Bombardment

The Battle of the Somme shows you how most battles of the First World War were fought.

It began on the Ist of July 1916, with an eight day bombardment, known as 'softening up', which meant that the British heavy guns fired almost without pause day and night for eight days.
They fired nearly 1.7 million shells. The idea was that they would'lay a carpet of shells', as it was called, and completely smash the German trenches. However, it was not easy to fire shells accurately and so they did not succeed in doing this. Of course, the Germans knew what was going to happen and they shelled back.