Sir Martin Gilbert put an article up at The Cutting Edge News. In it, he remembers sitting next to Prof. Tolkien at Oxford forty-four years ago, and Tolkien talking of his memories of World War I and the Somme.

Gilbert has published a book titled The Somme: the Heroism and Horror of War, and in this article claims that Prof. Tolkien was the first eye-witness account he heard of the battle.