And some more from that thread.

Steve recently posted some thoughts on the Somme.
I find I have a book on my shelves on that subject by military historian Malcolm Brown.
The famous historian Richard Holmes said of it in The Times Literary Supplement, "If you can buy only one book on the Somme, it should be Malcolm Brown's powerful and scholarly account."

From the foreword.
"The character of the Somme fighting is seen as so appalling and the losses it entailed so unimaginably huge that decent civilised people find themselves, as it were, angrily demanding that it should be called off, for the sake of the wretched victims duped into fighting it.
The advantage of researching what the alleged victims wrote at the time is that they don't seem to have seen things that way. Even those who clearly deplored the brutal, inhuman aspects of the Somme - and there are not a few of that persuasion in this book - believed that there was no option other than that of carrying on with the fighting. They might not like the practice, but there was little argument with the principle. After all, the Germans were occupying French and Belgian soil and had to be removed."

He quotes Charles Carrington who wrote the "classic" A Subaltern's War in 1929. "The Somme battle raised the morale of the British Army. Although we did not win a decisive victory there was what matters most, a definite and growing sense of superiority over the enemy. man to man....We were quite sure that we had the Germans beat: next spring we would deliver the knock-out blow."

Prof. Dr. Gary Sheffield in the interview I mentioned last week.

How about your view of the most decisive battle?

"I would argue that the single most decisive battle came two years earlier, on the Somme."
http://www.historynet.com/interview-with-military-historian-gary-sheffield.htm