............ By ten in the morning, it had all been over. Two out of three men who had gone over the top had become casualties and lay dead or wounded on the gentle slope of ground between their trenches and the German line. The “Pals” who had joined up in all the euphoria of the early weeks of the war; the lads from Leeds, from Bradford, from York, from Lancaster, from Sheffield, from Hull had been slaughtered in the first short hour of the great battle. The last echoes of the cheers and the shouting, the last faint remembered notes of the brass bands that had sent them off from the towns and villages of the North, had died out in a whisper that morning in front of Serre. © Lyn Macdonald #Somme100 Sent from my SM-T800 using Tapatalk
Can't even imagine what it must have been like in the trenches or what was going through the (insane?) Generals minds when they kept ordering men over the top.