![\"Somme2\"](\"https:\/\/hcsblogdotorg.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/07\/somme2.jpg\")
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One\u00a0hundred years ago Friday, as the last shells of a week-long bombardment\u00a0crept off into the fields of northern France, British Army Capt. William\u00a0P. Nevill kicked a football into no-man\u2019s land.<\/p>\n
It was a few minutes after 7:30 am on July 1, 1916, and one of the bloodiest engagements in the history of civilization \u2014 the Battle of the Somme \u2014 had just begun.<\/p>\n
About 110,000 men spread across a 13-mile stretch of front attacked that day. By July 2, 60,000 would be dead or wounded \u2014 stretched lifeless over fields of barbed wire or\u00a0calling out from the depths of shell craters.<\/p>\n
Nevill was one of those men. A company commander with the 8th East Surrey Regiment, his story and the story of his company\u2019s four footballs are chronicled in historian Paul Fussell\u2019s seminal work, \u201cThe Great War and Modern Memory,<\/a>\u201d and a website<\/a> dedicated to Surrey county\u2019s past. A small corner of history, it is a painful reminder of the Great War\u2019s cost and the generation it nearly eradicated.<\/p>\n Prior to the Somme, Nevill had been home in\u00a0London on leave and bought four footballs \u2014 one for each platoon in his company. He offered a prize for the first group that got a ball to the German front line. Fussell writes that kicking a football toward the enemy was a way of showing \u201csporting spirit\u201d and was first done at the Battle of Loos in 1915.<\/p>\n