In some of the forgotten corners of Flanders fields, we look at the war beneath the western front with the tunnelers, the men who held the line and are buried in the small soldiers' cemeteries of the Great War, and those who flew above the battlefields, the men of the Royal Flying Corps, who took the war to the skies above the Massines Ridge.

For the first time this season we've returned to the battlefields in Flanders

and we're south of the city of Eap in the village of Wichata or White Sheets as the British

soldier called it during the First World War.

Those tommies of the Great War struggled to pronounce many of these names in Belgium and France, just like we do today.

And for those of you who often follow these podcast walks on Google Earth, I've actually for the first time put together a map

with the root on so you know where I start from, where we go, there's a slight adaptation because

it wouldn't let me take us through a particular minor road past a farm but you'll get the rough

idea and I hope to continue to do those kind of maps

as they were a lot simpler to do than i must confess i thought they were for future podcasts where

we walk the battlefields so where are we well we're in the village of wichita white sheets

and we're standing outside the church in the very heart of the village,

and we're in front of a memorial that shows a kneeling soldier with an entrenching tool in his hand.

And this village is atop the Messines Ridge, where in June 1917, on the 7th of June, 19 mines were blown along that ridge, creating the largest man-made explosion in the history of the Great War on the Western Front.

These 19 mines totaled nearly a million pounds of explosive and they

destroyed German positions along the ridge. That in combination with the bombardment and the

advances in the cooperation between infantry, tanks, artillery, aircraft enabled the men to move

forward and capture the ridge in a single day.

We've looked at elements of the Battle of Messines before and we will no doubt return to them.

But the tunnelers who prepared those 19 mines were never properly commemorated on this battlefield.

And this is a modern memorial, a bit of modern sculpture,

symbolising one of these miners in his tunnels working away at the mining face,

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