Walking the Somme

Where the 36th (Ulster) Division attacked at 7.30 a.m. on the first morning of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, I ate a cheese and onion sandwich and a KitKat. What happened was this. Charging forward from saps dug out into no man’s land from the frontline trenches in Thiepval Wood, the Ulsters overran the enemy’s first, second, third and fourth lines and the formidable Schwaben Redoubt. But the Germans quickly put down a barrage of machine-gun fire across no man’s land preventing reinforcements getting through. Hand-to-hand scrapping in the German trenches continued all day until a weary remnant was pushed back to the original German front line. The sunken road in no man’s land was heaped up with dead. The Ulster Division suffered 5,000 casualties, roughly half its strength, and won two Victoria Crosses. A failure, but a glorious one. The sandwich was supermarket bread and thinly sliced processed cheese.

After the war a fairy-tale commemorative tower was erected at the northernmost limit of their advance. The Ulster Tower is a replica of a folly called Helen’s Tower, which stands near the old divisional training ground at Clandeboye, County Down. The tower and surrounding garden of tonsured cypresses is an enchanting oasis in an enormous field of ripening wheat.

Beside the tower is a British-run café with good toilets selling tea, coffee, cold drinks and snacks. Our battlefield guide brought the foreign correspondent and me here for our lunch break. We sat at a picnic table next to a stack of rusty artillery shells. The foreign correspondent had tuna and onion. Our guide, a former Royal Marine, ate nothing because he was watching his weight.