Why?
Well, this day has seen its share of disasters. For example,...
...it was on this day that the Battle of Abrittus was fought in 251 between the Roman Empire and the Goths. Fought in what is now Bulgaria, the Roman army was lead by the Emperor Decius and his son, Herenius Etruscus, were both killed. The new Roman Emperor, Trebionanus Gallus, had to conclude a hasty peace treaty under extreme duress which resulted in Rome paying tribute to the Goths. Contemprorary historians rated the defeat as one of worst, even worse than the disaster of Teutonborg Forrest.
Speeding forward a thousand years, in 1520, this was the day that Cortes decided to retreat out of Tenochtitlan (modern day Mexico City). Cortes had arrived in Tenochtitlan eight months earlier with a little over 500, largely Castillan, Conquistadores and his native allies. Together, they had held the Aztec monarch captive, Moctezuma. He had been effectively the ruler of the Aztec empire. After defeating an attempt by his superior, Navarez, the subdue and wrest control away from him, he had increased the number of Europeans under his command to approximately 1,200.
However, while he was away dealing with Navarez's forces, he had left a trusted subordinate in charge of Tenochtitlan. Pedro de Alvarado had heard news, from his native allies, that the Aztecs were conducting a religious festival in preparation for an attack on the Castilians. Whether this was true, or whether Alvarado was in fact the crazy that some have suggested, is irrelevant. The result was the death of thousands of Azetecs. Their temple defiled. The people humiliated by the hundred of so men left on Alvarado.
When Cortes returned, he found the formerly pacified city in full rebellion. The Aztec nobility and the people were no longer willing to listen to Cortes' mouthpiece, Moctezuma. When Cortes ordered him to calm his people, he was hit with a stone while calling out to them.
For more than a week, Cortes and his men would sally out into the streets. His heavily armored Castilians, backed by their cannon, would mete out death in a fashion completely foreign to the Aztecs. Some have estimated that for each Castilian who was captured and later sacrified by the Aztecs, hundreds of Aztecs were killed or wounded. Realizing that in the end, the numbers were against him, Cortes resolved that he had to break out of the city so that he could regroup and try and retake the city. On the night of June 30/July 1, 1520, with his Tlaxcalan allies, he lead his men as quietly as possibly to the Tacuba Causeway.
To prevent him from using this way out, the Aztecs had cut the causeway. But knowing this, Cortes had brought bridging equipment to help him slip away in the night. Unfortunately, they were spotted by an Aztec sentry. Soon, Cortes, his men, and their allies were surrounded in a bloody street fight. Ladened down with armor, weapons, and treasure, the Castillans were easy targets to catch, but hard to kill. The head of the column was able to make it across the causeway, but the rear third was cutoff and overwhelmed. Order broke down, and what had started as an orderly maneuver turned into a desperate rout. As Victor Davis Hanson writes in his book, Carnage and Culture, "Fewer than half the Castilians and Tlaxcalans finally stumbled onto shore. What saved them from seeming annihilation was the near manic determination of Cortes himself. Far from panicking, Cortes quickly organized in Tlacopan what was left of his little army..." Those who survived the escape from the Aztec capital would refer to the night as La Noche Triste.
Then, perhaps the saddest July 1 of all took place in 1916. For eight days, British Artillery had been pounding a 25 mile section of German trenches with 1,500 artillery pieces near the Somme River in north-eastern France. Watching the bombardment was the New Army of the British Empire, waiting for the order to go over the top.
In every sense of the word, the British Empire's army was new. Britain had started the war with the smallest army of the major combatants of the First World War. At first, the British Expeditionary Force consisted of six infantry divisions and one cavalry division, approximately 100,000 men deployed to the continent. All were volunteers. On the average, they had a little over three years of experience. The senior NCOs and senior officers had been blooded along the Northwest-Frontier, in the Sudan, and in the South African War. It was light on artillery, having opted for mobile light field artillery and neglecting heavy artillery. It possessed machine guns, but failed to develop a doctrine to make full use of it. It's power lay in the rifle training. Infantry and cavalry alike had been trained with the Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifle. Both accuracy and rate of fire (15 rounds a minute was expected when the command "rapid fire" was given) had been emphasized.
Unfortunately, the B.E.F. was sent to fight on the continent against the massive German army. The quality of the B.E.F. was overwhelmed by the numbers of the German Army. At the battles of Mons, Le Cateau, and the Marne it gave a good account of itself, disrupting the Schlieffen Plan. In the race to the sea, they prevented the German Army from outflanking the Allies. At the Battle of the Ypres, the old British Army died stopped the final German attempt to breakthrough and drive to either the Channel or Paris.
For the next year, the France shouldered the burden while the British Empire turned its massive resources to creating a new army. In fact, that was what they were called. Even as the B.E.F. was sacrificing itself on the Western Front, the new minister of war, Lord Kitchner, had issued a call for volunteers. Between August 1914 and January 1915, approximately 1 million men volunteered for the British Army. Units were also raised for Imperial service in the Dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Even South Africa and Newfoundland raised units for service on the Western Front. Although Britain had begun the war with a professional army, the heads of British war effort believed that this could not be reproduced with the Kitchner Armies.
As a consequence of this, they were trained to a different standard and with a different doctrine. Although rifle training was continued, gone was the same emphasis on rate and accuracy. Fire and movement tactics and decentralized control, which the British Army had spent the previous decade learning, were abandoned. Instead, all manuevers were to be rigidly controlled by headquarters. In the Dominion forces, where Kitchner had less control, the latter problems were not as pronounced.
In effect, the British New Armies which began taking up positions in the Allied trenches looked like British Army troops, carried British Army weapons, and sounded like British Army troops. But to the few surviving Old Contemptibles, it was a complete foreign entity.
To prepare for its first major operation, the troops were taken out of the line and walked through the operation. Literally. They would start in a taped off area, instructed how long to wait till the artillery bombardment was completed and then walked in formation over the ground to the objective.
It was believed that the eight days of artillery fire would destroy the German fortifications. That the wire would be cut. That the German machine gun positions would be wrecked.
As the barrage shifted to strike at German positions behind the front lines, thirteen British Divisions started to go over the top at 7:30 am. Among them was a company of the 8th East Surreys of Captain Nevill. Each of his four platoons, in addition to its regular gear, was equipped with footballs to dribble across no-man's land.
Captain Nevill, two footballs, and nearly 60,000 other British Imperial troops failed to return at the end of the day. The Germans held most of the positions, losing approximately 8,000.
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