'Somme. The whole history of the world cannot contain a more gruesome word.' This is how one German officer described the Battle of the Somme in 1916. It was here that, day after day, lines of advancing soldiers were cut down by machine-gun fire; here that the shriek and thud of hundreds of thousands of artillery shells shattered the air.
It was on the Somme that the majority of New Zealanders were killed or wounded during the First World War, and it was here that New Zealand experienced its worst days in military history in terms of loss of life.
By the time of the Somme offensive of 1916, the Great War had become shaped by artillery. Villages, woods and fields were reduced to drab wilderness by relentless shellfire and blighted by the squalid apparatus needed to support hordes of soldiers.
The Great War was halfway through when the big guns roared into life along the New Zealand Division's sector around the Somme to support a major attack on 15 September 1916.
The New Zealand Pioneer Battalion arrived in France in April 1916. It was the first unit of the New Zealand Division to move on to the bloody battlefield of the Somme.
This painting of the village of Pas, the Somme 1918, is by N.H. Welch. Note the poppies in the field. See the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services' Association website for information on the significance of the poppy.
Tanks were used in battle for the first time, by the British, on 15 September. Still mechanically unreliable, the tanks were rushed into action in small groups. Many broke down, and the Germans soon devised ways to stop them.
More than 90 years after the Battle of the Somme it is still possible to
find the physical traces of the hundreds of thousands of men who fought
and died there in 1916. In 2007 a French family unearthed the identity disc of New Zealand soldier Richard Kemp, and in 2008 the disc was
returned home.
Following his death, Henry Nicholas was buried in the French cemetery at Beaudignies. However, as the battalion wished to show greater respect, his body was exhumed and reinterred, with full military honours, in the Vertigneul churchyard in northern France.
The old and the new. A horse-drawn team passes a tank that seems to have broken down on the side of the road. Over 100,000 British horses were estimated to have been killed in the Somme offensive.
This is the Somme bell in the Carillon at the National War Memorial in Wellington, New Zealand. The inscription reads: To the Glorious Memory of The New Zealand Division, 1916–18. Its Record does honour to the land from which it came and to the Empire for which it fought.
