Bernafay Wood lies quietly in the darkness. Outside the old railway station at Montauban in northern France, a few horses and a munching cow drowse in the warm night, only the occasional twitch of a tail disturbing the stillness.



Standing in the open doorway of what was the modest waiting room, I feel the wood all around me, speaking to me. Inside my sons Chris and Mike sip the last beers of the evening, settled comfortably into antique rocking chairs examining books and artifacts from the great battle that took place here during World War One.

I'm drawn outside, further away from the small circle of light, out onto the grass where the tracks once were. The stars are quite bright above the dark countryside, but I'm afraid that there will be rain by morning.

The woods and fields stretching before me are not empty, I know. The memories they hold seem to flicker like ghostly fireflies, phantasmic columns of mourners filing among the trees, whispering their terrible glory.

"Do you ever see ghosts?" I ask Christine Matte next morning. "You know, spectres?" She and her husband Jean-Pierre have converted the old country rail station into an exceedingly comfortable bed and breakfast, with surely the softest beds in Europe. They live next door in a tidy, white-frame house with their two daughters, while their four-legged boarders – the three horses and cow – forage methodically in the field between house and station. "Oh no," she replies, busy with our breakfast.

But I wonder: the French are so pragmatic, she probably takes me literally, and I don't mean it that way. I should have said: "Don't you feel them all around you?" We settle down to a large country meal in the polished waiting room. Two burly Scotsmen, ruddy-faced from cycling, bob their heads at us. They must anticipate a long day of pedaling ahead, from the way they crackle noisily into their cereal. By contrast, we seem to be the bacon-and-egg table. We are soon joined by a friendly Italian, exploring Europe prior to a business meeting in Brussels. His English is excellent and he's just come from Berlin, where we were over the weekend, so we compare impressions. These little international moments are one of the charms of the continental B&B.

It has begun to drizzle lightly, and stepping outside, I breathe deeply of the country air, taking shelter from the occasional large drop under the eaves of the station's front door, below the large sign: Montauban.

Book of remembrance of those who fought and died in the area; 85 years later, family members still come and pay respects.

Unlike today, Saturday, July 1, 1916 dawned warm and sunny. Montauban station stood not far behind the third line of German reserve trenches. Although mostly intact, it had been damaged by shellfire. At 7:20 am, several enormous explosions to the southwest were heard above the terrible din of the weeklong British bombardment as gigantic mines were exploded beneath the German front lines. Ten minutes later the firing stopped, and for a few long moments there was a startled, eerie silence. The sun pierced the clouds of smoke and filthy dust, and the men could even hear birds singing. At 7:30 am precisely, the awful barrage resumed, now from both sides. Less than 3,000 yards from where I am now standing, all along a 28-mile front, whistles blew and 100,000 men of the British Expeditionary Force rose up from their trenches and began moving forward. Not too far up the line from here, an English football soared into the air over no-man's-land, kicked by a member of the 8th East Surreys. Another leather ball followed it, bouncing high toward the German lines. With a schoolboy cheer, the Surreys joined the long khaki columns.

So began the Battle of the Somme.

The German fortified village of Montauban was the first-day objective of the British 18th and 30th divisions, which anchored the position of honor on the right of the line, next to the French. Everywhere along the great sweep of attack – so beautifully planned, so meticulously drawn up – things turned all too quickly into disaster. The artillery barrage proved almost futile, the German barbed wire was not cut as had been promised, and most of the enemy survived, contrary to what the men had been told. The German machine gunners staggered practically unharmed out of their reinforced dugouts at the call of a bugle, and began annihilating the neat British lines. By 10 a.m., it was virtually over. The British had taken some 60,000 casualties, 20,000 of them dead or missing. It was the worst day in the history of the British Army.

Part of the trench system on Vimy

Now, on this gray August morning in the next century, I am standing near to where the only success of that long-ago day occurred. The Royal Scots Fusiliers, part of the 18th, had miraculously achieved their goals and entered the smoking ruins of Montauban. Further to their right, men of the 30th, including eight Pals battalions from Manchester and Liverpool – boys and men from similar walks of life, or from the same town or district; friends and acquaintances enlisted together to serve together, and die together – had secured the village at the cost of 700 casualties, mostly in the two Manchester battalions.

According to "First Day on the Somme," by Martin Middlebrook: "the successful troops gazed in wonder at an amazing sight. Before them they could see open country and peaceful woods…the only Germans…were those fleeing in the distance." The Montauban depot quickly became a field dressing station, the wounded rapidly spilling out onto the grass and beneath the trees of Bernafay Wood. Many of the men from the aid station are buried over to the west of here, in the Quarry Cemetery, lucky only in that they had been tagged with their names before they died, sparing them an unmarked grave.

Jean-Pierre Matte often tramps these green and brown fields of Picardy, searching for artifacts that are constantly working themselves to the surface: shell casings, cartridges, mortar rounds, water bottles and helmets, deadly detritus emerging after 85 years like grim reminders, rusted and still lethal. Occasionally, human remains are found by farmers, parts of uniform still clinging to the bones, buried all these years ("Don't forget. Don't forget what we endured here."). After the battle, the British held Montauban into 1918, when the Germans overran it in March of that year, part of a great spring offensive that took them almost to Paris. But their nation was exhausted, and, pushing them into retreat, the British re-captured the station on August 27, nearly 83 years to the day of our visit.

Jean-Pierre, who in addition to working at a local motorbike shop is also an experienced guide, quickly draws a route on our road map for us to follow. It will allow us time to see everything we want during our brief visit.

We had taken the high-speed TVG train out that morning from Paris, about an hour away. Renting a car in the large medieval town of Arras, we had driven first northeast to Vimy, where gallant Canadian troops had charged a ridge in 1917 to heavy losses, but still managed to secure a small victory in an overall Allied ground campaign that resulted in little territorial gain. The Canadians dug in frantically, and their trenches – and those of the German's opposite – have been preserved as they were. The grass grows green and bright over the shell-tossed earth, and a slim forest of mossy trees has spread over and around the shell holes themselves. Most of the surrounding area is off-limits to visitors because of the live ordnance under the earth; sacrificial sheep keep the grass cropped.

Military graves along the Somme.

The first thing that strikes almost every visitor is the unbelievably short distance between the two lines – close enough to sling a cat across, Monsieur Mark Twain might say. Then there is the landscape – dimpled like a green golf ball – a demented pitch-and-putt course – craters crowding into holes, punched into more craters; holes on top of holes, between still more craters. The face of the moon is a placid sea compared to this storm-tossed surface. What an awful place it must have been, so green and quiet now. I try to imagine the splintered, leafless trees, the mud, the noise of exploding shells, the bodies hanging on the wire; the fear, the cold, the misery. But even standing in its midst, I cannot. The original sandbags and duckboards that lined the trenches have been preserved in concrete, giving them an artificial appearance, but preventing the natural erosion that would eventually turn the ground into shallow, ominous ditches. All around us are fields and farms, endlessly quiet on a late summer morning, a lone plume of dust chasing a farmer's tractor.

After our pleasant interval with Christine and Jean-Pierre, we settle our luggage in the large family room on the second floor of the station and drive over to the village of La Boisselle, and the Lochnager Mine Crater. The largest charge detonated on July 1 – 60,000 pounds of ammonal explosive – it was set off under the Germans with a stupefying blast that could be heard all the way to England. The gigantic smoking cavity - at least 50 yards across – was rushed by men of the Grimsby Chums (10th Lincolns), who managed to secure the lip nearest to the Germans and hold on, while the crater behind them filled with the wounded and stragglers, seeking shelter by crowding in amongst the dead and half-buried Germans. Soon the whole struggling mass came under enemy shelling, adding to their misery.

Today privately owned, the grassy crater yawns silent and empty, topped by a huge cross at the rim, stark against the gray skyline. Close to it, poignant above the chalky soil, stands a small memorial for a British soldier whose remains had been discovered in 1994, dedicated by his family. Garlands of red plastic poppies lie at its base, left from the remembrance ceremonies that take place each July 1.

This whole area of the Somme resounds with the names of great battles that echoed painfully on the casualty lists throughout that summer in English cities, towns and villages. The historic sites are strung out on a slanted north-south axis like a line of tilted gravestones: Mametz, Fricourt, Contalmaison, Ovillers, Thiepval, Beaumont Hamel, Serre, Gommecourt.

Across the fields can be seen the huge Thiepval Monument, rising over the landscape like some gaunt and haunted chateau, its dark ochre walls inscribed with the names of 73,412 men, regiment by regiment, part of the 300,000 who are still missing in this area. (There were women in this war of course, many of them, volunteers serving and risking their lives all across the battlefields, primarily as nurses and aid workers.)

Just outside of Beaumont Hamel are more preserved trenches, grown over and eroding, but just as compelling. The Newfoundland Regiment attacked on this ground, struggling with their overloaded packs down a slope and across a field, while the Germans on the ridge looming on the right used their machine guns to annihilate them. Of the 801 men that began the attack, 733 were casualties. The entire battlefield is today marked out, with maps and commentary, allowing visitors to trace the Newfoundlanders' wearisome and tragic path.

But there is more to the Somme than just killing grounds, and the visitor is quickly caught up in its provincial charm. Amiens, the largest city in the region, hardly seems to have been disturbed since the Middle Ages, the countryside surrounding it dotted by distinctive brick and stone country chateaux. Stretching throughout Picardy, from the Haute Somme to the ports and fishing villages along the channel coast, are outstanding examples of gothic art, wonderful cathedrals and abbey churches built during the 11th -16th centuries, their white facings charmingly framed by Picardy roses. The small villages that rise up suddenly along the straight country roads haven't changed all that much over the centuries, nor has the rolling countryside, still ageless, castles looming from the mist, idyllic lakes and streams to fish, barge trips floating down tree-lined canals through colorful market gardens, even the P'tit Train, at St. Valery-Sur- Somme a narrow-gage steam railway (le authentique train a vapeure) that chugs along the banks of the river past golden fields and shady glens.

Vimy Ridge in Northern France. Canadian divisions attacked German positions in 1917, one of the few places where the allies gained ground on the Western Front.

For the visitor, Great War buff or not, in addition to the hotels in the larger towns and cities, there are a variety of B&B's to choose from, ranging from private guest cottages to farm houses to villas to lovely and ancient chateaux, many of them located right on or near the battlefields. A selection of these is listed on the Western Front Association website, an organization dedicated to preserving the memory of the war dead on both sides, click: www.westernfront.co.uk.

Traveling across the flat horizons of the Somme, it becomes apparent that the natural eternity of the land is for those who farm it, the soil to whom it has always belonged, now shared with reverence with the tens on tens of thousands who lie here beneath the chalky ground. Indeed, it would be hard even to believe war had ever occurred in this pastoral setting, except for the occasional disrupted earth, the rusted bunker or pillbox, and the small cemeteries that dot the countryside. These quiet green gardens of remembrance are close to where the men fell: the West Yorkshires outside Serre, the Irish at Hamel, the Welsh and Scots at Mametz. "Little towns of the dead," the poet laureate John Masefield called them. They have been maintained all these years by the British Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Outside of the small town of Pozieres, we can't resist stopping at the Tommy Bar, a friendly sort of pub/museum/souvenir shop. We order three drafts and wander out back and down the cluttered yard, drawn by the tinny strains of "Pack Up Your Troubles" over a loudspeaker. At the bottom of the slope between the neighbors' back yards, the proprietor has set up a virtual battlefield – an ugly junkyard of dugouts and trenches populated by department store dummies with vacuous clothes-model faces. Outfitted with British and German uniforms, they awkwardly clutch all sorts of weaponry, dug in amid the mud and clutter, surrounded by barbed wire, enduring the rain and muck. It is surreally realistic. As there seems to be a truce in effect, we sit peacefully at white circular tables beneath cafÈ umbrellas with our beers, until the drizzle drives us inside.

Driving over these back roads, the visitor is struck by the verdant abundance of the countryside that was fought over. This was noted widely by the soldiers: the bucolic landscape unfolding like stage scenery as they rolled back from the terrible actuality of the battlefield. Now, even the scars of no-man's land are mostly healed, disappeared beneath the crops. So it is in the towns and cities: Albert, to the west, at the other end of the old Roman road from Bapuame, was a mile or so behind British lines, and served as a jittery haven for the British soldiers who burrowed into its ruins for a night's sleep out of the elements. The basilica of the main church had been heavily damaged, and above on the dome the statue of the Golden Virgin teetered precariously, her head pointing down at the square below. The soldiers believed that when the statue fell, the war would end. French engineers secured it with chains. Long ago restored, it gleams dully under the gray sky. Further back, in Amiens, the troops were glad for a chance of a meal in a restaurant, or for most of the enlisted men, the opportunity to crowd into a cheap estaminet for a few overpriced bottles of local table wine, or "plonk" as the Tommies called it.

We drive over to Albert for an evening's meal at Le Relais Fleuri, a restaurant that has been recommended by Christine. With no English menus available as usual in France, once again we guess at our order (Mike was introduced to roast duck in this way in Paris), and I hit the Powerball of gastronomy, a succulent salmon on a bed of spinach, topped by an indescribable sauce that melts away on contact with the tongue. Accompanied by an excellent Pouilly Fuisse and rounds of Heinekens (the Taylor family tradition of alcoholic mix-ën-match), in a clean and welcoming atmosphere devoid of frills, we experience our best meal in France. Driving home along the dark streets, we are surprised to find a convenience store still open at 9:30 and stop for a six-pack. A group of local teenagers drifts by beneath the misty halo of a street lamp. Not much to do in farm country for young people after dark during summer recess.

That night, my large room at the Montauban station is clean and comfortable, connected to an even larger antechamber under the station's eaves housing my sons, furnished with three single beds, each with those comfortable mattresses. We share a single roomy bathroom, complete with a huge, old-fashioned, claw-foot bathtub, and even better, a narrow but sturdy shower compartment with a fixed showerhead that, unlike many fancier European hotels, does not require dismantling to use properly. My room has a large antique armoire, and an even larger double bed with an equally antique scrolled headboard, both inherited from Jean-Pierre's late great-aunt. Indeed, the old lady's lovingly cared for possessions give the place an especially authentic French provincial flavor.

Through my open window, I hear the call of an owl from somewhere deep in the wood. I never get to see one, I wonder, as I drift off to sleep.

The country house next-door where the Matte family lives was originally owned by Jean- Pierre's grandparents. After WWII, seeking tranquility and fresh air, the grandfather had come to these woods, working as a gamekeeper, guiding hunting parties that used the primitive facilities of the station as a hunting lodge. He purchased the two houses on the property in 1965, plus the old train station, which had been rebuilt after the war in 1922. Service had been stopped in 1950, and the building abandoned. It had no water, no electricity, and its grounds were grassless and littered with rocks. The family, which had been using the stationmaster's house for holidays, began restoring the old building, and then finally began renting it to local tenants. In 1997, Christine and Jean-Pierre sold their motorbike shop and moved here from Valenciennes, and Jean-Pierre found a job as a guide in the Great War Museum in Albert. Settling in, they were intrigued with the repeated suggestions from their English and French friends, who kept inquiring why they didn't do something with such a beautiful and historic structure. Very soon, all their money and effort were going into the old building. The result is a live-in landmark, a fascinating place to stay for anyone interested in the First World War, a chance to spend time upon a mystic battlefield, and, for a few hours or days, to be an actual part of history.

It's also an opportunity to sample the friendliness and hospitality of a lovely French family. For a young couple with no experience in the lodging business, Christine and Jean-Pierre have made all the right choices, putting the comfort of their guests at the top of their priorities. Where else would someone with an inquiry for the front desk have the pleasant option of walking across the small field dividing lodging from house, stopping to feed an apple to a friendly horse, then knocking at the back screen door and be greeted by the proprietor's pretty daughters, welcomed into their kitchen, and given directions to a wonderful restaurant where the family goes themselves for a night out.

Montauban proprietors Christine and Jean-Pierre Matte

Bernafay Wood opened on the first of July, 2000, right in time for the anniversary of the battle. The station consists of a room with twin beds on the ground floor, a double room at the head of the stairs, plus the family room on the top floor which can hold five persons without them bumping into one another. Each room has its own bathroom facilities. Almost 90% of their guests come from England, Christine reports, generally to tour the battlefields, to visit relative's graves or the endless monuments. But visitors also arrive from as far away as Australia and New Zealand and South Africa, countries which also sent men to fight here. Christine and Jean-Pierre keep a world map in the station's kitchen, with colored pushpins designating their guests' home countries. Although we are not the first pins from America, our family is the first from New York. (After September 11, the Mattes were among the first to e- mail to see if we were all right).

The bed & breakfast closes only for Christmas week, and is normally the busiest in April and May, and again in July and November, coinciding with the WWI anniversaries and memorial days taking place during that period.

Rates can only be termed as modest: ranging from 30 Eurodollars for a single person (about $27) to 38 Eurodollars (about $34), to 76 Euros for five persons (a little more than $67), including continental breakfast. A full English breakfast is provided for about an extra $2).

As we depart out to the main road, I recall that Bernafay Wood was finally occupied by the 9th (Scottish) division on the 3rd and 4th of July 1916, after terrible losses. It is very quiet as we crunch down the long driveway in our rented Mercedes. A moist breeze stirs the branches above us. The soft rain has stopped, and the car windows are down. In the light mist of early morning, I fancy I hear the Scottish regimental pipes in the woods around us. But it's probably just the wind in the pines.

To visit Christine or Jean-Pierre Matte at the Chambres D'Hotes Du Bois Bernafay on the web, click: http://cf.geocities.com/bed_and_breakfast_bernafay_wood; to e-mail, click: bernafaywood@aol.com. The address is: 55-57 Grande Rue, Bois Bernafay, 80300 Montauban De Picardie, France; Tel./Fax: 03-22-85-02-47