Péronne (Somme) - Bombarded Street in 1917. And an Irreverent Poem From the Somme Times.

            The Postcard

A postally unused carte postale that was published by Neurdein et Cie of 52, Avenue de Breteuil, Paris. The card has a divided back.

Local inhabitants were always quick to clear rubble from bombarded streets, therefore the street had only just suffered an artillery attack.

Note the wallpaper in the room that has been exposed by the enemy action.

Abba Eban

"History teaches us that men and
nations behave wisely when they
have exhausted all other alternatives".

This was said during a speech in London UK on 16th. December 1970 by Abba Eban (1915-2002), an Israeli diplomat and writer.

Péronne

Péronne is a town in the Somme département 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.

Visé Paris No. 900

The card bears the imprimatur 'Visé Paris' followed by a unique reference number. This means that the image was inspected and deemed by the military authorities in the French capital not to be a security risk.

'Visé Paris' indicates that the card was published during or soon after the Great War.

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. 

With an average length of two feet, that number of shells if laid end to end would stretch for 64,394 miles (103,632 kilometres). That's over two and a half times round the Earth. 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!'

Taken on: December 17, 2021

Tags:

postcard

old

nostalgia

nostalgic

Péronne

Somme

bombarded

street

33PSB59

Neurdein

Cie

Avenue

Breteuil

Paris

divided

back

rubble

Abba

Eban

Visé

Great

War

Dennis

Winter

John

Keegan

1917

Louis

Faille

Picardy

Drake

Goodman

Ypres

Salient

duds

Times

aplomb

poem

bomb

song « less

Sets appears in: • France • Great War more » • Péronne (Somme) in the Great War • Songs and Poems of the Great War « less

Stats: 397 views