In this 110th anniversary year of 1916, I've set out to ensure we remember not just Verdun and the Somme,

but some of the lesser-known operations which took place that year two.

The fighting at Sintelawar in Flanders in the spring of 1916 involving British and Canadian

troops is one example of this. And approaching this differently, what we're going to do in this

episode is talk about the battle in March and April 1916

and then hear the accounts of two Canadian soldiers serving there from the same battalion

taken from two fantastic and themselves lesser-known memoirs of the Great War. So where are we?

The village of Santa Luar feels little more than a hamlet today.

You can walk or drive through it in minutes. It has no church, there are some houses, many of them

from recent decades and a few agricultural buildings. The pre-1914 village was a little different,

but it took on an importance greater than its physical size because it sat at the junction of four roads, south of the city of

Eap and on some of the rising ground of the wider Messines Ridge. British and French troops

had fought here during the first Battle of Eap in October and November 1914

and then when the line stabilized in that first winter in this area it became the left flank of the British Army on the Western Front.

Then at Centre Loire its most northern position on a line only tens of miles long at that time the bulk of the

Western Front being held by the French Army at this stage.

Saint-Laua was a good choice for a juncture in the line because to the north was the city

of Epe itself, then held by the French, but one of the four roads in the village went towards

the neighbouring village of Vormazila, a useful staging post for units in the line.

Here in Vormazela were big houses that had cellars, covered approaches to Scentloire and space

to dig the infrastructure of the battlefield

from communication trenches to dugouts to mortar positions and field gun positions as well

...