"The Big Push" was meant to break the stalemate of trench warfare on the Western Front, offer relief to the French at Verdun, and get the war moving again. However, the attack plan, a compromise reached by British commander-in-chief Douglas Haig and his army commander Henry Rawlinson, was fatally flawed. As 60,000 British soldiers went "over the top" they were met by a devastating barrage of German machine guns and artillery that should by then have been destroyed by the preliminary British barrage.

By the end of the day over 19,240 men were dead, with another 35,493 wounded. A byword for the futility of war, the Somme marked the end of chivalrous notions of combat, and loudly heralded the mechanised slaughter of modern warfare.