FIRST OF JULY 1916

Tomorrow, July 1, marks the ninetieth anniversary to the first day of the Battle of the Somme where the British army alone suffered 57 470 casualties. By the end of the day 19 240 of those men and women were lying dead.
The battle raged relentlessly for five more months and continued horrendously, when in November, it finally ended bogged down in mud. In all this time, the Allied Forces could claim only to have taken ten kilometres of ground from the German defenders. The dreadful cost on both sides by then reached close to a million in lives and casualties.

Here’s thinking of all those whose lives and deaths have been touched by what rates as one of the most horrendous periods in human history.

If I should die, think only this of me

That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

There shall beIn that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,

A body of England's, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

'The Soldier' from the War Sonnets - Rupert Brooke 1887-1915