On the last great battlefield of the First World War, we discover a timeless scene along the Sombre Canal.

Here at lock number one, the last big push took place on the 4th of November, 1918.

I was recently on a Rekke for a new ledger battlefield tour looking at the fighting on the Hindenburg line in the final two years of the Great War.

When I design a new battlefield tour, any tour, I approach it in a similar way to how we used to construct TV documentaries and how I've written some of my books.

The tour isn't just a whiz round a few places, it should be a vehicle for learning and, in my view,

should have a beginning, a middle bit and an end. And this is what we try to achieve with the tours that we do.

So this new Hindenburg Line tour starts at Rossignoll Wood on the Somme.

Nightingale Wood or Copse 125, as Ernst Junger called it, close to the 1916 battlefield, so we've got kind of a back reference there.

But more than that, it's also a place where the Germans on this sector of the Somme front began to pull back

and where the 16th battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment, the Bradford Pows, who had been involved in the

assault on that summer's day on the 1st of July 1916. In the early part of 1917, fought a costly

battle here against an enemy who seemed to be pulling back, but wasn't keen on yielding ground.

And that became a kind of an insight into that early stage of the retreat to the Hindenburg line by German forces on this part of the Western Front.

And the cemetery here has the dead from that battle, from the Bradford Powers of the West Yorkshire Regiments

and you can see the wood you can see the ground where that action took place so it kind of sets the

scene for what the retreats to the Hindenburg line was and then the subsequent battles on the

Hindenburg line were all about. So in following that idea of a

beginning, a middle bit in the end, that was the beginning, and the kind of middle bit is when the

tour then follows the fighting in the outposts on the Hindenburg line, the approaches to that set of trenches,

all the problems involved, were suddenly facing an enemy dug into new defences,

and you have to do the same.

That's what British and Commonwealth forces found themselves doing

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