The Battle of the Somme

On the 1st July, 1916, 20,000 British troops lost their lives during the first day of the Somme.

Artillery had barraged the German lines for seven days, but the Germans were heavily dug in and many shells failed to explode due to the wet ground.

The bombardment signalled to the Germans that the British were coming, so once it had finished they emerged from their fortifications ready to face, and destroy, the enemy offensive.

Published as a short work just a year after the event, John Buchan's account of the first two phases of the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest battle of the Great War, leap off the page a century on.

He describes the manoeuvres and the generals who led thousands of troops, and also deliberates on the nature of war and the state of mind needed by the men facing such a terrible battle.

Buchan was well placed to comment on such events given that he was a war correspondent in France for The Times from 1915.

The Battle of the Somme is a classic contemporary account of the one of the key battles of WW1 by one of the finest writers of the era.

John Buchan, first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield, was born in Perth, Scotland in 1875. In 1900, Buchan moved to London, and two years later accepted a civil service post in South Africa. In the years leading up to World War I, he worked at a publishers, and also wrote Prester John (1910) which later became a school reader, translated into many languages as well as a number of biographies. In 1915 he published his most well-known book, the thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps. After the war he became a director of the news agency Reuters. Buchan would eventually publish some one hundred books, forty or so of which were novels, mostly wartime thrillers. In the latter part of his life he worked in politics, serving as Conservative MP for the Scottish universities and Lord High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland (1933-34). In 1935, Buchan moved to Canada, where he became the thirty-fifth Governor General of Canada. He died in 1940, aged 64.

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