THE SOMME
THE DAY AFTER…

Extract from “Andy Symington: Tyrone’s Most Wanted Man Vol 1: The Somme”

I can't imagine the air of melancholy and depression that descended over the Somme on July 2 when the killing paused and both sides drew breath to consider what had happened. And what they had created. The visual will have far exceeded Dante’s inferno with bodies everywhere in a mangle of broken trenches, severed limbs and gorging rats. Add the odour of rotting flesh peppered with the smell of excrement from bowel movements that accompany sudden death. Exhausted Tommies and Bosch staring in mute witness at the indignity of Death.

Most torturous of all- the sound! The sounds of wailing wounded drifting in from No Man’s Land. Too dangerous to reach them after the frenzy, they left them to lie, beg and cry. Many called for their mothers as their life ebbed into the shellholes and they made the lonely transition from son to statistic. Others would scream in agony. Such was the aggregation of noises, like a packed football stadium, it was impossible to pick out individual sounds as the cacophony synthesised into a single unearthly whine. An eerie, unsettling sound, persisting before dwindling into the chalk of the Somme and the silence of Eternity.