The detonating of the mine at Hawthorn Ridge on the morning of July 1, 1916 marked the advent of the darkest day in the history of the British Army, a covenant with death that saw 58,000 British troops killed or wounded before nightfall.

By the time the Somme offensive came to an end four and half months later, the lives of more than a million men – British, Commonwealth, French and German – were shattered.

As well as treading lightly over the physical relics of the Somme battlefields – the trenches, shell holes and mine craters – our course will echo to the music of the Great War, from the 1914 recruiting refrain “Oh, we don’t want to lose you but we think you ought to go” to Ivor Novello’s Keep the Home-Fires Burning:.

They were summoned from the hill-side;
They were called in from the glen,
And the Country found them ready
At the stirring call for men

The poetry of the war years will also come under review, notably the verse of two veterans of the Somme (and two future professors of poetry at Oxford), Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden.

Our visits will examine both the northern and southern sectors of the Somme battlefield, the Memorial to the Missing at Thiepval, the controversial Musée Somme 1916 at Albert and the famous Historial de la Grande Guerre museum at Péronne.

We stay throughout at the three-star Royal Picardie Hotel in the town of Albert. Located between Amiens and Arras in the heart of Picardie, Albert was the main staging post for British forces during the Battle of the Somme.