The War Rages On 907
the terrain over which the attackers had to struggle but left intact most
of the German barbed wire, too strong for British wire cutters. German
machine gun emplacements had also survived the barrage. Many British
soldiers managed only a few yards before being hit, falling with the sixty
six pounds of equipment they were carrying. A captain sought to inspire
his men by jumping out of the trench and leading the attack by dribbling a
soccer ball across no-man s-land. He was shot dead far from the goal. The
Germans moved up reserves to wherever their lines were bending. The
British commanders sent wave after wave of infantrymen “over the top” to
their death; corpses piled up on top of those who had died seconds, min
utes, or hours before. Of 752 men in the First Newfoundland Regiment, all
26 officers and 658 men were killed or wounded within forty minutes.
Sixty percent of the Tenth Battalion of the West Yorkshires died in the ini
tial assault. At the end of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, about
60,000 soldiers of the 110,000 British soldiers had become casualties,
including 19,000 killed. (There were more British soldiers killed and
wounded in the first three days of the Battle of the Somme than Americans
killed in World War I, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War combined,
and three times more killed than in fifteen years of war against Napoleon.)
When the disastrous offensive finally ended in mid-November 1916,
Britain had lost 420,000 men killed and wounded. The French lost 200,000
men in what was primarily a British offensive. It cost the Germans 650,000
soldiers to hold on. This was almost 200,000 casualties more than at Ver
dun. Such losses helped convince the German high command that only a
campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare against ships supplying Britain
might bring victory. Yet the maximum German retreat was a few kilome
ters; in most places, Allied gains were measured in yards. A sign left over one
mass grave said, “The Devonshires held this trench, the Devonshires hold it
still.” The British poet Edmund Blunden, who survived the Battle of the
Somme, tried to answer the question of who had won: “By the end of the
[first] day both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and mur
dered men, the answer to the question. No road. No thoroughfare. Neither
race had won, nor could win, the War. The War had won, and would go on
winning.”
Futility and Stalemate
Futility and stalemate also prevailed on the mountainous Austro-Italian
front, where in 1916 there were twelve different Battles of the Isonzo River,
where the Habsburg armies had well-developed defensive positions. The
Italian army considered one of these, the sixth, a great victory because it
moved three miles forward. After half a million casualties, the Italians were
still only halfway to Trieste. In the twelfth Battle of Isonzo in 1917—more
widely known as that of Caporetto 1917—Austro-Hungarian and German
forces broke through the Italian lines, capturing more than 250,000 troops.