The Gun

barrage in late June, and on July 1, eighty-four British battalions, more than sixty thousand men, would attack on foot across a sector eighteen miles wide. No operation of this size could be kept secret. Spies worked the lines, and the pilots of German aircraft and spotter balloons watched the buildup. For weeks rumors of the impending offensive filled conversations in the trenches on both sides. “Apparently the Germans know as much about the coming offensive as we do,” Private Anderson wrote in his diary, before the battles began.⁴⁶

The preparatory barrage appeared terrible, but the Germans had dug sleeping shelters within their trench systems, and they took cover within them with their weapons, ammunition, and even beer.⁴⁷ They watched from relative safety, keeping watch on No-Man’s-Land and the British lines with mirrors and trench periscopes.

The troops gathered before dawn on July 1. The barrages lifted. At 7:20 A.M., the British engineers detonated explosives in shafts they had cut deep under the German lines. The blasts heaved dirt high into the sky and left craters of smoldering earth. A brief calm ensued. The British soldiers had been told by their officers that the artillery would destroy the German defenses and kill so many German soldiers that survivors would be unable to resist. Confidence was distributed like rum. Bunkers would be crushed, the officers said, and the barbed wire defending them would be severed. The British infantry would quickly carry the other side. At 7:30 A.M., Zero Hour, the time came to find out if any of this would be so.

The first battalions, their soldiers laden with backpacks and loads of at least seventy pounds, carrying Lee- Enfield rifles with bayonets affixed, climbed out of their trenches. As the soldiers stepped over the top, some of them, observing a tradition that marked their boyishness, kicked footballs gamely out into the stillness. The leather balls bounced into No-Man’s-Land, a zone almost without cover. In front of the British soldiers, and in most places uphill, were the German front lines. The British began to walk, in formation, lines of men moving forward parallel to the frontage ahead. This was not the full madness of nineteenth-century close-order drill, but it was close. German machine gunners opened fire. Some of the British soldiers were knocked back into the trenches by bullets before they had taken a step forward. The companies formed up and pushed on in waves, deeper into the trap their officers had designed for them. Survivors recounted the scene.

From their trenches came the “tac-tac-tac” of the guns as they traversed to and fro along the endless lines of advancing men. Whole waves were swept over by the fire. The dead lay in long rows where they had fallen, the wounded lay with them, pretending to be dead, or took cover wherever they could—in a fold in the ground, in one of the rare shell holes. Many huddled behind the body of a dead comrade. If a wave or part of it was missed in the first sweep, back would come the traverse of fire seeking out the survivors. The long line of men came forward, rifles at the port as ordered. Now Gerry started. His machine guns let fly. Down they all went. I could see them dropping one after another as the gun swept along them. The officer went down at exactly the same time as the man behind him. Another minute or so and another wave came forward. Gerry was ready this time and this lot did not get so far as the others.⁴⁸

Watching from behind their machine guns, German soldiers were amazed. They had weathered fear and frustration through the shelling, waiting for the immense attack they knew was coming. As they peered over their parapets in the sudden quiet, the sights astonished them: thousands upon thousands of men, strolling exposed in neat lines. The British carried their rifles across their chests, in the drill-field posture known as port arms. “The English came walking, as though they were going to the theatre or as though they were on a parade ground,” one German soldier said. “We felt they were mad.” Another saw waves in which the men were so densely packed they “were like trees in a wood.”⁴⁹ Some of the Germans whooped. They were professional soldiers, the product of a German military system in which conscription was nearly universal in early manhood, and civilian men maintained and updated their skills through mandatory reserve duty into early middle age. They had never seen such targets before. The time for killing was at hand. One German machine-gun team alone would fire at least twenty-five thousand rounds.⁵⁰

In this withering fire, a Yorkshire battalion, Company A of the Seventh Green Howards, lost 108 of 140 men in minutes. An even more galling destruction fell upon the Tyneside Irish, a brigade of three thousand men, which had to cross almost a mile of open ground behind its own front-line trenches just to reach the British edge of No- Man’s-Land. It took twenty minutes under fire to complete this march. Bullets slammed into the soldiers the entire way. The surviving Irish were ordered on, to press the attack across five hundred yards of open space and breach the German lines. They plunged forward, through the bloodied remains of the battalions that had gone before. Somehow they managed to cross the ground and get a toehold in the German lines. Of the three thousand men who had stepped off, fifty fighting men remained.⁵¹ The New Amy, Lord Kitchener’s grand two-year project to replace the battered British Expeditionary Force with volunteers from all walks of British life—the mines, the factories, the clerks, the schoolhouses—was being cut down in an hour. The Dervishes had fought this foolishly. So had Japanese soldiers, who saw duty in death. Now the British army was doing it, too.

A darker hour for England would be hard to measure. By one estimate, 30,000 British soldiers were killed or wounded in the first sixty minutes. The midday tally reached 50,000. By the end of the day, 21,000 British soldiers were dead, 35,000 wounded, and 600 more had been taken prisoner. The survivors were emotionally devastated. One lance corporal, a signaler who had not been assigned to advance, watched his friends try to cross, only, he said, to be “mown down like meadow grass.” He stayed back, weeping.

Private Anderson’s battalion was not ordered to attack the first day. Several days later, as the battle continued, his unit raided German trenches. Before returning to the British side, his platoon lost several men, and a bullet struck and splintered his rifle stock. After several months of war, his platoon had been wrecked. “Of the old crowd only Wightman, Davidson, Tommy Graham, Harvey, and the hefty Irishman Connell and myself remain, as well as Reid and Crossley,” he wrote. Two sentences later he added: “A German sniper also got 2nd Lieut. Stewart through the head when he was having a look over the top.”⁵² Tens of thousands of men had been lost. Front-line life remained the same.

As news of the slaughter on the Somme trickled out, Hiram Maxim, now seventy-six, was retired comfortably in London. If he was troubled by the killing being done with his namesake invention, he revealed no sign of it. If anything, he seemed proud. After the war had begun, he had published an essay in the New York Times boasting of inventing both the automatic machine gun and the smokeless powder that made it a more effective killing machine. His principal concern appeared to be to make sure that he received credit ushering these developments to form. In 1915, in his memoir, My Life, he crowed more. “I was the first man in the world to make an automatic gun,” he wrote. “The gun was very light, small, and effective, and the automatic system, which was thoroughly worked out by myself, went into universal use throughout the whole civilized world. It is astonishing to note how quickly this invention put me on the very pinnacle of fame.”⁵³ He maintained his detachment and dark humor to the book’s end, where he lamented that an inhaler he had designed to relieve congestion brought him no fame at all. “It is a very creditable thing to make a killing machine,” he wrote, “and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering.”⁵⁴ Maxim died in November 1916, a few weeks after the end of the Battle of the Somme, which caused more than a million casualties to the armies involved without changing the fundamental contours of the Western Front. To the end he never showed a public hint of regret. Given his history and the record of his public statements, this is neither surprising nor especially significant. The time of sales pitches, claims of inventive genius, and disputes over patents had passed. Machine guns were now firmly in the domain of the common foot soldier, and soldiers both understood their uses and gave the weapons their meaning

War was not for the likes of Gatling and Maxim; neither ever experienced it firsthand. That experience fell to others. It was these young men, who suffered what modern battle had become, who would best explain the experience of automatic fire, as Wilfred Owen did. In 1918, just before he died, Owen wrote “Spring Offensive,” which described a British unit resting behind a hill before trying to cross a valley. The front had been broken by then. The Allies were chasing the retreating German forces. The British unit emerged on open ground and discovered that the Germans were ready with a delaying action. Owen described what Maxim could not. In his poem, the soldiers were a hardened and exhausted bunch. To them the war was old and horribly familiar, and experience had scoured away any expectation of glory, or even of nation or heroism. The soldiers were simply tired. Some felt a sense of foreboding before they tried to cross the valley. It was as if, Owen wrote, they knew “their feet had come to the end of the world.” Then they moved out, to be memorialized in Owen’s elegy for the common