“We must never forget the Somme, the muddy grave of so many who died in vain in 1916. On both sides, Allied and German, they will remain in history as victims of one of the most awful conflicts ever fought. No one won the Battle of the Somme, everyone was a loser. Whole towns and villages were wiped out because the British garrisons enlisted all from the same areas. 146,000 Allied soldiers died in the Battle of the Somme. It was a terrible tragedy and should never be repeated in reality. This is why we are doing the battle reenactment today, to show even a fraction of what it was like for those young men to fight and die in such tragic circumstances. To show the horror that those men had to endure in their short lives,” Elliot Mandlebrant, 21, one of the organisers for the battle reenactment told the Sun newspaper.
The trenches have already been built and revellers who have travelled to the field where the Somme will be recreated have prepared themselves for the mud and cold.
“I think it will be an experience. I will never know the utter fear of being ordered to go over the top knowing full well that the German machine guns will cut me and my fellow soldiers down like blades of grass, but to experience the mud will be a small fraction of what those soldiers had to go through,” Sally Tunstable, a student at Durham University told the Times.
