It seems appropriate, in the year that launches so much commemoration of WW1, that we make at least one visit ourselves to the battlefields of the Somme.
So, travel with me if you will between gently rolling French fields, along tree lined roads and beside little woods, all peaceful now but home to 165 military cemeteries maintained ‘in perpetuity’ by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. These range in size from a ‘concentration cemetery’ housing over 7000 graves (Serre Road No.2) to a simple gathering of 72 stones within a shoulder high wall. (Luke Copse, Puisieux).
The first type tells us starkly of the enormity of war. The second, equally moving, graves dappled perhaps by the rays of evening sun passing through trees, reminds us that each stone commemorates a fellow human being. For, faced with so few we can pause beside some of these; see the man or boy, Colonel beside Private, now buried there. Perhaps we can picture the families they must have left behind as we absorb the personal inscriptions requested by relatives, most of whom would never get to see the spot where a loved one lay. ‘Will some kind hand in a foreign land/place a flower on my son’s grave’ – (Foncquevillers).
For maximum appreciation we need to feel the soil beneath our feet, mostly chalky here, rich with flints; soil which for those now at rest beneath it mostly became mud, once green-clad but churned into a grey wasteland, vegetation replaced by shattered timber and wire and worse. Having stepped down from our tour bus we may sense some incongruity in the present situation, born of our ease of travel and communication. Shortly we are stood amongst a group of graves, said to be only a few hundred yards from the site where in fierce battle these same men died (and where one victim, a doctor, won a Victoria Cross). We have come here on a swift motor coach after an easy ferry crossing perhaps. In modern terms we are just an eight-hour comfortable ride away from hearth and home.
For the troops their time here meant a long march followed by weeks, months even, in a cramped, often wet and bitterly cold world with the chief distraction being the terrifying call to go ‘over the top’ and there perchance to die. A further incongruity; it is a clear sunny July day and suddenly from far, far above, we hear the call of a skylark, a black speck barely visible against the glare of the sky. This, a very distant relative of some earlier bird, a sudden reminder both then and now, of England and of peace.
Wanting to re-create for ourselves something of the ever-present tension that must have accompanied life at the Front we travel on, to Vimy Ridge. Although not itself within the Somme district, it offers ‘preserved trenches’, both British and German, their most striking characteristic being that they are/were but yards apart. We walk along duckboards, between sandbagged walls, past scaling ladders and entrances to dugouts (precise simulations though in concrete now).
We can hear the chatter of those in the opposing trenches and they can doubtless hear us. Peer over the top and we shall see them peering back perhaps. But today we are safe. Today, we shall not be shot.
Out of the real, the non-concrete, battlefields hard evidence of their past is still coming to light, 100 years on. Farmers still plough up shell casings and the like, sometimes live ammunition even. So now, homeward bound, we speed by the occasional gateway where such evidence lies, left in small piles for attention.
If you wish to replicate closer to home the scale and something of the atmosphere of the larger cemeteries of which I have been talking, you might visit the CWGC plot within Harrogate General Cemetery, Yorkshire. Here lie no less than 800 airmen, row on row, killed on aircraft returning to Yorkshire Air Stations during WW2. Stood here at dusk, with names, ranks and dates made invisible on stones just like those above, one might once again be in some corner of a foreign field...
John Pearson is a former Chair of SOF Trustees.