The Postcard
A postally unused carte postale published by La Pensée showing the roofless shell of Péronne Cathedral in March 1917.
Catherine de Poix
Before the Great War, the stone plinth in the photograph supported a statue of local hero Catherine de Poix. When Péronne was under siege by Charles Quint in 1536, Catherine led the defence of the town, and is reputed to have thrown a Spaniard off the top of the town wall.
The Germans took Catherine's statue in March 1917 in order to melt it down for the bronze.
Péronne
Péronne is a town in the Somme Department of Picardie in northern France and is close to where the Battles of the Somme took place during the Great War. The Museum of the Great War is located in the Château.
Péronne was virtually totally destroyed in 1917. In May 1940 the Germans had another crack at the town when the Luftwaffe bombarded and burned it.
The Alfred Danicourt Museum, founded in the Hôtel de Ville in 1877, is the only museum of the Somme to have been pillaged and destroyed by the Germans between 1916 and 1918. It lost 98% of its collection.
Péronne is known for its Monument to the Dead, a brilliant work by the architect Louis Faille, representing a Picardy woman with clenched fist raised above the body of her son or husband killed during the war.
The Battle of the Somme
The Battle of the Somme took place between the 1st. July and the 18th. November 1916 on both sides of the upper reaches of the River Somme in France.
In total, more than one million men were wounded or killed, making it one of the bloodiest battles in human history.
A Poem About the Battle of the Somme:
'It was 1916 on the 1st of July
That artillery and smoke blackened the sky.
Shots rang out and men fell dead,
The sky was black, while the ground was red.
To battle the Germans the French and British had come,
To the bloodiest fight of the War, the Battle of the Somme.
While artillery rained down on the German side
The allies swallowed their fear and stood with pride.
Waiting to be ordered over the top,
To run without question, don’t look back and don’t stop.
But this is when the slaughter started,
Machine guns screamed out as bodies and limbs became parted.
Fifty-eight thousand casualties in one single day
‘A necessary loss’ the Generals would say.
‘We will rest for now and recommence tomorrow
No time for the men to indulge in their sorrow’
So they readied the next batch of men for the slaughter,
Would they fare better when faced with the mortars?
The answer to this question was obviously no
As the casualty counts continued to grow.
For every single centimetre of ground that was taken
The lives of two men were sadly forsaken.
And so the battle waged on and on,
The bloodiest battle of World War One.
Yet as they made progress towards German lines,
The allies had one thing in the front of their minds.
For the Germans had a weapon the allies had yet to discover
One that would find men even if they took cover.
As the allied assault drew nearer and nearer
The time to use this weapon had never been clearer.
The little grey canisters flew through the air
Giving the allied forces more than a scare.
The men now engaged in a fight for their lives,
They could not protect themselves with their guns or their knives.
Their only weapon now was a mask
But fitting it in time was a very hard task.
‘Gas, Gas!’ some men would cry
Most had masks, the rest would die.
Their screams could be heard as they approached their death,
Blood curdled in their lungs as they drew their last breath.
Eventually their eyes would roll back in their head
And with a final twitch and spasm they lay still, dead.
And so the battle waged on and on,
The bloodiest battle of World War One.
Even with the threat of the German gas,
It was time for a final allied assault to mass.
And with this Britain unveiled their tank
When the battle ended they had this to thank.
It stormed over No-Man’s Land, through German wire,
The Germans shook in fear as it prepared to fire.
For the British troops it opened the way,
For the deaths of their comrades the Germans would pay.
And the German death count grew and grew
As the allied assault continued to break through.
And though the fighting had not ended,
The morale of the allies began to get mended.
They pushed with valor towards their objective,
With a new vigour the Germans had not expected.
Although the enemy held, and did not retreat
This battle is viewed as a German defeat.
It was 1916 on the 21st of November
That the five month long battle was finally over.
No shots rang out but thousands were dead,
The sky was still black, the ground was stained red.
To battle the Germans the French and British had come,
To the bloodiest fight of the War, the Battle of the Somme'.
The Use of Artillery in the Great War
Artillery was very heavily used by both sides during the Great War. The British fired over 170 million artillery rounds of all types, weighing more than 5 million tons - that's an average of around 70 pounds (32 kilos) per shell.
If the 170m rounds were on average two feet long, and if they were laid end to end, they would stretch for 64,394 miles (103,632 kilometres); the line would go round the equator over two and a half times. If the artillery of the Central Powers of Germany and its allies is factored in, the figure can be doubled to 5 encirclements of the planet.
During the first two weeks of the Third Battle of Ypres, over 4 million rounds were fired at a cost of over £22,000,000 - a huge sum of money, especially over a century ago.
Artillery was the killer and maimer of the war of attrition.
According to Dennis Winter's book 'Death's Men' three quarters of battle casualties were caused by artillery rounds. According to John Keegan ('The Face of Battle') casualties were:
- Bayonets - less than 1%
- Bullets - 30%
- Artillery and Bombs - 70%
Keegan suggests however that the ratio changed during advances, when massed men walking line-abreast with little protection across no-man's land were no match for for rifles and fortified machine gun emplacements.
Many artillery shells fired during the Great War failed to explode. Drake Goodman provides the following information on Flickr:
"During World War I, an estimated one tonne of explosives was fired for every square metre of territory on the Western front. As many as one in every three shells fired did not detonate. In the Ypres Salient alone, an estimated 300 million projectiles that the British and the German forces fired at each other were "duds", and most of them have not been recovered."
To this day, large quantities of Great War matériel are discovered on a regular basis. Many shells from the Great War were left buried in the mud, and often come to the surface during ploughing and land development.
For example, on the Somme battlefields in 2009 there were 1,025 interventions, unearthing over 6,000 pieces of ammunition weighing 44 tons.
Artillery shells may or may not still be live with explosive or gas, so the bomb disposal squad, of the Civilian Security of the Somme, dispose of them.
The Somme Times
From 'The Somme Times', Monday, 31 July, 1916:
'There was a young girl of the Somme,
Who sat on a number five bomb,
She thought 'twas a dud 'un,
But it went off sudden -
Her exit she made with aplomb!'
