6/20: 24 Brit soldiers

[Slithy_Tove]

Originally posted by CyclopONE
I'd wouldn't think that they are all from the same town. Imagine going through war with a group of men.
-Cyc

Lord Kitchener imagined just that, and the British public loved the idea. History knows them as the 'Pals Battalions', or sometimes 'Chums'. They were groups of men recruited from communities, clubs, and trade associations, who trained together, deployed together, fought together, and often died together. See: http://www.granadalearning.com/yitm/...christmas.html, 'The Pals Battalions' near the bottom of the page, or http://www.eebo.freeserve.co.uk/chums.htm on the 'Grimsby Chums'. (Latter page has midi music that can't be turned off.) The Chums were at Arras, and lost 420 dead. Maybe these are some of them. But they could easily be another Pals Battalion.

{Edited in later: Damn, I just read the original story on Yahoo, and these <i>were</i> the Grimsby's, or at least three of them definitely were: they wore 10th Lincoln shoulder patches, which was the Grimsby Chums' unit.}

Just a bunch of dead together doesn't mean they were killed deliberately as a group, after having been taken prisoner. Losses in trench warfare in WWI were huge, and often simultaneous. Machine guns were new at that time. Sometimes a battalion would go over the top, directly into machine gun fire, and be mowed down, to the man. It took the tacticians a while to figure out how to deal with this kind of warfare. Eventually they did. There's a good discussion of the horrors of the Battle of the Somme, and the kind of tactics that ultimately ended trench warfare in John Keegan's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140048979/o/qid=993111812/sr=2-1/ref=aps_sr_b_1_1/103-7896707-9346265"><i>The Face of Battle</i></a>, a fascinating book.

These are very poignant pictures, and reminders of a colorful and horrible moment in military history. Arms linked in death...

[Edited by Slithy_Tove on 06-21-2001 at 04:39 AM]