As the rhomboid shapes of tanks crossed the muddy fields of the Somme,

on the 15th of September 1916, the Battle of Fleursk-Corsolet began.

Men from many nations fought that day, but over on the right, at bully and lousy wood,

the London lads fought their way through dense thickets of trees

to approach the village of Combles.

As we continue to follow the Battle of the Somme a hundred and five years on,

this week marked the anniversary of the Battle of Fleur's Corsolet.

Roughly halfway through the Battle of the Somme,

this saw not just a further advance into the German lines between Albert and Bapom,

but a turning point in military history itself,

with the implementation and use of tanks for the first time on a battlefield in military

history. The battle of the Somme had begun on the first day, on the 1st of July 1916, that

sunlit picture of hell, a perfect summer's day when thousands of men from Gomacour in the

north to Montauban the south had gone over the top.

Often seen as a battle that's the first use of the Powell's battalions and men of Kitchener's army.

In fact, Kitchener's army had been first thrown into battle at Gallipoli the previous August.

The Somme was an all-volunteer battle in its early stages.

But given the heavy losses on that first day of more than 57,000 officers and men killed,

wounded and missing, gradually as the huge war machine that the Somme was, it drew in more and

more men and it signalled a changing character of the British army.

Conscription by this stage had been introduced, but the first conscripts did not begin to arrive

until the autumn of 1916. So those early battles when we exploited some of the few successes

...