One hundred and ten years ago, the Battle of the Somme began—a conflict in which Europe turned itself into raw material, and human beings into ammunition.
The Morning That Would Not End
It is 7:30 a.m. on July 1, 1916, and the whistles of British non-commissioned officers are shrilling through the trenches. For a week, one and a half million shells had pounded the German positions; now, the men—armed with nothing more than walking sticks—were to stroll across the shattered landscape toward the barbed-wire entanglements that the bombardment was supposed to have cut to pieces. At least, that is what the orders said. What actually happened was quite different. The German infantry had survived the shelling in underground dugouts—many of them driven fifteen meters deep into the chalky soil of Picardy. When the barrage fell silent, the riflemen climbed up, trained their machine guns on No Man’s Land, and mowed down anything that approached. Each man carried a good thirty kilograms of equipment—spades, sandbags, ammunition, wire cutters, daily rations—because the plan was that no one would ever need to return for supplies. That very fact made moving forward impossible. By the evening of that day, the British Army had suffered 57,470 casualties, 19,240 of whom were dead. It was—and remains—the bloodiest day in British military history; the losses exceeded those of the Crimean War and the Boer War combined, with some battalions losing over 700 out of 800 men in just four hours. What began that morning would last 141 days, finally ending in November when the rain turned the clay into a black sludge through which even horses could no longer pass. Territorial gain: twelve kilometers.
The "Pals" and the Arithmetic of Ruin
It was not soldiers in the traditional sense who died that morning. Accountants from Accrington, miners from Leeds, railway workers from Hull, teachers and bakers from Sheffield, Tyneside, and Glasgow—these were the men who perished. Lord Kitchener’s concept of "Pals battalions" had envisioned grouping volunteers from the same towns and factories into the same units. Those who enlisted together were to serve together—a promise of social solidarity that mobilized England’s provincial communities as never before. The strategists had not foreseen that this very promise would, in the span of a single morning, transform into a demographic catastrophe. In some Lancashire villages, every single son who had once played in the same schoolyard was killed. The Royal Newfoundland Regiment, deployed at Beaumont-Hamel, lost nearly 90 percent of its strength in less than half an hour. For that North Atlantic island, that half-hour marked a loss that could never be recouped. It was a day when entire streets, entire neighborhoods, and entire generations were extinguished at once. The sociology of this war—preserved in the sober tables of the War Graves Commission—later read like the topography of a plague epidemic: one district left almost unscathed, another depopulated. It would take the British decades to even begin to grasp this arithmetic of ruin. And it remained, above all, a private rather than a political scandal: the fact that what had proven its worth as a social bond—neighborhood, trade, camaraderie—was turned by industrial warfare into its own deadly delusion.
The War of Material and the Birth of a Term
The Somme was the first "war of material" in the technical sense that would later enter military history. The seven-day drumfire barrage consumed over one and a half million shells—yet left most German dugouts untouched, as a significant portion were duds and the rest consisted primarily of shrapnel rounds that did little damage to the barbed wire. In terms of scale, logistics, and machinery, it surpassed anything seen before; it was the battle in which warfare itself was transformed and acquired a new protagonist. No longer the general, no longer the soldier, but the shell, the machine gun, the limestone dugout, the barbed wire. On September 15, 1916, a new entity appeared on the battlefield at the Somme for the first time in the history of warfare: the tank. Forty-eight machines rolled toward the German trenches; a third broke down beforehand with snapped axles or overheated engines, yet those that did move forward heralded a future that no one could avert. That same summer, armies experimented with phosgene and mustard gas, with targeted barrage fire, and with the synchronization of artillery and infantry. Those who survived the war during this phase had experienced something that previously defied categorization: an encounter with a force that did not respond, did not hate, and did not rage, but simply functioned. It was the moment when the craft of war changed its form—shifting from a profession rooted in courage, loyalty, and honor to an industrial process defined by tonnage, fuel, and fuses. Those who grasped this wrote books.
Jünger’s Storm of Steel: An Aesthetics of Petrifaction
One of these men was Ernst Jünger. His regiment arrived at the Somme in late August 1916; while in the rest area at Combles—and having barely arrived—he was wounded on the eve of a British offensive. His platoon was later destroyed at Guillemont. In November, he suffered his third and, for the time being, most severe wound. From this experience, he wrote the book during the winter of 1918–19 that would make him famous: *In Stahlgewittern: Aus dem Tagebuch eines Stoßtruppführers* (*Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a Storm-Troop Leader*), published privately in 1920 and by Mittler & Sohn in 1922. A peculiar prose emerges here: terse, precise, and possessing an almost scientific sobriety—a diary of perception in which horror is not lamented but observed. Jünger writes—and this is the passage that would drive his critics to fury—that war had become something that does not shatter consciousness but sharpens it. "Literally not a blade of grass," he notes at Guillemont; "every millimeter churned up, the trees torn out, shredded, ground to mulch." And further: "Houses shot down, stones pulverized to dust. And everything filled with the dead, turned over a hundred times and torn apart anew." It is the language of a petrifaction that has become a method. Whoever writes in this way has turned himself into an observation machine—and senses that this may be the only way to preserve one’s sanity amidst industrial warfare. In *Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis* (1922) and later—more coolly and systematically—in *Der Arbeiter* (1932), Jünger would generalize this observation into a theory of the archetypal subject: one that does not suffer the machine but instead internalizes its logic.
Benjamin’s Diagnosis: The Silenced Returnees
It was precisely to these silenced figures that Walter Benjamin dedicated a famous sentence in his 1933 essay "Experience and Poverty." Looking back, he asked: what became of those who returned from the war? "Did people not return from the battlefield grown silent? Not richer—poorer in communicable experience." Soldiers, Benjamin writes, came home unable to tell their stories. They had experienced too much, and this very excess shattered the forms in which experience could be communicated at all. The generation that had once ridden horse-drawn trams to school now stood "under the open sky in a landscape where nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and in the center—amidst a force field of destructive currents and explosions—the tiny, frail human body." What Benjamin was identifying here was an epochal void. Experience in the old, venerable sense—the kind where grandfathers still had something to impart to their grandchildren—had been blown apart at the Somme, the Marne, and Verdun. What remained was a new kind of poverty of experience: not the poverty of one who has experienced nothing, but that of the survivor from whose grasp tradition has slipped away. From this, Benjamin drew—and therein lies the true scandal—not a lament, but a demand: for a "new, positive concept of barbarism" that would cast off bourgeois-humanist culture in order to make a fresh start within that poverty. It was a risky maneuver, the consequences of which would catch up with him seven years later in Portbou. Jünger and Benjamin write of the same rift, only from opposite shores.
Man as Material
In the language of military staffs, the men who lay motionless before the barbed-wire entanglements on July 1, 1916, were classified as "casualties." The word belongs to the realm of logistics, not mourning. It denotes a discrepancy between authorized and actual troop strength—a figure appearing in army reports alongside ammunition expenditure, shell tonnage, and daily rations. Here, the human being is no longer the bearer of a personal history but a component of a machine whose functioning is measured by the balance sheet. Hannah Arendt would later write that totalitarianism rendered human beings "superfluous"; the battles of attrition of the First World War had rehearsed this superfluity long before it became a systematic practice in the camps. When a shell does not ask whom it strikes, when a machine gun mows down men like a scythe through stalks, then the human being has indeed become the very "material" that general staffs tallied up so dispassionately. And this is no mere metaphor: the Somme and Verdun gave rise to terms that would persist in the language of industrial administration—attrition, consumption, capacity utilization. In truth, it was here that the modern world learned its grammar. A quarter of a century later, Heidegger would speak of the "Enframing" (*Ge-Stell*)—a mode of being that renders all entities available as a standing reserve—thereby leading his listeners, without explicitly acknowledging it, back to those muddy pits where the first spade-cut toward this state of availability had been made.
Remembrance as a Task
In Great Britain, the Somme remained what Verdun was for France: a wound in the national self-conception. Every July 1st, bells ring out in Newfoundland. Since 1932, Sir Edwin Lutyens’ memorial has stood at Thiepval—a colossal triumphal arch structure bearing the names of 72,000 soldiers whose bodies were never found. It is one of the century’s most peculiar structures: a triumphal monument devoid of triumph, an arch form celebrating nothing but the absence of celebration. It embodies a grief that defies conventional symbolism, for it knows not in whose name it ought to be commemorated. It was the poets who first broke the silence: Wilfred Owen, who fell just a week before the armistice; Siegfried Sassoon, who threw his medal into the Mersey; and Vera Brittain, who in her *Testament of Youth* mourned three dead men at once—her fiancé, her brother, and her best friend. In *The Face of Battle*, John Keegan demonstrated that the Somme only rose to become the dominant symbol of British war memory after 1960—as the generation of veterans aged, their sons and grandsons began to read, and skepticism regarding the imperial self-image took shape. Today, "the Somme" is a word that evokes a distinct sense of gravity in every English schoolchild—much like "Verdun" in France, or "Stalingrad" in Germany and Russia. It is a term that no longer holds the experience itself, yet must, for that very reason, bear the memory of it.
The Machine Does Not Fall Silent
What can we infer from this for our own time? Perhaps, first of all, this: that the question of how technology degrades human beings into mere material must be answered anew in every era. The drone hovering over the Donbas—registering a face during its automated approach to a target and destroying it in the same instant—is the latest relative of the machine gun on the Swabian Ridge. What has changed since 1916 is the refinement of the method, not its essence. What has not changed is that peculiar paralysis of speech Benjamin observed in the returning soldier: the fact that there are experiences which shatter the capacity for storytelling. Timothy Snyder has reminded us that every new war invents its own language, in which the dead are no longer called dead—"collateral damage," "target neutralization," "kinetic action." Anyone who speaks this language has not overcome Benjamin’s diagnosis but confirmed it. Perhaps the task facing the writer today is twofold. First: to respect the muteness in which trauma hides, and not to rush too quickly toward an edifying lesson. Second: to resist the urge to view technological progress as nothing but liberation. The war of matériel was a triumph of engineering, yet it was also the moment when Europe sealed its own doom. It was both. To conceive of the one without the other is to have learned nothing from the Somme. The 57,470 men who fell on a summer morning in 1916 left behind a question addressed to us: How much humanity can a machine withstand? And how much machine can a human being?
Sapere aude!
S.
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