On the landing of her home, Rosalind Grey has a large, fading photograph of a man she never knew.

"I think of him often," she said. "Every time I pass the photograph, I think what a terrible tragedy and waste that I never knew my grandfather and what a greater tragedy that my father was left with no memory of his own father."

The name of the man in the photograph is Walter Lockwood. He was killed, aged just 28, in the Battle of the Somme on 24 August 1916, leaving a widow and six young children. His body was never found.

Today, Ms Grey, 60, from Ely in Cambridgeshire, will be one of more than 100 relatives of soldiers who died on the Somme, boarding a special Eurostar train at Waterloo station to travel to the battlefield in northern France. They will take part in an event that will make history, not the history of the war but the history of how we remember the war.

The Duke of Kent will open an educational visitor centre, the first of its kind to be built on any British battlefield of the First World War. It is an Anglo-French project, paid for two-thirds by French taxpayers and the European Union and a third by private British donors, including Rosalind Grey.

Although there are several private museums on the battlefields, French and Belgian museums and visitor centres for Commonwealth countries, there has, until now, been nowhere to tell the story of the British role in the most terrible battles in history.

How was the war fought? What were the Pals battalions. Why were the British in France at all? Why were more than a million British, French and Germans killed in the five months of the Somme alone?

The £1.8m centre in the village of Thiepval, close to the great Portland stone and brick arch designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, is dedicated to the 72,000 British "Missing of the Somme".

Those on the Eurostar train today - partly paid for by Eurostar - will include earls Haig and Kitchener, the sons of the two leading British military figures in the Great War; members of the Lutyens family; and the author Sebastian Faulks, whose novel Birdsong has helped generate interest in the war in younger Britons.

The centre, sunk into the ground to preserve the sight lines of the Lutyens memorial, contains hi-tech equipment and displays to explain the battle from the British, French and German viewpoints. The aim is to be factual, enlightening and moving - not jingoistic or simplistically anti-war.

The opening marks the end of a six-year campaign by a small group, led by Sir Frank Sanderson a retired businessman from Sussex. The Somme centre was resisted by traditionalists, including some senior officials in the Ministry of Defence. They believed the 1914-18 battlefields and cemeteries should be left to speak for themselves.

Sir Frank Sanderson maintained that information was necessary, certainly for the young. More Britons are visiting the battlefields than ever before but the memory is fading as the last few centenarian survivors die.

Sir Frank and his team persuaded the local council, the French government and the European Union to back the scheme. After appeals in The Independent and The Daily Telegraph, Sir Frank raised £600,000.

Ms Grey said: "Every time I go, I have a strange feeling that somewhere out there, there is a flower or blade of grass which owes its life and strength to my grandfather's body."

A ceremony was held at the Cenotaph in London on Wednesday 4th August to mark the 90th anniversary of Britain's declaration of war on Germany in 1914. At least four of the 23 known surviving veterans - all aged over 100 - attended, with some reading out poems. They were accompanied by veterans minister Ivor Caplin, and Commonwealth high commissioners to London. Wreaths were placed at the Cenotaph on behalf of the Queen, the government and the Commonwealth.

The veterans included:

Henry Allingham, 108, from Eastbourne, East Sussex
William "Bill" Stone, 103, from Watlington, Oxfordshire
John Oborne, 104, from Porthcawl, Carmathenshire
Fred Lloyd, 106, from Uckfield, East Sussex

The ceremony was scheduled to start at 1100 BST. Following the lament of the Last Post and a minute's silence, the four men laid wreaths for those slain between 1914 and 1918. Mr Stone led the service as he delivered the exhortation before Mr Allingham, Britain's oldest known surviving World War One veteran, read the Lord's Prayer. First Mechanic Allingham, of Eastbourne, East Sussex, served with the Royal Navy Air Services at the Somme, Battle of Jutland and the third battle of Ypres.

Death toll

Mr Lloyd served with the Royal Veterinary Corps and risked death by taking horses to the front line on the Western Front. He was expected to recite John McCrae's haunting 1915 poem "In Flanders Field." Mr Lloyd, who lost both his brothers between 1914 and 1918, said: "War is not a wonderful thing to be remembered, but those who died must never be forgotten. I'll be there for the lads."

Other guests will include Lord Kitchener, a great nephew of Kitchener, the head of the war ministry who rallied an army of a million men with his war-call "Britain needs you". Dennis Goodwin, who runs the World War One Veterans Association which organised the events, said: "The event today is not dissimilar to 4 August 1914, when we were unprepared and only able to muster a small standing army. We have only been able to muster a very small number of our veterans, although to get four there is incredible. The rest will be there in spirit only. The country must still recognise these men for what they did."

Germany declared war on France on 3 August, 1914, and Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August. Some 900,000 British soldiers died in action in the conflict, and more than two million were wounded.

Weirleigh, a neo-gothic mansion on the outskirts of the village of Matfield, is on the market for £800,000. The war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, was born there in 1886 and lived and wrote in the house after returning from service in World War I. Current owner Charles Wheeler said the poet's fans and biographers have visited during his 35 years at the address. The tall, narrow house, built in 1866, has a staircase with 92 steps which featured in Sassoon's poetry, linked to memories of childhood. In one poem, he describes creeping down the staircase on tiptoe, before escaping into the garden to see the dawn.

Unmitigated Hell

He became a critic of the war and what he called the unmitigated hell of the spring offensive, but he also wrote about his rural upbringing and the house itself, which he described as "the background to all his dreams". Mr Wheeler said: "It was certainly a very important aspect of his life. "The people that have written biographies of him have stressed how important it was - they spent a lot of time here getting the atmosphere."

His wife Lisbet Wheeler has quashed local stories that the house is haunted by the ghost of the poet's mother. She said: "Mrs Sassoon had eczema. She excluded everybody and people were intrigued. She had cream to put on her skin and people saw her white face when she grew old." During the years in the house, the Wheelers have kept a white African mask at one of the windows to perpetuate the legend.

A series of letters from a World War I poet have been sold to the Imperial War Museum. Siegfried Sassoon's correspondence, along with a number of poems and books, fetched £24,000 at an auction in Cornwall. The letters were sent by Sassoon to his friend and fellow soldier Vivian de Sola Pinto. They were offered for sale at Mill House Auctions in Helston by de Pinto's grandson. The 49 letters and six postcards chronicle a lifelong friendship which started in the trenches. The letters have been bought by the Imperial War Museum in London for £7,000.

A book called Counter Attack, which includes the one-off handwritten poem "Idyll", was the single most expensive Sassoon item, selling for £4,000. Other books and poems sold for more than £1,000 each.

11 November 2003

A maze of nearly intact trenches covering the area of half a football field has emerged from the mud of the First World War battlefields in Flanders after 86 years.

The discovery, together with that of the bodies of seven soldiers, provoked calls from British politicians and local historians yesterday for the Belgian government to reconsider plans to build a motorway over the site. They said the trenches - where chemical weapons were used for the first time and at the starting point for one of the bloodiest battles in history - should be preserved as a reminder for future generations.

At first glance, the mournful, featureless and mud-brown archeological dig, just northeast of Ypres in Belgium, could itself be a Great War battlefield. Out of the raw, moist earth, largely undisturbed since the third battle of Ypres in 1917, there have emerged seven bodies, an immense treasury of war-time artefacts and the most complete pattern of preserved 1914-18 trenches to be found for many years.

A mound of earth on one corner of the site was heaped with poppies by British and Belgian visitors yesterday to mark Remembrance Day and to record the discovery at the spot last week of the body of an unidentified, but probably British, soldier of the Great War. Only the lower half of his skeleton was found. Another of the bodies discovered near the trenches several weeks ago has been provisionally identified as that of a member of the 5th Battalion of the Northumberland Fusiliers in his twenties.

The unearthing of the bodies of First World War soldiers, in this case six British and one French, is not unusual. About 60 bodies are uncovered each year on the 1914-18 battlefields in France and Belgium - an annual "harvest of bones".

The significance of the site near Pilkem Ridge, north of Ypres, is the discovery of such a large area of shallow, but otherwise intact, trenches, which criss-cross the ground like a maze of sunken garden paths, no more than three feet deep at their lowest point. In places, the duck-boarding which covered the bottom of the trenches, and the corrugated iron which reinforced their sides, are still standing. Some of the dugouts - the living quarters in the trench sides - are intact.

The trenches are shallow because of the notorious marshiness of the ground in this area, which was the starting point for the third battle of Ypres in 1917, better known as the battle of Passchendaele. A punctured canal and broken land-drains turned the gently undulating Flanders landscape into a quagmire in which 70,000 British and Commonwealth and German soldiers died.

The fortifications are believed to have been constructed in 1915 after British troops fled to Pilkem Ridge from the first gas attack in military history during the second battle of Ypres. Originally, the trenches would have extended above ground level with parapets of sandbags and barbed wire.

Within and near the trenches, archeologists have found what they describe enough artifacts to fill a "shipping container", ranging from ammunition and guns to rum bottles, kettles and mess cans.

The maze of trenches represents a major historical find, according to Marc Dewilde, 49, head of the archeological team which has uncovered the site progressively over the last six months. "We have found what we predicted we would find," he told The Independent yesterday. "Here, just under the surface of the ground, only a few tens of centimetres down, there is a place where the battlefield of the Ypres salient, one of the most terrible battlefields of the war, remains virtually intact."

Mr Dewilde and his team have been given permission by the Belgian government to excavate nine sites in the path of a projected extension of the A19 motorway from the Lille area to the Belgian coast. Only four of them have been excavated so far.

The Belgian government and the Flanders regional government must decide next year whether to go ahead with the extension of the motorway. The A19 project has been criticised by British veterans' groups and local pressure groups in Ypres.

"Surely they cannot go ahead now. It would be a great desecration, not only of the memory of what happened here but also of an important historical site," one local historian, who asked not be named, said yesterday. "It would be possible, with a detour of one and a half kilometres at most, to take the motorway in another direction and preserve this site for the generations to come."

Between 1914 and 1918, and especially in 1917, Ypres, known to the British troops as "Wipers", entered the lexicon as term synonymous with slaughter and futility, alongside names like Verdun and the Somme. Over 55,000 of the British soldiers who died in the Ypres area have no known grave and their names are carved on the Menen gate on the edge of the town.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester, the Labour peer who chairs the All-Party Parliamentary War Graves and Battlefield Heritage Group, visited the archeological dig a few weeks ago.

"It is quite astounding how well preserved the trenches are in places," he said yesterday. "The archeological excavations have uncovered far more than anyone could have imagined. The Belgian authorities are due great credit for allowing the digs to go ahead but they must now consider very carefully whether it is appropriate to build a motorway over this ground."

Piet Chielens, head of the much-praised In Flanders' Fields Museum in Ypres, said he was unable to comment on the politics of the motorway decision but that this was a "find of immense importance".

He added: "As the years go by, and the last living memories of this war vanish, the new generations are going to need much more than we do in the way of physical remains and artefacts to help to them to grasp what happened here. That is the importance of a find like this."

Belgian officials have argued that similar trench patterns could be found by excavating elsewhere, out of the path of the motorway, but local historians say this is not necessarily true. "This is the last part of the main British trench fortifications in the Ypres salient which has not been covered over by housing or other roads," a local historian said. "This is our last chance to show people what the battlefield really looked like."

There were five great battle in the Ypres area in the 1914-18 war. The trenches discovered near Pilkem are believed to have been built by the British Army in 1915 after they were pushed back by a German gas attack.

The trenches remained the front line for British and Commonwealth troops until 31 July 1917 when 12,000 soldiers died in one day on Pilkem Ridge in the first attack of the battle which ended in the mud in the village of Passchendaele, five miles to the east, just over four months later. Over 35,000 British soldiers and 35,000 Germans died in the battle for Passchendaele - a failed attempt to break through the German lines and reach Bruges and Brussels, forcing an early end to the war.

The identity of the Northumberland Fusilier whose body was found near the trenches several weeks ago has been provisionally identified. No announcement will be made until checks are completed and any surviving family is traced.

The slaughter at Ypres

• There were major battles at Ypres in 1914, 1915 and in 1917, which culminated in the Battle of Passchendaele in November. There were two further smaller offensives before the Armistice.

• The trenches at Pilkem Ridge were in use between the second battle of Ypres and the opening assault of the third, on 31 July 1917.

• The second battle was the only major attack launched by the Germans on the Western Front in 1915 and marked the first use of gas there, when the Germans released 168 tons of chlorine in April.

• The offensive continued until the end of May 1915 and included many more gas attacks. Around 59,000 British, 10,000 French and 35,000 Germans died.

• The third battle began with a lengthy Allied bombardment which gave the Germans time to prepare for the attack. Drainage systems were damaged and the battleground was cratered. About 12,000 men died at Pilkem Ridge on 31 July.

• As the offensive continued, conditions were made worse by the heaviest rains for 30 years, which turned the area into a sea of mud by the end of the summer. Germans used mustard gas in their defence.

• The third battle caused 325,000 Allied and 260,000 German casualties. Many drowned in the mud.

• Military historians consider the offensive planned by Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig to be largely a failure. The assault advanced the Allied lines by just five miles.