{"id":12049,"date":"2013-08-04T09:59:48","date_gmt":"2013-08-04T08:59:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=12049"},"modified":"2013-08-04T18:02:06","modified_gmt":"2013-08-04T17:02:06","slug":"the-battles-of-verdun-and-the-somme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=12049","title":{"rendered":"The Battles of Verdun and the Somme"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I explained in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=11807\">this posting<\/a>, for my recent birthday some friends gave me the box set of the groundbreaking\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Great_War_(documentary)\">1964 BBC series on &#8220;The Great War&#8221;<\/a>. There are 26 episodes and I have now viewed 15.<\/p>\n<p>The most recent episodes that I have watched cover two battles that involved casualties that were so huge as to be barely comprehensible.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Battle_of_Verdun\">Battle of Verdun<\/a>\u00a0lasted from February &#8211; December 1916. It was fought between French and German armies and the number of those killed and injured is now thought to be almost one million.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Battle_of_the_Somme\">Battle of the Somme<\/a> took place from July &#8211; November 1916. It was a conflict between British &amp; French armies and that of the Germans. The number killed and injured was over one million, making it one of the bloodiest conflicts in history.<\/p>\n<p>In each case, the Allies &#8216;won&#8217; the battle but very little land changed hands and the war itself was far from over. This vast slaughter was not in the distant past but just one century ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I explained in this posting, for my recent birthday some friends gave me the box set of the groundbreaking\u00a01964 BBC series on &#8220;The Great War&#8221;. There are 26 episodes and I have now viewed 15. The most recent episodes that I have watched cover two battles that involved casualties that were so huge as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12049"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12065,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12049\/revisions\/12065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}