verdun knowing that this would offend French national pride and would have to be defended no matter what the cost in human lives, so the political order was 'defend Verdun' and French soldiers paid the cost with their lives. The popular historians of the period have always laid the blame for the carnage on General Douglas Haig, or Earlboy as we always callcd him in the White Hart pub, but a new breed of historians has surfaced who argue that Haig was Jack the Lad and that the slaughter of the Somme was a victory in that it upset the German army and was a signpost to victory. It may have taken a lot of the fight out of the German army, but it took all the fight and the life out of the 72,094 British soldiers who marched slowly to their deaths. There are around the White Hart pub tables those of us who believe in a 'Just War' and this is a view long held by the Catholic Church Militant, but the nuclear warhead long-range missiles have long gutted the White Hart libertarian view of a 'Just War' and friendly debatable tactics with or without uniforms.