I shall do three things in respect of this weekend's 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the Great War. I shall reproduce two articles written many years ago which touched the horrendous events of 1914-1918, and I post (above) a clip of June Tabor singing the finest version I have heard of Eric Bogle's superb song, No Man's Land. If I wear poppies this weekend, there'll be two, red and white ....
The first article was published by The Daily Telegraph on September 24 2004 after I had paid a visit to the Great War memorial in Thiepval. The story touched me on a personal level for two reasons. Read on and you see mention of a French child called Poupard, my wife's maiden name (she is from la Sarthe, not so far away from the Somme) and also of a great friend and colleague, the late David Graves
By Colin Randall in Thiepval
On the plains of the Somme, two children, one English and one French, will perform a simple ceremony on Monday to honour the dead of the Great War.
Watched by guests including the Duke of Kent, Jonty Leggett, 10, and Emilie Poupard, nine, will formally open the doors to a £1.8 million visitor centre near the towering Thiepval war memorial in northern France.
Great-uncles of both children were among the soldiers who died there in the 1914-1918 war.
Nearly 90 years on, the involvement of Emilie and Jonty at the centre's opening honours not only their forebears but more than a million soldiers of Britain, the Commonwealth, France and Germany who were killed or injured in the five months of the Battle of the Somme.
The ceremony represents the climax to six years of planning, arm-twisting and fund-raising that began after Sir Frank Sanderson, chairman of the Royal British Legion branch in Burwash, East Sussex, noticed the lack of facilities for the 200,000 who visited the memorial each year.
"There was nothing to explain what happened in 1916," said Sir Frank, a retired insurance broker. "There wasn't even a lavatory."
Sir Frank, now 70, set up a charity, the Thiepval Project, to raise funds from public and private donations, the Somme local authority and the EU.
Pensioners sent £5 notes, a British businessman who prefers to remain anonymous contributed £72,000: one pound for each of the British soldiers' names, including that of his own great-uncle, on the memorial designed by Sir Edward Lutyens and opened in 1932.
Sir Frank's nephew, James Lyle, a New York investment fund manager, gave £35,000 - including the cost, already heavily discounted by Eurostar, of using the "Entente Cordiale" train to take guests to France for Monday's event.
A Telegraph article on the progress of fund-raising in July 2002, one of the last to be written by David Graves, one of the paper's senior reporters, before he died in a diving accident in the Bahamas, produced a new stream of donations.
"It is difficult to be precise, but we think it brought in between £20,000 and £30,000 pounds," said Sir Frank. The article is reproduced on the charity's website at www.thiepval.org.uk
Visitors to the centre, expected to be overwhelmingly British and to include numerous parties of schoolchildren, will learn about the Battle of the Somme from an illustrated narrative and from films shown in a small screening room set behind a partition built with sandbags.
A bank of computers will provide details of every British and Commonwealth soldier lost in both world wars.
Thomas Compere-Morel, the director of the French Great War museum, which will run the centre, said: "I see this as a way the French community can express its gratitude to Britain.
"French people know so little about what happened, which I think is shocking. Only now are our school history books beginning to tell the story of the Somme."
Military cemeteries and smaller memorials are dotted throughout the surrounding countryside, recalling the scale of military losses.
About a mile from the centre, at Authuille, are the graves of two soldiers called William McBride, the inspiration for No Man's Land, a song written by the Scottish singer Eric Bogle and once described by Tony Blair as his favourite peace poem.
One line in the song reads: "I can't help but wonder now, Willie McBride, do all those that lie near know why they died?"
Sir Frank is content to leave visitors to decide for themselves about issues of war. But he knows why the soldiers died. "Most of them had a degree of patriotism that we simply would not understand today," he said. "But even that doesn't explain it. They died for their mates, because that's what you do in warfare."
*****
This article is reproduced from these pages, where they appeared four years ago, though they refer to another Telegraph article from 2006 ... the photograph is shown with the prior consent of Geoff Pugh, who took it
Just three months before the abrupt end of my Daily Telegraph career, I travelled by train from Paris to the Somme to write about the 90th anniversary of the start of one of the grimmest and bloodiest of battles in military history.
As my photographic companion, Geoff Pugh, and I walked up a lane towards the giant Lochnagar crater, just outside the village of La Boiselle, we spotted children linking hands around its rim.
We quickened our pace.
It turned out that the hands belonged to children from Dunblane, which I - as I reminded DT readers in this article - was "the Scottish town that has only to be mentioned by name to stir different memories of violent and random death".
The children had no direct connection with the tragic events of 1996 but it was impossible, as an outsider, not to contemplate the awful fates of two groups of people, small children slaughtered at school by a lunatic and soldiers butchered in the First World War. The crater is a relic of the massive mine detonated two minutes before the Battle of the Somme is generally regarded as having commenced.
The teachers accompanying the pupils readily agreed to get the children to repeat the gesture for Geoff's benefit. His photograph, used shallow across much of the page, lingers in my memory as one of the most striking images, taken in my presence, of my long journalistic career. NB: See more of Geoff's work at www.geoffpugh.com, though as I write on Nov 9 2018 the site is "currently under maintenance".
I thought of it again when preparing articles for The National, Abu Dhabi about the mighty commemorations of 2014: the 100th anniversary of the start of that war and the 70th anniversary of D-day, the beginning of the end of World War II. In the midst of this work, coincidence struck again: the man I chose among winners in a competition at Salut! Sunderland works in the Middle East but asked for the prize to be sent to his UK address. In Dunblane.
There will be many centenaries to mark in the period to 1918 as we reach the 100th anniversary of each major development of the war.
And now, please, reflect on some more powerful words you hear in the clip above, those of the Scottish-Australian singer-songwriter Eric Bogle, whose songs of the Great War are rightly considered among the finest to be written.
This is one verse from his wonderfully crafted No Man's Land.
The sun's shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that's still No Man's Land
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man.
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.
If the short extract makes you wish to see more, please see the lyrics in full at https://ericbogle.net/lyrics/lyricspdf/nomansland.pdf.
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