A stride a busy road in northern France,

a tall column surmounted by the star of India

rises from between two weeping willows.

At its base, two tigers, two Indian tigers,

guard the temple of the dead.

This week, we're following in the footsteps of the Indian Corps at Nouve Chappelle.

We're starting our walk on the main roads between Labasse and Estes

as it comes into the area close to the village of Nouve Chappelle in northern France.

Here it meets a crossroads, now a roundabout, a crossroads marked on contemporary maps

as Port Arthur or La Bomb Crossroads. Just before the roundabout to the left is the imposing

structure of the Indian Corps Memorial, the memorial that commemorates the Indian army soldiers

who fell in France, who have no known grave. And over to our rights is the village of New Chappelle

itself. This battlefield is one of many in this part of northern France that could be described

as the forgotten fronts of the Great War, that area sandwiched between Eap in the north and Aras and the Somme

to the south. And it's the subject of my next book on the First World War to be published by

Pen and Sword next year. And there'll be a chapter on this area of the battlefield around

New Chappelle in that book. It's an area of the Western Front that has

fascinated me, perhaps since the very start of my visits to the old battlefields. Those battles of

the early part of the war of 1914 and 1915 in many respects saw the passing of an old world

into the new in terms of the type of warfare that was witnessed

on the Western Front. It was a period when the bulk of the troops who fought in these

battlefields along the Forgotten Front were regular soldiers, were territorials, were from the far-flung

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