1st July 1916
At 7:28am on the 1st July 1916, the majority of the battalion were waiting to advance, either lying face down on the edge of no mans land or in the trenches. The previous week had seen heavy bombardment of the German lines, the primary objective of which was to destroy the wire protecting the trenches. To the right of the battalion were 60,000 other men. The Sheffield City Battalion were on the northern most point of the Somme offensive and their goal was to take the town of Serre 1000 meters ahead of them. This town was to be a kind of pivot point on which the rest of the offensive would turn, sweeping the Germans northwards allowing an advance to the south.
In order to take the town of Serre, the plan was to have the first line of attack walk across no-mans land under the cover of a smoke screen, and take the forward most German trenches, take out the machine guns and allow successive waves of men to push forward into Serre.
At 7:30am the whistles blew, the men struggled to their feet under the wait of their backpacks, walked forward and were mown down in a hail of sweeping machine gun fire. The next wave of attack then climbed out of the trences walked forward into no mans land over the bodies of the first wave and were mown down in a hail of sweeping machine gun fire. It was a pattern that was to be repeated over and over again all across the Somme front. Those that somehow made it as far as the trenches found that the wire was impenetrable. A few went to the right to were the Acrington Pals were, and found a way into the trenches but on realising that they could go no further then had to make their way back across no-mans land to the British trenches.
And that was that. As John Harris put it in the book Covenant with Death: "Two years in the making. Ten minutes in the destroying. That was our history".
The remains of the battalion carried, before eventually being disbanded in 1918, having never recovered from the first day of The Somme. In total, there were 58,000 British casualties that day. When the battle finally ended in November the total had reached 420,000, with a further 195,000 French troops and 650,000 German troops.