The first day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, 1 July, was so grim that many people forget that it went on until 18 November, and that it comprised a number of smaller battles during the five months duration. One of those battles was the one for Delville Wood, or Devils Wood, which sits just east of the village of Longueval and which, at the time, was 156 acres of mostly beech and hornbeam and a very dense undergrowth. Difficult fighting territory. The Battle of Delville W

The Roll of Honour of the black South African soldiers buried in France numbers 445.* It starts with the driver J Lutas buried in the Abbeville Communal Cemetery Extension and ends with Lance Corporal Alpheus Zwane buried at Arques-La-Bataille Military Cemetery in Deppe. It includes the name of 3009 Private Beleza Myengwa, buried at the Bleville Community Cemetery just north of Le Harve, but in June 2014 exhumed and re-interred at the South African Memorial at Dellville Wood.

Photo: Author's own Of the 60 million shells fired in the battle of Verdun during the 300 days and nights in 1916 about one in eight of them remained unexploded in this tract of land outside the city. The government declared this 10 000-hectare area a red zone, or ‘zone rouge’; part of the larger 150 000- hectare area stretching from the North Sea to the Swiss border: Its destruction so absolute it was considered not fit for human or animal habitation and too expensive to cle

If you step out onto the beach at Asnelle in the fog and in the trough of the low tide, you get to see the unusual and irregular shapes of remnants of Mulberry Harbour B that won’t be visible again for 12 hours, and then only if there is light, and, if you happen to be on the beach. Lesser known than Arromanches-Les-Bains, the beach commonly associated with the Mulberry Harbour, Asnelle was the eastern edge of the facility imagined by Lord Mountbatten, given the go-ahead by C

Copywrite Imperial War Museum Q4866 The Labour Corps of WWI Note: The stories of the individual labour corps are detailed in separate blogs. On 21 February 1917, in heavy pre-dawn fog near the Isle of Wight, the British merchant ship Darro  collided with the SS Mendi . On board the Mendi  were 823 men from the 5th Battalion, South African Native Labour Corps. Tragically, 650 of them perished that night. These men were heading to the Western Front, not to fight, but to work. T

Photo: Author's own A recent and unrelated trip to Uganda gave me a chance to investigate how locals – specifically soldiers of the King’s Africa Rifles are remembered for their role in the East Africa campaign. There were about 4200 deaths during the war, with a further 3 000 due to disease. It is unknown how many of these deaths are Ugandans, but it is fair to assume that they are many and I was looking for any sign that these men’s deaths had not gone unnoticed. Sadly, the