As the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme approaches, we find ourselves back in those dusty

tracks of Pickety, walking the ground at La Boiselle, Mash Valley and overlars, where the Battle of the

Somme began more than a century ago.

This episode of the Old Front Line will go out a few days from the annual commemoration of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, the 1st of July.

That terrible day in 1916, almost that midpoint in the Great War, when an army of volunteers, regular soldiers,

territoriales and men of the new army, Kitchener's Army, went over the top on that perfect

summer's morning and walked into machine gun oblivion. It was the blackest day of the British

army, with over 57,000 casualties, of which

nearly 20,000 were killed in action or died of wounds. And that black, terrible day started a battle,

a campaign which came to symbolise the First World War for so many. A battle of contrast

beginning in the sunshine of that July morning and ending with a snowstorm in November

four and a half months later as the battle came to its conclusion. It's a battle that connects many

of us to that history, that

landscape and those ordinary men in extraordinary times who were there during the Great War.

And at this time of year, my mind is often on the Somme, and I'm sure that's true for many of you listening to this podcast.

There is always something about the SOM for me, not just because I once lived there,

not just because it was one of the first battlefields of the Great War that I explored,

but there's something about the whole story of the

SOM, the men of the SOM who marched there in 1916. And of course, so many of the veterans

that I interviewed back in the 1980s and 90s were veterans of the SOM battle. It was often a starting point in our conversation,

often what led me to their door, and something that really, as a subject, the Battle of the Somme,

the events of 1916, that has kind of consumed me ever since.

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