The Battle of the Somme raged between July 1st 1916 and November 18th 1916. An estimated 650,000 German soldiers were killed along with 420,000 British soldiers and 195.000 French.
Perhaps the significance of the name "Somme" is fading as the decades pass by but in my generation - born thirty to forty years after World War I, the very word "Somme" remains an irksome symbol of the futility and heartlessness of war.
Upon that terrible killing field, there were two young Yorkshiremen. As far as I know, they never met but such a meeting would have been possible. The man in the top picture is Wilfred Henry Jackson, a coal miner by trade who hailed from Rawmarsh in South Yorkshire. He was my maternal grandfather.
The man standing in the picture below was my paternal grandfather, Philip. He came from Malton in North Yorkshire. Though he was from a long line of agricultural workers, he himself worked on the railways.
Sadly, I never met either of these men. Wilfred and my grandmother separated and later divorced in the early nineteen thirties and Philip died just a month before I was born in 1953.
Yes it is true. Not all of the men who fought at The Battle of the Somme were killed. In fact the majority came home. But what had they seen? What had they heard? How had their lives been changed? Though physically unharmed, I wonder what price Wilfred and Philip had to pay in the years that followed The Somme.
Ailly-sur-Somme today
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/dtXmF8G
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