On the battle-scarred fields of the Somme, teenagers from a school in central England follow in the footsteps of their great-grandfathers in the trenches of the Somme.
Mick Biegel shows the youngsters around what is now hallowed ground. The memorials reveal the full horror of the Somme. In just a few hours on July 1 1916 some 20,000 British soldiers died here.
Before becoming a battlefield tour guide, Mick was a soldier, serving with the British army in Northern Ireland and Sarajevo. Now he passes on the memory of World War One to today’s generation. But is it commemorating a bloody nightmare or celebrating glory and victory?
“It is too easy to be “macho”, to think it is glorious, to think it is triumphant and that it is nothing you need to worry about today,” Biegel said. “This is not ancient history! Could it happen again? I suppose it could.”
Celebration or commemoration? It is a poignant debate gripping the UK.
In Cambridge Professor Richard Evans, a leading British histor
