Across the vast open fields and the rolling downland of the Arras battlefields of 1917,

we find a small, possibly insignificant-looking village.

But here, in the great battle of that year, the men of the Royal Naval Division won this ground at high cost.

Here was their altar of sacrifice, Gavrelle.

We're back at Arras for this episode of the podcast, the second time this series we've come to this part of the old front line.

It often grieves me really just how under-visited the battlefields around the northern French city of Arras are.

It's an accessible battlefield as we've discussed before.

You can get to it from the Channel ports or the Channel Tunnel in around about an hour.

And there is so much great war history there that doesn't just span the British and Commonwealth involvement.

That's only half the war from 1916 when the British first took over

until 1918 when Canadian troops broke through the Hindenburg line, the Dracor-Quiont switch line,

the DQ line and advanced on Combay. And then in the previous two years, in that first half of the

war, this is a French sector of the Western Front

and there's much evidence of that throughout the sector around Arras so lots to see and it's no

accident that we've returned again in this season to these battlefields around Arras having visited Henin Hill and that part of the

Hindenburg Line sector around Arras right at the beginning of this season six. So where are we on

those Aras battlefields where east of the city on a piece of high ground close to the fast road that runs from Arras itself

up towards the A1-Lill-Paris motorway and this bit of ground known as the Pondujure, the break of day,

is a piece of high ground that was so critical to the British advance here in 1917.

When we study almost any battlefield of the Great War, we discover how important high ground

is. In Flat Flanders, those low rises really turns the whole war there into a battle for

the possession and repossession of that so-called high ground.

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