Battle of the Somme Quotes

More Americans are buried in France than in any country in the world except our own—the result of the casualties of World War I and World War II—over 60 thousand.

[Describing World War I:] A short cleansing thunderstorm.

I actually love history. I've devoured book after book of stories from World War I and World War II. They're really two sections of world history that really interest me. I knew very extensively a lot about World War I.

Beaumont-Hamel sits within a thousand acres of French agriculture. The trenches are under this blanket of grass. In the 1920s, a park was established here and trees from Newfoundland imported to encircle the battlefield so you get the feeling of being within a copse of woods.

I'm a bit embarrassed about how little I know about the First World War. I didn't even know that tanks were used in it.

Today the Somme is a peaceful but sullen place, unforgetting and unforgiving. ... To wander now over the fields destined to extrude their rusty metal fragments for centuries is to appreciate in the most intimate way the permanent reverberations of July, 1916. When the air is damp you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley.

I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?'

World War One is an important part of Ireland's multi-layered history during which tens of thousands Irish people lost their lives.

The stories from World War I are worse than anything I have ever read.

In Britain and Europe, no event is less forgotten than World War I, or 'The Great War,' as it was called until 1939.

Brits, Indians, Frenchmen and Belgians fought side by side in the trenches of the Somme and on the fields of Ypres.

We have in our heads a pretty well-defined narrative of the First World War, and there are certain events that are obviously key.

Aig [F.-M. Sir Douglas Haig] 'e don't say much; 'e don't, so to say, say nothin'; but what 'e don't say don't mean nothin', not 'arf. But when 'e do say something--my Gawd!

The fantastic thing about the memorial to the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont-Hamel is that it's one of the rare examples where they've preserved a battlefield more or less as it was. You can see all the trenches, where the British were, where the Germans lined up.