from Guardian, Wednesday November
10, 1999
Ghosts of war recalled to the
Somme
by John Ezard
Doomed soldiers go over the top through
shellbursts in the mud of the Somme - and in the same picture you can see not only the
pastures in which they will fall, now rich again with grass and crops, hut also the three
cemeteries in which they lie buried.
In another corner of these foreign
fields, troops advance up a trench to attack a farm so heavily bombarded that even its
foundations were obliterated. But ahead of them 83 years pass in a flash. The farm has
been handsomely rebuilt and a copse has regrown.
These images, in which time seems to
slip from 1916 to 1999 as you look at them, have been created from real photographs
for a new book and television series to mark the last remembrance week of the century.
The series, Great Battles of
the Great War, is being shown on Sundays on Granada, Yorkshire, Tyne Tees
and Borders ITV. Its study of the Somme will be shown on Remembrance Sunday, November 14.
The book, just published, uses an
atmospheric technique of fusing precisely matched recent colour photos of first world war
landscapes with black and white archive pictures from the Imperial War Museum in London.
Yesterday the series producer, Ed
Skelding, who spent six years reconnoitring French and Belgian battlefields and reading
archive material, said the method had never been used before. Its aim was "to put the
reader. in the position of the soldiers and to capture the spirit of these haunted
places."
In one of his most potent combined
photographs, captured German troops lean down to stretcher a wounded British soldier
across a hedge to the shelter of a building which stands in a modern meadow so green
and gentle that it looks like a cowshed.
In fact the building is one of the
battered surviving concrete pillboxes on Hill 60, one of the deadliest
killing grounds in the three battles of Ypres from 1914-1917. The hill, a key vantage
point in flat terrain, changed hands three times. For a time it was so churned and choked
with corpses, and the stench and fear of disease was so intense, that neither side dared
mount a fresh attack. Thousands of British troops were killed.
The picture with the cemeteries is of
Redan Ridge, near Beaumont Hamel on the Somme, where 5,000-6,000 British soldiers died.
Many were from Lancashire "lads" regiments, joined by youngsters from the same
streets and factories in a spasm of patriotism in 1914.
The no man's land into which the
soldiers are advancing is in the middle of the picture. "Conditions were unbelievably
severe, with glutinous mud making the very act of movement a battle of personal
willpower," writes the hook's author, the war historian Michael Stedman.
In the modern woodland to the right are
the German machine gun posts that massacred them. "There is no more telling sight on
the Somme than a sequence of cemeteries such as this," says Mr Stedman.
Mouquet farm on the Somme, in one
of the matched images. Anzacs fought there - they called it Mucky
farm - as did Canadians and men trom the Salford pals' battalion
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The man who now runs Mouquet farm,
near Poziêres on the Somme, still unearths a pile of bombs every year. When Australian
survivors of Gallipoli fought on his land in summer 1916, they called it Mucky farm. It
was prized as the gateway to a German stronghold, the Schwaben redoubt.
"Throughout those hot days it was
the Anzacs who repeatedly threw themselves in the grotesque, stinking sea of churned soil,
subterranean passages and shell-battered cellars which made up the sector," writes Mr
Stedman.
The soldiers advancing up the trench are
Canadians. Men from the Salford "pals battalion also fought. By September, when
Mouquet farm was captured, the Australians alone had lost 6,300 men.
Between July and November 1916, Britain
and its empire countries lost 420,000 on the Somme, France more than 200,000 and Germany
500,000. After five months' fighting, the British had advanced eight kilometres. However,
some historians believe the impact on German armies was so great as to contribute to the
1918 victory.
Few veterans are fit enough to return
any longer to Ypres, the Somme or other battlefields. Their place has been taken by new
generations of young visitors as their experience - like that of the second world war -
passes from individual into collective memory.
Some of the newcomers go to the farm,
some to the memorial park on Hill 60 - where the grass is in danger of being worn away
again, this time by visitors' feet - and some to Redan Ridge cemetery No 2, where the
headstone for Private T Taylor of the Lancashire Fusiliers says: "My task
accomplished, the sundown splendid and serene."
 Great Battles
of the Great War, Leo Cooper, an imprint of Pen & Sword Books, £19.95.
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