The Somme ... and not the Same at all!

On my journey through Lincolnshire earlier this year, I visited the town of Horncastle.  There in a bookshop I found a volume that took my eye and, as is often the case, I began reading it immediately.  Unusually, instead of putting it aside fairly soon afterwards and turning to something else, I carried on with it and - rather topically, in the sequence of centenaries - have now come to the end of it.  Called 'Kelly's War', it is the diary of Frederick Septimus Kelly, an Olympic rower, composer and naval soldier, from September 1914 to November 1916, when he was killed in one of the last phases of the Battle of the Somme.

I was struck by a description he wrote after a reconnaisance walk in the last days of October 1916 to a point from which he could see the line of their forthcoming advance.  "The land up there is an indescribable scene of desolation.  For acres and acres (as far as we could see) there was no sign of vegetable life, just a sea of lacerated earth, with here and there the traces of a former trench system. ... I was haunted by the sense of terrible tragedy - the triumph of death and destruction over life. ... There were no trenches in the sense of an excavation or breastwork giving protection - just tracks from shell hole to shell hole."  The previous day Kelly had written, "we turned to the left and walked through Thiepval Wood - or, rather, the appalling wilderness of tree-stumps and lacerated earth which was once a wood - to the northern edge where we got an excellent view of both the bank and the trenches over which we are to advance."

Having read them within the last week, these phrases were still fresh in my mind anyway, but they were brought back to me again as I reflected on my mission yesterday to the Suffolk Record Office in Bury St Edmunds.  I've lost count of the number of times in the last fifteen years that I've examined the fiche copies of the parish records for the villages of Hoxne and Syleham. Most of my father's immediate family came from there and, every time I turned a corner in my research, I returned to seek some more data from the same records, perhaps looking for a different name, or for one particular detail I hadn't recorded on an earlier visit.  After ploughing in the same field so many times (sorry about the changed metaphor) I'm beginning to know the terrain backwards.

As I return time and again to the same entries, I find there's a decreasing limit to the new life I can squeeze from them.  After nearly five hours, I emerged with two or three pages of scribbled notes; I now find that the majority of what I had written was not only familiar, but exactly the same as what I already have recorded on my computer.  I have verified about a dozen items that had been passed to me fifteen years ago by a distant cousin with whom I lost contact long ago; I have found the names of the two hitherto undiscovered direct ancestors, great-great-great-great-grandparents, and revealed a possible step-great-great-uncle, whose very existence is subject to further checks before I can count him.

It must have felt a bit like that to those men in 1916.  Quite apart from the effects of earlier campaigns, the to-and-fro-and-get-nowhere shooting and shelling of the past three months had, by November, left little recognisable of the countryside, let alone any trace of normal village life.  As Kelly wrote, there was no sign of vegetation ... just mud in the advancing autumn rains.

Hundreds of comrades lost, hundreds of thousands of other men killed ... and all for a few hundred yards of unrecognisable land.  Little wonder, then, that, at the same time, talks were going on among the politicians of both sides - although not between them - of some kind of peace to bring this waste to an end.  But little wonder, too, that any peace to be considered would have to secure some recognisable gain that those lives had bought.  In 1916, no such gain was apparent.

In comparison, I'm just playing games!