Return to the Somme

As the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme approaches, we walk part of the battlefield across the iconic Mash Valley, visit Ovillers Military Cemetery and walk through Ovillers village to the far end of the valley facing the Pozières Ridge.

Alf Razzell discusses the burial of the dead at Ovillers: A Game of Ghosts.

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Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_00 (00:02):
As the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme
approaches, we find ourselvesback in those dusty tracks of
Picardy, walking the ground atLa Boisselle, Mash Valley and
Ovalers, where the Battle of theSomme began more than a century
ago.
This episode of the Old FrontLine will go out a few days from

(00:26):
the annual commemoration of thefirst day of the Battle of the
Somme, the 1st of July.
That terrible day in 1916,almost that midpoint in the
Great War, when an army ofvolunteers, regular soldiers,
territorials and men of the newarmy, Kitchener's army, went
over the top on that perfectsummer's morning and walked into

(00:49):
machine gun oblivion.
It was the blackest day of theBritish Army, with over 57,000
casualties, of which nearly20,000 were killed in action or
died of wounds.
And that black, terrible daystarted a battle, a campaign
which came to symbolise theFirst World War for so many.

(01:12):
A battle of contrast, beginningin the sunshine of that July
morning and ending...
with a snowstorm in Novemberfour and a half months later as
the battle came to itsconclusion.
It's a battle that connects manyof us to that history, that
landscape, and those ordinarymen in extraordinary times who

(01:34):
were there during the Great War.
And at this time of year, mymind is often on the Somme, and
I'm sure that's true for many ofyou listening to this podcast
today.
There is always something aboutthe Somme for me, not just
because I once lived there, notjust because it was one of the

(01:56):
first battlefields of the GreatWar that I explored, but there's
something about the whole storyof the Somme, the men of the
Somme who marched there in 1916.
And, of course, so many of theveterans that I interviewed back
in the 1980s and 90s wereveterans of the Somme battle.

(02:16):
It was often a starting point inour conversation, often what led
me to their door, and somethingthat really, as a subject, the
Battle of the Somme, the eventsof 1916, that has kind of
consumed me ever since.
And when we visit that landscapeof the Somme, today more than a

(02:38):
century later, it has all thoselayers of history that we often
speak about in this podcast.
From the stories of those menand women and how it affected
them, through to the history ofregiments and brigades and
divisions.
through to how the landscapetoday weaves its way through the

(02:59):
journey of the past and theshadows of the past and how the
modern landscape its modernlayers affect what we find from
archaeology through to the ironharvest and of course a subject
again very dear to me thenatural world the birds and the
nature that we find on thatlandscape today that also echoes

(03:22):
to a past because the men inthose chalk cut trenches of the
Somme, they heard that birdsongtoo in 1916.
So as we approach thisanniversary of the Battle of the
Somme, I think it's time oncemore to return to those fields
in Picardy.

(03:43):
We've been there so often inthis podcast and we will
continue to do so.
The Somme sits in as we've said,at that kind of central point of
the Great War.
For A.J.P.
Taylor, that turning point fromthe old world to the new world.
And that idea for some writersthat idealism died on the Somme,
and for others it was a battlethat only strengthened their

(04:06):
resolve to see the fight to thefinish and to make that
sacrifice worth something.
A thousand years from now,historians say, will still be
arguing over the Battle of theSomme, its causes, its conduct,
what happened in those fields ofPicardy, what it meant to
generations then, what it meansto us now, and what it will mean

(04:30):
to those in the future.
But for us now, we once morestrap on our virtual walking
boots and we head to those dustylanes that take us back to
Picardy and across.
that landscape of the Battle ofthe Somme.

(04:55):
So where are we and what do weplan to see on this anniversary
episode looking at the Sommebattlefields?
We're standing on theAubert-Bapaume road with the
town of Albert behind us,Bapaume way ahead in the far
distance, unseen from wherewe're standing on the outskirts

(05:16):
of the village of La Boiselle.
We have two hills behind us, theTara and Usna Hills, which we've
discussed in some recentpodcasts, and we're on that
Albert-Bapaume road, which againwe've looked at in a recent
podcast episode.
And we're not going to walk itagain, but we are going to begin

(05:36):
here and look around to what wesee as we approach this village
of La Boiselle.
We're roughly at a kind of amidway point on the line of the
first day of the Battle of theSomme.
To the north at Gomercourt,where the diversionary attack
took place, then from Serre,down through all those villages,
from Beaumont-Hamel toChiappeval and beyond, to where

(06:00):
we're standing now, then acrossto our right, Fricourt and Mamet
and Montaubat, where our linesjoins, the British lines joined
with the French.
We're at that rough midwaypoint, and we're going to cut
through one of the valleys thatcame to characterise the
experience of the early phase ofthe Battle of the Somme, And

(06:21):
although this is close to the1st of July anniversary, we
won't just look at that one day.
We're going to look at somedifferent aspects of Somme
history in those first few weeksof the battle that connect us to
events of 109 years ago.
And what can we see from wherewe're standing just astride this
busy modern road?

(06:42):
Well ahead of us is a memorial,a memorial seat to the Tyneside
Scottish and the Tyneside Irish,battalions of the Northumberland
Fusiliers that formed twobrigades of the 34th Division
that attacked this ground justto the right of La Boiselle
where we're standing and justbehind us to our left on that

(07:03):
first day of the Battle of theSomme.
battalions that have been formedas part of the new army
Kitchener's army as it becameknown because of Lord
Kitchener's heavy hand in theraising of these battalions in
the early phase of the war hebeing one of those senior
commanders who did not believethe idea that the war would be
over by Christmas that it wouldbe a long conflict and they

(07:25):
would need to supplement theregulars and the territorials
with volunteers so he pushed forthe creation of this new army in
1914 wanting a hundred thousandor more men and by the end of
that year they got more than amillion of which these men from
Tyneside were just a part ofthat vast army that marched off

(07:46):
to fight in places like theWestern Front in 1915 and then
found themselves drawn into thefighting here on the Somme the
following year.
These two units characterisethose communities in Tyneside
around Newcastle from a Scottishbackground and from an Irish
background.
It was an area of massimmigration from people not just

(08:09):
from Scotland and Ireland butfrom all over the world.
It had one of Britain's blackcommunities, for example, and
there are photographs of menfrom the Tyneside battalions
showing black soldiers amongstthem.
So it was a very diversecommunity in all kinds of ways.
but to a degree polarised bythis Scottish and Irish identity

(08:31):
that then drew these men intothese battalions and brought
them out to the front line andhere at La Boiselle on the first
day of the Somme This becametheir anvil of sacrifice when so
many of them became casualties,killed, wounded and missing.
And many of the missing lay outon the fields around where we're

(08:52):
standing now in the old no man'sland for some time until they
could be properly buried,creating terrible additional
misery for the families of thosesoldiers wondering what their
fate had been.
For the Tyneside Brigades, thiswas their first mission action
and their last with thatcollective identity because the

(09:15):
scale of loss was so greatthough some of these men were
wounded and returned to thebattalions later in the war they
were never really as Tyneside asthey had been in the early part
of that conflict and it's quitea modest memorial in many ways a
stone seat with the badges ofthe two units with the harp of

(09:37):
the Tyneside Irish and and theSt Andrew's Cross and the Lion
Rampant of the TynesideScottish.
And when this memorial wasunveiled just a few years after
the war, it sat isolated on thissmashed landscape.
The battlefields of the Sommehad not really recovered at that
point, and there was white chalkas far as the eye could see.

(10:00):
The line of the Albert-BaponeRoad now recovered, and...
the beginnings of a new village.
as La Boisselle rose from theashes of destruction, that
destruction that had sufferedhere throughout the four years
of the First World War, from theearliest battles that took place

(10:21):
in the fields around it in 1914,when the French clashed with the
Germans, through to theunderground operations, the war
underground, the tunnelling thattook place here, with French
engineers and British engineerstunnelling under this landscape,
and of course German engineersdoing exact Exactly the same
thing on the other side of NoMan's Land, creating this

(10:44):
minefield of craters known asthe Glory Hole on this side of
the village of La Boisselle, andeventually, with the British and
tunnelling companies of theRoyal Engineers, the creation of
two vast mines that would beblown here on the first day of
the Battle of the Somme.
across to our right, the LochNaga Crater, named after the

(11:04):
trench where the tunnel began,Loch Naga Trench, positions that
had once been occupied by the51st Highland Division, who had
named a lot of the positions onthis part of the battlefield,
and the so-called Wysap Crater,which was just to the left of
the Albert Baphome Road,overlooking the neighbouring
valley.
And La Boiselle was reallydominated by two valleys either

(11:26):
side of the village, to theright, a long valley heading
back towards the next the nextvillage of Contal Maison where
there was a German sausageshaped observation balloon that
kept popping up to observe theAllied lines and that became
known as Sausage Valley and ifyou have a Sausage Valley you've
got to have a Mash Valley aswell and the valley to the left
hand side of the village fromwhere we're standing now the

(11:47):
northern side of La Boisellethat became Mash Valley and the
British lines Prior to that, theFrench lines weave their way
through and around and in frontof both of these valleys with
the Germans occupying thevillage and holding the high
ground beyond it and holding astrange position along the
Albert-Bapone Road where theycould look down into Mash Valley

(12:10):
to the north of the main villageitself.
So if we'd been standing here onthe first day of the Battle of
the Somme, we would have seenthese two huge eruptions over to
our right at roughly...
A two o'clock position wouldhave been the Lochmagar mine
exploding on the Germanpositions in the forward part of
their defences there and thenthe Weissach mine being exploded

(12:34):
in the German positions that ranalong the edge of the
Albert-Baphome road andpotentially looked down into
Mash Valley.
Both of those mines killedGerman soldiers.
The exact number I suspect wewill never know but it's in the
tens rather than the hundreds.
because these went off inforward positions and the

(12:55):
Germans kept most of theirtroops in reserve and support
line positions and wereunaffected by the explosion of
these two mines.
So all those months oftunnelling, all those probably
millions of man hours put intoit with the collective amount of
troops that had been brought into work on both those mining
projects, all of that resultedreally in minimal casualties for

(13:18):
the Germans.
And this became a lesson in theuse of these mines so that when
the big mining offensive tookplace at Messines in June of
1917, a different approach wasmade there.
Rather than blow the mines inthe forward position to take out
the frontline defences, you blowthem further into the German
defences to take out the biggestamount of the defenders.

(13:41):
Because if the trenches weredestroyed but the defenders were
still intact...
the end result was probablyalways going to be the same.
Men would come out of dugoutsthat had not been affected by
the explosion of a mine likethis, set up their weapons
teams, and mow down theattacking force in the open.
So that was a kind of lessonlearnt from the use of these two

(14:02):
great mines here.
And although today, Loch Lugaris the more famous one, in the
interwar period, when the roadthat we're standing on was the
main kind of conduit forpilgrims through these
battlefields, in that 20s and30s period in that interwar
period the Wysap mine was thebetter known one because it was

(14:25):
just astride this main road justup ahead of us to the left
beyond the village cemeterywhere there's some new build
houses now that weresubsequently built when the mine
crater was filled in which we'llcome to in a minute that is
where this crater was locatedAnd in the 20s and 30s, if you'd
come here as an individual,you'd have seen signs for it.
You'd have seen a gate to takeyou into the ground where the

(14:48):
crater was located.
And because it was just astridethe main road, just about every
battlefield tour that wentthrough this area in that 1920s,
30s period stopped here.
And there are probablythousands, tens of thousands of
postcards of it that were soldto pilgrims during that period
who came here.
Probably a little shop set up inthe village to do just that.

(15:10):
that or you could buy them inalbea and that continued for
many many years but once you getto the 1970s the number of
people making that pilgrimagemaking visits to the
battlefields was very very smalland that led to features on this
landscape this changingever-changing landscape
disappearing and amongst themthe ysat mine that was filled in

(15:34):
by the farmer who saw no onecoming here anymore.
The fence had collapsed, thegate had fallen off its hinges
and the whole site was overgrownbecause so few people came there
anymore.
So the crater was filled in andthat led to a threat to the
neighbouring crater on the otherside of the village, Loch Ngar

(15:55):
Crater, being filled in as welluntil Richard Dunning, an
English businessman, came there,passionate about the Great War,
saw an opportunity to save itAnd he did, thankfully, for
posterity.
And when he bought that craterin the 1970s, he could never
have known that by the time ofthe Great War centenary in 2016,

(16:17):
hundreds of thousands, if notmore than a million visitors,
came to see that site duringthat period.
Incredible, really.
And it's become...
A fixed part of the Sommeidentity, that culture of the
old front line that we oftentalk about, Loch Nagaal is very
much today a part of that.

(16:38):
And the importance of the YSATmine and how that was part of
the battlefield culture in the1920s and 30s, perhaps lesser
known, maybe even forgotten.
So from here we're going to headup past the memorial seat,
continue along the Albay-AbaponeRoad and then cut across to the

(16:59):
left and as we do so we'renearer to the site where the
YSAP mine was located and we cansee those modern houses there
they all went up in the early2000s the field itself where the
crater had been filled in satthere empty for a long long time
and you could see this chalkscar on the landscape where the
crater had once been and therewas talk of building for many

(17:23):
many years I mean who wouldbuild a house on the site of a
former mine crater buteventually I guess as collective
memory faded of what that sitewas people came along and got
building permission and builthouses there quite what the
foundations of those houses arelike who knows but they now
dwarf that site where that greatmine that huge crater once stood

(17:50):
and we're going to turn off nowto head to the next bit of our
battlefield walk which will takeus into mash valley coming off
the albert bapone road we take aminor road that goes roughly

(18:10):
north and goes past the moderncivilian cemetery the original
one was back where the tinesideseat is located that triangular
bit of ground was the pre-warcivil cemetery for the village
of la boisselle And part of thefront line went right through
there.
So it must have been pretty grimfor some German and French

(18:31):
soldiers in 1914 who were thefirst ones to dig their trenches
through that bit of ground rightthrough the middle of that
cemetery.
But the modern cemetery is alsoon the site of some of the
tunnels and the mine entrancesand I know this because Dominic
Xanadie who runs the Tommy Barup in Pozières went down these
in the late 70s early 80s and hestill has photographs on display

(18:55):
in the cafe which he took in thetunnels beneath this position
that led up towards the YSAPmine so that bit of the Somme
landscape deep beneath this siteis still there but not open to
the public and probably Thankyou very much.

(19:17):
come past that civil cemetery upinto what is essentially the
opening of mash valley and welook to our right we can see how
the ground cuts away across thisvalley it rises ahead of us and
to our right towards thecemetery we can see on the
slopes beyond that's oval asmilitary cemetery which we're
going to walk to and the furtherwe go up this track and we look

(19:40):
back towards the village we seehow where the village was
located and how the germanssighted their lines along the
edge of it running parallel tothe Albert Bapaume road gave
them a distinct advantage herethey could look down onto the
valley itself and the road thatwe're walking on very close to

(20:01):
the British front line meantthat any troops that came out of
here and advanced from any ofthe forward positions that cut
across a bit of an angle acrossthe valley at this point would
be seen by anyone in thoseGerman defences but of course it
didn't matter No one was goingto survive the bombardment.
No one was going to survive theexplosion of the great mines
here.

(20:21):
All of that would do its job.
and the German garrison would bedestroyed, and the units that
would attack here from the 8thDivision, which was a regular
division made up of units thathad been in the far-flung
corners of the British Empire in1914, brought back to Britain
and then formed into this newdivision, the 8th Division, and
then came across to France inNovember of 1914, occupied the

(20:44):
sector in northern France,fought in the Battle of
Neu-Chapelle, the first Britishoffensive of the war, in March
of 1915, and then in the Battleof Albers Ridge and the
diversionary attack for theBattle of Loos in September of
that year and then it moved downto the Somme and it was one of
those formations that served inthis sector in front of villages

(21:05):
like La Boiselle in those monthsnearly nine months leading up to
the Somme offensive in 1916 Sothe units within it and the
personnel within those units hadbeen very heavily involved in
the build-up to this offensive.
They'd worked on new trenches,they'd worked on strengthening
the British wire, they'd spenttime underground supporting the

(21:29):
tunnellers, either takingmaterial up to the mine face or
carrying out bags of spoil andchalk that would be scattered
further behind the lines inwoods or in quarries.
They'd seen the build-up to theoffensive in all kinds of
different ways with the hugeamount of artillery and these
were men, some of them, who'dfought in those battles of Neu

(21:50):
Chapelle and Albers Ridge in theoffensive of September 1915 and
had seen how some of those earlyengagements had been plagued by
lack of shells for the guns.
Here there was no shortage ofshells for artillery.
That was very clear on the dustyroads of Picardy in the lead up
to the Battle of the Somme.
Wherever there were guns, therewere massive stockpiles of

(22:11):
ammunition.
So perhaps they kind of feltthat there was an inevitability
about this battle in a way thatthey hadn't experienced in
previous offensives of the war.
Perhaps this really would be thebattle that defined the war,
ended the war, changed the war,and it would do probably some of
all of that in different ways,ways that they probably couldn't

(22:35):
imagine.
But not everyone saw thepossibility Others looked that
were clever soldiers that couldread a battlefield.
They looked at positions out onthat battlefield over which they
would have to advance.
They looked at the definition ofthe German line, the landscape
and how that might affect theoutcome of any attack that would

(22:56):
be made here.
And they weren't all convincedthat there would be success.
And one of those was thecommanding officer of the 2nd
Battalion of the MiddlesexRegiment, part of that 8th
Division, Lieutenant ColonelEdwin Sands.
He was a regular soldier, anexperienced soldier.
And he was one of those thatwhen he looked out into no man's

(23:18):
land from observation posts orhe'd filled glasses, when he
looked at the intelligencephotographs and the maps, he was
worried that the bombardment andthe mine and everything else
that was planned would simplynot be enough to destroy these
German defences.
And that if they went out intono man's land and the enemy was
still there...

(23:38):
It could be a bloodbath.
He relays those fears to hisbrigade commander, then his
divisional commander, but thesewere men who were buoyant from
the idea of success.
They too had seen the problemsof the battles of 1915 and saw
how the Somme was visiblydifferent in the way
preparations were being made andthe amount of manpower that was

(24:01):
being brought in for this battlewas also unprecedented.
And Sands was...
really advised to not rock theboat, to carry on, and he was a
man who'd never refused an orderin his life.
So at zero hour, 7.30am, on thefirst day of the Battle of the
Somme, the 1st of July 1916, heled his men out into no man's

(24:23):
land as the whistles were blown,and they walked down those
slopes through the grass of MashValley, straight into his worst
fears.
A garrison, a defensive garrisonthat had survived the
bombardment, that had survivedthe explosion of the Wysat mine
and laid down heavy fire intohis battalion and all of the

(24:43):
other battalions that wereadvancing alongside him.
And on that perfect summer'smorning of the 1st of July, 673
officers and men of the 2ndBattalion Middlesex Regiment
went over the top.
And by the end of the day,Perhaps as few as 51 came back
unwounded.
Amongst the wounded was Sandshimself.

(25:06):
Almost all of his officers werekilled or wounded.
The battalion had been destroyedby going into the attack at Mash
Valley.
And it was something that playedon his mind from when he got to
the casualty clearing station, Isuspect, through to the base
hospital, through to thehospital he was treated in in
London.
And it played him so much thattwo months afterwards, in

(25:26):
September of 1916, he wrote to afellow officer to say, I've come
to London today to take my life.
I have never had a moment'speace since July the 1st.
And because of those losses inhis battalion, his proud
battalion, He could not shakethat feeling that somehow he
should have done more, protestedmore, rocked the boat more,

(25:49):
perhaps more of them would bealive now.
And sadly, Colonel Sands shothimself and died in St George's
Hospital on the 13th ofSeptember 1916, just as his
award of the DistinguishedService Order was announced in
the London Gazette.
Colonel Sands was one of thesadder casualties of the first

(26:09):
day of the Battle of the Somme.
A phrase I first heard in thatdocumentary from 1976 presented
by Leo McKern about the Battleof the Somme and written by
Martin Middlebrook and MalcolmBrown and it's something that
stayed with me ever since.
And every time I come here tothis part of Mash Valley just as
we walk up the slopes of thatroad with the valley going

(26:31):
across to our right I think ofhim and his men.
And I have a personal connectionto one of those men because many
years ago in a junk sale Ibought two memorial plaques to
brothers and one of them,Frederick Montague Ramond, was a
regular soldier in the 2ndMiddle of Sex, came out in
November 1914 and was killedhere on the first day of the

(26:53):
Battle of the Somme, his brotherhaving been killed at Gallipoli
the previous year.
It was a place, this corner ofthe Somme battlefields, where
many families were thrown intomourning on the first day of the
Battle of the Somme.
And a few days later, one of theofficial photographers came up
and photographed Mash Valley.
And if you look very carefullyat those images where you can

(27:15):
see the shape of the YSAT minevery clearly on the slopes of
that part of the village of LaBoiselle, you can also pick out
lots of black dots in no man'sland.
The shattered bodies of the menof the 8th Division who'd gone
over the top there.
on the 1st of July 1916.
And when we stay on this road itcurves slightly and gets to a

(27:37):
junction.
And if we look to our left, wecan look down into the town of
Albea.
We can see the basilica with itsgolden figure of Mary and her
outstretched arms holding theinfant Jesus, a view that the
men in the trenches would havehad here in 1916, looking back
to the shattered basilica andthat figure of Mary at that
90-degree angle, the leaningvirgin, the golden virgin.

(27:59):
And this attack here wasfictionalised by Henry
Williamson in his book, TheGolden Virgin, published as part
of his Chronicle of AncientSunlight series, and I always
think of him and Philip Madison,his character in that series,
coming down the slopes of thisridge into the valley that day
too.
Again, it's those layers ofGreat War history that we get

(28:21):
from war diaries, personalaccounts, books like
Middlebrooks, and also fiction.
like Williamson's too, thatweaves the tale of the landscape
and opens that landscape up forus and brings new meaning, I
think, again, all part of thatculture of the old front line.
But this was not the only attackinto Mash Valley and as we turn

(28:43):
right along this road headingtowards the military cemetery
and get a much clearer viewlooking across to La Boiselle on
our right and the village ofOvalers at the far end of Mash
Valley ahead of us, we're inground where the 12th Eastern
Division moved up after the 1stof July.
They'd been in reserve on theother side of Albea and were
brought up to continue with theoffensive here.

(29:05):
The attack had been a failurewith more than 6,000 casualties
on this part of The Battle ofLuz fighting over pretty much

(29:30):
the same ground, under the samekind of conditions, going over
the top, often in broaddaylight, straight into the
German defences that had causedsuch heavy losses on the 1st of
July.
Their attack, particularly onthe 7th of July, suffered pretty
much a similar fate.
with unit after unit being tornapart by German machine gun and

(29:51):
shell fire trying to cross thismash valley units like two of
the battalions of the RoyalFusiliers the 8th and the 9th
Royal Fusiliers the 7th RoyalSussex which of course interests
me having researched a lot ofthe lads from West Sussex which
was a big intake of lads fromthat part of Sussex into the 7th
Royal Sussex from Chichester andBognor and the little villages

(30:13):
along that kind of Arran Valleythis was a unit that again had
seen battled before, but wouldsuffer absolutely catastrophic
casualties in trying to crossthis ground.
And although many of thoseattacks did sustain critical
casualties to the unitsinvolved, gradually the German
line collapsed here andeventually the village of

(30:36):
Ovalers was taken.
This is a place where I don'tjust reflect on those Sussex
lads who fell here, although Ihave researched so many of them,
including the medical officerCaptain Thompson, who'd been
with them from pretty much thebeginning and ran out into no
man's land during the fightinghere on the 7th of July, was
tending to the wounded, pickingup the wounded, retrieving the

(30:58):
wounded, dashing here, there andeverywhere until he was
eventually killed.
Like so many medical officers,not all of them were recognised,
not all of them got the VC andbar not all of them were
chavasse and Thompson I thinkpossibly was recommended for a
Victoria Cross but perhaps itdidn't fulfil the criteria or

(31:18):
there were not enough witnesseshe was posthumously mentioned in
dispatches which was the onlyother thing he could receive as
a posthumous award and his bodywas never found and his name is
on the Chapval Memorial to themissing underneath of course the
Royal Army Medical Corps ratherthan the Sussex lads to whom He
was attached.

(31:39):
But it's not just a dead that Ithink of when I come to this and
so many places along this oldfront line.
These places, so many of themweave into the story of those
veterans that I interviewed inthe 80s and 90s.
And I've mentioned him manytimes on this podcast before and
will no doubt do so again.
And that's Alf Rozelle, whoserved here with the Royal

(32:01):
Fusiliers, a man who Iinterviewed on many occasions,
who I got to come down to ourSussex branch.
The Battle of Arras CheerfulSacrifice And Alf also is in

(32:27):
that incredible documentary fromthe 1990s, A Game of Ghosts,
which for me will always be thebest documentary about veterans
of the Great War because itcaptured them at a time in which
I knew so many of them,including Alf and others in that
documentary I knew too.
And it was a time in which theywere old men, but not as old as

(32:47):
they were when a mass of publicinterest suddenly concentrated
on veterans in the early 2000s.
And by By then, that generationthat survived were often
confined to wheelchairs, couldspeak in I guess a degree of a
meaningful way about the FirstWorld War but nothing like I

(33:08):
experienced with those veteransin the 80s and 90s.
It was a different period.
Those men at that age saw thewar differently for all kinds of
reasons but could articulate itin perhaps a more meaningful way
and it was something that I sawagain literally a generation
later with those veterans of theSecond World War that I

(33:29):
travelled with in such greatnumbers to the battlefields of
World War II but I do think ofAlf every time I come here and
it's nice to see that someonehas placed a plaque to Alf in
Overla's Military Cemeterybecause he wasn't just in the
battle here that cost so manycasualties within his battalion
he was one of those detailed toclear it up after the advance

(33:51):
had moved forward so thesurvivors came back into the
valley this would have beenprobably 10 days after the 1st
of July the fight has movedforward the battlefield is still
covered in the dead it's thesummer it's hot I mean you can
imagine the rest and the deadneed burying and this was
probably for Alf one of theworst things that he ever had to

(34:14):
do and he speaks about this insuch a moving way impactful way
in that documentary A Game ofGhosts when they have to go out
and go through the pockets ofthe dead and remove pay books
and dog tags and they find thereality of war the reality they
know of only too well whatartillery fire and machine guns

(34:35):
do to the human body and theythen have to bury those
fragmentary remains of the deadin shell holes and positions on
the battlefield.
Now, many of those would haveeventually ended up in
Overland's Military Cemetery,which we're walking towards now.
We'll say more about that whenthey're there.
But again, when you look acrossthis landscape, you know

(34:56):
wherever you look, you'relooking at a vast military
cemetery because this landscapestill retains much of the dead,
many of the dead from bothsides.
Because Alf relates that itwasn't just British Tommies they
were laying to rest on thisbattlefield.
It was the bodies of those whodefended the trench around Mash
Valley and Ovalers that had tobe buried the Germans had to be

(35:19):
buried here too and whathappened to their graves after
the war we can only reallysurmise because so many German
burial sites were not recoveredand not moved to proper military
cemeteries once the conflict wasover so fields of death really

(35:39):
these fields around Ovalers andMash Valley are But a place too
with skylarks high above thisvalley we can perhaps find some
hope in the remembrance that wehave of those who passed through
here in 1916.
So we'll continue along the roadnow and that'll bring us to the
front steps of Overla's MilitaryCemetery.

(36:08):
Ovilas or Ovier la Boisselle,the village at this end of the
part of Mash Valley where weare, gives name to the cemetery
that we've come to now.
It's quite a large cemetery onthe slope of the rising ground
that looks down upon this partof Mash Valley itself.
And here are more than 3,500British and Commonwealth burials

(36:30):
from the First World War andsome French burials here as well
from the fighting and fromholding the line here in that
early phase of the war in1914-15.
Of the British and Commonwealthburials, two-thirds of them are
unidentified.
They're unknowns.
A regiment, a rank, a year ofdeath, sometimes a date of death

(36:52):
is recorded on these headstones,but who they were, will perhaps
never know, and their names willbe probably on the Thiepval
Memorial to the Missing, or ifthey died in the fighting here
in 1918, then they'll be on thePozières Memorial.
But men who are part of thatvast legion of the missing that
so characterises the experienceof death in the Great War.

(37:16):
And amongst the identifiedburials that are here, 913 are
from Britain, 27 from Canada, 17are Australian, 7 are South
African, 1 is from New Zealand.
So that's 965 identified burialsout of 3,561.

(37:37):
The original burials in thiscemetery are in plot one.
When you go up the front steps,plot one is a little way in
across to your right.
And the graves there areslightly staggered and laid out
in a different way to the restof the cemetery, which are
graves and burials moved in fromthe surrounding battlefields and
laid out in orderly plots.

(37:59):
And plot one is always the placeto start in the cemetery, any
cemetery of the Great War that'sa British and Commonwealth
cemetery, because those arealmost all the original burials
and that gives us a kind ofstarting point really for the
history of this site ofcommemoration.
When we look at the identifiedgraves in the rest of the
cemetery there's a very heavyweighting to the fighting here

(38:22):
in early July 1916 but there aremany others from later periods
of the fighting too brought infrom this wider Ovier, La
Boiselle, Pozières, even towardsCourcelette, part of the
battlefield.
So it's not just a first day ofthe Battle of the Somme or a
Mache Valley cemetery.
It covers a bit of a widerperiod.

(38:44):
And plot one was made towardsthe end of the Battle of the
Somme when soldiers from up atthe front line, beyond Pozières
and the Pozières Ridge andCourcelette were killed in
action.
They were brought back here forburial there are one or two
earlier casualties buried inthere and we're going to come to
one of those who was killed onthe first day of the Battle of

(39:05):
the Somme in fact two of thembut one of those was found many
years later And the other one, Isuspect, could well have been
found during the later period ofthe Battle of the Somme when the
ground was cleared and bodieswere being found even halfway,
two-thirds of the way throughthe fighting and then brought
into burial grounds like thisfor a proper burial.

(39:26):
The discovery of the dead wasn'tjust done by search parties like
Alfred Zell's.
It could be something that wasfrom a much later period of the
fighting when men were sent todig a new trench, build a trench
mortar position or a gunposition, whatever it was, and
the remains of soldiers werefound then.
That was all too common.
But when we look at that plotone, one of the graves that kind

(39:48):
of leaps out at us is CaptainJohn C.
Lauder of the 1st 8th Argyle andSouthern Highlanders who was
killed on the 28th of December1916 age 25 that name lauder is
a name that really leaps out ofthat headstone because one of
the most famous music hall starssingers of the day was sir harry

(40:08):
lauder who sang the incrediblypopular song of that period keep
right on to the end of the roadand this captain john lauder is
his son His death broke hisfather.
He writes very movingly about itin his book A Minstrel in
France, which recounts hisexperiences of going out to the

(40:29):
battlefields to sing to thetroops, to entertain the troops,
and then coming here to thisoriginal plot of burials to
visit the cross that marked hisson's grave.
Many years later, I think in the80s, this story grew that
Captain Lauder was not a verypopular officer in the 1st 8th
Argyles.
I don't know really where thatemanated from.
from and there were suggestionsthat he'd been shot by his own

(40:52):
men I've never found anyevidence of that in any of the
documents that I've looked atperhaps there wouldn't be
evidence but to follow the kindof trail back to where that
story began kind of leaves youin a grey area really so I don't
know whether that's somethingthat will ever get to the bottom
of but certainly for me the mostimportant part of this is again

(41:13):
how we look and how we assessgrief and how that affected
people during and after theFirst World War and Harry Lauder
really was never the same managain after his son died here in
1916.
And in this same plot as Imentioned there's two graves
from the first day of the Battleof the Somme that I always come
and visit when I come to thiscemetery.

(41:36):
One of them was found many yearsafterwards in the 1990s and
that's George Nugent of the 22ndNorthumberland Fusiliers who
died on the 1st of July 1916aged 28 and was from Newcastle.
A British visitor to the who Iknow very well found his remains
close to the lip of the LochNgar crater and the commission
were called in they foundartifacts with him that

(41:58):
identified him and he waseventually given a burial here
in the presence of survivingfamily members so he was one of
those whose remains as part ofthat last witness of the great
war the landscape still givingup its secrets he was very much
part of that story back in thedays when perhaps that was more
unusual and the inscription thatthe family chose for his grave I

(42:22):
think is particularly impactfuland it reads lost found but
never forgotten.
Buried in this same plot anothercasualty of the first day of the
Battle of the Somme is a soldierof the 8th Battalion King's Own
Yorkshire Line Infantry ClemCunnington.
He fell that day aged only 19.

(42:43):
I came across his story in LynneMacDonald's songbook that came
out in 1983.
I got it that year for my 16thbirthday from my grandmother,
and I still have that cherishedcopy that she signed for me.
It's a book that really, Ithink, brought together so much
of how I felt about the Somme atthat time and continue to feel

(43:06):
about the Somme.
I was beginning to interviewveterans.
Her accounts of what she gotfrom interviewing veterans kind
of spurred me on to do that evenmore.
But her powerful writing, shewas a fantastic writer, Lynne,
and the way she wove thosesoldiers' stories, particularly
with that book, is somethingthat I think is what makes it

(43:27):
really a classic account of theGreat War and a book that if
you've never had an opportunityto sit down and read is
something that should be the topof your pile really but there
are so many stories within itthat then prompted me to go out
onto those battlefields andfollow those stories on the
ground and one of them was ClemCunnington because she tells the

(43:49):
story from the point of view ofone of his mates Private Ernest
Dayton who Dayton was a sniperin the 8th Battalion, King's Own
Yorkshire Infantry, and he wasactually sent out in advance of
the attack of his battalion tobe out in no man's land to take
out targets of opportunity,they'd be called today, in case
some of these Germans hadsomehow miraculously survived

(44:11):
the bombardment, which of coursethey had.
And this is his account of hisexperience on the first day of
the Somme and what happened tohis best mate, Clem Cunnington.
I thought I was a goner.
I didn't think I'd get back.
I didn't think I'd ever getback.
Lying out there that morning, Iwas within 25 or 30 yards of the

(44:32):
German front line, lookingthrough this telescope sight at
the gap in their trench.
I could have touched it.
I had my finger on the triggerall the time, not moving, and I
saw a few of them laid to rest.
but it didn't do our lads muchgood.
As soon as they started across,the machine guns opened up.
It seemed like hours before theygot up to near me, but they kept

(44:54):
on coming.
I didn't dare move.
Those bullets were flying allover the place.
It were Maxims they were firing,and they were shooting across
each other with this hissingnoise as they went past.
I didn't turn round, but I heardthe noise behind me, and I knew
our fellows were coming.
Some of them were getting hit,and they were yelling and
shouting.

(45:14):
But they came on.
And when the first wave got upto me, I jumped up.
I were in the first row and thefirst one I saw were my chum,
Clem Cunnington.
I don't think we'd gone 20 yardswhen he got hit straight through
the breast.
Machine gun bullets.
He went down.
I went down.
We got it in the same burst.

(45:36):
I got it through the shoulder.
I hardly noticed it at the time.
I was so wild when I saw thatClem were finished.
We'd got orders.
Every man for himself and noprisoners.
That suited me.
After I saw Clem lying there.
I got up and picked up my rifleand got through the wire into
their trench and straight infront there was this dugout full

(45:56):
of jerrys and one big fellow wason the steps facing me.
I had this mills bomb.
Couldn't use my arm.
I pulled the pin with my teethand flung it down and I was
shouting at them.
I were that wild.
There you are.
Bugger yourselves.
Share that between you.
Then I were off.
It was hand-to-hand.
I went round one traverse, andthere was another, face-to-face.

(46:19):
I couldn't fire one-handed, butI could use the bayonet.
It was him or me, and I wentfirst.
Jab, just like that.
It were my job, and from there Iwent on.
Oh, I were wild, seeing poorClem like that.
Ernest Dayton was wounded againshortly afterwards, but somehow
he kept on into those Germanlines before the shattered

(46:41):
remains of his battalionwithdrew.
The 8th Battalion, King's OwnYorkshire Line Infantry lost 21
officers and 518 men that day,one of which, of course, was
Clem Cunnington, whose grave ishere.
And Lynne MacDonald put apicture of his grave in the
book, which somehow, certainlyfor me, and I know quite a few

(47:03):
others, acted almost as a magnetto go and visit that grave, and
I've been visiting it regularlyever since.
Such powerful accounts fromthese men that people like Lynne
MacDonald interviewed, and somuch of what they tell us about
the experience of war.
You're not going to get bigarrows on a map from veterans
like Ernest Dayton, but you'regoing to get that experience of

(47:25):
war, that essence of war, andwhat sacrifice and what the
death of mates meant to men likehim.
And when you begin walkingbeyond this plot one into the
wider cemetery, you'll comeacross a pattern of units that
will explain the wider unitsthat pass through here.
Battalions from the 8thDivision, the 34th Division,

(47:46):
quite a few from the battlefieldcloser to La Boiselle were
brought in here for burial,including two of the Tyneside
Battalion Commanders and also,of course, many graves from the
12th Eastern Division.
A very large number of these areunknown.
You can tell, of course, withthe Tynesiders that were
partially identified fromshoulder titles and perhaps cap

(48:07):
badges that they are part ofthose formations that were there
at at the beginning of the song,When you look at the cap badges
of some of the other unitsaround you, you can pick out the
orders of battle of some of theother formations that came this
way.
But not all of the burials thatwere originally laid to rest on
this battlefield are within thiscemetery.
And some of those that wereburied by the likes of Al-Frazal

(48:29):
are not here too.
And this jumps on to 1982because at the back of the
cemetery when I first came here,there was a bit of pasture land
surrounded by trees and thefarmer made a decision to level
that and plough it over And hegot Yves Foucault, who was my
old friend who lived inPozières, to come up with his
metal detector to clear thesurface ammunition away for him.

(48:50):
And while Yves was working hisway across that bit of old
pasture, he got a very bigreading that was a collective
burial of a number of soldiersthat had been buried there in
1916.
In fact, when the War GravesCommission came up and excavated
the site, they found the bodiesof 49 British soldiers and two
Germans who'd been buried in abig shell hole And you could see

(49:13):
by the way the bodies werearranged that they'd been picked
up by the epaulets and the bootsand swung in there.
The bodies were at kind of anangle as they'd been tossed in
and covered over with a looseamount of soil which had
remained undisturbed for allthose decades until 1982.
Now, none of them were foundwith any means of

(49:34):
identification.
That probably had been removedby whoever buried them, the
knows.
The cap badges and shouldertitles identified men from the
Royal Fusiliers, the RoyalSussex and the Essex Regiment
from the 12th Eastern Division,so from the 7th July attack, and

(49:54):
some Royal Barks and WestYorkshears from the 8th Division
attack on the 1st July.
So they were very much thebodies of soldiers, the remains
of the fallen from that earlyphase of the first day of the
Somme.
Now in the 1980s, when soldierswere found on the battlefields,
they were not buried in the thenearest cemetery at that time

(50:15):
there were two open cemeterieson the western front for British
and Commonwealth burials one inBelgium Cement House Cemetery
and one in France and that wasTurlington Cemetery up on the
coast so all of these burialsthese 51 burials were taken up
and buried in one grave atTurlington with a very unusual
headstone and I'll put a pictureof that onto the podcast website

(50:37):
with some other images connectedto this cemetery and that is a
unique grave if you go toTurlington if you're along that
French coast perhaps going toWimmera to visit the grave of
John McRae the Canadian poet ofthe Great War who wrote in
Flanders Fields or for whateverreason go to Turlington find
that grave it is a very unusualone and it links you to this

(50:57):
spot here at Ovalers and perhapseven to Alfred Zell or men like
him who were burying the deadhere in 1916.
So we've paid our respects tothe fallen here at Overlands
Military Cemetery and we'regoing to go back down those
steps onto the road and head oninto the village.

(51:22):
Coming down into the village ofOvier-la-Boisselle, overlars to
the troops who were here in1916, we're coming into a
typical Somme village with someolder 1920s buildings rebuilt as
part of the reconstruction ofthis part of Picardy in that
post-war period, some moremodern buildings.
buildings along the road to theright that goes out of the

(51:45):
village towards La Boisellewhere the German front line was
there's a whole line of modernhouses there that literally
overlook where the Germanforward positions were it's a
quiet village it's largely adepopulated village as many of
these some villages are there'sno bar there's no shops there
are signs to memorials there's aFrench memorial to Breton troops

(52:06):
who were fighting here in 1914just on the other side of the
village to the left of where weare and there is a very big
church as you'll find in most ofthese villages which is perhaps
only open a handful of days ayear again very common in these
small isolated communities notjust in the Somme but right
across France and we'll see onthe village war memorial as we

(52:27):
walk through the bulk of thevillage which doesn't take us
long really because it's sosmall the devastating effects
France experience in the GreatWar just from the perspective of
a single village a small ruralvillage like this, and that long
list of names listed there.
Mortpour-la-France died forFrance.

(52:49):
All those poilus who fell on allthose different French
battlefields of the Great War,often a long way from this
village on the Somme.
And on the far side of thevillage, as we come out of
Ovalers, we're looking towardsthe next bit of ground.
The road curves to our right,goes back up towards the

(53:11):
structure of Pozières BritishCemetery and the Pozières
Memorial ahead of us thedistinct line of the Pozières
reach that highest point of the1916 battlefield the obelisk of
the first Australian divisionmemorial because the Australians
are ones that took the villageof Pozières in July of 1916 and

(53:33):
we're coming into what isessentially the far end the very
far end of Mash Valley so thisis a the positions over to our
right and to our left so uptowards Chapval and beyond the
other side of La Boisselle overtowards Contal Maison all that
kind of ground there had tocatch up a little bit to kind of

(53:54):
not quite straighten the lineout but essentially straighten
the line out to enable the nextphase of the operation to
continue here pushing on towardsthis Pozières Ridge and of
course bear in mind that we'renow in the second approaching
the third week of July of 1916and this is all ground that
should be should have been takenon the very first day, but of
course was not.

(54:16):
And that meant that unit afterunit kind of passed through
here.
And one that took over from theshattered remains of the 12th
Eastern Division, who pulled outof this ground following the
capture of the village,following the capture of some of
the positions towards a farmthat was just out of view on the
other side of that bit of thePozières Ridge, which was Femme
de Mouquet, Mucky Farm.

(54:38):
The unit that moved in in thisground that we're coming up to
now were some battalions of the48th South Midland Division, a
territorial division that hadbeen out since 1915 and had
served on different parts of theSomme front, particularly up in
the north around Hebutern.
On the first day of the Somme,some of its units had been
involved in the attack atSerres, the quadrilateral, and

(54:59):
some of its Royal Warwick'sbattalions were now moving up to
take over this part of the line.
And amongst them was a youngofficer, Charles Carrington, or
Charles Edmonds, as he calledhim, when he wrote these war
memoirs, A Subaltern's War inthe 1920s.
Now that has been published manytimes both under that pseudonym

(55:21):
Charles Edmonds and then underhis own name Charles Carrington.
It's a book that's not difficultto find.
There was a 1980s paperbackversion of it that I bought in
my local bookshop in Crawley andtook with me to the battlefields
and travelled with me acrossthat landscape on many, many
occasions.
because There were two factors,really.

(55:44):
A, that it's a fantastic memoir,and B, I met him.
Charles Carrington was a memberof the Western Front
Association, and the first talkthat I went to in London in the
1980s as a newly joined youngmember of the association,
Charles Carrington gave thetalk, and I went to speak to him
and shook his hand.
Sadly, I never got anopportunity to go back and

(56:06):
interview him, but he wassomeone that I met on a number
of occasions, and what alwaysstruck me about him was that he
was very different in somerespects to many of those early
veterans that I met, that he wasa very literate man and he could
recall his war in a meaningfulway and speak about it in a very

(56:26):
meaningful way as well.
And he had this phrase that hetrotted out.
I saw him interviewed ontelevision about that time and
he said it on there, but hecertainly said it at this WFA
meeting.
He said, no quartermaster everstole my rum.
And that was a favourite sayingof his.
And what he meant was that thewar wasn't all bad.
There were lots of memoirs thatcame out in that interwar period

(56:48):
that described the terribleconditions and the pilfering of
rations and supplies andeverything else.
And what he was saying is thathis war was very different.
He'd enjoyed his war.
He'd got a lot from it.
He'd experienced some terriblethings and seen loss and lost
friends.
But...
It was a war that had meaningfor him.
And this part of the book, whichwhen I read it again in the

(57:11):
preparation for this podcast, Ikind of thought this sums him up
very, very well.
And this is what he says fairlyearly on in the book.
In 1914, I was a very youngsoldier, so young that I've
sometimes wondered whether thewhole problem may be summed up
by saying that I was a juveniledelinquent who wanted to gang up
with the other boys todemonstrate my manhood and to be

(57:34):
allowed to indulge a taste forantisocial violence.
It would be insincere to excludethis factor and inadequate to
overweight it if only becausemany respectable men, old enough
to be my father, fought throughthe war if if only because I
enlisted again in 1939.
Better, perhaps, to abstain fromarguing and let the story make

(57:57):
what effect it can.
This is what I thought about itat the time.
And then he goes on to tell youwhat his war was and what I
think he means by thatstatement.
A juvenile delinquent let runfree across the landscape of the
Western Front to fight his war.
I mean, it's a very honestaccount in so many ways.
And as we come out of thevillage of Ovalers and that road

(58:20):
bends off to the right, we don'ttake that.
We take a little track justahead of us past some
agricultural hangars and thatleads us right out onto the
landscape here.
The approach, the contour linesleading up to the Pozières
Ridge.
We can see more clearly PozièresCemetery and Memorial over to
our right and the outskirts ofPozières Village.

(58:42):
And this is ground where theMidland Division moved in and
these battalions of the RoyalWarwicks took over outlined
posts here, the odd bit oftrench, a lot of connected shell
holes, probably a fragmentaryline in so many different ways.
And he describes it like this.
We all found ourselves standingabout carelessly on the top for

(59:03):
the snipers had been cleared offthe oval as crest and we were
only visible from the Pozièresridge far away to the right not
that we cared if we were visiblefrom Berlin but Pozières was
developing troubles of its ownthe Australians were going in
the line there to attack it andas we stood and talked the
skyline heaved and smokedthrowing up fountains and jets

(59:23):
of soil and grey smoke as if itwere a dark grey sea breaking
heaven on a reef.
The bombardment grew thicker andthicker, clouds of smoke sprang
up and drifted across its torngroups of trees.
The spurts of high explosiverose close together till it
seemed that the very contour ofthe hill must be changed.

(59:49):
And in those outpost positions,they held on, not in any great
meaningful battle, acounter-attack, a
counter-counter-attack, a localoperation, call it what you
will, but they lost men as aconsequence of it.
Not on the scale of Mash Valleyon the 1st or the 7th of July,
but a battalion that took aknocking there and left comrades

(01:00:12):
behind, buried on thebattlefield there.
and they then had to withdrawthrough that smashed landscape,
that contoured hill beingchanged forever by the
bombardments, and then move backthrough the village of Ovalers
and back beyond.
And he describes that in thisway.
It was then, turning back, thatI knew what novelists mean by a

(01:00:33):
stricken field.
The western and southern slopesof the village had been
comparatively little shelled.
That is, a little grass hadstill room to grow between the
shell holes.
The village was guarded bytangle after tangle of rusty
barbed wire in irregular lines.
Among the wire lay rows of carkey figures as they had fallen

(01:00:55):
to the machine guns on thecrest, thick as the sleepers in
the green park on a summerSunday evening.
The simile leapt to my mind atonce of flies on a flypaper.
I did not know then that twicein the fortnight before our
flank attack had a division beenheld at that wire-encircled
hill, and twice it had witheredaway before the hidden machine

(01:01:19):
guns.
The flies were buzzing obscenelyover the damp earth, morbid
scarlet poppies grew scantilyalong the white chalk mounds,
and the air was tainted withrank explosives and the sticky
scents of corruption.
It's a fantastic memoir, ASubaltern's War.
It's not a forgotten memoir, itdoesn't classify to be part of

(01:01:42):
the continuation of that series,that part of this podcast, but
it is a book that I think shouldbe on everyone's Somme and Ypres
pile, because he covers thosetwo great battles, the
experience on the Somme beforethe 1st of July, the fighting
through the battle, up to whenthe Germans began their
withdrawal to the HindenburgLine in 1917, and then he moves

(01:02:04):
up to take part in the 3rdBattle of Ypres in 1917 it's a
remarkable book a book that's sowell written that I think you
can get so much from it time andtime again when you return to it
and it's his account myconnection to him having shook
his hand having met him havingheard him talk that always kind
of drew me back to it And theexperience along this track, for

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him and men like him, in thisvalley before the village of
Pozières, for men like CharlesCarrington, this was a footnote
in their war.
But he mentions in the book thatas they came out of the line,
got beyond Overlas, got backtowards Albea, as the men who'd
not been part of that battlelooked at them approaching, they
looked as if death had touchedthem all somehow.

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It was a footnote in his war,but it was a place...
A moment that he never forgot.
And when I lived on the Somme,and often came down that
Albert-Bapome road on a dailybasis, and even now, all these
years later, when I travel alongthat Bapome road, coming up
towards Pozières, I always,always find myself looking down

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into that valley, where we arenow, just beyond the village of
Ovalers, at the far end of MashValley.
A turn in the track where oncewere shell holes and shallow
trenches occupied by those ladsof the Royal Warwick's
Carrington amongst them.

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It always, always draws me backto that moment in his war and to
him.
Those criss-cross paths and allthose shadows, so many shadows
along that old front line.

(01:04:00):
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(01:04:27):
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front line links to all of theseare on our website thanks for
listening and we'll see youagain soon