100 years ago today Inconceivable horror with 20,000 British and Commonwealth dead on the first day of the battle and around a million British, French and German, dead by the end of the battle.
 
Kiplings “Dead Statesman” from his “Epitaphs of War” comes to mind.
 
I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

Indeed Glyn. We cannot begin to imagine what they went through. After a week of bombarding the German defences the Allies thought it would be a matter of walking through and mopping up. How wrong they were, and what must the 2nd wave of the attack have gone through, seeing their friends hanging on the barbed wire.
 
My grandfather, Sidney Evans (Queen Victoria Rifles) was at Ypres (or 'Wipers' as the Tommies called it), and was mustard-gassed. Sent home but suffered terribly from what we'd now call PTSD. I can just barely remember him, he came to visit every 2 weeks on the bus from the 'mental hospital' in Gloucester, but died when I was 17.

My grandfather was lucky, as a wheelwright with the Royal Flying Corps and later the Royal Naval Air Service he missed the worst horrors.
 
In the Second World War he was recalled to the RAF and evacuated at Dunkirk.
 
Other relations spent the First World War minesweeping using sailing trawlers!