A small village on the Somme helps us trace a journey to the old front line.

Name scratched on ancient walls somehow flag the past,

and a tree-lined avenue makes us reflect on those long columns of soldiers

who marched ever onwards in 1916.

We never seem to be too far from the Somme on this podcast,

and this week we're back on the Somme battlefields,

but not in the front line areas, not in the places where those battles took place in 1916,

but behind the lines in the village of Engel Belmere.

And this is a village which I suspect very few of you will probably have visited on your journeys along the old front line.

It's just off of the battlefield area. From one side of it you can see the

Thiepvale Ridge with the Thiepvale Memorial sitting atop it and then on the other side of the

village you can see towards the trees of the Newfoundland Park. So it's very close to two of the

most popular, the most visited areas of the Somme today, but a village that gets few visitors. So why are we

here and where are we? Well we're actually on the western side of Engle Belmere. We're just off of

a streets called the Schumann de Forceville and we're outside the communal cemetery. We'll come back to that shortly. But the

village of Engel-Belmere sat just behind the British front line on this northern sector of the Somme

battlefields. When we took over this sector in 1915 from the French, we inherited villages like this

which they had used to billet their troops and

which we used to bill it our own. To the east of Engel Belmell was the front line close to the

German-held village of Beaumont-Hamel. And to the north, another village behind the British

sector, Mei-Mei, or Mali-Malit, as the troops call it, and then to the south the onkra valley villages like this form

part of the british infrastructure on the som we tend to think of the great war just in terms of

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