LIONS led by donkeys” was the scathing, but entirely accurate, verdict of historians on the judgement of the British generals who forced hundreds of thousands of young soldiers to their death through utter incompetence, and the most bone-headed strategies known to military history.

East Lancashire had — and still has — every reason to be angry about these dolts.

In the battle for the Somme in June 1916, for example, few battalions lost more men more quickly than the “Accrington Pals”, of the East Lancashire Regiment.

Half of this battalion was recruited from Accrington itself; the majority of the remainder from Burnley, Blackburn and Chorley.

The Pals’ orders were to go “over the top” across No Man’s Land to attack the German front line after they had been subject to a heavy artillery bombardment.

Monumental errors had been made in the planning and execution of this attack.

The most fundamental, by the commanders-in-chief of the French and British armies, Joffre and Haig, was to select an area for the attack where the Germans were able to construct deep underground shelters, incredibly resistance to shelling, and with some of the German lines on higher well fortified ground.

On the morning of 30th June 1916 720 Pals took part in the assault.

These East Lancashire lads were mown down by wave after wave of machine gun and rifle fire, and grenade attacks — 584 were killed, wounded, or declared missing in action.

For East Lancashire it was the single greatest trauma of that war.

British casualties as a whole on that fateful day alone totalled an incredible 60,000.

During the four years of the war nearly one million UK service personnel and civilians died, and another 1.6 million of the military were wounded, many never properly to recover.

All told, 18.5 million people on both sides died in a war justified as “the war to end all wars”.

The question still remains as to why the politicians and the generals got it quite so wrong.

One answer is to do with the lack of scrutiny of their decisions.

For all that most men had the vote (though no women) the UK was a highly deferential society where decisions were handed down.

Britain had been lulled into an extraordinary sense of its own omnipotence, with the greatest Empire the world had ever seen.

Parliament reflected this. There was no occasion where, as now, those responsible for making decisions in respect of war were constantly put under questioning; no daily casualty announcements; and crucially no 24 hour news broadcasting instantaneously of the horrors of the front, and no inquests into military deaths.

War is by its nature the most uncertain of human activities. It subjects both people and machines to intense levels of stress, violence, depravity and deprivation.

Errors will always happen.

But before anyone joins in the chorus of complaints about a “human rights culture”, it is worth remembering that, if in the first world war there had been the regard for the value of human life we have today, and the level of scrutiny of decisions leading to a loss of life, the barbaric and relentless waste on the killing fields of the Somme and the whole of northern Europe could not have continued unabated for as long as it did — and that, maybe — the Accrington Pals could have returned in one piece to be pals into the old age they never saw.