With The Somme Battlefield: The Top 20 Places to Visit, former soldier Ruaraidh Adams-Cairns offers us something quite different to an ordinary battlefield guide, thanks to the inclusion of both factual information, and moving personal testimonies. Adams-Cairns attributes this interest in the individual experience of war to having listened to the historian David Rattray, who placed deliberate emphasis on the personal experiences of those involved in the conflict. It is this attention to how soldiers responded to astoundingly brutal circumstances that makes the guide so particularly gripping.
It is, after all, easy to become overwhelmed by the staggering scale of suffering wrought by the five gruelling months of warfare that made up The Battle of the Somme. As Adams-Cairns reminds us in his introductory ‘Background to the Battle’ section, roughly 200,000 British and Commonwealth lives were lost in an offensive intended to last only seven days. Should you find the sheer scale of destruction understandably difficult to get your head around, however, Adams-Cairns never allows his focus to remain too wide, nor too impersonal. After laying out the battle in broad, factual terms, we then move onto the twenty sites that make up the author’s tour of the battlefield. Accompanying each place are the often harrowing recollections of those soldiers who had the terrible misfortune of participating in the battle, adding fresh, urgent poignancy to the vast human cost.
Personal testimonies not only lend a suitably sorrowful tone to the guide, but also remind us of just how extraordinarily soldiers reacted to unthinkable conditions. Adams-Cairns names the story of the Reverend Theodore Hardy as his favourite, and it this account of such an unlikely war hero that adds some colour to a bleak, if compelling picture of the battle. Serving as an army Chaplain, Hardy was a quiet and unassuming figure who initially attracted little attention. However his utter fearlessness eventually earned him the moniker ‘The Unkillable One’ and Hardy was even appointed Chaplain to the King for his valour. The picture Adam-Cairns gives us of this remarkable man is a touching one; Hardy would take sweets and cigarettes up to his men, distinguished by the catchphrase ‘It’s only me!’ Hardy may not have survived the war, but his exceptional time at the Front is a fitting reminder that personal courage and compassion were able to endure, in spite of the horrors of the trenches.
If, like me, you are a reader with relatively little understanding of the Somme, it may seem easy to focus your attention almost entirely on the personal side to the work. Engaging with stories of human courage requires no specialist knowledge. Yet the guide also presents an accessible overview of the main events that happened at each site, and which clearly benefits from the author’s military background; before working for Savills, Adams-Cairns was commissioned into the Queen’s Own Highlanders. If you should find yourself among the surprisingly pristine fields of the Somme battlefield, then you can do far worse than to have this particular guide tucked under your arm.
