River Somme

Ypres had taken the guts out of him.

The Somme would do him in.

Not that that so much mattered.

Nothing mattered much that would end for him in this unendurable fatigue, this life of horror.

They had been marching out for three nights, resting through three days.

They would now probably have three days and nights of rest and reorganization in this village.

Then three days marching up again to lead, it was rumored, in an attack, to push forward another half-mile perhaps in the slow-rolling Battle of the Somme.

Falcon had gone along the street with the sergeant major and was inspecting a loft in which twenty men were billeted.

She enrolled at the Caudron Brothers Flight School in Le Crotoy.

Le Crotoy is a small town on the Somme Bay where the Somme River empties into the English Channel on the northern coast of France.

You know what was a few miles from Le Crotoy, the Somme battlefield? She was learning to fly, in a Newport B-plane, over the same countryside where a generation of young men had been fed into the worst machinery of destruction the world had ever produced.

The contrast between what that ground had seen and what she was doing there is something I keep turning over.

Furthermore, mark by the usual symbol of war, two crossed swords, the localities where battles were fought by the pirates, where they were defeated or triumphant, or where they pillaged, burned, or destroyed.

And the valleys and the banks of the Elba, Rhine, and Moselle, Scheldt, Meuse, Somme, and Seine, Loire, Garonne, and Ardour, and all the coasts and coastlands between estuary and estuary, all the countries between river and streams will appear bristling as with chevaux de frise.

This will give us some idea of the invasions as far as Gaul and Germany are concerned, but it should be repeated for England, Scotland, and the islands which surround their coasts to give any adequate conception of the misery they caused.

Confining then our attention more particularly to the second period, let us briefly consider the appearance and characteristic qualities of these Northmen.

In that deed Arnulf no doubt was the prime mover.

The actual assassin was probably one of the old Breton rebels who had the blood of relatives to avenge, but Hugh at least seems to have secretly favored it.

The plot being laid, William was treacherously invited to a negotiation with Arnulf of the Somme at Picquigny, separated from his adherents, and basely murdered on the Flemish side of the river in 942.

William Longsword is one of those characters whom history has falsely honored, and he finds a place among the acknowledged heroes of France, almost among her martyrs.

And for General Douglas Haig, these new tanks cannot arrive soon enough.

He's the commander-in-chief of British forces on the Western Front, and he intends to launch a new offensive in the area around the Somme River, where British and German armies have been locked in position for months.

So tank production is made a priority by the British government, but the new weapon still isn't ready for the start of the Battle of the Somme in July 1916.

And without it, the first attack goes disastrously.

Attempting to march in lines toward an enemy's trench, soldiers of both sides were mowed down by machine gun fire.

According to one German machine gunner at the Battle of Somme in 1916, At the Somme, the British lost 60,000 men in the first day of fighting.

Remember the old colonialist verse, whatever happens we have got the maxim gun and they have not? Yeah, well, now everybody had machine guns.

One of the things we try to remember here at Crash Course is that people both make history and are made by it.

Now let's separate the history we can actually establish from the legend that grew around it.

The Somme was born out of a desperate need to lift the stalemate at Verdun and to break through the German line.

The British High Command hoped a massive artillery barrage could crush trench lines and open up a path for infantry.

Yet they underestimated how much of the Germans had entrenched with machine gun nests and barbed wire.

The assumption was that the German positions would be softened enough for men to step over the wire under cover.

In reality, the Germans had been rehearsing counter-battery tactics that kept the barrage in doubt.

German defenses at the Somme were a network of dugouts, concrete pillboxes, and an interlocking machine gun system.

Each sector was protected by extensive barbed wire entanglements designed to funnel attackers into kill zones.

Now, where did we leave him last time, Pete? Well,

well, he'd been through hell, hadn't he, with facing the German march offensives on the Somme.

Operation Michael.

You're so intellectual.

Can I just say, you pronounced Levante beautifully and then couldn't say Portuguese.

Just pointing that out.

Now, after the failure of the German spring offensive on the Somme, Ludendorff decided to attempt a decisive blow in Flanders, where there were genuine strategic targets within reach.

That's strategic targets.