Welcome to the Old Front Line with me, military historian Paul Reed.

This is a regular podcast where we'll look at the history of the First World War and travel

together across the battlefields from Ep to the Somme and beyond.

So what's in this week's episode?

We're back on the Somme this week and we're starting our walk in the village of Ocean

Vie.

Now just like us, the British Tommy of the First World War often struggled to pronounce the names of some of these

French villages, so he corrupted them. Foncavilliers became funky villas, Montchie Breton became Monkey

Britain, and Ochoingier became Ocean Villas. And the village of Ocean Villas sat just behind

the British front line on this northern part of the

Somme battlefield. It was an area that we took over from the French in the summer of 1915,

a year before the main battle of the Somme. And the first units in the line here were men from

the fourth division. They had just taken part in the second battle of Eapr in April and May of 1915 and were sent

down here to the Somme for a rest. Now the SOM at that time was very much a quiet sector. There were

no major battles taking place here. It was just the day-to-day activity of trench warfare, all quiet on the Western Front.

Far from quiet, of course, because there would be daily bombardments, there might be gas releases,

there could be raiding, both you raiding the enemy trenches and the Germans raiding our trenches.

There would be sniper fire, rifle grenades,

trench mortars, so really it wasn't ever quiet. But for these regular soldiers of the 4th Division,

it was great contrast, the sort of intense fighting that they had taken part in at Eap just a few weeks before.

And they spent their first month in the line here at Ocean Villas extracting bricks from the trenches

because the French had lined all of the trenches here with bricks to make them more sturdy.

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