In their book titled simply (like most others) The Somme, Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson continue the sardonic tone, but generally eschew the heroics. This is a very clinical account, almost devoid of sentiment or humanising focus. For each attack, it charts the plans (or lack of them) and lists the consequent casualties figures. An occasional battle diary adds colour and personality here and there, but the focus is squarely on command strategy and decisions. There is plenty of discussion about Haig and his battle commander Rawlinson, as well as about Lloyd George and the War Committee back in London, but the authors tend to treat the British Tommy much as Haig himself did – not as the ‘face of battle’, but the number. This denies the reader the personal engagement of accounts by such diverse writers as John Keegan, Ernest Bell, or even C.E.W. Bean, but it allows the book to maintain a critical perspective across the whole battle, which is its particular aim.

Prior and Wilson are no strangers to this field. Their earlier work Command on the Western Front (1992) was well received, although Gary Sheffield, in his own book The Somme (2003), complains that they overlooked the importance of Rawlinson’s relationship with his Chief-of-Staff, Montgomery. The authors don’t reply to Sheffield in the present work; indeed, apart from a few key passages, there is little direct engagement with previous scholarship. And this is in many ways the point of this book. As Prior and Wilson argue, a number of narratives about the Somme have accrued in popular and critical perceptions that they set out to disturb.

First among these is the idea that the Somme battle was forced upon the British because of the need to relieve the French, who were in danger of imploding at Verdun. In fact, the Somme was planned as a joint British–French campaign before the German offensive began at Verdun in February 1916. The effect of Verdun was simply to reduce the French participation from an initial thirty-nine divisions (something like half a million men) down to twelve divisions, thus making the Somme a predominantly British battle.

The second narrative that Prior and Wilson wish to displace is the picture of the British Tommy going ‘over the top’ on the morning of July 1, marching forward shoulder to shoulder, and being mown down in waves. This iconic image was first expressed by John Buchan in 1917, and was made famous by Liddell Hart in the 1930s. Certainly, some battalions did attack in this way, and suffered the consequences, but many others used quite different tactics. Prior and Wilson argue that, of the eighty battalions who attacked at zero hour, not more than seventeen marched in formation across no man’s land. The rest used dispersed formations, or rushed from advanced positions.

More important, however, is that, whatever the infantry did, their fate was more likely to be determined by what the artillery did. This is the crux of the book: that the British never learned how to use their artillery effectively, and that any infantry attack would fail without proper support from both offensive and defensive artillery bombardment.

The essence of this argument is that the British gunners generally failed to subdue the German batteries, so that, even if the wire had been cut and the machine guns were silenced at the moment of attack (both rare occurrences), the assaulting soldiers would still be vulnerable to shelling. This problem was compounded in Prior and Wilson’s view by the fact that attacks were typically on a small front, allowing multiple German batteries to concentrate their fire. They thus argue forcibly that more large-scale assaults might have met with greater success, simply because it would have attenuated the intensity of any counter barrages. It is ironic to think that this implies that Haig’s failing was perhaps not to order more large-scale attacks.

On the matter of Haig and his reputation, Prior and Wilson are unequivocal: he performed badly in every aspect of the planning and conduct of the campaign. They point out that, whereas Haig later defended the Somme as an attritional campaign designed to wear down the German army, all his battle plans imagined a war-winning breakthrough, and included elaborate plans for cavalry advances of forty miles or more. His orders were forever characterised by oxymorons such as ‘attack without delay, with methodical planning’.

Rawlinson emerges in a slightly better light. He tries to bring sense to the plans, and especially a sense of realism about objectives; but he inevitably rolls over in the face of Haig’s vagaries. The British official historian James Edmonds argued that any historian must put themselves in the position of the commander, and not criticise from the benefit of hindsight. This doesn’t stop Prior and Wilson admonishing the generals for failing to learn the new realities of warfare. And again, Haig is ‘the main culprit’, whose whole conception of warfare was ‘rooted somewhere in the nineteenth century’.

The clarity of Prior and Wilson’s theories and arguments is admirable, though their prose occasionally falls into cliché and repetition. Haig offers a ‘boy’s own guide’ twice in a couple of pages; Robertson, Balfour, and Lloyd George are all ‘obtuse’ on various occasions; the front is never quiet but frequently ‘quiescent’; companies are ‘lavishly supplied’ and ‘lavishly equipped’; and endless battalions are ‘wiped out’. In a work that attempts to avoid generalisations and platitudes, this last phrase is rather meaningless.

What this book lacks (like most others on war) is any detailed examination of the battle from the other side. Occasionally, the authors offer some German accounts and opinions, but surely any future work needs to be more comparative.