One hundred years ago Friday, as the last shells of a week-long bombardment crept off into the fields of northern France, British Army Capt. William P. Nevill kicked a football into no-man’s land.

It was a few minutes after 7:30 am on July 1, 1916, and one of the bloodiest engagements in the history of civilization — the Battle of the Somme — had just begun.

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 — stretched lifeless over fields of barbed wire or calling out from the depths of shell craters.

Nevill was one of those men. A company commander with the 8th East Surrey Regiment, his story and the story of his company’s four footballs are chronicled in historian Paul Fussell’s seminal work, “The Great War and Modern Memory,” and a website dedicated to Surrey county’s past. A small corner of history, it is a painful reminder of the Great War’s cost and the generation it nearly eradicated.

Prior to the Somme, Nevill had been home in London on leave and bought four footballs — 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 “sporting spirit” and was first done at the Battle of Loos in 1915.

Read the Remainder at Washington Post