‘No one wavered, broke ranks or tried to go back’

One hundred years after the start of the battle of the Somme, Anthony Peregrine follows in the footsteps of the many thousands who fell

The farm track in the Somme was rough but drivable. We had some kind of Citroën; it managed easily. We pulled up where we’d been aiming for: the Pals battalions memorial park. It was some way off the road, down a gentle hill, in the middle of the farmland where the battalions were slaughtered on July 1 1916, the first day of the battle of the Somme. We got out. A man in a van had followed us. A farmer, perhaps. He seemed irritated. French farmers around here aren’t all in awe of the Great War. Unearthing steel and bones from the conflict, as they still do, holds them up. Remembrance tourism, too, can slow down agriculture. Our chap apparently considered us intruders. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “My English friend,” said my French friend Benoît, “has come to pay his respects.” The exchange was curt. The fellow drove off.

“We should tell him that, were it not for the men killed here, he’d now be speaking German,” said my friend.

“Or,” I said. Then I stopped. Battlefields require self-control, for they provoke unpredictable emotions. Particularly, for me, right here, 25 minutes north of Albert. The memorial park – the Sheffield Memorial Park, to give it its proper name – commemorates the northern Pals battalions of the British Army’s 31st Division. They came from Barnsley and Bradford, Leeds, Hull and Durham, Sheffield, Accrington and Chorley and, at 7.30 on a sunny Saturday morning a hundred years ago, jumped out of trenches to be mown down. “Not a man wavered, broke ranks or attempted to go back,” reported Brigadier-General Hubert Rees. “[I could never have] imagined such a magnificent display of gallantry, discipline and determination.”

The memorial park is directly behind where the front line ran. All around, treeless acres have returned to farming. But the park stands out, once again a copse as it was pre-1914. Shell craters and trench indentations remain, keepsakes of cataclysm. Memorials punctuate the site. I’m a Lancastrian, so I made for the monument to the Accrington Pals, most famous of the local battalions READER OFFER

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The Chorley Pals prior to setting off for the Somme