We were travelling through northern France at this time and took the chance to visit the battlefield again. The previous day we had visited the underground Wellington Quarry and tunnels in Arras and picked up a small wooden cross and poppy, upon which we wrote some of Redford's details. On the morning of the 23rd, before dawn, we drove along a farm track to a point which was in no-man's land and directly in the path of the advance of the 7th Borders on 23rd April.
"Zero hour" for the 2nd Battle of the Scarpe was logged in the various regiments' war diaries as 4:45am in 1917 but as France and the British Army were using GMT and daylight savings time, this was equivalent to 5:45am local time in April 2017. When we arrived on the battlefield the sun wasn't due to rise for another hour, but the eastern sky was already light and Venus and a crescent Moon had just risen.
100 years ago the sky would have been lit up by the explosions of the creeping barrage ahead of the troops.
At about 6am we planted the cross amongst the wheat which was illuminated only by the car headlights and a torch. In the distance the ridge we were on descended towards the 7th Borders' preliminary objective, Bayonet Trench. Off to the right we could just make out the woods on the east side of Monchy-le-Preux and on the left the lights of Roeux. From both places had come the deadly machine-gun fire which decimated the units of the 51st Brigade on that day.
Within a few months the cross will be ploughed into the same ground where so many soldiers lost their lives and where the remains of a good number still lie. Looking at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission list of dead for this day, it seems that only 1 in 10 ended up in a marked grave which managed to survive the war. The rest, including Redford, are marked on the memorial in Arras.
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