On 7 June 1920, The Times reported: ‘The French have a better term for what are described in this country as battlefield tours. They called them pilgrimages.’ The language of sacralisation was an attempt by a devastated post-war generation to make meaning of the war. The article added that, while in pre-war tours to places such as Pompeii or Paris, ‘we were merely spectators at a drama long played out’, in the battlefields of France, ‘we have a direct personal interest and too often an intimate share of sorrow’. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the personal resonance of the war is lost to most of us. Yet the battlefields continue to haunt and overwhelm us; the sheer scale of devastation seems to confront us with the inadequacy of a personal response.

In 1928, Legionary described the preserved trenches at Vimy Ridge as a place where ‘a man can feel that he is back again in 1914–1918 … where he can stand at a sniper's post and fit the rotted butt of a rusted rifle to his shoulder as he peeps out between the bushes towards the German trenches’. Though concrete sandbags and duckboards have changed much of the original character of Vimy Ridge, we still get an idea of the Allied and German frontline trenches zig-zagging in frightful proximity. Undetonated explosives still litter some of the fields pockmarked with mine craters; a large German trench mortar found here has been set up with other weapons scattered around.