To mark the end of season six, we take the podcast on the road,

and beginning at the vast soldiers' cemetery at the Tartpler on the French coast.

We travel across that rural countryside through towns and villages behind the front,

onwards, ever onwards,

to the old front line itself in the city of Arras

and what we find on the panels of the Arras Memorial.

There are signs of spring on the old front line.

I've come across to France this weekend with my friend John to have a kind of potter around bits of the battlefields here.

And I've come just down the coast from the Euro Tunnel to a tarpler, et etapels or heel taps, as the troops called it.

The location of the great base depot where soldiers did their training in the latter stage of the war from latter 1916 through to the end of the conflict.

In the infamous bull ring where the instructors,

the canaries, pushed the men through their training before they went up the line.

It's also the scene of the famous Etyarpal mutiny in September 1917

and not far away from where I'm standing at the moment is the grave of Corporal Wood of the Gordon Harlanders,

who was accidentally shot by a military policeman that led to some of the rioting.

But that's not the subject of this podcast.

I've come down the coast to this vast cemetery, which has fewer graves than Tyne Cot.

So it's not the largest British Commonwealth Cemetery,

but its acreage is much, much bigger and it gives the impression of being a much bigger burial ground.

And around me is the signs of spring, there's bluebells in the woods just to my left beyond this final plot of graves which are all from April 1918 in this

particular corner of the cemetery and I just heard chif-chaffs in the woods there so I kind of feel

that I'm very much back on this landscape of the First World War this familiar landscape of the old

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