The Somme

[davidbfpo]

A WW1 & WW2 battlefield guide's commentary on visiting The Somme is a short read. He ends with poignant words:

I’ve walked the Somme a thousand times, and I hope to continue to walk and visit it for many years to come, whether for television, with a Leger group or just on my own. It is a place that haunts you, and along its dusty lanes, and under the trees of its many woods, the voices of a generation of men still resonate.

The Somme will stand for so much to so many: sacrifice, tragedy or sheer bloody murder. But for me, it will always be a place where I can focus on the essence of the Great War: ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances, doing their bit in something they knew was bigger than them, and which defined the deaths of those who fell and the lives of the majority who came home. The Somme changed them all, and a hundred years later it can change us.

Link:http://www.leger.co.uk/blog/2016/08/...e-means-to-me/

I have been to several WW1 battlefields, visiting cemeteries for all those who fell. The Somme is a strange place; blood-soaked land. On a wet day I visited Newfoundland Park, walking around the now much wider trenches.

Thinking tonight I do wonder how long will our successors visit such places. Interest in WW1 has grown for at least twenty years here; for the French it is deeply embedded - along with others.

Enough melancholy.