It was a perfect autumn morning…a thick mist rising over the flat fields with the sun trying to break through., spotlighting the brilliant golds and russets glowing from the trees along the roadside…such a beautiful morning…the slow movement of Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ wafted through the car and floated into the mist, promising a wonderful day. But somehow it didn’t seem right…as Barber came to a break we looked for another tape…one bought in the ‘3 for £5’ offer in the Channel Tunnel terminal.

“So, you were David’s father,
And he was your only son,
And the new cut peats are rotting
And the work is left undone
Because of an old man weeping.
Just an old man in pain for David, his son David
That will not come again.
Oh, the letters he wrote you
And I can see them still
Not a word of the fighting..but just the sheep on the hill
And how you should get the crops in ere the year got stormier.
And the Bosch have got his body…and I was his officer.
You were only David’s father, but I had fifty sons
when we went up in the evening under the arch of the guns
And we came back at twilight
Oh God, I heard them call to me for help and pity
that could not help at all
Oh never will I forget you, my men that trusted me
More my sons than your fathers’
For they could only see the little helpless babies and the young men in their pride
They could not see you dying and hold you while you died.
Happy and young and gallant they saw their first born go,
But not the strong limbs broken and the beautiful men brought low.
The piteous, writhing bodies,
They screamed ‘Don’t leave me Sir’.
For they were only your fathers,  but I was your Officer.

“In Memoriam for Private D Sutherland, killed in action in the German Trench, May 16^th 1916…and the others who died” by E.A.Mackintosh (who himself was killed in later action )

Death…that was what we had come to contemplate…the honourable death, the terrible death, the terrible waste, the terrifying fear of all those men in 1914 to 1918 who gave their lives that we might be free.

So, here we were. Unexpectedly on the Somme. We had gone to France for the weekend at the invitation of friends… ‘Come away for the weekend, we’ve found a lovely little chateau with great food, just an hour or so from Calais. Leave the kids behind and come with us.’ We couldn’t resist and had set off for our gourmet weekend with a hurriedly purchased map from Stanfords –‘A Guide to the Western Front’ ..”because we might be quite near”.

To be honest, we didn’t know where we were going…happy to be led by Carol and John. So on the Friday evening we opened the map and discovered we were right on the edge of the Somme…on November 10^th and 11th.

We had a marvellous time…very moving, very stimulating, very contemplative. We paid homage at many large battlefields and military cemeteries. We found ourselves standing at the lone cross of Major Dickens…Charles Dickens’ grandson. The place where he fell and was buried marked by a solitary wooden cross amongst a small grove of shrubs down a farm-track…still there after all these years.

We went to Delville Wood and stared in amazement at the 1916 map of the trenches…Rotten Row, the Strand, Fleet Street…dug outs so entrenched that they were given permanent names from dear old Blighty. In these streets 3857 South African Men and officers died in 6 days…leaving 143 to walk out when relief came. Their bodies still lie in this beautiful wood…which was of course reduced to mud and stumps in just six days. The lone surviving tree stands as a memorial amongst the many others that have since been planted.

We went to ‘Moo Cow’ farm…which lay at the top of a slight incline of 300 yards. A regiment of Australian soldiers were all killed in a matter of days when they tried to capture it from the Germans, and it took the relief troops another month to get across that three hundred yards of open space to capture ‘Mocquet’ farm.

It was difficult to understand how it could take so long…why? what was it that could cause it to take so long? what happened? Oh yes, you could read in books that they were all dug in. with trenches and bunkers…but you still couldn’t comprehend why it took so long.

Well, when we got to the French National Memorial at Notre Dame de Lorette on the Sunday…suddenly we began to understand. There were 40,000 French graves, 20,000 named and 20,000 unnamed, and at the back of the cemetery was a small, low, white building. You rang a bell and Madame came from cooking her Sunday lunch to take your francs and let you pass, into the bunkers. These were a replica of the underground towns that our grandparents’ generation devised… with, again, names like Rotten Row, Fleet Street and The Strand. Here they suffered and struggled that we might be free…and gave their lives so terribly.

‘Gassed last night and gassed the night before’…how clearly I saw the Parish Player in ‘Oh What a Lovely War’ who had made me cry that night in cosy Merton Park…I’d had no idea of the reality…for the reality was just behind the small white building. the trenches of the French and German front lines which had stayed here for just over a year during the battle of the Somme.

Oh they were all that you had imagined and seen in pictures. shallow, muddy, inches deep in water, providing so little protection to the fathers, brothers and sons cowering inside them waiting for the orders to run out and kill the fathers brothers and sons cowering on the ‘other side’. But what I had never imagined was how near the ‘other side’ were…the distance between the two front lines was less than that between the first and last pews in our church. We were the only visitors but there were French men in the opposite trench acting as soldiers…a living museum on November 11^th visited by 4 English people. We could hear them talk, laugh, ask for coffee, even pass wind. you could hear everything…and then the time would come when you would burst out of the hole in your barbed wire and try to shoot them or stab them…kill them, when they could see and hear you coming as you scrabbled out of your trench to run the few yards across to theirs. ‘The bells of death go ring- ting-a ling’..another song in ‘Oh What a Lovely War ‘ which ting-a-linged in my ears that morning.

The poignancy of the following poem struck me

But the men who stand by their rifles
See all the dead on the plain
Rise at the hour of midnight
To fight their battles again.
Each to his place in the combat
All to the parts they played
With bayonet, brisk to its purpose,
Rifle and hand grenade.
Shadow races with shadow
Steel comes quick on steel
Swords that are deadly silent
And shadows that do not feel.
And shades recoil and recover
And fade away as they fall
In the space between the trenches
And the Watchers see it all.

"A Vision” – unattrib.

Here, the Watchers would have been less than the church’s length apart.

It was a very moving weekend and has led to much thought and contemplation of the great sacrifice made…by the men, by their families, by the French people whose homes and, in some cases, entire villages disappeared. And it made me think of my father, a Polish Officer, who only saw five days of action, with fear and death all around him…and then lost six years of his life as a POW in the second world war, along with his family and his homeland…another tremendous sacrifice.

So was that the reason for so many British veterans of the Second World War visiting these monuments this weekend…to remember their comrades in arms and to touch again the true, most meaningful, most challenging experience of their lives.