ABSTRACT
July 1, 1916, dawned sunny and hot in Flanders, with a thick haze of smoke and dust from the Allied artillery barrage that had been blasting the German lines for seven straight days. The deafening roar of cannon fire heralded the beginning of the Somme offensive, the baptism by fire of Britain's New Armies. The million volunteers of this force had flocked to the colors to replace the original, professional British Expeditionary Force (BEF), the “Old Contemptibles” who had been all but wiped out in the bloody combat of 1914–1915. In the early morning hours of that day, Britain's mostly untested infantry battalions waited to advance, crammed shoulder to shoulder in the first-line trenches. Officers and NCOs gave last-minute instructions and motivational speeches to their soldiers, in all likelihood partly to gear up the men and partly to prepare themselves for the experience that lay ahead. In one of those battalions, the 8th Battalion, East Surrey Regiment, those preparations took a somewhat different form: Captain W.P. Neville, a company commander in the East Surreys, had set up a contest among his four platoons. He issued each platoon a football, purchased on his last London leave, and offered a prize to the first platoon to kick its football into the German front lines after going “over the top.” A survivor of that day's fighting recalled zero hour:
As the gun-fire died away I saw an infantryman climb onto the parapet into No-Man's Land, beckoning the others to follow. As he did so, he kicked off a football. A good kick. The ball rose and traveled towards the German lines. That seemed to be the signal to advance.
