As summer's bright rays bring these long days to a peak, the sound of bird song along the old battlefields

diminishes at this time of year. The dawn chorus has passed. But in the woodland as we walk the western front, the

chif-chaff still sings in the trees. It's summer on the battlefields. Welcome to the old front line.

With me, military historian Paul Reed.

Each week I bring you a glimpse of the Great War

and we walk together across the battlefields

from Eap to the Somme and beyond.

So it's time to head out again.

Take our pack, strap on our boots, and walk out onto the old front line.

We're back in Flanders this week and we're about two miles east of the Mening Gates, the memorial, on the edge of the city of

Eap, where at eight o'clock each evening the last post is sounded. We're on the Menin Road,

the old Roman road that links the city of Eap with the town of Menin, and runs right through

the main area of the battlefields, where for those four years four major battles were

fought and many other actions besides and a quarter of a million British and Commonwealth soldiers

died here. Roughly one in every four of those who died in the war fell here at Eap. So this is one of

Britain's most important battlefields from the

Great War. Where we are now on the Menin Road, ahead of us, the ground rises towards the little

hamlet of Hoog. Beyond that is the Gellervilt Plateau and the Menin Road Ridge. Behind us is the city

of Epe. Over to our left, the Belloada, and beyond that the Friesenburg and eventually the Pilcombe

Ridges that guard the approaches to the village of Passchendale with a third Battle of Eap was 40 in

1917. But we're going to turn off of the Menin Road onto a new road, a road that didn't

exist at the time of the Great War, a road that was built in the post-war period to take the battlefield

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