The Battle of the Somme has attracted tremendous attention since its release in August 1916. It had a profound effect upon contemporary cinema-goers and continues to move and inform the audience of the early twenty-first century. There is now nobody alive who took part in those terrible battles of 1916 and the film very much takes their place in the modern imagination of what the Great War was like. The scholarly comment on the film looks at it as media history and asks what the film meant to those watching it in 1916 and whether it was effective propaganda. One aspect of the film has been neglected, however: what are we actually looking at? Who are these men and where are they? What are they doing and when? The viewing notes produced by the Imperial War Museum team represent the only attempt to look at the film from this viewpoint and we acknowledge our gratitude to the authors. We believe that we have built upon their work and taken our understanding of the film considerably further.
As military historians, we examine the film to determine its value as an historical document. We have many years of experience in researching the Great War and as members of No-Man's-Land, the European Group for Great War Archaeology which has been excavating and recording sites along the Western Front since 1997. Great War archaeology is a truly multi-disciplinary endeavour, using documentary sources and the ‘hands-on’ skills of landscape archaeology, forensic science, aerial photographic interpretation, geophysical survey and field walking. It seemed to us that we might be able to use these skills to unlock other secrets of the Great War that exist on film rather than under the ground.
In the film we can learn a great deal about the British Army in June and July 1916. We see what it looked like, how it was fed, clothed, armed, supplied and went about trying to break the formidable German defences, and how in some areas it succeeded in this task. The images of dead and wounded had a profound effect upon contemporaries and are a moving record of the price of war. The question of whether such scenes should be shown is still a controversial issue in the early twenty-first century. It is clear from fairly accurate estimates that more than half the population of the British Isles saw the film in 1916. No film until Star Wars in the 1970s has commanded a comparable audience. In the recent past the most widely seen image is the explosion of the Hawthorn Ridge mine, shown in virtually every popular documentary on the Great War; few non-specialist viewers have any idea what it is they are seeing. The explosion itself often appears in isolation and without the poorer quality and less spectacular scenes of troops advancing on the crater. Without understanding where and when it was taken it is not apparent that this seemingly unremarkable footage was filmed at considerable risk and shows men dying in action on the bright, sunny morning of one of the most significant days in British history – 1 July 1916.
We have tried to get behind the footage and give it meaning. Each scene has a context in time and space which can be revealed with careful research. Some men seen in the film were killed within hours; some were killed later in the war; others survived to lead productive lives, fight in a second great war, and to have children and grandchildren. We know of one man in the film who endured the awful fate of losing a son in the Second World War. By identifying individuals in the film we can tell the story of how they came to be there. Most of the men pictured are nameless, unidentifiable figures but their condition is no less poignant for that. Sometimes the camera gives us fragments of the lives of men who have names and histories. We can tell how they came to be there and what happened to them after the filming stopped. In a few instances we can even report what they were saying while they were being filmed. We also discovered that this can be a two-way process and can help us to deduce where and when some scenes were shot. We can return much footage to the historical record by fixing it as a portrayal of known events at a specific time. Some scenes have eluded detection, as they contain too few clues for identification. We would welcome any information on these shots from readers.
We have gone back to first principles with every scene in the film, re-examining every deduction made by other commentators, looking at each scene in detail and comparing it with other sources:
As we mentioned earlier, the Imperial War Museum's viewing notes to accompany the video release represent the most recent study of the film. Edited by Roger Smither with contributions from many of the museum's experts, they are entitled The Battle of the Somme and The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks.
The most notorious allegation levelled at the film is that some of it was faked. Close examination confirms that there are degrees of faking present, but the issue is not a simple one; the reasons for faking have more to do with the technical limitations of the equipment than any lack of courage on the part of the operators. Malins was awarded an OBE and McDowell earned an MC later in the war. That no British or Empire cameraman was killed in action was a matter of good luck despite their willingness to put themselves in the way of danger. We can, however, prove that certain scenes, making up a very small proportion of the film, were shot on a training area. Some footage that was previously said to have been shot away from the front line is in fact genuine, while other scenes, although filmed in the front line, are not correctly captioned. We believe that we have set the record straight with regard to this.
We leave the film on the day of the first public showing on 21 August 1916; the reaction to the film, both at home and abroad, is another story and we hope to look at this, together with an analysis of The King visits his armies, The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks and the German and French films of the Somme in another volume.
The book is not merely a highly detailed set of viewing notes, although it can be used for that purpose by reference to the table of shots in the appendix. We have attempted to set out the movements of both cameramen chronologically, ascribing to them the footage they took in the order in which it was shot, not the order in which it appears in the film. Some scenes have proved impossible to allocate to a specific cameraman and we have sometimes had to make a best guess at the time and place; however, every scene in the film is discussed at some point in the book, even if some have defeated us. The book is not a military history of the Battle of the Somme; units and their deeds are discussed where relevant but the books cited in the bibliography will provide much fuller information. For walking the battlefield we recommend both the Pen & Sword Battleground Europe series and the reproduction trench maps produced by G.H. Smith & Son of Easingwold.
Unfortunately some of the comparison photographs in the book are not exact matches. The Somme battlefield is mostly farmland and we feel strongly that we do not have any right to walk into the middle of crops or to trespass on private land to take photographs. We would urge anybody following our work to do the same and respect the rights of landowners. The villages of the Somme battlefield have changed greatly in the last ninety years, making it difficult to locate some of the footage in the film. All modern photographs were taken by the authors unless otherwise stated. Some older photographs are of poor quality but are the best examples that we can obtain. Every effort has been made to trace copyright ownership but this has not proved possible in every case. We apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to credit material appropriately in any future edition.
As archaeologists of the Great War we are acutely aware of the danger of unexploded munitions which we uncover on a regular basis; we owe a constant debt to our explosive ordnance disposal personnel for keeping us all safe. Munitions from the Great War are not souvenirs – they were designed to kill and are all still potentially deadly in the hands of both expert and non-expert. Only people who have undergone a course in ordnance disposal are experts. Do not dismantle munitions or take them home with you; the legal penalties are severe and the consequences of an accident could be disastrous to you, your family, friends and fellow travellers.