Battle of the Somme: Royals at Somme centenary commemoration

YEREVAN, JULY 1, ARMENPRESS. Thousands of people, including members of the Royal Family, are at a ceremony in France to mark the centenary of the start of the Battle of the Somme, reports BBC.

The Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry are at the Thiepval Memorial for the event.

It follows a nationwide two-minute silence at 07:28 BST that marked when the battle began on 1 July 1916.

More than a million men were killed and wounded on all sides in the WW1 battle.

The Battle of the Somme, one of World War One's bloodiest, was fought in northern France and lasted five months, with the British suffering almost 60,000 casualties on the first day alone.

The British and French armies fought the Germans in a brutal battle of attrition on a 15-mile front.

At the ceremony, Prince Charles gave a reading from The Old Front Line by John Masefield who visited the Somme in 1917 and recounted the horrors of the battlefield.

This was followed by the hymn Abide With Me.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, The Most Reverend Justin Welby, said in a prayer: "On this day we remember all those caught up by the Battle on the Somme; those who faced the terrible waste and devastation, those who fought against all the odds, who endured the clinging mud and squalor of the trenches"

At a vigil in France on Thursday, the Duke of Cambridge paid tribute to the fallen soldiers, saying "we lost the flower of a generation".

At an early-morning ceremony at the Lochnagar crater, which was created by an explosion at the start of the battle in La Boiselle, France, a rocket was fired to simulate the artillery fire.

This was followed by whistles to symbolise those that were blown 100 years ago as men scrambled from the trenches.

Ahead of the two-minute silence in the UK, the King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery fired guns from Parliament Square for 100 seconds to mark the 100 years since the battle began.

Across the country and at the vigil sites at Westminster Abbey, Edinburgh Castle, the Somme Heritage Centre in County Down, the Welsh National War Memorial in Cardiff, as well as in France, the silence was observed.