On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, a young Cecil Arthur Lewis was sent aloft in a Morane Parasol with No. 3 Squadron to observe British troop movements — a mission that placed him not above the war but inside its most terrifying theatre. Ordered to keep clear of La Boisselle because enormous mines were due to be exploded, Lewis nevertheless watched from some distance as earth heaved in a column 'higher and higher to almost four thousand feet' and felt his aircraft struck by lumps of mud hurled into the sky by the blast. The scene he later described in Sagittarius Rising and in BBC oral history recordings captured the surreal violence of artillery warfare: shells and howitzer rounds turning in flight, aircraft buffeted by shock-waves, and the constant, numbing knowledge that friends and fellow pilots were being killed below.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1910s
Witness to the Somme: Mud, Mines and the Deadly Air of 1 July 1916
Cecil Arthur Lewis / 1910s
On the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, a young Cecil Arthur Lewis was sent aloft in a Morane Parasol with No. 3 Squadron to observe British troop movements — a mission that placed him not above the war but inside its most terrifying theatre. Ordered to keep clear of La Boisselle because enormous mines were due to be exploded, Lewis nevertheless watched from some distance as earth heaved in a column 'higher and higher to almost four thousand feet' and felt his aircraft struck by lumps of mud hurled into the sky by the blast. The scene he later described in Sagittarius Rising and in BBC oral history recordings captured the surreal violence of artillery warfare: shells and howitzer rounds turning in flight, aircraft buffeted by shock-waves, and the constant, numbing knowledge that friends and fellow pilots were being killed below.
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