Dulce et decorum est...

Keeling Copse was not one of the great objectives of the Great War, the war to end all wars. A tiny wood a few miles from Monchy-le-Preux near Arras, today it hardly seems worth fighting for. In May, 1917, however, it was a very different story. A month earlier, 24,000 men had been packed into the Arras' maze of underground chalk quarries, the idea being they would attack from tunnels just yards from the German line. The attack was largely successful and the night of 2nd May found 2nd Lieutenant Norman Gunther of the 6th Buffs some four miles east of Arras peering into the darkness trying to make out the distant outline of the trees.

But who was Norman Gunther and why, almost a century later, would I find myself, like him, before this insignificant little wood? Last November marked the 90th anniversary of the end of the Great War and there has naturally been new interest in visiting the battlefields. The problem is that the scale of the suffering and slaughter is so great, the headstones so many and the lists of those never found so long, such a visit can too easily become merely a sad history lesson when it could be – should be – so much more. Perhaps a way to ensure this, is to reduce the tragedy to a scale we can all understand – the scale of a single human life. To choose a relative who died in the Great War, research his life and service record a little and then follow in his footsteps through Belgium or France to a final name or a headstone or memorial. If you don't have a relative who fought, simply 'adopt' a soldier whose name appears on your village War Memorial. My only relative to die in the Great War was killed in the Middle East so when I decided to visit the battlefields of France, I adopted Norman Gunther.

Norman's name I knew well. I had passed it literally hundreds of times as I walked into my sons' school, Saint Ronan's, once Tongswood House, a beautiful country mansion in Hawkhurst. In the entrance porch are memorials to Norman killed in July, 1917, aged 19, and his brother Charles, aged 28, killed in September, 1918,. They were the sons of Tongswood's owner, Charles Gunther, a banker and trader but now best known as the creator of the Oxo cube. Ironically, both he and his wife were predominantly German and there was a real question as to the side on which their sons should fight. The boys made their own decision. Charles returned from Argentina to join the Life Guards and Norman went straight from Eton into the Royal East Kent Yeomanry. Alas, it was all too short a journey from the playing fields of Eton to the killing fields of Arras:

"Part of the objective allotted had been a spot called Keeling Copse, and it was found after the battalion had taken stock of its losses, that 2nd Lts Cockeram and Gunther with about 40 men and a Lewis gun had actually got there, only to discover that they were completely isolated, the enemy having reformed his line behind them, and both sides being in their original trenches. Thus three lines of Germans intervened between this handful of men and their comrades.

"Nothing daunted, however, they held their own all day, accounted for many of the enemy and then, when night fell and they had expended every cartridge and bomb they possessed, they gallantly fought their way back again, breaking through one line after another, until at last the two subalterns and thirteen of their stout lads were enabled to report themselves to battalion HQ. Cockeram and Gunther both received the MC for their gallant conduct on this occasion." (Buffs Historical Record).

The record concludes: "It is sad to have to add that Gunther was killed shortly afterwards within half a mile of Keeling Copse gallantly defending a trench the German was attacking."

Today, Keeling Copse has, like so many woods here and on the Somme, re-grown and looks exactly as it would have done in 1917. One can lay the old trench maps over today's satellite pictures and the detail is uncanny. Using both, on a summer's day, larks overhead, I walked in Norman's footsteps across No Man's Land to the copse. It was hard to imagine on such a day Norman's own experience here, although Isaac Rosenberg's

"The air is loud with death,
The dark air spurts with fire,
The explosions ceaseless are.
Timelessly now, some minutes past,
These dead strode time with vigorous life,
Till the shrapnel called 'An end!'"