General JC Campbell, VC, addresses 137th Brigade from the entrance to the Riqueval Tunnel near Bellicourt, France, 2 October 1918 © Imperial War Museums
The battlefields of the Somme are little more than an hour’s drive from Calais, one reason why so many of those who set out on the sombre tour of the memorials are British. After all, the seven-day bombardment which preceded the 1st July 1916 assault on the German lines—the worst day in the history of the British army—could be heard in Kent and in Hampstead. Memoirs are full of accounts of British soldiers on leave being stricken to silence, transported so quickly back to the world of armchairs, newspapers, hot meals, and a family utterly uncomprehending of the lice, disease and constant fear of shells of those in the trenches.
Ahead of next year’s centenary of the start of the war, and the four years of commemorations which will follow, the understated but well-established memorial trail (the “Circuit de Souvenir”) which loops across the 450 miles of the Western Front, is preparing for a swell of visitors. The high chalk downs which rise above the River Somme are now farmed into neat, 10-acre fields of wheat, but the slopes are punctuated with clusters of white crosses at odd angles, soldiers buried where they fell; many-fingered signposts, adorned with red poppy symbols, point the way to the hundreds of cemeteries from the war, some up dirt farm tracks. Those who run the ceremony at the Menin Gate at Ypres in Flanders, where every evening at 8pm since 1928 the Last Post has been sounded, think that thousands may assemble over the next few summers.
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Bronwen Maddox will be in conversation with Jeremy Paxman on Tuesday 29th October, 7pm.
