Soldiers must be left to slumber

It might be a pub, cafe or perhaps a park bench. There's nothing like the delectable hour's respite that divides the working day for so many people.

A sandwich in the sun, a sip of beer and a chance to draw breath. The simplicity of bliss.

Maybe you will reflect that, despite all the troubles and worries of this hectic and wearied world, life is still sweet and worth savouring for every vital minute. Thousands - no, millions - will come to the same conclusion.

The middle of the year is a marvellous time to be alive. It doesn't matter how old you are. Whether young, or of advanced years, the hiss of watered lawns, buzz of bees and birdsong at dawn provide confirmation that every single, succulent second is a gift to be treasured.

There is a good reason why I am paying this homage to life on this date, Monday, July 1, 2002. For on this very day, 86 years ago, thousands of young men lost their precious lives in a single morning of murderous madness.

July 1, 1916, was the first day of the Battle of the Somme. On that day, at about the same time many of you were walking downstairs for your breakfast this morning - 7.30 - the British infantry advanced towards the heavily-defended German lines along an 18-mile front.

The outcome is well-known. By nine o'clock - roughly the moment when many of you arrived at your desk in the office or factory workbench today - 20,000 British soldiers were lying dead and wounded.

In an horrendous hour-and-a-half of flying bullets and high explosives, the equivalent to the population of a small town had been wiped out. And at roughly 11 o'clock, about the time you were having your coffee break this morning, barely a mile of ground had been won from the enemy.

The price was the annihilation of a whole generation of young men. Those who died on that blistering hot day would have been the fittest and potentially the most motivated, the youngsters who, in other cicumstances, might have contributed much to their country had their lives not been cut short.

But now these men could be disturbed in their eternal sleep. For on two battle grounds along the former Western Front - in the Somme area and further north at Ypres in Belgium - there are plans for major developments that may involve the moving of soldiers' remains.

The French government has named the Somme valley farming town of Chaulnes as the site of a controversial third airport for Paris. The plan looks like going ahead, despite calls to abandon the project amid slumping confidence in air travel.

Although the French have not yet made a decision, if the airport was built, some of the many cemeteries in the now-serene fields of the Somme would have to be moved. The bodies would have to be exhumed, a proposal that has understandably enough angered many of the relatives of those who lost their lives defending French liberty.

If the French allow this sacrilege - and that is what it is - they would be breaking the promise made after the First World War that these graveyards were to be granted to the British nation in perpetuity.

For these cemeteries belong to the people of this country and her former dominions. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission acts as custodian for all of us - the descendants of the fallen who are embarking on pilgrimages to the battlefields of France and Flanders in increasing numbers.

Log on to the CWGC website and type out your surname. The chances are that you will find ancestors who died in the First World War and are buried in a foreign field.

Meanwhile, on Pilkem Ridge battlefield, north of Ypres, the scene of savage fighting during October 1914, and three years later in the opening stages of the Passchendaele offensive, the deathbed of tens of thousands of British soldiers is in danger of being torn apart by a motorway.

Only an impact study stands in the way of the Flemish authorities deciding to route the road through the heart of the ridge.

The road would pass perilously close to 12 war cemeteries and cut a battlefield in two.

This would leave some of the tens of thousands of British troops still listed as missing in action under a carpet of concrete and tarmac. The authorities are due to decide early next year on the route of the bypass which is intended to reduce traffic through several villages.

As many of you will know, I have travelled to the Somme and Ypres on numerous occasions. On one particular trip, three years ago, I went to Passchendaele's Tyne Cot Cemetery to find a 20-year-old soldier by the name of Harry Hirons.

He was lost in the mud of the Ypres Salient in October, 1917. I had seen his name recorded on his parents' gravestone in my home village in Warwickshire and was determined to find his grave. Or an inscription, at least.

And I did. He is recorded among the missing at Tyne Cot - but with the help of David Paterson, of Birmingham War Research Society, his name, etched in Portland stone, was soon located.

I remember that day with crystal clarity. It had been raining hard all morning, and the ploughed fields were already waterlogged. It would have been Harry's lot to have to struggle through similar conditions as he played his part in the suicidal folly of Passchendaele during the autumn of 1917.

From the green fields of leafy Warwickshire to the flatlands of Flanders, young Harry Hirons, a country lad who had been plucked from paradise and dropped into hell, now knows he has not been forgotten or forsaken.

So, as you sit here at leisure, reading your paper on this summer's afternoon, spare a thought for the soldiers who perished on this terrible day 86 years ago. And maybe also remember lads such as Harry Hirons, too.

For their slumber is about to disturbed by the inexorable advance of a different enemy. It's called progress, but some of us know otherwise.

And you can protest in a number of ways - either by complaining to the authorities via a website, like I have done, or lobbying your MP.

I think it's the least we should do. Lest we forget.