At 7.30am on Saturday 1st July 1916 the ‘flower of Britain’s youth’ rose from the trenches along an eighteen mile stretch of the Western Front in the final ‘push’ of the ‘war to end all wars’. They had flocked to the recruiting offices in their thousands, most eager to give ‘The Hun one on the nose’ before the war was over. For so many it would be their lives that would be over, and well before the end of the war in 1918. By the close of that fateful July day in 1916 nearly 60,000 British soldiers, each a son, a father, a loved one, lay dead and wounded, near a small unassuming river whose name would live in infamy - the River Somme.

The Somme Battle raged on until late November 1916. During those terrible 142 days more than one million two hundred thousand soldiers from all sides were killed or wounded in actions to take woods, ridges and villages which, by the end of the battle, were nothing but tree stumps, moonscapes and rubble.

The ravaged landscapes of the Somme and Ypres Battlefields have now been returned to agriculture, where crops once again grow. But things are different. Crops now grow alongside seemingly countless cemeteries that stand as silent testament to those who never returned. There are, however, many places where the battle-scarred land has been left just as it was at the end of this terrible carnage - and these are the places I find particularly moving, and which I include in all our tour itineraries. This is why the Somme and Ypres battlefields continue to be amongst the most interesting and thought provoking battlefields of the First World War.

Visiting the battlefields can be quite a moving experience, an experience best handled as part of a small group of friends (as we soon become…), as opposed to being part of a larger more impersonal group.  This is the main reason why our tours are restricted to no more than six persons.

As one walks over the ploughed fields which were once No Man’s Land, whether on the Somme or Ypres battlefields, it is easy to come upon pieces of shrapnel, barbed wire, cartridge cases and other battle debris. Unexploded shells are still unearthed on a regular basis even to this day in what is known locally as the ‘Harvest of Iron’. It is a common sight to see unexploded shells lying by the roadside after the spring and autumn ploughings, awaiting collection by the authorities.

Walking through woods, such as Delville, Mametz and Ploegsteert (Plugstreet), fought over with such terrible losses, is an eerie experience. These woods have been left almost as they were. Even today they are still a mass of shell craters and old trenches, with many of the fallen still lying beneath the visitor’s feet. There is an almost tangible silence in the depths of these and other woods which is difficult to describe. At Delville Wood, like many other woods, there was no ‘front line’. Battles ebbed one way then the other as each side attacked and counter attacked. Shell upon shell fell relentlessly on the same spot, churning up the soil and those who occupied it in a relentless hell of artillery fire.

Wherever you stand on the battlefields today, whether it be the gentle slopes leading to a little town called Passchendaele, or the rolling fields of the Somme, one can try to turn the clock back to how the land must have looked back in 1914-1918. To make this transformation possible you should preferably have copies of the original trench maps and plans, as these are your ‘window’ to an almost unimaginable world. Only in this way can what otherwise appears to be just rural Belgium and France be seen in your mind’s eye for what it must have been like. One can never truly understand, for only those who were there truly know, but we can try . This quest, and the level of material we provide, is the underlying theme of our self-drive tours.

Perhaps the most lasting impression is that of the countless cemeteries on the Somme and Ypres battlefields today, and throughout the Western Front, each with its own story to tell. Each uniform grave an individual, a son, a father, a treasured life, a name on a telegram, a loved one never to return. An individual to be talked of in years to come as being the distant uncle or grandfather, ‘killed in the Great War’ - the war to end all wars.… This sentiment is always present in our minds as one walks amongst the seemingly endless rows of headstones.

Almost half the headstones bear Kipling’s words - ‘A soldier of the Great War - Known unto God’; a body that could not be identified. Even sadder is the realisation that tens of thousands of the 400,000+ British and Commonwealth ‘missing’ have been denied the dignity of even an ‘unidentified’ burial.

These soldiers of ‘the war to end all wars’ today lie at rest under the thin veneer of normality that is the countryside of Flanders and Picardy today, their bodies having never been found.

Their memory is kept alive by those like us who seek to take a few minutes of their lives to try to understand what happened in this ‘Great War’, the shadow of which still falls upon us even all these years.