A century ago the Battle of the Somme had come to an end. The scale of fighting had been drastically reduced since the last major attack on 18th November, but there was much ‘localised’ action after this, often not always recorded in the pages of the official histories. Gradually the weather worsened, and the winter of 1916/17 turned into the worst of the war, with temperatures dropping to minus 25 on the Somme front.
For us a century later it seems as if the Somme is over. The centenary has passed, the people who have visited this year returned home, and the battlefields quiet once more. But of course they are never truly quiet, if we chose to listen. The Somme was a turning point not just in the war but in Britain’s history and interest in it will never fade away. Somehow we will always return to the Somme, and that is just as it should be.
And of course the Somme’s story is far from over; the war came back to Picardy in 1918 with the German offensive that swept across the ground in the spring, through to the beginning of the end of the war with the breakout on the Somme in August 1918.
This blog will return for coverage of that in 2018 but for next year you can follow a new blog: