178 A HISTORY OF AMERICA IN 100 MAPS
On the morning of May 7, 1915, a German submarine
torpedoed the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania off
the coast of Ireland. The next day newspapers across
the United States highlighted the loss of American
lives in the attack, stoking outrage and calls for a
declaration of war. In a New Jersey military recruiting
office Guy Empey read the news, then watched his
superior solemnly drape an American flag over a
map of Europe on the wall. The United States, they
assumed, would now join the Allied cause to avenge
this German atrocity. They quickly prepared the office
for an onrush of volunteers.
Yet in the coming weeks and months President
Wilson issued no call for war, and instead doggedly
reiterated a policy of neutrality. Back at the recruiting
office, the flag came down from the wall, and Empey
took matters into his own hands. At the end of 1915
he sailed to London to join the British Army. Initially
recruiters refused his offer of service out of deference
to American neutrality, but a few weeks later he was
sent to the Western Front in France as a machine
gunner. By this point the front stretched from the
North Sea through Belgium, northeastern France,
and Alsace-Lorraine all the way to the Swiss border.
Sergeant Empey’s first task was to dig miles and miles
of trenches in preparation for the “big push” against
Germany in the summer of 1916.
From July to November, over 1 million men
were killed in the Battle of the Somme, the most
destructive of the entire war. Empey himself was
injured at the Somme, and upon his return home
wrote a memoir of the war entitled Over the Top that
captured both the horror and humor of the war.
Empey portrayed his fellow soldiers—the British
“Tommies”—as both stoically and heroically facing
the constant threat of death. To illustrate his account,
Empey included a map that profiled not a specific
location in the conflict, but rather the general
dynamics of trench warfare. Between 1915 and 1917
the front was nearly immovable, so Empey’s map
might apply to a spot anywhere along the line.
It was this uniformity that made the front so
destructive. From the rigid front lines to the fortified
rear defenses, the armies tore at each other. The
OVER THE TOP
Arthur Guy Empey, “Diagram
Illustrating Typical Fire Trench, Second
Line and Communication Trenches,”
1917