The Battle of the Somme was immortalized even before the fighting had ceased. The intensive British and French assault along the chalk ridges of the Somme River Valley began on July 1, 1916; scarcely two months later, a silent film shot within and behind the British trenches screened in London cinemas. The Somme, like so many other battles of the Great War, was also commemorated in real time by such trench-line poets as Alan Seeger, who composed what became, in short order, their own epitaphs (I have a rendezvous with Death) as German shells shook the wet earth beneath them (...)
