'All them lives, what a waste': Veterans recall the Battle of the Somme

By Paul Tyson, ITV News

The pomp and ceremony to mark the hundredth anniversary of the Somme is a stark contrast to the scenes when I last visited twenty years ago. No parades, press or presidents then but something much more precious; the last surviving veterans of the bloodiest battle in history.

Physically frail, the youngest was then a hundred, the veterans spent three days touring the battlefields and monuments.

They took the gruelling schedule in their stride, laughing and joking with carers, relatives and friends but every now and again something - a familiar hill or wood, a name on a headstone - would transport them sharply back, to a time and a place that none who were not there could begin to understand.

At 07:30 on the first of July 1916 after a ferocious bombardment 420,000 British and Empire troops went "over the top" to attack the German trenches.

By the end of the day 20,000 were dead, thousands more wounded. The battle went on for another 141 days becoming a brutal attrition, a test of national will that has since become a byword for wanton waste of life.

"All them lives, what a waste" recalled Mike Lally, then 102. "It was the biggest mistake ever. They threw so many men into that battle, it was a complete waste."

Mr Lally, from Salford, was a regular soldier before the war and had already seen his share of horrors but the Somme stood out.

I went with Mr Lally to the trench where he and his comrades had fought. Astonishingly he still remembered the place. He told jokes as he posed for a photograph but time had not dimmed the anger: "Our generals had no business fighting the war like that. They never cared about us then and they never cared for us after, too."

He recalled how after the war he met a VC winner from his Battalion begging in the street. "I said hello and gave him what little I had with me. That's all I could do. That's how it was."

Donald Hodge, 102, from West Sussex was one of the many volunteers who joined up and by 1916 formed the backbone of the British Army.

He said: "The last thing I thought about before the war was joining the army, the old regulars were a bunch of scallywags but when the time came it seemed the right thing to do."

Mr Hodge went over the top with the Royal West Kent Regiment: "The first week of July was a wholesale slaughter, no end of my friends died. The bodies were piled up high. We were young and fit and we took it all in our stride, whatever the orders were we just obeyed them, that's how we were then."

"We were very, very close, we trained together, we marched together, we fought together, we were closer than brothers but you learned to lose friends without unduly grieving, otherwise we would have gone mad."

When I spoke to him, Mr Hodge was then President of the First World War Veterans Association who had organised the pilgrimage. "I feel it is a duty to come back. I must come back for the sake of my friends who lie here. It could so easily have been me instead of them"

Norman Booth, then 100, from Golcar near Huddersfield fought on the Somme with the Duke of Wellington's Regiment. "They're shocking, my memories of the Somme. I thought it was a disgrace that they should lose all those men in one day. To see all those lads slaughtered in that swamp it broke my heart. It made me very angry. It still does."

On Friday 10,000 people will join Royals, Presidents and Prime Ministers at the Somme for a service of commemoration. Twenty years ago as the last veterans visited for the last time there was no such fanfare. The British Government didn't even send a Minister to attend the annual service at Thiepval.

"We don't need their thanks" said Donald at the time "we didn't come here for that. They say the next big show will be the 100th anniversary but I'm afraid us lot may not be around for that."

The veterans are all gone now of course but to meet them, even briefly, was a huge privilege and a small step towards understanding the sense of duty, of service and of sacrifice that drove a whole generation to the hell of the Somme.

As world leaders meet to honour the dead, I will raise a glass to those who fought and survived, many like Mike Lally badly wounded, all changed forever. Their memory too is everlasting.