Back to the Somme

Next weekend I shall be back on the Somme battlefields, in the company of military historian Jeremy Banning, writer Vanessa Gebbie and others.

This will be my fifth trip and we will be revisiting places like Thiepval, Mametz and Mametz Wood. This year in the UK we have been commemorating the battle of the Somme which began on 1st July 1916 and pettered out sometime in the autumn of that year (officially it ended on 19th November after 141 days). So why are these fields and hamlets, which are now peaceful farmland, such places of pilgrimage and why do I go back?

Part of the answer is because each visit has a different quality to it and there is always more to learn. I did not fully appreciate the poetry of David Jones until after I’d stood in the pouring rain in the environs of Mametz wood reading his words and looking into the wood which he and the other Welsh troops had to attack in July 1916. This year we will be tracing the footsteps of Edmund Blunden who wrote about his wartime experience in ‘Undertones of War’. Another reason is because they were all so young, the many men who did not come home and whose remains are still in France or Belgium. When another writer asked me why I went I told her simply ‘it is because our dead are still there’. I’ve written elsewhere about looking for R.Victor Davies, my great uncle and the only boy in his family who was killed at Passchendaele on 31st July 1917. It feels right in this centenary year to go quietly and without pomp and flags and banners to remember them.

We will be attending the burials of two twenty-one year olds, Harry Carter and William J Marmon, who were killed on 22nd November 1915. Their remains have only recently been found and identified, thanks to the efforts of the La Boisselle Study Group.