the area as “Le Petit Champs de la Vigne” – roughly translated, “the little fields of the vine” or the vineyard. Tara Hill is “le Bois le Comte” – The Count's Wood. Usna Hill is “Mont d'Ancre” – Ancre Hill. (Institut Geographique National, Paris (1996) Map 2408 0 Serie Bleue 1:25000 “Albert”). It was on the slopes of the Tara-Usna line that the Tyneside Irish Brigade was decimated by machine gun fire before some had even reached and crossed the British Lines. So, on that day in 1979 when my son Richard and I looked out from Ovillers cemetery towards La Boiselle across the field, we were looking across Le Petit Champs de la Vigne. For one mad period of history this field had become a sinister place, a battleground, infamous for the pernicious loss of life and personal injury suffered there. By the decree of politicians and generals it was an arena of war. In those times it would not be recognisable as part of a gentle rural landscape because of its shell holes, barbed wire, trenches, stunted trees, shattered farm buildings and shrapnel. Mash Valley became famous for all the wrong reasons and its name crossed the lips of wives, girlfriends, brothers, sisters and parents in the streets of Byker, Heaton and Augsburg, entered into history books and has become a part of school history lessons and television programmes. I am glad that the field is once more Le Petit Champs de la Vigne – no longer a vineyard, but ploughed and sown with crops, with its beautiful rolling banks running down to the La Boiselle-Ovillers road. It is pleasing that Ovillers military cemetery looks over it – a peaceful scene of rural beauty. The larks and the poppies have taken it back in something of the same manner that we have taken and welcomed back Richard Dale.
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