Over The Top

Over The Top

Nearly twenty thousand Tommies lost in a single day.

Originally shared by Timothy Street

"See that little stream—we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it—a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation. … This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. … All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love."
Tender Is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36674451

The Battle of the Somme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Somme
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-36674451

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