My friend rather patiently explained to me the meaning of Remembrance Day, and eventually I realized it was America's Veterans Day. For my friend, as for many others of the British baby boom generation (Christopher Hitchens once said the same to me), Remembrance Day was a day for remembering the horrors of war. That is to say, it was a day for remembering, not the sacrifices made by the First World War generation for later generations (which is how the Allied dead of the Second World War are still remembered, the Greatest Generation's sacrifice for us), but instead a day for remembering that the Great War generation had merely been sacrificed. Cruelly, for no particularly worthy end, unintentionally even, by incompetent generals and murderously patriotic politicians, to the bloodthirsty and yet bloodless machines of war, to the machine gun and the artillery.
There are serious dissenters to the view that the First World War was essentially a pointless war, but for many, as for my friend, the so-called "Lost Generation's" sense of the utter senselessness of it all predominated (sympathetically analyzed in Paul Fussell's classic literary study The Great War and Modern Memory).
Whatever the correct understanding of the Great War, however, no single battle so exemplifies the sense of pointless slaughter, of men being sacrificed, as the Battle of the Somme, which began one hundred years ago today. On July 1, 1916, British forces attacked the entrenched German forces at the Somme, and took an astounding 55,000 casualties, including 20,000 killed in action in that first day of fighting. And yet this was merely the beginning, as the British high command continued to press the attack for months, until the operation came to an inconclusive close in November 1916. The final losses for all belligerents were around one million men killed or wounded.
