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Donec oras Angliae

Alma lux fovebit,

Floreat Etona!

Floreat! Florebit!

(So long as kindly light cherishes the shores of England

May Eton flourish! She will flourish!)

Enlisted men waiting for the big day entertained themselves in other ways. A haunting piece of documentary film footage from these months, taken from a Red Cross barge moving down a canal behind the lines, shows hundreds of Allied soldiers stripped completely bare, wading, bathing, or sunning themselves on the canal bank in the warm summer weather, smiling and waving at the camera. Without helmets and uniforms, it is impossible to tell their nationality; their naked bodies mark them only as human beings.

Riding a black horse with his usual escort of lancers, Haig inspected his divisions as they rehearsed for the attack, on practice fields where white tapes on the ground marked the German trenches. On June 20 the commander in chief wrote to his wife, "The situation is becoming more favourable to us." On June 22 he added, "I feel that every step in my plan has been taken with the Divine help." For additional Divine help, he invited his favorite preacher, Reverend Duncan, to his forward headquarters. On June 30, the day before the attack began, as the great artillery barrage had been thundering for four days, Haig wrote in his diary, "The men are in splendid spirits.... The wire has never been so well cut, nor the Artillery preparation so thorough." For good measure, the British released clouds of deadly chlorine gas toward the German lines. Haig recorded only one note of caution, a complaint that two divisions at the northern end of the attack front had not carried out a single successful reconnaissance raid, something that should have been easy under cover of darkness if the British shelling actually had destroyed the German barbed wire.

As it grew close to zero hour, 7:30 A.M. on July 1, 1916, ten enormous mines were detonated deep underneath the German trenches. Near the village of La Boisselle, the crater from one that contained 30 tons of high explosives remains, a stark, gaping indentation in the surrounding French farmland; even partly filled in by a century of erosion, it is still 55 feet deep and 220 feet across.

Alfred Milner could hear the low thunder of the bombardment at his country house near the Kent coast, and when the barrage reached its crescendo, 224,221 shells in the last 65 minutes, the rumble could be heard as far away as Hampstead Heath in London. More shells were fired by the British this week than they had used in the first 12 months of the war; some gunners bled from the ears after five days of nonstop firing. At a forest near Gommecourt, entire trees were uprooted and tossed in the air by the shelling and the forest itself was set on fire. Soldiers of the 1st Somerset Light Infantry sat on the parapet of their trench cheering at the tremendous explosions. Officers issued a strong ration of rum to the men about to head into no man's land. Captain W. P. Nevill of the 8th East Surrey Battalion gave each of his four platoons a soccer ball and promised a prize to whichever one first managed to kick the ball to the German trench. One platoon painted on its ball:

THE GREAT EUROPEAN CUP

THE FINAL

EAST SURREYS V. BAVARIANS

14. GOD, GOD, WHERE'S THE REST OF THE BOYS?

PREPARATIONS FOR THE Somme offensive were already at high pitch when the first group of British conscientious objectors forcibly transported to France were taken to an army camp parade ground with other soldiers and given the order "Right turn! Quick march!" The other troops marched off; the 17 remained in place, unmoving. The army fined them five days' pay, something that amused them, since on principle they were already refusing to accept any military pay. There was little else to laugh about. Periodically they were summoned to hear announcements of men sentenced to death for desertion or disobedience. And, of course, they knew that in Ireland the Easter Rising leaders had just been shot by army firing squads.