Chronicles of the Desolate

Blood in the Trenches 🥖

Remember the fallen.

Bataille de la Somme.

That is what they called it. It was not the first war that broke out, but it was his first. They also said it was the most brutal battle to date, and worse could come. They who sat afar safely behind doors and bars and soldier boys.

They who sit and eat past their fill, wiping their greasy fingers on the table cloth while boys no younger than 16 sit and starve in filthy, bloody trenches, constant rain of bullets and death from above, smoke and a dark haze over the land.

The never-ending threat of death looming over the men had them itching all over, with the hair on the nape of their necks standing up on end.

But what was so special about this battle specifically? It was like any other; men died, land was lost and recovered, shots fired--just like any other battle....

The battle started July the 1st, 1916, and only ended One Hundred and Forty days later, in November 18, 1916.

For One Hundred and Forty days artillery spat out metal tubes that brought death to almost all there.

It was a battle of such brutality that its horror is hard for people to comprehend. Never had so many soldiers been killed in one day's fighting. Twenty Five Thousand killed almost in one hour.

On July 1, 1916, after a week of prolonged artillery bombardment, aimed to cut the barbed wire guarding the German's trench defenses and destroy the enemy's positions, 11 divisions of the British Fourth Army (Created and placed under Sir Henry Rawlinson) had received the call to begin the attack north of the Somme on the front.

The front extended for 15 miles from Serre and Beaumont-Hamel southward past Thielpval, Ovillers, and Fricourt, then eastward and southward to Maricourt, north of Curlu.

Back then, William didn't know the names of these places he'd had to defend. He was just a young English man from England's countryside. Born and raised in a large town amongst rolling hills of green pastures and cottages. The cold, grey, cobbled stone streets that he ran through as a boy, and marched down as a teenager, and walked by as a man.

It was only after the battle that he'd reluctantly come to know the names of the burnt blackened cities and towns the Huns wanted to have.

William Raymond Baker lay on the slope of the trench, one of millions of men, lined up awaiting the whistle that would send them into the heat of the battle. Blood was pumping in his ears and he could feel the other men's anxiety, just as they could feel his.

For a moment, there was quiet above in the no man's land. It was pierced by the sound of a whistle, and then followed by the sound of men yelling, clamboring over the top, and racing towards the enemy.

Everything that could go wrong, went wrong.

They had the machine-gun that ate through men like a child devouring a sweet treat. Men dropped, bodies spinning, skin torn and now donning a red colour. Still the men ran on, still they dropped.

The ground started erupting as well. Throwing up dirt and rocks, and the debris rained down like the relentless cold rain.

His first though was that they'd mined the land, but then he caught glimps of something flying through the air. It landed at the feet of a man a several feet a head of him, and both the man and earth flew apart.

The force of the explosion sent William flying backwards, shattering his eardrums and sending him deep into the dark unconsiousness.

She was 16 when he'd asked her out to the Cinema to see a silent movie. William couldn't remember what the film's name was, but there was something about the World War, encouraging young men to join and become heroes. He could remember the smell of bread and flour when Annie (she'd insisted he called her that, as she thought Anne made her sound old) laid her head on his shoulder, her hair tickling his cheek.