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Somme Where in France

The long march towards the ninetieth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme is now in progress, with various memorialisation activities going on, including an online exhibit from the Imperial War Museum and several activities around the Somme area.

At the same time, there is a much more public attempt this time round to explain the changes that have taken place in academic thinking about this event, including a huge area on the BBC website, which also contains a series of articles on the 'misrepresentation' of the battle, written by Trench Fever's Dan Todman. I hope fervently that this endorsement by major insitutions will start, finally to shift and broaden the thought about the Somme, and indeed, the whole of the First World War entire. It is the limiting nature of the way that we think about the conflict that is so frustrating to me, something discussed in my Trip-Wire paper (due out in July). It isn't just the first day, and it isn't just the level of casualties we should focus on. Any historian looking at events in the way that the Somme is so often described would be laughed out of their courdroys for lack of critical vision, and yet still, the Somme becomes pity, horror and futility in the public eye with very little recourse to the actual details of the event or consideration of anything beyond a vision of the staged parts from the film 'Battle of the Somme'.I hope this time, with the collective effort that seems to be going on to change this (rather than simply pointing it out), that we have a lot more to look forwards to than simply going over the top on July 1st.

Posted on Tuesday, June 27, 2006 at 6:05 AM | Comments (0) | Return

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