1916 was the tipping point of the ‘Great War’. During the course of 1914 and 1915 the war had been brutal and had seen national ambitions and efforts expand, but there was still the glimpse of a way back, a way out of it all. But 1916 changed everything. The huge battles fought on the eastern and western fronts cost so much, demanded so much that by the year’s end the war’s own internal logic overtook every player.

By Christmas 1916, no one could afford to walk away easily without it seeming like a betrayal of the sacrifices so painfully made. In turn, this demonic self-perpetuating motion demanded that each nation key itself up for even more effort, even more sacrifice and plan for a long, long war of unlimited commitment.

For Britain and its Empire, the year was, and is, dominated by one massive event, the Battle of the Somme fought between 1 July and 18 November. Units from across the empire took part in the great struggle which started on a blazing July day and ended in the freezing sleet and snow of a bitterly cold winter.

Designed to crash through German lines and end trench stalemate, the battle morphed into one of attrition with the British. Supported by the French, they launched assault after assault successively wresting small parcels of territory from the Germans.

During the course of the battle there were around 650,000 British and French casualties and 434,000 German casualties, meaning men who were killed, wounded or missing. Determining a victor at the time was controversial enough; military historians have debated the issue ever since, but the general consensus is that the immense effort represented an entente victory as it drew the German army into yet another battle – it was already fighting hard in the east and at Verdun – and it could ill afford this drain on its human and material resources.

Of course, just as the battle is not the preserve of military historians now, nor was it at the time something owned and compartmentalised by the soldiers who took part in it. An element sometimes lost when looking at historical events is that they cannot be neatly delineated and the military history of the Great War is a great example.

The Battle of the Somme was titanic on the ground ravaging the Picardy countryside, but the concussion waves rippling out from the sickening crash of each artillery shell reached every corner of Britain and its Empire. In other words, the military history is actually the key to a myriad of other histories unfolding hundreds of miles away from the trenches. Therefore using the military history in its rightful position as the essential skeleton of the conflict, we can branch out from it to explore the full effects and meanings of the Somme.

At its most basic level, the Somme meant Death stalked the streets of Britain more intently and continually than at any point since the war’s opening. With the deployment of Kitchener’s New Army and its famous ‘pals battalions’ of men drawn from the same streets, work place or clubs suffering dreadful losses, Britain experienced mass grief and mass mourning. At times it slipped into mass hysteria.

In the small Lancashire town of Accrington, rumours spread about the fate of their men. An awful mix of fear and foreboding took hold and the Mayor’s office was besieged by local women desperate for news. When it came it wasn’t as bad as some feared, but it was numbing nonetheless. The 11th East Lancashire battalion, the Accrington Pals, went into action with 720 men of whom 584 were made casualties within an hour or so on 1 July.

Across Britain, the blinds of mourning were drawn and stories of pride and sorrow were poured out in local newspapers as details emerged. Requiring a focus for their grief, people across Britain began erecting war shrines. These simple memorials took many forms, but a typical example was a triptych consisting of a central panel containing an image of the crucified Christ flanked by panels listing the dead on one side and those still serving on the other. Here people, especially women, laid flowers and said prayers either in memory of a loved one or as votive offering in the hope of protecting a loved one at the front.

Such rituals were part of a process of understanding and coming to terms with the battle being fought in France. The desire to understand what was happening along the Somme front was also partially met by the newspaper coverage local and national; but in August 1916, just as the shrines were mushrooming, a potent new method of mass communication brought the reality of war into the streets of Britain in the form of cinema and The Battle of the Somme film.

The film caused a sensation across Britain. Consisting of a vast collection of footage shot up and down the front during the final preparation stages for the battle and in the immediate aftermath of the first fighting, nothing like it had been seen before.

Somewhat ironically, the scene which gained the deepest reactions from audiences was the faked sequence of men clambering out of their trench and moving into no man’s land as if for the assault on the enemy lines. Totally unable to shoot such scenes in the real trenches due to the cumbersome cameras, reconstruction behind the lines was the only way of realising this crucial moment of the attack.

In the sequence on film, a man slips back injured or dead before he has even emerged from the trench and another is seen falling whilst still not clear of the British barbed wire. People cried out in cinemas as they were confronted with the face of battle. It is often believed that people understood nothing of the realities of the fighting fronts in the Great War; The Battle of the Somme film, no matter how imperfectly, certainly did not shy away from it. As with the war shrines, the military activities on the fighting front had a direct impact and corollary on the home front: the experience of one cannot be divorced from the other.

This symbiotic relationship was made very clear in the need to support the battle’s material needs. Above all else, the Great War was a gunner’s war. It was artillery that made men dig trenches and live a troglodyte existence in dugouts; it was artillery that smashed men’s bodies to pulp; it was artillery that turned no man’s land into a sea of mud; it was artillery that caused the terrifyingly large numbers of missing whose names were carved on the great memorials erected along the western front after the war.

Feeding the ‘monstrous anger of the guns’ demanded an industrial commitment on a gargantuan scale and in 1916 that burden was increasingly falling on women who were exhorted to come into the factories and help the war effort. Munitions production was dangerous, but lucrative, work for many young women urged on by propaganda to labour hard in order to bring their loved ones home more quickly: every shell made was another step towards victory.

Thus, the Battle of the Somme, like all the military engagements of the war, should be seen as the portion of the iceberg that can be seen above the waterline. Therefore, like all icebergs, there is an enormous weight immediately below it equally important, equally fascinating and utterly integral to the story that demands consideration and exploration.