In the summer of 1916, an army gathered in Picardy in northern France, an army the likes of which the British had never fielded before.

Alongside the men was a gigantic amount of material, the stuff of war.

Shells, guns, explosives, bullets.

The men and the equipment was gathered together in that rolling chalk downland.

A place, not unlike, well, Sussex really, wide fields, villages hidden in the folds of the ground, copses of trees, sunken roads.

In a valley, at the southern end of the British Imperial Army, was what one soldier described as a

kind of muddy stream. It was midsummer. The water levels were low. It was the river Somme. And that muddy trickle would give

its name to a battle thought by that army, a battle that began on the 1st of July 1916. A terrible

battle in the Somme basin. It would become the biggestomme Basin.

It would become the biggest and bloodiest in British history.

It remains one of the largest battles ever fought by any nation.

It dragged on for 141 days officially.

Although men continue to punch and stab and shoot and kill each other all through the winter that followed in the snow and the rain and the mud. The number of troops

amassed from around Britain, Ireland and the Empire for that battle is very difficult to comprehend,

particularly when you remember that each one of those men was a son, a cousin, perhaps a father,

an uncle, nearly always a friend.

Each of them had a whole world, a whole community, a set of hopes and dreams and ambitions.

All of them marched off to that front line with no promise that they would return.

Many of those men were persuaded to do that to march off to the front line to join the army

by a recruitment initiative I'm sure you've heard of. It's called the Pals Battalions. They were

men who volunteered to serve in the army if they could do so alongside their friends,

their teammates, their neighbours, their work colleagues.

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