AT the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them. As this nation once again pays homage to the fallen of two world wars, it will come as no surprise to many of you to learn that this time yesterday found me in Ypres, Belgium.

As the bells of St Martin's Cathedral tolled that fateful hour, I stood in silence at the Menin Gate, having earlier sung Oh, Valiant Hearts with broken voice and then wiped away a tear as Laurence Binyon's immortal exhortation once again rang out across Flanders Fields.

For the last few years, I have been making the pilgrimage to France and Flanders, retracing the battle lines of the Western Front. What started as an attempt to research the ordeal suffered by ancestors gradually became something else.

Over the last nine decades, far better scribblers than I have created histories, novels and poems. But there again, as one who hails from the same town as Rupert Brooke, I would like to think that I'm in good company.

Every hamlet, village, town and city across Britain bears stark reminders of a conflict that is now within a hair's breadth of fading from the screen of living history. So why do I make this yearly journey?

The clue lies in John McCrae's immortal poem In Flanders Fields. I think it's that line about not breaking faith with the fallen... a pleading, almost scolding warning not to allow the events of 1914-18 slip from the folk consciousness. How could we let them down?

McCrae's words serve as a reminder that we wayfarers are walking on hallowed ground. Ypres is such a place.

I suppose it was with such thoughts in mind that I picked up that handful of acorns in a Somme wood near Thiepval a couple of years ago. Somewhere near the spot where I stood, in September 1916, a certain Frank Sutton had been killed in one of those futile attacks that so personified the attritional nature of the Somme campaign.

Frank's body was never found. This is why his name is inscribed upon Lutyens' imposing memorial to the missing that towers above the chalk uplands of the Somme. But why the acorns?

Well, Frank came from my home village in Warwickshire, and I had resolved to symbolically return this long-lost son of The Bear to his native heath. The plan was for the acorns to travel back to Blighty where they may survive and become saplings.

These, in turn, would then grow into trees like a certain other heart of oak who had departed in 1916, never to return.

A few months later, the acorns had germinated, each now sprouting three or four leaves. They were then taken to Frank's village and left with a couple who could just about remember a time when people called Sutton still lived in the vicinity.

From time to time, I check on their progress. At some stage, they will be found a permanent home befitting a young lad who left for the Somme, never to return. This week, I returned to Thiepval. It is impossible not to think of Frank Sutton's native land, a leafy, green Midlands shire that he left forever in 1916.

I would like to think that, in a very small way, I have helped to write a final chapter. Those Somme acorns represent the return, at long last, of a young man who died in a far-off war.

Oh yes, I almost forgot, there is one other thing you should know. For Frank Sutton, village lad and unknown soldier, was born and raised in the same house in which I grew up.