The German strategy on the Somme in 1916, meanwhile, was entirely defensive while their armies in the east, supported by the Austro-Hungarians and the Turks, tried to knock Russia out of the war, which would allow them to bring their full weight to bear on the Western Front. The surprise Verdun Offensive was intended to kill as many Frenchmen as possible, relying on French pride in not withdrawing from the iconic fortress city on the Meuse, and it was largely successful in this. There was no need for Germany to advance on the Somme, even if they had the capacity to do so, which they did not during the Verdun Offensive. For over a year the Germans had therefore been digging deep dugouts and laying out barbed wire across the whole front. The Prussians and Bavarians they stationed there were not the hardened, experienced veterans of legend; because the sector had been hitherto so quiet, units were sent there for rest, recuperation and time in the reserves. Many came from the south of Germany and tended to despise the Prussians, and had only joined up after war broke out. The troops were mostly in reserve regiments not officered by career soldiers. ‘They were the sorts of soldiers who defined the German army of the middle war years,’ writes an historian of the Central Powers, ‘grumbling about rations, praying to God to protect them just that little bit longer, and yearning for Maria, Ursel or Greta. It was their bad fortune to be in the path of a juggernaut determined, as they saw it, to carry the devastation around them into their homeland.’28

By the spring of 1916 the French army seemed to be suffering far more than its German opponent, because of its heroic but bloodily expensive stubbornness in refusing to yield up Verdun. (As with the Russians at Stalingrad in the Second World War, French honour was bound up in this symbolic citadel, which was the centre of a vast network of forts and bunkers.) The British Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, had not wanted the BEF to shoulder the main weight of fighting the Germans in 1916, preferring a policy of ‘defensive attrition’ until the army was properly trained and equipped.29 On 5 June, however, he was drowned in HMS Hampshire west of the Orkney Islands on his way to Russia, so Haig was able to impose an ambitious battle plan that Kitchener had never envisaged nor wanted. The level of Haig’s ambition may be judged by the widespread belief in the General Staff that the offensive would be the ‘Big Push’ that could indeed bring the war to a successful conclusion. Although Haig drew up plans that envisaged a great breakthrough, he had the political sense to try to minimize expectations in the event of failure. ‘It is always well to disclaim great hopes before an attack,’ he wrote to General Charteris, his chief of Intelligence, the day before the assault.30

The ground north of the river Somme that was about to be contested so aggressively had been fought over scores of times by almost every army that had invaded or made war in France over the centuries; indeed some of the same farms had been occupied by the Cossacks fighting Napoleon I in 1814 and by Bavarians fighting his nephew Napoleon III in 1870. The undulating, chalky Picardy farmland and the meandering Somme and Ancre Rivers formed a sector which was also pitted with small villages whose names meant nothing to the world before 1916 but were forever afterwards to be synonymous with untold slaughter. The Germans had been expecting and methodically preparing for an attack in the Somme sector, which had been quiet since September 1914. Some German divisions there had hardly lost a man since then.31 The first two lines of German trenches—a third was under construction—had been built long before by Russian prisoners captured on the Eastern Front, and the 2nd Army of General Fritz von Below and the 6th Army commanded by Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria had had twenty-one months to perfect their defences.32 The German Staff had analyzed the war’s previous battles carefully, and ordered the construction of deep dugouts, protected bunkers, solid strongpoints and well-hidden forward operation posts, and they had thought especially carefully about their machine guns’ fields of fire. They also kept modifying their plans as new information became available.33 The more advanced dugouts had several exits and were sophisticated enough to incorporate kitchens and supply rooms for food, ammunition and equipment such as grenades, ammunition and woollen socks. Some even had rails attached to the steps so that machine guns could be pulled up quickly and placed into position on the parapet.34