The First of July

the long version

Follows the lives of four very different men, Frank, Benedict, Jean-Batiste, and Harry, as their fates converge on the most terrible and destructive day of World War I, the first day of the Battle of the Somme. On July 1st, 1913, four very different men are leading four very different lives. Exactly three years later, it is just after seven in the morning, and there are a few seconds of peace as the guns on the Somme fall silent and larks soar across the battlefield, singing as they fly over the trenches. What follows is a day of catastrophe in which Allied casualties number almost one hundred thousand. A horror that would have been unimaginable in pre-war Europe and England becomes a day of reckoning, where their lives will change forever, for Frank, Benedict, Jean-Batiste, and Harry. Here the author captures the dangerously romantic atmosphere of war-torn Europe. -- From book jacket.