July 1st 1916--a surgical catastrophe.

On the morning of July 1st 1916, after five days of intense bombardment, the British Fourth Army under General Sir Henry Rawlinson, with a ration strength of 519,324 men, supported by two divisions of the Third Army, under General Sir Edward Allenby, advanced into what was to be known hereafter as the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Within the first 60 minutes of that attack, those troops sustained some 30,000 casualties, dead, dying and wounded, and that number would be almost doubled by the end of the day.