A significant proportion of yesterday was spent in preparation for a trip to France & Belgium later this week.

Several months ago a distant family relation and a friend contacted my younger brother to ask if he would ‘supervise’ the Ypres leg of their visit to the battlefields & cemeteries of the Western Front. He replied that he’d be honoured, and has since roped me in to assist. The expedition has the added advantage of providing us with the opportunity both to check on how sales of my book are going in the Ypres bookshops and do some ‘original’ research of our own …

Yesterday two big plusses emerged.

We – or rather Pippi – found the Imperial War Museum CD of trench maps that my brother had left with me about six months ago, despite my protests at the time that he shouldn’t do this because I was bound to lose it.

As I duly did.

It turned up in the CD cupboard, but in a DVD-sized case – my brother kindly accepted responsibility for causing confusion by consistently stating that I was looking for a “CD case”, which, not unnaturally, had caused me to confine my searches to the CD shelves.

The second discovery related to our proposed itinerary, which was always going to be a mix of tried & trusted highlights (e.g. the gravestone of double VC winner Noel Chavasse) and items that might resonate with our ‘pupils’.

Hitherto neither of them had been able to identify family members who had been buried in Flanders, so we had been concentrating on alumni of Charterhouse School, where one of them had been educated.

Yesterday it emerged that the family relation had just ‘found’ an uncle who had died in the Ypres Salient at the age of 24. From our point of view, this is potential gold-dust. My brother plans to visit the Public Records Office at Kew today in order to see if he can find his service file and anything else about him.

Ironically, in one sense, it doesn’t matter whether he uncovers anything. Just to be able to stand in (or close to) the area where somebody’s ancestor spent his war and/or died is enough to get the eyes moistening & the bottom lip quivering. My brother and I refer to such instances as “two-box Kleenex [a well-known brand of tissue paper] jobs”.

Indeed, in honouring certain individuals whose stories are particularly poignant, we always arrange to be on standby for each other … just in case the one who is doing the reading ‘breaks down’ in the act. My brother is most nervous about his forthcoming tribute to one of the greatest VCs, Captain Thomas Tannatt Pryce (also MC and bar) of the 4th Grenadier Guards, whose name is commemorated on the Ploegsteert Memorial. Once before, travelling with our father and third brother, he has handed me the book of words because he could not face attempting the task and he is scheduled to ‘step up to the plate’ for Pryce again this week.

Pryce’s sacrifice is always worthy of the re-telling. In the German all-out ‘last ditch’ offensive of the spring of 1918, things became pretty worrying for the Allies. There was a real danger of their defensive line being breached, with potentially catastrophic results for both the immediate battle and indeed the outcome of the entire war. The Grenadier Guards were right in the middle of it near a place called Vieux Berquin in Belgium. Pryce’s unit was defending the left flank and, having been ordered to attack a village, he had personally led two platoons from the front - literally - working from house to house in desperate fighting, to secure the objective. By the time they had achieved it, he had a fraction of his men left.

The next morning (13th April 1918), as early as 8.15am, his men were being fired on from three sides. Four times during the day the Germans attacked, in ever greater numbers, and each time Pryce and his men held out. Eventually the enemy brought three field guns to within 300 yards and began firing over open sights and knocking in his trench. Still he would not surrender.

The VC citation (published in the London Gazette on 21st May 1918) goes on:

‘At 6.15 p.m., the enemy had worked to within sixty yards of his trench. He then called on his men, telling them to cheer and charge the enemy and fight to the last. Led by Captain Pryce, they left their trench and drove back the enemy with the bayonet some 100 yards. Half an hour later the enemy had again approached in stronger force. By this time Captain Pryce had only 17 men left, and every round of his ammunition had been fired. Determined that there should be no surrender, he once again led his men forward in a bayonet charge, and was last seen engaged in a fierce hand-to-hand struggle with overwhelming numbers of the enemy. With some forty men he had held back at least one enemy battalion for over ten hours. His company undoubtedly stopped the advance through the British line, and thus had great influence on the battle.’

As I said – in the right circumstances, it can be a two-Kleenex-box job.