Packs, rifles, bayonets, belts, and haversacks,

Shell fragments, and the huge whole forms of shells

Shot fruitlessly — and everywhere the dead

The night patrol (1916) Arthur Graeme West

I begin my journey in France by going back to the past, to where it all ended for my great-grandfather, the Somme. Herons perch along the roadside, as still, silent and ever-present as the graves of the war dead which litter the surrounding countryside. The landscape is appropriately bleak, flat and empty, permanently scarred by the war. The loneliness of the endless gravesites in such a vast scene is, in itself, moving. My great-grandfather was one of the many thousands of unlucky young men who arrived in France in October 1915 and didn’t live to see a year, dying in the mud, blood and shit of the Somme in September 1916 at the age of 27, on the day that tanks were first used in warfare. With more than 72,000 others his name appears on the Thiepval Memorial, which commemorates the ‘missing’, those whose bodies were never found or with no known grave. The key battle of the Somme took place between the 1st July–18 November 1916 and the Theipval memorial museum has some terrifying first-hand accounts of those who survived its bloodiest first day which saw 57,470 allied casualties and 19,240 deaths, most killed in the first hour. Total casualties by the end of the first Battle of the Somme, including French and German losses, were 1 million with 300,000 dead. Carnage. Aside from the obvious threat of constant death the museum gives some insight into the atrocious conditions the men and boys endured, photographs of them huddled outside holes in the snowy ground like rabbits next to their burrows or lying in freezing trenches. It must of surely seemed like hell.

I drive on.