Click here for photographs of the weekend described in this feature

If you saw last May’s Parish Players’ production of "Oh What a Lovely War", you may have become as fascinated by the play’s subject matter as the cast. Four of us were determined to try to touch something of the four years in the early 20th century which reshaped the world order and unleashed an unprecedented horror on millions of ordinary people.

So a glorious warm October Friday saw Simon Cheetham (who directed the play), John Gout, Graham McCubbin and myself setting off across the channel on the same journey as much of Britain’s youth took over 80 years ago. - many innocently thrilled at the prospect of a new adventure. The destination? A line down France and Belgium that became known as The Western Front.

Within an hour’s drive we were at our first stopping point - the Indian Memorial at Neuve Chappelle. No graves, just a sight we were to get un-nervingly used to - walls covered with row upon row of names. A memorial to those who have no known resting place.

Later we visited Dud Corner, our first sight of a British and Commonwealth cemetery. Perfect ranks of impeccably maintained white gravestones, many with the names of those resting beneath but, distressingly, so many others with the simple inscriptions "A Soldier of the Great War" and "Known unto God". Then onto Vimy Ridge to view the magnificent Canadian memorial and the beautifully kept park, and more graves.

An overnight stop in Arras was followed by a pilgrimage to the grave of Roland Leighton, Vera Brittain’s fiancé, at Louvencourt. Roland was aged just 19 when fatally wounded by a sniper’s bullet. Then perhaps the most haunting experience of the weekend, back to Vimy but this time to the German cemetery. The sheer vastness of the place was truly awful -over 40,000 men buried in a place bereft of any sense of victory or glory, so unlike the Commonwealth cemeteries. The sight appalled us - it simply said "death".

Next stop was Ypres, a remarkable place utterly destroyed by 1918 and yet perfectly restored to its mediaeval glory. We attended the simple and moving Menin Gate ceremony - in which the Ypres fire brigade daily remember the 55,000 Commonwealth dead recorded on the enormous memorial Gate by playing "The Last Post".

Sunday took us to Railway Wood, a gentle but lonely place, which featured in the play and where a dozen British tunnellers were buried alive, to the fascinating open-air museum with its preserved trenches, at Hooge Crater and finally to another vast, gaunt German cemetery. And then home to England, a simple, short journey for us, but which for nearly a million of our countrymen was a journey too far in those dark years of the First World War.

"At the going down of the sun, and in the morning - we will remember them."

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