First Day On The Somme by Martin Middlebrook

At 7.30am on 1st July 1916, a continuous line of British soldiers climbed out of their trenches and began to walk slowly towards the German lines. Many of them believed that the enemy positions had already been destroyed in the previous artillery bombardment. By the end of the day the British had suffered 60,000 casualties – one for every eighteen inches of the front. Martin Middlebrook has drawn on official sources, local newspapers, autobiographies, novels and poems to write this book and,above all, on the recollections of hundreds of survivors who contribute to a brilliant, horrifying and intensely moving portrait of war on the front line.