Whenever I find myself cruising around the back roads of Flanders I am always on the lookout – of course I am – for evidence of the Great War in the surrounding fields, and bunkers such as this are still the war relics that you are most likely to see. Continue reading
On the one hundred and tenth anniversary of the opening day of the Battle of the Somme, a day when close on 20,000 British soldiers would lose their lives – this is Ancre British Cemetery, near Beaumont-Hamel – allow me to introduce you to some more men who survived their war experience, if not wholly. Continue reading
The Newton Universal Military Tractor. In case your literacy skills have just let you down. Continue reading
The sun is setting as we arrive at Maple Copse Cemetery at the end of another glorious spring day in Flanders’ fields. Continue reading
A Bullock tractor looms up in front of the cameraman during tests at Burton-on-Trent in Staffordshire in June 1915. Continue reading
Just to the east of Zonnebeke, and a few hundred yards south of the hamlet of Broodseinde, alongside the main N303 that connects the village of Passendale, as Passchendaele is now called, two miles to the north, and Wervik, way down south on the River Lys, stands this roadside memorial to the 7th Division. Continue reading
Some years back now, we paid a surprise visit to White House Cemetery, only half a mile north east of the Menin Gate in Ypres (Ieper), on a somewhat greyer day than this one. Surprise, because one minute before we arrived, I had no idea we were going to stop here, and thus had done no research on the place beforehand. Continue reading
