The popular tendency to view the Somme as a specifically British experience not only obscures the French contribution to what was intended to be a joint offensive, but also the wider context of coalition warfare.

In 1916 Britain was still the junior military partner to France and Russia. Some British politicians had hoped to avoid committing a large army to the Western Front altogether and even the Secretary of State for War, Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, had assumed that the brunt of the continental war would fall on France and Russia until the moment ‘when France is getting into rather low water, and Germany is beginning to feel the pinch’. The intention was to ensure that Britain became the strongest partner in the coalition in order to be able to impose its own peace terms on enemy and ally alike for those who were allies might not always remain so. What went wrong with such calculations were the heavy losses suffered by the French and Russians in 1914-15. Indeed, the French and Russians were understandably not prepared to wait indefinitely for the British army to arrive when their national territory remained in German hands and their manpower resources were depleted. Thus, the British offensive at Loos in September 1915 was mounted for the political purpose of sustaining allied morale, Kitchener remarking that ‘unfortunately we have to make war as we must, and not as we should like to’.

By April 1916, most British policy-makers were reluctantly convinced that the war might end in either indecisive peace or possibly even German victory if they did not participate fully in the co-ordinated offensives on the Western, Eastern and Italian fronts to wear down German reserves that had been planned at the Chantilly Conference between 6 and 8 December 1915. The Somme was chosen as a battlefield precisely because this was where the British and French sectors of the front lines met. Nonetheless, Anglo-French strategy was a compromise between the desire of the French Commander-in-Chief, Joseph Joffre, that the British carry out an attritional blow before the French launched the decisive attack in the West and the desire of the new British Commander-in-Chief, Douglas Haig, to maintain operational independence by attacking in Flanders.

By the time the Somme opened, the French had been heavily committed to the defence of Verdun since 21 February 1916. That offensive, in turn, reflected the inter-connection of the western and eastern fronts for the Germans. The Chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, had long concluded that a decisive victory was no longer possible and was prepared to countenance seeking terms with Russia because he believed France and, especially, Britain represented the greater threat to German interests. In the West, he would then seek a result through a strategy of military attrition. By contrast, the two leading German commanders in the East, Paul von Hindenburg and his chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff, still believed a decisive victory attainable there. Falkenhayn conceived Verdun as a means of striking at the French not in the expectation of a breakthrough but of ‘bleeding them white’. With the French exhausted, Falkenhayn assumed the British would be forced into a premature offensive of their own, allowing him to blunt this in turn before launching his own counter-offensive to force both to sue for peace.

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