Many crawled in; many badly wounded, others shell-shocked. Two of the latter were quite mad (one had taken off hall his clothes), and fired at their own trenches whenever anyone showed himself.

From an account given by Major G.V Goodliffe's on the British attack towards Beaumont Hamel on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

BoB as tweets 10/?

my mom doesnt like the word Piss bc its crass but the fact of the matter is that when our cat shoots a perfectly horizontal beam of urine hard as fuck straight over the top of the litter box she does not Pee. she Pisses

Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

society if tori amos björk and pj harvey had done their own boygenius.

yes complete with kissing each other for fun onstage.

Under the conditions of this campaign no attack has any chance of succeeding without a large numerical superiority. At least 4 or 5 to 1, and one must also have the effective support of a large number of guns, provided with a great quantity of ammunition of the right kind.
With these conditions it is possible to gain ground at any given place but that is not sufficient to break the line, force the Germans to withdraw, or obtain a decisive victory.
Unless the attack succeeds on a large front at once, the subsequent fighting develops into a desperate struggle for villages, networks of trenches, fortified points, and so on, and the progress made is so slow that the Germans are able to bring up local reserves, and even reserves from forces in front of other parts of the line many miles away, by train, and by motor transport.
The attack in the same way is obliged to bring up every available man to attack and to relieve the men who have been attacking.
In consequence a situation is produced by which you have a great assembly of troops in the immediate area where the attacks are being made, and a line held comparatively lightly in other places.
This would produce a favourable opportunity for the Allies to attack on a large scale elsewhere, and two or three such attacks delivered simultaneously at the present time would probably achieve the object of “breaking the line” and forcing the Germans to retire.

An extract from a letter Major John Grant, a staff officer on the headquarters of the British 36 Corps, wrote to his father in law Lord Rosebury 11 June 1915.

This is really interesting to me because what we've got here, less than a year into the war, is Grant clearly identifying the military problem facing everyone in the war, and then explaining how the allies ended up solving in it in 1918.

Grant clearly had good insight and in letters as early as March 1915 is already saying the war was one defined by attrition and would thus go on for years. Prescient ideas, but as a major it's not easy to push them up the chain of command. And there's the whole issue of not having an army or industry capable of carrying out those ideas.

British soldiers from the VIII Corps use the French Brocage for cover as they fire on German positions during Operation Epsom - 26th/30th June 1944