Tuck behind the houses of a small village in northern France, new burial plots await the remains

of British and Commonwealth soldiers who have been found after more than a century.

What is the story of this new First World War Cemetery.

I've taken the podcast on the road again,

and I've travelled this morning across on the Euro Tunnel,

come down the motorway into northern France,

and I'm close to the city of Lens,

in the coal mining, the coal-filled area of northern France. And I've come to one of the larger villages in this area, the village of Lusongot,

or Luz, as it was known, where the Battle of Luz took place in September and October of 1915.

The Battle of Luz was a kind of turning point in the war on the Western Front from a British

perspective because it was one of the first major British offensives of the war.

The year 1915 had seen a whole series of offensives along the

Western Front, New Chappelle, Alba's Ridge, Festerbett. But this was a much bigger battle and

some of those earlier attacks had been hampered by the unavailability of artillery shells for the

guns. But that had been changed and that had been

overcome and there was plenty of shells for this battle and plenty of guns and plenty of men as well

because this was a battle which for the first time on the Western Front saw large numbers of men of Kitchener's

Army, the new army, taking part in it. It wasn't the very first time that Kitcheners Army went

into action. That had been at Suvla Bay, at Gallipoli, in August 1915, when men from several new army divisions,

like the 10th Irish and the 13th Western Division and the 11th Northern Division

took part in the landings there.

But here on the Western Front, this was the first big battle in which sizeable numbers of men from this

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