Battle of the Somme Trench frontline at Beaumont-Hamel - vintage version Photograph by Weston Westmoreland

Battle of the Somme Trench frontline at Beaumont-Hamel - vintage version

by Weston Westmoreland

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Title

Battle of the Somme Trench frontline at Beaumont-Hamel - vintage version

Artist

Weston Westmoreland

Medium

Photograph - Photograph

Description

Battle of the Somme Trench frontline at Beaumont-Hamel. Vintage version.

The first and second line trenches of the British front as seen from the Caribou Newfoundland Memorial. The German trenches would be roughly in the tree-line. Maybe 50 meters away in places. Thousands of British soldiers fell here on July the 1st, 1916, during the first two hours of the Battle of the Somme. The only Newfounland Battalion went over the top in the second wave and was also obliterated.

There is a dead tree stump that survived the war, was called Danger Tree at the time, next to two young ones in the middle of the panorama halfway from the first British trench to the cemetery you can also see where the Germans were. No man passed beyond that tree that day, as the men advanced against undamaged machine-gun crossfire...

Those are some of the best preserved trench structures from the Western Front and are considered sacred land as many of the young British and Newfoundlander men who died here were never buried elsewhere.

Newfoundland has always been a demanding place to live. Scarcely populated, at the time of the Great War the Newfounlanders were about 200,000 souls. Their biggest city was inhabited by about 5,000 people. Nevertheless they managed to form a battalion and sent it to war. These men were together for two years, friends of old, relatives, neighbors... they belonged to a close-knitted community, and those two years got them even closer.

Their first serious war engagement for them came the first day of the battle of the Somme, on the first of July, 1916. Thirty minutes after the order to go over the top was issued, less than 70 of the over 700 young men that were to fight that day remained alive.

Beaumont-Hamel is where it happened. Five years later, the Newfounlanders gathered money and bought that land to honor their fallen. Today, their symbol, the Caribou, watchers over the place of their sacrifice, in one of the most moving memorials to visit, and one of the best preserved front lines of those terrible times.

There is a version of this image without the texture.

You can learn more about what drives me in my blog:

http://inspiringthoughtsandimages.com/

Weston Westmoreland.