Sir Julian Lewis

Over a century after the appalling losses on the western front, historians still debate whether any alternatives existed. Some blame political intrigue and poor generalship; others emphasise technology, with the battlefield dominated by interlocking fields of fire, which ensured that slowly advancing troops would be mown down by machine guns before making any worthwhile inroads into the enemy’s trenches. Minor advances that were occasionally achieved were usually reversed by counter-attacks or simply absorbed into a new, static confrontation a short distance from the original one. We heard echoes of some of those controversies, with the pendulum ascribing guilt and responsibility swinging first one way, then another, in the very perceptive speech of my hon. Friend the Member for Dumfries and Galloway (John Cooper). I was first influenced by a work of fiction—a rather more in-depth work of fiction than the immensely entertaining television series to which he alluded. It was a book by a Sheffield journalist and writer called John Harris, entitled “Covenant with Death” and published in 1961. In 1961, the people who had fought on the Somme were still living, and John Harris interviewed many of them. He says in the introduction to his great novel that although the characters are fictitious, the real people will recognise many of the incidents that he describes. The story is based on the Sheffield City Battalion. On 1 July 1916, the battalion sent 700 men over the top. The majority of them—nearly 500 men—became casualties, half of whom were killed, and only four of their officers survived the battle.