The First Day on the Somme

<p><b>The soldiers receive the best service a historian can provide: their story is told in their own words - <i>Guardian</i></b><br><br><i>'For some reason nothing seemed to happen to us at first; we strolled along as though walking in a park. Then suddenly we were in the midst of a storm of machine-gun bullets and I saw men beginning to twirl round and fall in all kinds of curious ways' </i><br><br>On 1 July 1916 a continous line of British soldiers climbed out from the trenches of the Somme into No Man's Land and began to walk towards dug-in German troops armed with machine-guns. By the end of the day there were more than 60000 British casualties - a third of them fatal.<br><br>Martin Middlebrook's now-classic account of the blackest day in the history of the British army draws on official sources from the time and on the words of hundreds of survivors: normal men many of them volunteers who found themselves thrown into a scene of unparalleled tragedy and horror.</p>