Somme
The Battlefield of the Somme
From 1 July to 18 November 1916, British, French and German forces fought one of the deadliest battles in history along the Somme river in northern France, a struggle that left over a million casualties and reshaped how the First World War is remembered.
From the source
De Somme (Frankrijk), toneel van de Slag aan de Somme, van 1 juli tot 18 november 1916 — een van de grootste veldslagen van de Eerste Wereldoorlog.
Editorial reading
The Battle of the Somme opened with the bloodiest single day in the history of the British Army, and ground on for over four months across a front roughly 16 miles wide, advancing barely six miles at enormous human cost. Today the former battlefield around Thiepval, Beaumont-Hamel and the Ancre valley is dotted with cemeteries, craters and memorials that mark the scale of the loss. The centerpiece is the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, designed by the British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens and unveiled in 1932, which carries the names of more than 72,000 British and South African servicemen with no known grave. In 2023 UNESCO inscribed a serial World Heritage property, Funerary and Memory Sites of the First World War (Western Front), comprising 139 component sites across Belgium and France that commemorate the war's dead.
Recommendation
The Somme battlefield is one of the most visited First World War landscapes in the world: the scale of the Thiepval Memorial and the density of cemeteries in a small area of farmland make the human cost of the battle immediate and hard to forget.