Twelve Days on the Somme: A Memoir of the Trenches, 1916

By Sidney Rogerson and Malcolm Brown

A joint operation between Britain and France in 1916, the Battle of the Somme was an attempt to gain territory and dent Germany's military strength. By the end of the action, very little ground had been won: the Allied Forces had made just 12 km. For this slight gain, more than a million lives were lost.

There were more than 400,000 British, 200,000 French, and 500,000 German casualties during the fighting. Twelve Days on the Somme is a memoir of the last spell of frontline duty performed by the 2nd Battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment.

Written by Sidney Rogerson, a young officer in B Company, it gives an extraordinarily frank and often moving account of what it was really like to fight through one of the most notorious battles of the First World War.

Its special message, however, is that, contrary to received assumptions and the popular works of writers like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, men could face up to the terrible ordeal such a battle presented with resilience, good humor and without loss of morale.

This is a classic work whose reprinting is long overdue. This edition includes a new introduction by Malcolm Brown and a Foreword by Rogerson's son Commander Jeremy Rogerson.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Aug 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781784385958

Reviews for Twelve Days on the Somme

[john257hopper · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This memoir was written in 1933 by a former company commander on the western front in the First World War. He served there at the end of the Somme campaign in November 1916, so avoided the terrible first day (which many people take to be the whole battle, but it was a four months campaign). It is very well written and gives a full and well balanced picture of life in the trenches, depicting the camaraderie and sheer boredom and frustration of long periods of inactivity, as well as the horrors (not that many of these given the stage of the campaign covered). The author explicitly positions his memoir in opposition to the "war is unremitting hell" narrative that by this time had come to dominate discourse about the Great War, and indeed has done so until recent years. Worth a read in this year of the Somme centenary.

[landlocked54 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If you have any interest in World War I, this book is a must read. Most folks tend to read the novels centering around The Great War like ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT, JOHNNY GOT HIS GUN, and JOURNEY'S END. What sets this book apart from these novels is this is the diary of British officer Sidney Rogerson and the twelve days he spent on The Somme during the Winter of 1916. Although Rogerson was not in the trenches of The Somme that fateful day in July, 1916, he gives us a vivid portrayal of what the conditions were like during the time he was on the front line and near the front.