…..the department takes its name from the river which waters it. 

“Lethargically” one feels like adding.  For the Somme is a slow-moving river, winding its weed-choked way through a peat-bottomed valley below beech woods and bare chalk downland.  The countryside, too, is slow-moving, under the gaze of the traveller who takes one of the long Roman roads which radiate north-east, east, and south-east from Amiens.  Low plateaux and ridges, separated by the shallow valleys of the Somme’s tributaries, the Aire, Ancre, Noye, Avre, Buce, succeed each other monotonously, devoid of hedges and almost of woodland, thickly populated, intensely cultivated.  Between the Noye and the Somme itself, in the plain of Santerre, the land is completely flat and yields the most characteristic of the department’s crops, sugar beet, dull to contemplate, heavy to work, rich to harvest.  In September the roads of the Santerre are slippery with mud (“Attention! – Betteraves”) when the clay-smeared beet are hauled to the little refineries whose tall, single chimneys mark the villages of the plain; in October the refinery owners summon their neighbours to shoot partridge and hare among the furrows and sit down in the evening a hundred strong to eat the bag; in November enormous ploughs emerge from machinery sheds to be dragged on cables between stationery traction engines across the mile-wide fields.  The pace of life on the Somme is as slow as its rivers, as regular as its natural features. 

- John Keegan, The Face of Battle, 1976

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