Books are the jigsaw pieces of history.

When we study a massive campaign like the Battle of the Somme,

how can books lead us on a pathway of understanding?

What can we get from books about the Somme?

One of the things that I've learned from books about the song.

One of the things that I've learned by studying the Great War for so many years is that books on the subject are the currency by which we learn about that massive conflict

of 1914, 18.

But yet there are so many books on this subject.

Where do you even begin with any aspects of the First World War

and trying to make some sense of it and some sense of the history of the

wider subject of this conflict. We've looked in previous podcasts at how books can relate to

specific battlefield areas where we've taken a bit of the psalomme and talked about different memoirs that connect us to that

and gained some understanding, hopefully deeper understanding of those areas through those books.

You can go back through the podcast catalogue to find those.

And in those, we discovered how just a handful of books can inform us about one place.

But as the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme approaches, it will soon be the 1st of July.

And a lot of recent questions for the Q&A episodes have been about what books to read.

I thought we'd take this opportunity to look at the Battle of the Somme in

1916 as a subject and focus on how we might use books to increase our understanding of it.

But let's just quickly remind ourselves of the history of the Battle of the Somme.

At the end of 1915 was a change of command.

Sir Douglas Haig became the commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force

...