Quotes from Robin Neillands

What any analysis of the first day on the Somme comes down to is the familiar lesson - that Western Front defensive positions could not be stormed and taken by any means currently open to the attacker. The British assault on the first day of the Somme was a classic example of a nineteenth-century attack, only with aircraft in the scouting role in the place of cavalry.

The Somme began as an offensive; it ended as a battle of attrition.

At Neuve Chapelle in March 1915, the British lost almost 13,000 men in three days; at Loos in September, 59,000 men in six weeks, but most of them fell in the first two days; neither attack gained more than a few hundred yards of useless, shell-pitted, corpse-strewn ground.

It is an axiom of warfare that a good officer never reinforces failure. To do so simply throws away more lives and a good general will avoid doing that. A commander's task, even in moments of defeat, is to find some way forward, some way out of the current catastrophe and when General Haig assembled his reports and looked at his maps on 2-3 July, he saw that all was not yet lost in this battle on the Somme.

The general feeling among the Entente nations at the end of 1916 seemed to be that unless Europe returned to the status quo ante, the terrible loss of life in the previous three years had been for nothing.

During the Great War all armies lost men in quantity in the attack; the Germans at First and Second Ypres, the French in Champagne, on Vimy Ridge, in Artois and on the Chemin des Dames. Everywhere it was the same story: a failure to develop a breach in the enemy defences was common to all armies and, by the end of 1915, French and German losses far exceeded those of the British Empire.

No one seemed able to accept that the war had been a terrible mistake and that ending it, on any reasonable terms, which must include the German evacuation of France and Belgium, was far less costly than letting it continue.

There was, however, a deeper failure, a failure to realize that the current conventional tactics were not working. The focus was on solving the shortages of men and guns and of increasing the weight of attacks - which only increased the scale of loss.

Despite arguments between Easterners, who wanted an offensive anywhere but France, and Westerners, who believed that an offensive anywhere else was a waste of effort, it was generally accepted that the Germans could only be decisively defeated on the Western Front, not least because that was where most of them were.

There were two views on how to conduct a frontal assault and they reveal the basic tactical argument of the Great War. Should the attacker go for 'bite and hold', seizing a small portion of the enemy line and hanging on to it, then bringing up the guns and the infantry before taking another bite, or should he concentrate on going for a full scale 'breakthrough'?

And so the war was fought with new weapons and old ideas and the result was a slaughter exceeding that of any previous war. In just four years, about 9,300,000 soldiers died on the battlefields of the Great War; 3,600,000 from the nations comprising the Central Powers and 5,700,000 from the nations of the Entente.

The generals, British, French and German, were unable to achieve a breakthrough because the defences were always too strong and the facilities available to reduce them were not fully developed, either technically or tactically.

The French, and especially the French generals, would not accept the British as equal partners in the war. The fact that without the help of Britain and her Empire they would already have lost the war and what remained of their national territory did not alter their belief in their own military superiority, or lead them into any feelings of gratitude towards their Anglo-Saxon allies.

As Sir Douglas Haig's despatch makes clear, the series of engagements collectively known to history as the Battle of the Somme did not begin as a battle of attrition. The Somme battle was designed from the first as an offensive but major battles and offensives do not happen overnight.

There was, of course, another alternative to this endless, pointless killing - peace. Achieving peace depended on a recognition by all the participants that the war was not worth fighting, or that all that could be achieved had been achieved and the argument should be promptly transferred to the conference table. Given the benefit of hindsight and the losses so far, by the end of 1915 this seems the obvious alternative to more slaughter but that was not how it appeared at the time.

sufficiency of artillery depended not only on the number of guns provided but on the width of the front attacked. The guns-per-yards-of-front ratio was crucial; to expand the latter, it was necessary to increase the former, or the infantry would go over the top without adequate support.

Peace negotiations began, or were at least initiated, almost as soon as the war began, but by 1915 they had led nowhere. The nations of Europe were not yet sick of killing and at the end of 1915 there was no doubt in anyone's mind that the fighting would go on.

Haig and Robertson were two of the most inarticulate officers in the British Army. Haig could write lucid notes and detailed instructions but was unable to express himself clearly at meetings or discussions, while Robertson's normal response to any query or criticism was either an explosive grunt or the dour comment 'I've heard different.

This army contained 16 divisions, three per corps, but with a fourth division in VIII Corps. Each division could muster around 15,000 men, so the total, with corps troops and the Army reserve, came to some 400,000 men. To this can be added, for the initial onslaught on the German line, two divisions from VII Corps of Third Army, the 46th and the 56th, who would attack the salient at Gommecourt, north of Fourth Army line. More than half the soldiers in this force had never been in action before.

To supply Fourth Army's basic needs it was estimated that 31 trains must reach the front every day, bringing the day-to-day supplies as well as massive amounts of ammunition, food, water and trench stores that must be gathered for the main offensive. More than 3,000,000 shells were stockpiled close to the artillery batteries, ready to open the bombardment on 24 June.

By the turn of the century, all-out attacks by hosts of valiant French infantry, rather on the style employed by the Imperial Guard at Waterloo, were the received wisdom in French military circles, and would remain so until the losses of the Great War killed off its adherents and a million or so brave young men.

the men of the French Army have never been short of guts. Clad in their brilliant uniforms, carrying swords and wearing white gloves, the officers of this gallant army led their men into the German machine-gun fire in 1914 . . . and then war was suddenly not glorious any more. A million men were killed or wounded trying to make this tactic work.

Haig wanted Fourth Army to achieve a breakthrough of the first and second lines in the first phase; Rawlinson thought that if his men took the German first line in the first phase they would be doing well. This is the by-now-familiar 'breakthrough' or 'bite and hold' argument and, since Rawlinson's view prevailed, his proposals are the ones to examine.

The 72nd Division, which had opened the battle with 12,000 men, had lost nearly 10,000 men in three days; this is as many as all the Allied armies, navies and air forces lost on D-Day 1944 - and the French losses came from a single division.