Battlefield: The Blooms & Battles of the Western Front

Where the parapet is low And level with the eye Poppies and cornflowers glow And the corn sways to and fro In a pattern against the sky. The gold stalks hide Bodies of men who died Charging at dawn through the dew to be killed or to kill, I thank the gods that the flowers are beautiful still. Leslie Coulson, killed 1916 Flowers are in many ways the antithesis of war. They are a symbol of life and hope and beauty. For many men in the trenches they became too a symbol of the peace and the normality they had left behind, and which they hoped one day, if they lived, to enjoy again. And, of course, in the crimson red poppy, they have become the ultimate symbol of the suffering and sacrifice of a generation in the trenches of the Western Front. In this centenary year we pay tribute to that sacrifice and to the flowers that gave them hope then, and today represent the beauty, the hope, the peace and above all the new life that have sprung from those four dreadful years. Battlefield traces the bitter battles faced by the British army from 1914 to 1918, and follows their footsteps across the countryside, seeing landscapes they fought over once again decorated by green foliage and wild flowers, seeing places they knew as smashed ruins now reborn as pretty flower-decked villages, and seeing the cemeteries, where so many of them now lie, turned into gardens by beautiful blooms. It’s a book about a war a hundred years ago and about a beautiful countryside and its flowers today.