June 01, 2006
Remembering
Here's something fascinating: a new online history of one of the great and terrible battles of World War One.
Graphic accounts of the bloodiest single day in the history of the British Army have been given new life online, 90 years after they were written.Vivid letters and diary entries penned in the trenches on the first day of the Battle of the Somme on July 1, 1916, have been unearthed from the collection of the Imperial War Museum. They have been put in a new permanent online exhibition ahead of the anniversary of the battle next month.
The original letters and diaries are on show in an exhibition at the museum's London branch alongside items from the battle, including a revolver carried by the Lord of the Rings creator JRR Tolkien and a football kicked across no-man's land.
Tolkien, who served as a 2nd lieutenant with the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1916, is one of 20 individuals whose experiences at the Somme are followed in the online exhibition.
The accounts, many hand-written by men who were die hours later, tell the story of the catastrophic day in which the British Army suffered almost 60,000 casualties, of whom almost 20,000 died. The battle, which lasted until November 1916, cost the nation 420,000 casualties in all.
The war and its violent toll had a profound influence on Tolkien's life and writing.
"One has personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."
His vivid scenes of Frodo, Samwise, and Gollum inching their way through the haunted Dead Marshes before the Black Gate of Morder seem right out of Tolkien's memories of the trenches and blasted landscapes of the Western front.
In his spare time off duty, in the barracks behind the front, and often disturbed by music from gramophones (as he would later say), Tolkien started writing in a notebook the beginning of a mythology that he initially called The Book of Lost Tales. He would never finish this book, although most of it would eventually be published as The Silmarillon.In those months Death was omnipresent. Bodies of British and German soldiers lay unburied, stinking and rotting, around him in No Mans Land. Writing became for Tolkien a way to deal with this brutality and barbarity around him. He wrote whenever he found an opportunity, "in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even down in dugouts under shell fire".
So perhaps some good came from the carnage after all.
Imperial War Museum - The Battle of the Somme
Posted by Alan at June 1, 2006 05:41 PM