In the ground beyond reams, where the huge open fields of the champagne roll across some of the bloodiest battlefields of the Great War,

we discover how men from many nations fought here, and tucked away in a quiet and isolated village,

we find one of the forgotten corners of the first world war we're a little bit

further down the western fronts in this week's episode and we're in the area east of the city of

reams reams was a front line city like eep was during the first world. It sat right on the front line. The front lines

weaved around it from the north to the east and it came under tremendous bombardments, a very high

percentage of its buildings damaged or destroyed in those four years of war. And we're in that ground

east of Reams in the Champagne area of France, not so much visiting the places where champagne is grown on the vine here, but looking at the ground where some of the key battles of the French army in the First World War were fought, particularly in the years 1915 and 1917, although through all four years of the war there was heavy

fighting in this area of the Western Front. But it isn't just about the French, which we'll

discover, it is quite a multinational area of the battlefields of the First World War, with lots of

different nationalities that we perhaps might not always think of being involved in some of the fighting in this sector.

The front line established around Reams in 1914, and as both sides dug in, as everyone did along the Western Front during that first winter of the war,

the trench network in this area developed. That ground east of Reams was essentially quite flat,

and the Germans held some of the areas of high ground there. It was a familiar story with the

Germans on the high ground, and in this case the French beneath it. And 1915 saw an attempt by

the French army to redress that balance, particularly with the big offensive here

in September of 1915. And this was part of a joint offensive with the British. The date of

the attack was the 25th of September 1915, which was the date of the Battle of Luz in northern

France, a battle that we've covered a couple

of times in this podcast now. And the French attack here was not just a joint offensive there

with the British, but also the French themselves were attacking just to the south at what we'd

call Vimy Ridge and what the French called Hill 145. Here in the Champagne, the French army attacked

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