A short piece (delivered on BBC radio on Sunday - there's audio too, if you want) on the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme - which killed more British soldiers than any other, and so has been marked by various ceremonies in Britain and at the battlefield itself. This might be of interest to Tolkien readers - while he started to write Lord of the Rings around the time of World War 2, it was the First World War that he fought in, and which marked him.
The saturation bombardment was supposed to annihilate the opposing forces, leaving their positions undefended. Cavalry units would then pour through to pursue the fleeing Germans. But open preparations for the assault gave clear advance warning of an impending attack, and German troops simply moved into underground concrete bunkers and waited.
Almost five months later, the Allies had advanced only five miles, at a cost of over half a million lives. Early in 1917 the Germans fell back from their positions for strategic reasons. Their withdrawal made a mockery of the months of bitter battle and appalling loss of life. It had all been for 'a few acres of mud'.
...
Tolkien had just graduated from Oxford with a first class degree in literature when he saw his first active service at the Somme. From July 1916 until he was invalided out with trench fever at the end of October, he experienced the full relentless ghastliness of day after day of trench life under fire - the discomfort, the cold, the mud, the lice, the fear, the unspeakable horrors witnessed.
He had taken comfort from the fact that he was fighting alongside his three oldest and dearest friends from his school-days - a quartet of gifted would-be-poets who hoped to become outstanding literary men. But by November, two of those friends were dead.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/5133000.stm
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