The Bradford Pals by Ralph N Hudson Fourth edition

THIRTY-SEVEN years ago, in 1977, Bradford Central Library published Ralph N Hudson’s illustrated history of the Bradford Pals, principally the 16th and 18th Battalions of the West Yorkshire Regiment, famed for going over the top on the first morning of the massacre of the Somme in 1916.

Each battalion consisted of about 1,000 men, ten per cent of whom were held in reserve. Hundreds of men from the two battalions were dispatched across no-man’s land, each man carrying up to 90 lbs of kit, at walking pace. Behind them were military policemen with guns: “The men were told that ‘battle police’ had been ordered to shoot anyone who refused to leave the trench at zero hour. George Morgan remembered the anger of the men of the all-volunteer battalion at such a suggestion...”

Only the commanding officer Field Marshal Douglas Haig seems to have been surprised at the resulting slaughter as the Germans mowed down, atomised or injured nearly 60,000 men, killing almost a third of them in less than 24 hours.

That terrible battle was to devour the lives of hundreds of thousands of men (and boys) over the next five months. Many believe that all but a handful of the 16th and 18th Battalions were destroyed.

The names of the Pals’ fatalities, men and officers, fill 18 pages of the book, laid out in more readable format than in the 1993 second edition: there are 867 of them, by no means all of them born in Bradford. They also came from Darwin, Derby, Huddersfield, Newcastle, Pontefract and other places.

The common assumption, mistaking casualties for fatalities, that the Pals were annihilated that sunny Saturday morning of July 1 is not true - as post-war photographs of march-past ceremonies in Bradford testify.

The chapter on the Somme, like other sections of the revised edition, contains additional photographs showing what happens when flesh and blood comes into contact with fragmenting steel and explosives.

Air-pressure-changing shock waves from repeated detonations account for the vacancy in the faces those walking back from the front line.

The 16th and 18th Battalions were part of the 93rd infantry brigade that formed part of VIII Corps commanded by Lieutenant-General Sir A G Hunter-Weston. On the eve of the attack he had gone round the ranks assuring them that the Germans in the trenches facing them had been blown to bits by the five-day artillery bombardment.

Staff officers had plotted the battle like the scenes of a drama, with men moving forward towards preconceived objectives in four ‘bounds’. The July 1 Battle Order for the 93rd Brigade is produced in facsimile in the last 15 of the book’s 208 pages - 46 pages longer than the last edition.

Other insightful documentary evidence in this short history includes seven pages of court martial accounts. The British shot 307 men for various infringements of the military code. Those who weren’t shot were tortured - crucified with ropes to the wheels of wagons for hours, in some instances for a day or more. This was known as Field Punishment Number 1.

How much of this will be officially remembered on the anniversary of the Armistice? Not much, I suspect. Nor will the consequences of World War 1 that we are still living with – principally the botched settlement in the Middle East.