The word Somme has become synonymous with obscene. This July 1, 2016 marks the hundredth anniversary of the first day of the Battle of the Somme—the worst single-day experience in British military history. The World War I bloodbath saw over 20,000 British and imperial troops killed or never accounted for, and another 35,000 wounded—all in just the first few hours of a head-on assault against entrenched German lines near the Somme River in France. After Zero Hour on July 1, the British fell at the rate of eight men per second. Andrew Roberts notes that “By 8:30 a.m. just under half of the 66,000 British soldiers who had attacked in eighty-four battalions were casualties.”1

The centennial of the nightmare this year has already birthed a series of commemorative analyses, which, in the custom of the last century, still seek to make sense of the surreal. Why exactly for 141 days did the British Expeditionary Force, along with its French allies, so unimaginatively continue to batter well-entrenched German positions? When the months-long battle wound down in mid-November, the Western Front in northern France was pushed back eastward only about six miles, along a line less than thirty miles long—at the price of a million Allied and German soldiers killed or maimed.

After Zero Hour on July 1, the British fell at the rate of eight men per second.

Over the last century, even the revisions of the Somme have been revised. Along with Passchendaele