TO anyone passing through this little village in a rural corner of Northern France, there would be nothing remarkable about the church flanked by trees.

But look closer at the Church of Saint Pierre and you’ll see the names of young soldiers scratched into the limestone walls. Alongside them are regiment numbers, and dates. Some of the lads had carved June 30, 1916 into the wall - perhaps knowing it would be the last day of their lives.

The village of Bus-les-Artois offered brief respite for the Bradford Pals billeted there in the summer of 1916, prior to the Battle of the Somme. Up to 8,000 troops stayed in tents around the village, with Divisional Headquarters in its chateau.

For most of the Bradford Pals, the village they fondly referred to as‘Bus’ offered a last taste of leisure time, before they arose early on July 1 to march to the nearby Somme battlefields. Most of them never returned.

It was ‘Bus’ where they scrubbed their uniforms and polished their boots, played cards over a drink or two in the estaminet, sat among orchard trees listening to bandsmen play in the sunshine, and watched Charlie Chaplin in a makeshift cinema.

Today ‘Bus’, nestled in the Hauts-de-France region, is home to just 120 people. More than a century after the soldiers set up camp there, the village remains a time capsule, with residents still unearthing items - including shells which exploded long ago - in back gardens and nearby fields. Beer bottles, shaving kits and toothbrushes are among items left behind by the men, now displayed in a ramshackle museum, and still visible is the outline of a cinema screen in an old barn, and a ticket booth etched into its wooden door. It is like the men simply packed up and marched off yesterday.

The poignant history of Bus-les-Artois has drawn coachloads of visitors over the years, mainly on trips to cemeteries seeking the graves of fathers, uncles and grandfathers - men who lost their lives in the mud and horror of the First World War.

I visited Bus-les-Artois last autumn with members of Bradford WW1 Group. We were in France to unveil a Bradford Pals memorial on the Serre Road, marking the centenary of the end of the Battle of the Somme, and it felt particularly poignant to call at ‘Bus’, where so many Pals spent their final days. The village mayor, Ghislain Lobel, showed us the old barn which was converted into a cinema, where the soldiers would have watched silent films, and another barn where some of the men slept. It still contains a shell case fashioned in a candle-holder, a smut of candle smoke visible on the wall above.

The carvings of soldiers’ names and drawings in the soft stone church walls are fading, but I could make out ‘W. Yorks’ and caught my breath as I thought of local men clinging to their final hours of freedom.

Inside the church was a fascinating display of photographs of soldiers going about their duties in the village - sharpening bayonets, washing and ‘de-lousing’ uniforms in tin tubs and hanging their socks on a wall behind the church.

The scrapbook of photos, assembled by a villager during the war, offers a rare glimpse into life behind the scenes of the Front. There’s a charming picture of Maori soldiers doing the ‘Haka’, a New Zealand dressing station in nearby woodland, and poignant images of animals used in the war, including a faithful dog lying at the grave of a soldier in his regiment.

Housed in a shed at the end of a row of cottages is a bewildering array of items the men left behind, including toothbrushes, helmets, petrol cans, binoculars, stretchers, shells and shell carriers. “It’s as if they’d just left,” said Bradford WW1 Group founder Geoff Barker.

Two Bradford Pals billeted at 'Bus' never made it to the front line. Private Herbert Crimmins and Private Arthur Wild had been on ration duties, carrying water, ammunition and other stores. At noon on June 30 the ration party's officer, Second Lieutenant JR Thornton, issued orders for the following day: the men were to parade at 6pm that day, ready to proceed to the trenches.

That afternoon Crimmins and Wild went to an estaminet in the village, knocking back a few drinks and no doubt trying to forget, albeit briefly, about what was to come the next day. The men later wandered along a road a few miles before falling asleep in a field - missing the roll call at 6pm. They awoke at dusk and, afraid to return to camp, walked on to the villages of Beauquesne and Vignacourt. Three days later the pair gave themselves up to the Military Police and on August 16 they appeared before a Field Court Martial. Despite recommendations for clemency based on good character reports from their officer, both men were found guilty of desertion and executed by firing squad. They are buried at Vieille Chappelle Cemetery.

In 'Bus' stands a Bradford Pals memorial installed last summer by a group of Bradford City supporters. The group, called Bus to Bradford, raised £3,000 for the stone and unveiled it at a ceremony attended by the Bus-les-Artois mayor and French Army veterans. Early on July 1 last year - the centenary of the first day of the Somme - the group followed the Pals’ footsteps along a four-mile route to Colincamps, gathering at Monk Trench, facing Serre. At 7.30am, a Bradford Pals officer’s whistle blew, echoing the signal 100 years previously for the men to go over the top.

The Somme Offensive, fought by British and French armies against the Germans, took place between July 1 and November 18, 1916 north of the River Somme. The largest First World War battle on the Western Front saw more than one million men wounded or killed. The first day alone claimed almost 60,000 casualties. Of the 2,000 First Bradford Pals emerging from the trenches together that day, 1,770 were killed or wounded before lunchtime.

The few who returned to Bus-les-Artois were shattered and shellshocked. But they had fond memories of those late June days in ‘Bus’. Survivors of the conflict would later return there on battlefield pilgrimages, heading to the cafe for a fry-up, their thoughts wandering back to sunny afternoons spent washing socks and carving their names into the church walls.

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