In a quiet field of northern France once stood tall towers of bricks, the brick stacks.

Here the hellish world of the Western Front unfolded over four long years.

What can we find here on this part of the forgotten front?

We've returned to the forgotten front this week. We might ask ourselves, what is the forgotten front?

Well, this is a bit of ground between the two great battlefields of Eap in Flanders to the north

and the ground around Arras to the Somme in the south.

It's that part of the British sector of the Western Front that connects those two areas together.

And it runs approximately from near to the town of Armantier on the border between France and Belgium,

down through the flatlands of northern France, west of Lille,

going through some of the great battlefields like Newchapel, Alba's Ridge and Festibet,

across the Labasse Canal and down towards the area around Luz.

And this term forgotten front is something that I seem to recall came from Rose Coombs. I can't remember

whether she actually mentioned it in her book before Endeavors Fade, which is that great

Bible to the Western Front battlefields. But it's certainly something I remember her saying. And when

I wrote a little section on my very first Great War website that I launched in 1999 when I was still living

on the SOM in the old days of Microsoft pages which made it very easy to write and publish

a website and that website which is also called the old front line is still online and you'll find

it by following a link which I'll put to the new old

frontline website the podcast website oldfrontline.com.uk but on that website I did a section

on the forgotten front looking at some of those battlefields and it's forgotten in the

great battles of the psalm and arras and messines and passiondale they do to a degree overshadow some of the earlier events of the war.

And there's a lot to see on that front from Armentiers down to Luz.

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