The Somme is a river in northern France, and also the name of the flat farming area around it. The word is heavy for British people, because of what happened there in 1916, during World War I. The Battle of the Somme lasted about five months. On the very first day, 1 July 1916, the British army lost around 57,000 men killed or wounded — the worst single day in British army history. After all those months, the front line had moved only a few miles. So when someone says 'the Somme' in English, they usually are not talking about water at all; they mean pointless slaughter, young men sent to walk into machine guns, a whole generation lost for almost nothing. You will meet it in poems, in history lessons, and on Remembrance Day in November. The land there today is quiet farmland, with white gravestones in neat rows and a huge memorial at Thiepval carrying the names of more than 72,000 men whose bodies were never found. The word is usually said with 'the' in front of it, and it rhymes with 'from'.