NORTHERN FRANCE'S WAR HISTORY

Greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his friends. Or perhaps his country. Jonathan Crouch takes his family - and an Infiniti M30d - on a journey to the Pas-de-Calais region of Northern France to search out the wartime stories of men who ninety-five years ago, did both.

Just over a hill at the side of the little road that leads from the French town of Heninel to Croisilles lies a small military cemetery. Small, that is, in size. Not in meaning. For here amongst headstones bleached white in nearly a century of summer sun lie buried forever stories of bravery, acts of heroism and the lives of ordinary people asked to do extraordinary things for a country they didn't know, fighting a war they didn't understand. The Great War extracted a Great price.

In a sense, Britain still pays it. How different a country would ours have been had it had the service of the millions of lives frittered away in the conflagration that enveloped Europe between 1914 and 1918? And of the millions more who died in Hitler's nightmare little more than two decades later? In both conflicts, Northern France provided arguably the principle theatre of war, but especially so in the First World War when the world's two greatest armies faced each other across a bloody line that bisected France in two.

The geometry of the line pivoted back and forth depending on the results of skirmishes that saw whole platoons and regiments sacrificed for the acquisition of little towns like the one just a few kilometres from where I found myself standing one August afternoon at the entrance to the Heninel to Croisilles Road Cemetery. The fight for Heninel didn't change the course of the War but the larger battle it was a part of around the nearby city of Arras did. It's now just a footnote in history for most on our side of the Channel but for those who live in this closest part of Northern France, the Pas-de-Calais region, it's a harder chapter to forget.