This is a little under an hour. Thank you for coming out. Can you hear me okay . No. Do i turn up the volume here or elsewhere . Get friendlier with the mic. How is that . That friendlier . As far as pulling up your chair. It sounds like unpaid labor to me. So i dont know. Like unpa can weid turn off the light oron turn down the lights . Re ill just start. What im going to do is run yout through the first day of the go battle and talk a bit about it the first day of the battle of the somme and talk a little bit about it. This is the word kitchner of Great Britain in the first part of world war i. He was quite prescient. He predicted that no more would go on for years. Many people thought it was going to be over bye christmas. You have always heard that line but he heard of what it would require is a lot of manpower so he built up a volunteer army. He started this recruitment process. The british professional army was small by confidential standards about 100,000 people, 100,000 troops and mostly in 1914 the british army was pretty much spent. 1915 the territorial space to the National Guard the british National Guard took over and volunteers started to come into play. By 1916 during the battle, the army was mostly volunteers with remnants of the professional and territorial divisions. This is general the chief architect of the battle of the somme. Here he is walking around. He was very rigid and he would take a four minute walk precisely timed to be an interesting man vivified by yell of historians and and rehabilitated by what historians. My opinion of him is rather low. But i try to be rather neutral about how i show him. There he is riding a horse. Hes in the front. Everyday he would also take a ride if he could with the 17 lancers which is a unit he actually used to command because the generals account for the officer and he believed in the calvary. In fact his idea for the battle which was mostly to relieve pressure on the french who were fighting against the germans, his idea was after a massive bombardment, unprecedented the british infantry would take the german lines, the trenches and the calfee would go through and the stalemate youve heard of the trench warfare, the trench warfare stalemate with the broken and the calfee would roll up and once again it would be a war of movement. And for those who say that he was wrong about certain things that there was a learning curve and eventually, he got it they are only accessories so he had a different perception about the modern warfare. There were a lot of back roads and a lot of material had to come up as you could imagine. The average regimen had about 19 or 20,000 soldiers and maybe 60 or 70 trucks or motorized vehicles and 5,000 horses so one of the things i have to remember is to draw all the horses because the course was still the Main Transport the hinkle. Famously i told you about this launch at the german positions. There was one for every 17 yards of the front. Its an often quoted figure that was an unprecedented bombardment, but a lot of the British Artillery wasnt as big as this. Much of it was smaller and also in 1916 a lot of the shells were duds said about 40 . So this unprecedented bombardment had a lot of bark, but the bite wasnt quite what it was advertised to be. This is a train, the british had a lot of tracks before the battle to bring as much stuff off as possible and here you see the dump where soldiers are unloading things from the train and then the shells would be taken. And in the bombardment, 1,500,000 shells were fired at the germans before the infantry actually attacked. Here i show the british soldiers going to the front. As i mentioned they were mostly volunteers and they were quite enthusiastic about the war at this point still. In the recruitment drive, kitchner came up with this idea and so a lot of the idea is you would join up with your pals and so a lot of the friends joined up from the same villages and towns and the units were built around even the professional class is like the clerks or there was an artist battalion for example and so friends joined up together. One of the reasons they were enthusiastic is a lot of them were told would be a cakewalk no german would be alive in the trenches when they got their. And here is the bombardment. It was planning to go on for five days and it did. Then there was a rain squall said the battle was postponed by a couple of days so it went on for another two. At the very end, they were put there and had to be stretched over a couple more days. This is one of the beloved units that came from india. It was one of three british regiments of the cal dirty that was put right behind the front lines waiting for that breakthrough so that it could go to the gap. Mostly, that was one of the units that mostly on the first day it was british soldiers. It was probably the most british of all the battles. There was a newfoundland regiment but at that time it wasnt part of canada pity is a selfgoverning colony. Around evening time, the soldiers who were meant to go over the top would be coming into the trenches, the ones on the first wave would be given stage and wire cutters as i show here. The hope is that the barbed wire was a very effective antiinfantry within. A was used extensively by both sides. And the hope is that this artillery bombardment would cut the supply year, that it really varied in the places and the soldiers would get to the wire and supposedly they would try to cut trees of the comrades could go through. Might all the soldiers tried to get some sleep. In some places the trenches were so crowded that the soldiers spent the last night. On the left of this illustration or sort of where you could see the bar and why year at night time the british soldiers would have gone out and cut a hole in their own wire and other words the barbwire in the british trenches because obviously you need a place the troops can go through. In the background by showing the bombardment and we are getting towards morning now and in the last 60 minutes or 65 minutes, the british intensified their bombardment. Now its around 7 20 a. M. On july 1st, 1916. Its a bright day. Its already sunlight. And you see the bombers letter basically grenades that would take a culture of the grenades and every soldier would take a couple with them to get to the throwers when they got close to the german line. The average soldier had a pack or equipment that was about 60 to 65 pounds of equipment. At the bottom left you will see the soldiers having their rum ration because it was in the british army attack that they would drink tea laced with rum and according to Martin Middlebrook who had a books of the soldiers went over to monk. I guess self medicated before the major battle. On the right to see than fixing the bayonets. The idea is that they would close with the germans and then the British Steel would prevail. Just before the troops went over, the british exploded large mines under the german trenches. They had been prepared for weeks or months. Obviously there were miners in the british army. And they would have tunneled under the german lines and then some of the larger ones were heard in england. This one blew the debris 4,000 feet into the air. So they went off and then there was silence. And of course the whistles blow and the british troops start going over the top and i shall an officer there with his browning Service Revolver and what sort of interesting about the First World War is that the not the high command but the Junior Officers like the lieutenant and the captains lead from the front and throughout the war and including of course the battle they had a high casualty rate than the average infantryman. And the officer class was generally from the has dhaka see basically very welleducated graduates of cambridge and oxford that came out of eden. The high command didnt have great confidence in the volunteer army. Most of the troops were seeing the combat for the first time. So, they were told to line up outside of their own barbwire and move sort of napoleonic style in a row towards the german line. The high command didnt want to disorganize the advance. They were told to walk and not to stop for anyone the was wounded but they would be picked up by stretchers later and there were two or three apart and these lines moved towards the german position about a minute apart from each other so there were rows of infantry moving towards the german trenches. Now, i talked about this bombardment. The germans were very defensive minded at this particular time and they had dug very deep dugouts, 30, 4050 feet below ground and most of the soldiers were taking shelter from this bombardment. And the machine guns positions often concrete reinforced and would have taken a direct hit to knock them out with the british on the other hand actually never wanted their soldiers to be comfortable in the trenches. They never wanted their soldiers to appeal to sort of have a defensive mind set. So there were dug out that there were just a few people below ground usually for officers and most of the soldiers and trenches would have dug a hole into the side of the trench or sheltered with the cape. So these soldiers began to move out and meanwhile many germans have survived. They hear the silence. The british bond has gone further to the german line some of these germans are manning their machinegun posts. And they just start cutting down the rows of british soldiers. Then the german artillery began firing into nomans land and basically puts up a wall of shellfire and in the first hour of the battle its estimated that the british incurred 30,000 casualties of which 10,000 workers deaf and just to put that into perspective, that is more than the amount of american servicemen killed in iraq and afghanistan combined. And that is in the first hour. The germans would have trained their machine guns right on those openings in the barbara fire that the british soldiers were going through. So many of the british soldiers lost their lives might as they got out of the trench and were clustered together. The germans also began firing into the british trenches which were packed with troops waiting to go over the top into the subsequent way and many british soldiers died or were wounded before they left the trenches. When someone died in the trench they would just throw them over the side. With a wounded in the trenches ostriches were coming to try to get them out and of course there were scenes where the soldiers were trying to move forward and the structures were going back and in some cases sort of at the top white they actually got out of the trenches and walked across the open ground because it was just soft to get someone to medical care. This is the italian coast its were basically light casualties would be seen in an ordinary basis daytoday basis. And these were obviously just very quickly overwhelmed. He would have one medical officer and a few orderlys. So most of the casualties were just get to the rear. And here i showed the Wounded Soldiers coming out of the trenches, the walking wounded as im showing here were basically told just to keep walking to the casualty station which could be miles behind the front so they helped each other get to the rear. The more serious the injured would be put on ambulances either motorized ambulances like this one here or the horse ambulances. Again there were many that were used in this sort of thing. This is a casualty clearing station where surgery could actually be done and they were done in these tents. But as you can imagine, the overflow of casualties meant that not everyone could be treated right away. So they began just laying out the wounded in the field and many died and attended unattended. Here i show a soldier going to the effect of one of the dead. The british would have dug the graves knowing that there would be casualties that wouldnt survive. And so, the book basically ends in the grave with the soldiers being buried. Their names would be painted on a temporary wooden cross just to know where the body was so after the war whenever they could figure out to do with those bodies. So, in net the on the first day of the somme i mentioned figures before but the totals, the british had 57,000 casualties of which 21,000 were fatalities. And so the casualty rate was basically one out of every two soldiers who was thrown into the battle that day. So you could see why the battle really hovers over the psyche of the british nation. The battle went on for another four and a half months and about a million or 200,000 people casualties on all sides because the french were also involved in putting the british, too so that gives you a brief overview and i would be happy to take your questions if you have any. Where did the battle over . The somme is in the eastern france basically. Its hard for me to describe exactly. I can probably point it out on the map but its the eastern part of france. The front line ran through belgium and into eastern france and then all the way to the swiss border. Yes. Your book illustrations call to mind a book sebastian. Have you read that book . I havent. You should. [laughter] there was an image that was conjured up and i think that you would find it well worth your time. Thank you for saying that you get its interesting because i spent some time in the Imperial War Museum looking at the Photo Archives and there were many great pictures but very few of the combat. And the way that i could get those images was by firstperson accounts of the battle but also some fictional accounts. There is a great book by frederick manning, for example and its like when you are reading prose you get images in your head. Basically what i did is i took those images floating in my head and tried to put them on paper. [inaudible] good. Definitely. You get a lot out of fiction in this firstperson accounts. I think we are using the microphone so if you want to come up. I have a pretty loud voice. Okay. Go ahead while we are waiting. What inspired you to write this or do this production . Im familiar with many of the photographs and the Imperial War Museum and the detail that you captor is exquisite. And your knowledge of the battle is equally so. And i would like to know what inspired you and how you ended up doing the work that youve done. How did that all come together . I spent a lot of time thinking about the battle in the First World War. I grew up in australia and in australia, world war i take years very heavily into the National Consciousness because of the landing. And i remember as a boy when they commemorate those landings, the clocks would stop and over the loudspeaker they would broadcast these stories from the First World War so its sort of in a your head in that way. But then i read about quite a bit as a boy and i had the thrill to the to little fascination with planes and the gas masks they were wearing it all looked so surreal and a sort of intrigued me that horrified me, too reading about nomans land and what that meant literally. You take the words literally and it means like no man can be in this land. So that sort of stuff just pulled me and. But at the same time when i began to realize that the army is just battered each other over and gained almost no ground, that sort of horrified me. In 1915 hundreds of thousands of people died and eight square miles were exchanged which is really shocking to think that people would be thrown into this sort of a furnace. Later on my interests went so far that i actually hitched out to the battlefield will spend about three days camped outside theyre just reading tombstones. Its very poignant because families were allowed to have an inscription on the tombstone of the departed person and what can you say and ten words and most were the same but every now and then something sort of stood out where someone tried to Say Something different. And i spend time doing the same thing so it stuck with me for a long time. And what happened as i was seeing new york and we both have an interest in world war i. This was 15 years ago and he said wouldnt it be great if you drew a panorama of the western front and i sort of forgot that he called me and now hes an editor at w. W. Norton and he said would you be interested and i thought about it and i said i dont want to do a panorama but i do want to do a narrative. And i thought about the tapestry and how that is a narrative and its also read in a way you read it from left to right it tells a story of the norman invasion of england and it shows the ships being built crossing the channel and the battle of hastings so to me i already have a template for the idea. I really appreciated your talk and the wonderful illustrations and drawings. Two things. I was curious about the sources for the pictures themselves and you will tell us if you havent already photographs, what ever and the sort of process of creating these wonderful illustrations you did. And second, last night i was looking at this calendar from this year and it was based on the part paintings from the civil war and this kind of made me think about people different but going up there went the other without body armor or anything like that but just any thoughts you might have about relating world war i in 1914 to the civil war 70 years before. To answer the second question first it seems like the civil war had many modern and what we would call modern aspect to it. There was trench warfare, bombardments, the siege of the citys. There were a lot of things that became familiar to a greater degree in the 20th century that we saw in the civil war. I think that is true. Now as far as the edges like i said i was at the Imperial War Museum looking for those sort of details you dont normally find in a book of photographs of world war i. You often see the same picture over and over again in the same books that i needed specific details of even looking at the blinders of this marvelous archive cade me ideas when there was a whole binder on you as you think okay so you start looking through and you realize how much they would bring up the mortar ammunition and all kind of things so it gave me an idea looking at those archives. The the other thing when i was in london i sat down with a world war i historian and he sort of answer a lot of questions i had about the small details and the questions you have when youre drawing you think how exactly do they go over the top. How would that have been done because i have seen images of people going up all at once which isnt really typical. Normally they would go up the ladder because they have to get through a little bit of barbwire. So they have to go out up over the top through certain curious and he explained a lot of that sort of stuff