As Sir Henry Rawlinson put it, "The country resembles Salisbury Plain, with large open rolling features.It is a great improvement on the flat muddy plains of Flanders." It also had the added bonus of not being the site of a previous defeat and therefore not being associated with failure, and it was the spot at which the French and the British armies joined, allowing the possibility of a joint attack.
`The drawbacks associated with the battlefield, though, were to prove costly. Because this part of the front had been a 'quiet sector' since 1914, the Germans had had almost two years to prepare their defences, and had done so extremely well. The soft subsoil allowed trenches to be dug to a depth of ten feet, and the dugouts within them in which the Germans were to shelter, to one of thirty feet. Furthermore, although it is true that there were no great impenetrable forests or formidable towns on the battlefield, there was a profusion of small scattered woods, villages and hamlets which were to become like fortresses which the British were unable to take without heavy losses. It was also true that despite the generally flat nature of the land, what rising ground there was was in German hands, giving them a clear view and more importantly a clear shot at any advance which might be made across no-man's-land.
`According to the plan which the British generals had devised, the main part of the attack was to have been the five-day bombardment of the German trenches. Through weight of shell, the British hoped to remove the enemy infantry, including the machine guns, allowing the infantry to walk across no-man's-land and occupy the vacant German positions. While this was fine in theory, the reality of what actually happened was rather different. The first problem was that although every spare artillery piece had been brought to the Somme, the vast majority of these guns were simply not powerful enough for the job of destroying the German positions.
