We will remember them
Captain Alfred ‘Bill’ Bland of the 22nd Battalion Manchester Regiment (7th Manchester Pals) wrote to his wife on 26 June 1916:
It’s a marvellous war, with these thousands of miles of trench system. If only we can smash it all in, and get out in the open, the war might suddenly collapse this year. I am afraid this is too optimistic, though at the present time I am outwardly blatantly optimistic. The true English spirit of deliberate self-depression and self-deprecation has to be countered.
We are a most happy family, everybody doing his best to help everybody else, none of us expecting too much but all ready to do our part of the job, minimising the obstacles to the men, but considering them carefully enough in our thoughts and conversation.
By the time this reaches you, the sun out to be rising a fraction earlier upon us – a new vista, one hopes, fresh woods and pastures new, a slaughtered dragon, a monster laid low. Our Manchester lads are in good form today; burnt brown, eager and keen. I love ’em.
The Manchesters fought on the first day of the battle of the Somme on 1 July. Sgt R.H. Tawney saw Bland just before zero hour and wrote later: “My captain, a brave man and a good officer, came along and borrowed a spare watch from me. It was the last time I saw him.”
The 22nd Manchesters suffered almost 500 casualties that fateful day; eighteen officers and 472 other ranks killed, wounded or missing. The battalion ‘ceased to exist in any recognisable form’.
Captain Bland is buried in the Danzig Alley military cemetary, Mametz (below). His widow never remarried.
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