The song of the Skylark is something that immediately transports me back to the battlefields of the Great War.

When I walk the fields in my little South Yorkshire village and hear them singing in the blue sky above,

my mind immediately is drawn to the fields around the village

of Sayre on the Somme, and those men from the Northern Powers Battalions, men from this region,

who walked into machine gun oblivion on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Welcome to the old front line with me, military historian Paul Reed.

In this podcast, each week I give you a glimpse into the stories of the Great War

and we walk those battlefields together.

So let's get our pack, put out our boots and head

out onto the old front line. We'll begin our walk outside Sayre Road number one cemetery.

The road that it's named after the Sayre Road is today the D-919, the main road that

runs from the village of Mei-May, which in 1916 was behind the British lines, through the

small village, now not much more than a hamlet of Sayre, and beyond that, to Puisier, and eventually

to Arras. This was a road that had been used by soldiers

over many, many centuries. Roman legionnaires had once marched along here from encampment to

encampments in the conquest of Gaul. Napoleon's troops had come through here and marched along this road via Arras up to the coast

for a possible invasion of Britain. In the Great War, the French army met the Germans very close to

here in the opening phase of the war. The Battle of the Somme was fought here in 1916 and again

in 1918. And in the Second World War War German pandas swept through here in the

Blitzkrieg and four years later men from the Guards Armoured Division motored up this road

liberating the towns and villages in their wake following the invasion of France and the landings

in Normandy this really is part of the pathways of history, of all our history.

But this week we've come to focus on events here on one day, principally one day in 1916,

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