Welcome to the Old Front Line with me, military historian Paul Reed.

This is a regular podcast where we can travel together across the haunting battlefields of the Great War,

from Flanders to the Somme and beyond.

So what's in this week's episode?

Today is the 103rd anniversary of the Battle of Arras, fought in northern France on this day in

1917. Aras in many ways is one of the forgotten battles of the First World War,

sandwiched as it is between the Somme and the Third Battle of Eap, commonly known as Paschendale in 1917.

But Aras was an important sector of the Western Front for troops. We took it over from the French in 1916, a full year or more

before the actual Battle of Arras, and it became one of those sectors that almost every British

units, every British soldier, served in at some particular point. And it had several high points

in the war in which there was intense fighting there

the Battle of Arras in April and May of 1917 being one of those but again in the spring of

1918 in the Kaiser Schlacht of March 1918 the Germans attacked in this area and in the

summer British and Canadian troops advance from Arras across and through the Hindenburg line towards Combrae and beyond.

But today is the anniversary of the 1917 battle.

And the Battle of Arras on this day proved not just with the Canadians, because the Canadian attack at Vimy Ridge in the north was not a

separate part of the Battle of Arras, it was an integral part of it. There are many that

believe that somehow the Canadians took that ridge entirely under their own steam, having reinvented

trench warfare, but the truth is that the whole of the British expeditionary force of which

the Canadians were apart, just as the Australians and New Zealanders and South Africans had gone

through this incredible learning process on the Somme, a terribly costly one, but they had learned

from it. And the Germans having withdrawn into the Hindenburg line, the Siegfried Stelung in the spring of 1917,

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