AS Armistice Day approaches, EMMA CLAYTON looks back to the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, when she visited a French village where many Bradford Pals spent their final days. To anyone passing through this rural corner of Northern France, there would be nothing remarkable about the church flanked by trees. But look closer at the Church of Saint Pierre and you’ll see the names of young soldiers scratched into the limestone walls.
Alongside them are regiment numbers and dates. Some of the lads carved June 30, 1916 into the wall - perhaps knowing it would be the last day of their lives. The village of Bus-les-Artois offered brief respite for the Bradford Pals billeted there in the summer of 1916, prior to the Battle of the Somme.
Up to 8,000 troops stayed in tents around the village, with Divisional Headquarters in its chateau. For most of the Pals, the village they fondly referred to as‘Bus’ offered a last taste of leisure time, before they arose early on July 1 to march to the nearby Somme battlefields. Most of them never returned.
It was ‘Bus’ where they scrubbed their uniforms and polished their boots, played cards over a drink or two in the estaminet, sat among orchard trees listening to bandsmen play in the sunshine, and watched Charlie Chaplin in a makeshift cinema . These days ‘Bus’, in the Hauts-de-France region, is home to just 120 people. More than a century after the soldiers set up camp there, the village remains a time capsule, with residents st.
