Battle of the Somme: Centenary

Lord True Excerpts

Monday 14th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord Lexden for initiating this debate so movingly. No one can be immune to the horror and sacrifice of the Somme campaign. Standing on a bleak autumn evening watching the sun go down behind the Thiepval memorial was one of the most moving episodes of my life. Lutyens in stone captured the immensity of the thing but also the dignity and the space for contemplation that should inform remembrance this summer. I must say in passing how different from the shameful display in Whitehall with the Cenotaph enveloped in fumes as a prop for tawdry stunts for BBC’s “Top Gear”.

As my noble friend said, the Somme offensive followed agreement by the Allied powers to launch co-ordinated offensives in 1916, a need made ever more pressing in French eyes by the German assault on Verdun. As he said, on June 4, just three weeks before the Somme bombardment, our Russian allies, under General Brusilov, made what was to be the most striking breakthrough in the war before 1918—not by a massive, week-long artillery barrage followed by a formal human-wave advance on a relatively narrow front at the enemy’s strong point but instead by surprise, careful sapping and entrenchment, concealment of reserves, a brief if intense artillery bombardment probing the enemy’s weakest points and attacking at 20 points along a very broad front.

More than 400,000 Austrian troops were captured. Austria-Hungary suffered nearly 1 million casualties in that battle, and, arguably, neither the empire nor its army were ever the same again. The failure of other Russian commanders to support the offensive cost Russia dearly, but it is sad that neither those lessons nor ideas being advanced of infiltration came soon enough to be applied on the Somme.

Although the Somme has unique national resonance for us, it is as well to remember sacrifices made in the same cause by hundreds of thousands of young men of other nations that bloody summer. The bugles called from sad shires under the Urals as well as the Chilterns. I was sorry about the boycott of the Russian commemoration last year of the end of World War II. Surely honouring those who died in what was then our common cause should know no boundary of regime or politics.

The Somme was not an Italian or a Russian or a Romanian show. None the less, I hope that this spirit of openness and reconciliation will apply to former allies as well as to former enemies as we recall the cataclysmic events of 1916 in the Great War, which, on the Somme and elsewhere, left Europe bled white and exhausted, opened the way to revolution and changed its future forever.