On the 28th July 1918 the great powers of Europe went to war in one of the most tragic and bloody events in all of history. The main wars on the western front were between Britain, the ruler of the worlds’ largest empire covering over a quarter of the full land mass, and a new country called Germany. The reason that Britain was in the war was because it was upholding some treaties it had made some years before such as the treaty of London which said that Britain would protect Belgium if she was ever invaded, which was the first thing that Germany did.
Britain with France made another treaty and Russia this was called the Triple Entente it was the first military alliance made by Britain after it got out of splendid isolation. The armies first form of fighting was by using the cavalry but know with the invention of the machine guns these were quickly mowed down and in this way millions of people lost their lives. The only way for the armies to have some type of protection from the machine guns was to dig trenches. Someone even said that the most important weapon the soldiers had was their shovel.
In the following years many waves of charges were made over the top of No Mans Land and nearly every single one was shot down and died. This type of warfare had never ever been seen by the army and some people claimed that it wasn’t war of strength it was a war of attrition, that is that the winner would be the person with more people and supplies. In between the trenches was an area called No Mans Land, this was an area in which if a person went in they would never come out of alive unless they were extremely lucky. After a while the Allies started producing films which showed the greatness of the Allies at war and so make more people want to join up.
When people saw the amount of death and destruction there was it caused the exact opposite effect and the amount of people joining the army got lower and lower. Soon the British armies started putting up posters advertising the last push. This last push was going to take place at a place called Somme. This again made people want to join the battle and claim their moment of glory.
The amount of firepower that was going to be used was enormous.
