A couple of weeks ago I took a group down to the end of the Western Front in the Voshe via Verdun in the St. Miel Salient.

It's a journey I've done many times over the years, but I do so enjoy

sharing groups that ground beyond the Somme, where much more remains of the old front line.

We didn't do the Western Front End to End this time as such, but we came out of Calais and

cross the battlefield between Luz and Notre Dame de Lorette in northern France,

and thereafter pretty much followed the trench lines all the way down to the village of Perfetta House on the Swiss border,

where that western front came to an end.

Here you can find the final trenches and the bunkers, that end of those 450 miles of

positions, and walk to what was in 1914-18, the borders then of three countries, France, Germany

and Switzerland, and be near to what was known as kilometre zero, where the front

ended or began, depending on how you look at it. From the very stars of that journey with this group

as we cross the flat coal fields of the north and continued our journey towards the high peaks

of the Vogue where battles were fought in the snow.

One thing I wanted them to take away from this journey was the scale of the Western Front.

It's one thing travelling from Eke to the Somme, but it's only once you get down to that very far end

and have seen so much along the way

that the size of the ground fought over, the thoughts of millions of men whose pathways you've crossed

and the staggering amount of beacons to that conflict from cemeteries to memorials, from forts to trenches,

all of it begins to make sense and perhaps feels a little overwhelming. And then you get to that border point and the house just over the line

in Switzerland, which was there in the Great War and acts as a great comparison for then and now

photos. Those wartime images show Puelu staring across the border

at a handful of Swiss border guards.

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