La Boisselle, Wednesday 6 May 2026

A bright May morning, clear and warm – the kind of morning that does not concern itself with what happened here.

Philip, my brother-in-law, and I were standing on the rim of the Lochnagar Crater, behind the village of La Boisselle, looking out over gently rolling green fields. Albert, to the south west, was just visible on the skyline. Skylarks overhead, and a whitethroat singing from a bush at the side of the road, quite untroubled.

Philip’s great-grandfather was a private in one of the Tyneside Scottish battalions. Forty years old on 1 July 1916, he and his Battalion advanced behind their pipers across this ground towards La Boisselle, and was killed. The Tyneside Scottish battalions lost most of their officers and men almost immediately. The phrase is in every history of the day. Standing there, I understood for the first time what it means.

He is buried at Ovillers Military Cemetery, overlooking the village. Philip had stood at the headstone earlier. I had stood with him.

My own grandfather was somewhere behind these lines that same morning. An Edinburgh-qualified surgeon who had joined the 11th Battalion Royal Scots in late 1914 and gone with them to France in early 1915. By July 1916, he was somewhere on the Somme, most likely attached to a Field Ambulance. I don’t know exactly where. History is largely silent on the particular and specific, on where any one man stood at any given hour.

My great-uncle Maurice was killed flying over this same battlefield two months later. He had moved from the infantry to the RFC sometime in the spring of 1916, but his old battalion – the 1/4th Royal Berkshires – were at La Boisselle in mid-July, on the same ground Philip’s great-grandfather had crossed a fortnight earlier. Their War Diary gives some sense of what he would have known, and what the men below him were living through:

La Boiselle was a perfect scene of desolation; the wall of the village was left, the trenches were blown in, all the wire was shot away, and the debris of the battle lying about – dead, equipment, rifles, bombs, kit etc. – the scene was terrible. Our guns had done their work well and the village was completely destroyed. The fortifications of the Germans were wonderful and some idea of the difficulties our attacking troops had to face could be understood.

On 15 September 1916, Maurice and his pilot were reported missing after an offensive patrol over the German lines – a dog-fight with twenty enemy machines.

I have read a great deal about the Great War. I have known people who were in it – my grandfather; my first wife’s grandfather, who lied about his age and enlisted in the Canadian Division and was gassed on the Western Front; others. I thought I understood it.

I didn’t understand it until I stood on the crater rim in the May sunshine, looking out over the killing fields.

We drove from there to the Thiepval Memorial. The names of the missing of the Somme, those with no known grave, are inscribed on the Portland stone panels. Seventy-two thousand of them.

You walk along the panels and your eye travels over the names, and after a while the names stop being names. Then you make yourself slow down, and they become names again. Then something else happens, which I don’t have adequate language for.

The incongruity of it stays with me. A bright morning, green fields, skylarks. A man of forty, advancing.

And all those names.

Death admin.

“We are slowly working through the death admin.”

The message was from my niece Jules, Gillie’s daughter – Gillie, whose funeral I wrote about here. Jules and her sister are meeting at their mother’s house at the end of May to start thinking about what to do with it. “It feels a bit too soon,” she said, “but has to be done.”

Death admin.

It is a phrase that stops you in your tracks, if you let it. Administrative. Procedural. Managed. It does exactly what language under pressure always does. It wraps the unbearable in process, contains the grief inside a to-do list. The death certificate, the bank accounts, the subscriptions that keep billing the dead, utility bills, log ins and passwords.

And then the house.

I was taken directly back to 2014, to the time I spent settling my uncle Dennis into a nursing home and getting to grips with his affairs. I wrote about it in a piece I had rather forgotten. Re-reading it just now, I found this:

Going through their papers (my uncle has kept everything) I found a cutting from The Guardian, a short piece, Little boxes of past lives by Peter Preston – about how the memorabilia stored in our garages and lofts will mean little to those who one day clear them.

And as I have gone through my uncle’s brown cardboard boxes, files of papers, treasures and bric-a-brac I have travelled the years of his and his wife Otti’s lives, 40 before marriage, 40 married, and my uncle’s last lonely 10.

I still have the Peter Preston cutting. It is here, in my files, exactly where it should be. A small piece of yellowing newsprint from the Guardian, December 2005. My uncle had clipped it from the paper and kept it. By then, Otti had been dead less than a year. He was, I have come to understand, already thinking about it. About what would one day have to be done.

And the thing about Preston’s piece – published some twenty years ago now – is that the anxiety it describes is completely unchanged. How much of what we keep will mean anything to those who have to clear it? How will they know what mattered? The stuff in the boxes is only the bare bones; the rest – the life that gave those objects weight – will by then be gone.

Jules and her sister will meet at Gillie’s house at the end of May, and they will begin. I am sure it will be tender and it will be difficult. There will be things they cannot decide about, and things they cannot throw away, and things they find that they did not know existed. And there will be, I suspect, the exact same feeling I had standing in my uncle’s flat: that you are travelling a life, and that most of it has already slipped out of reach.

“It feels a bit too soon, but has to be done.”

It always feels a bit too soon, I think. That may be the point.