BBC News
Thousands of people, including members of the Royal Family, have attended a ceremony in France to mark the centenary of the Battle of the Somme.
The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry were at the Thiepval Memorial for the event. Earlier, a UK-wide two-minute silence at 07:28 BST marked the start of the World War One battle on 1 July 1916.
More than a million men were killed or wounded on all sides at the Somme. The Battle of the Somme, one of WW1's bloodiest, was fought in northern France and lasted five months, with the British suffering almost 60,000 casualties on the first day alone. The British and French armies fought the Germans in a brutal battle of attrition on a 15-mile front.
Prince Charles gave a reading from The Old Front Line by John Masefield who visited the Somme in 1917 and recounted the horrors of the battlefield at the Thiepval Memorial ceremony, close to the battlefields of the Somme, near Amiens in the north of France.
This was followed by the hymn Abide With Me.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, The Most Reverend Justin Welby, said in a prayer: "On this day we remember all those caught up by the Battle on the Somme; those who faced the terrible waste and devastation, those who fought against all the odds, who endured the clinging mud and squalor of the trenches."
At a vigil in France on Thursday evening, the Duke of Cambridge paid tribute to the fallen soldiers, saying "we lost the flower of a generation".
PA
PA
At an early-morning ceremony at the Lochnagar crater, which was created by an explosion at the start of the battle in La Boiselle, a rocket was fired to simulate the artillery fire.
This was followed by whistles to symbolise those that were blown a century ago as men scrambled from the trenches.
Ahead of the two-minute silence in the UK, the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery fired guns from Parliament Square for 100 seconds to mark the 100 years since the battle began.
Across the country and at the vigil sites at Westminster Abbey, Edinburgh Castle, the Somme Heritage Centre in County Down, the Welsh National War Memorial in Cardiff, as well as in France, the silence was observed.
In France
AFP/GETTY IMAGES
By Robert Hall, BBC News correspondent
Across the rolling Somme landscape, the whistles shrilled again; a century ago they sent tens of thousands out of their trenches, and across No Man's Land.
Today they were sounded on the lip of the Lochnagar crater, 300ft wide and 70 deep, the result of a British attempt to breach German defences.
Sixty thousand pounds of explosive sent debris 4,000ft into the air; no-one knows how many were killed.
At the cross of remembrance, a carpet of wreaths was laid, by representatives from Britain, France and Germany, along with families and local children.
In the base of the crater, beside a giant poppy, a lone bugler sounded the last post as clouds of poppies fluttered down on the breeze.
The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall have joined leaders from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland at a service at the Ulster Tower, a memorial to the men of the 36th (Ulster) Division in Thiepval.
The royal couple will then attend another ceremony at the preserved trenches at Newfoundland Park Memorial in Beaumont-Hamel, France, to mark the Newfoundlanders' part in the battle at 15:30 BST.
The Duchess of Cornwall will lay a wreath at the grave of her great-uncle, Captain Harry Cubitt, who was killed on the Somme in September 1916 while serving with the Coldstream Guards.
He was the eldest, and the first, of three brothers to die serving on the Western Front.
The 100th anniversary will be marked by Germany in Fricourt, France, where 40,000 Germans are buried.
And in Manchester, a wreath laying ceremony was held at the Cenotaph in St Peter's Square ahead of a national service of commemoration at the cathedral from 15:00 BST and a concert at 19:30.
PA
Meanwhile, men dressed as World War One soldiers have been spotted in railway stations and on UK streets handing out cards detailing casualties of the Battle of the Somme.
The hashtag #wearehere, which features on the cards, is trending on Twitter as pictures of the tribute are shared.
MAR DIXON
At the Westminster Abbey service on Thursday, the Queen was joined by the Duke of Edinburgh as she laid flowers at the Grave of the Unknown Warrior.
The tomb holds an unidentified British soldier killed on a European battlefield, brought back and buried in the abbey to honour the unknown dead of the war.
The Bishop of London, the Right Reverend Dr Richard Chartres, said the legacy should be that people worked towards reconciliation to ensure children never endured what the soldiers of WW1 faced.
Society must strive to reach an accord and reject "those who would stir up hatred and division," he said.
The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry attended a vigil at the Thiepval Memorial on Thursday evening.
Prince William spoke of European governments "including our own" who failed to "prevent the catastrophe of world war".
"We lost the flower of a generation; and in the years to come it sometimes seemed that with them a sense of vital optimism had disappeared forever from British life," he said.
"It was in many ways the saddest day in the long story of our nation."
AFP/GETTY IMAGES
GETTY IMAGES
Prince Harry also spoke at the event, reading the poem Before Action, by Lieutenant WN Hodgson of the 9th Battalion the Devonshire Regiment, who wrote it before he was killed in action on the first day of the battle.
Before the vigil, the three royals climbed to the top of the huge, newly renovated monument designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens to view the battlefield.
The memorial bears the names of more than 70,000 British and South African soldiers who have no known grave.
Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones joined personnel from the Army, Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force for the start of a vigil at Llandaff Cathedral in Cardiff.
"Those who fought bravely for our futures should never be forgotten," he said.
In Scotland, an overnight vigil was held at the National War Memorial.
And in Northern Ireland, a vigil was held at the Somme Museum near Newtownards, County Down. A guard of honour, including serving soldiers, was present throughout the night.
GETTY IMAGESThe Battle of the Somme
- Began on 1 July 1916 and was fought along a 15-mile front near the River Somme in northern France
- 19,240 British soldiers died on the first day - the bloodiest day in the history of the British army
- The British captured just three square miles of territory on the first day
- At the end of hostilities, five months later, the British had advanced just seven miles and failed to break the German defence
- In total, there were more than a million dead and wounded on all sides, including 420,000 British, about 200,000 from France and an estimated 465,000 from Germany
The Battle of the Somme was intended to achieve a decisive victory for the British and French against Germany's forces. The British army was forced to play a larger than intended role after the German attack on the French at Verdun in February 1916.
World War One finally ended in November 1918.
PA
No comments:
Post a Comment