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The Old Front Line

The Loos Memorial

The Old Front Line

Paul Reed

Education, History, Tv & Film, Film History

4.8637 Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2021

⏱️ 46 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

the heart of the Loos Battlefield. Here we look at the fighting in this part of the Western Front, the background to the Missing, and examine some stories of those commemorated here: from a Major-General to the son of Rudyard Kipling, to the men from Sussex, many of whom died at Richebourg. Send us a text Support the show

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

When you take the old Roman road between the towns of Bethune and Lons in northern France,

0:07.0

you cross over the Luz battlefields from 1915,

0:11.0

and as you top a rise, there on your left, is a cemetery, surrounded by high walls.

0:18.0

Here, the missing of Luz, the Luz Memorial.

0:25.7

We're standing on a viewing platform overlooking a British cemetery in northern France.

0:32.0

Behind us is a main road, a busy road, that runs from the town of Bethune across to the town of L'Annes.

0:39.5

It's an old Roman road that cuts right across this part of the old front line, a battlefield

0:44.6

most closely associated with 1915. We're right in the heart where the Battle of Luz was

0:50.8

fought that year in September and October. The cemetery beneath us is

0:55.9

Dud Corner Cemetery, so named because there was a German defensive position here, a Redoubt,

1:01.8

the Lens Road Redoubt, which it was said that in front of it was a large number of unexploded

1:07.0

dud shells, and so it was Dud Corner Cemetery cemetery we'll return to the cemetery itself another day

1:13.9

but it's the walls of the cemetery that we're interested in not just walls that delineate the

1:20.6

cemetery on the landscape these are memorials memorials to the missing this is the lose memorial and that's what we're going to look at but

1:29.8

before we get to the point where we begin our walk along some of those panels of the lose memorial

1:34.6

and discuss some of the stories of the men who are commemorated here what can we see from where we are

1:41.3

well this is an unusual feature that we're on, this viewing platform

1:45.1

in a cemetery. It was built as part of the design of the cemetery in the 1920s to allow our visitors

1:51.1

to come up the steps, the Portland stone steps, to stand up here and look out across this

1:56.6

essentially flat landscape where the Battle of Luz was fought in 1915. We can see how the battlefield here is

2:05.1

devoid of cover, which was a great factor in the casualties that were suffered here in 1915. And we can

2:11.5

see pretty much all of the battlefield from here. If we look behind us, we're close to Morocco, Sitae Moroc, one of the mining

...

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