JRT,

All that which you have written is true, of course.

The attack on that day had been preceded by a week-long barrage of about 1.7 million shells which was supposed to annihilate the German forward positions and cut the wire in enough places to facilitate the advance virtually unhindered. The Germans simply retired to their underground bunkers, and while the shells turned over the topsoil the barbed wire remained largely undamaged by the blast effects. Rawlinson in a masterpiece of confident smugness ordered that the men should walk across no-man's-land with rifles at the trail.

Some German ex-soldiers have opined that if the enemy had charged, their forward position would have been over-run in many places. Although the day was not without its successes, military history records a day of blood-letting on an unprecedented scale with most of the casualties being suffered in the first half-hour.

This day's carnage can perhaps be more readily imagined when considering the fate of the Tyneside Irish Brigade - 3,000 men - which proceeded to attack across nearly a mile of open ground in full view of the German defenders of La Boiselle. They were virtually wiped out.