At break of day

the long version

On the 1 July, 1913, meet four very different men leading four very different lives: Frank has secured an apprenticeship with Debenhams in London's Regent Street. Now all that he needs to crown his progress is a bicycle and a wife. Benedict is an organist at Gloucester cathedral, with fellow-pupils Ivor Gurney and Ivor Novello. Benedict has synaesthesia - he hears in colour - is uncertain about God, women and his oldest friend, Tom. Jean-Batiste is the fifteen-year-old of a Picardy widow. He makes plans for the day when he will row up-river to the coast and then to England. Meanwhile, he runs errands for the philandering local doctor, Vignon, whose stories he only half believes. Harry is the heir to a baronetcy. Estranged from his family, he has a successful life in New York and is engaged to be married. After eight years abroad he considers himself an American but has never quite persuaded himself to change nationality. 1 July 1916. Exactly three years later, it is just after seven in the morning, there are a few seconds of peace as the guns on the Somme fall silent and larks soar, singing over the trenches. What follows is a day of utter catastrophe in which British casualties number nearly 60,000. A horror that would have been unimaginable in pre-war England, France and America, becomes a day of reckoning for Frank, Benedict, Jean-Batiste and Harry.