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Shots were ringing out from the Bois D’Engremont, echoing across a shallow valley of cornfields now cut to stubble. “Local gun club,” murmured Colonel David Church as he led us up the track towards the wood. Wry smiles flickered here and there among the party of walkers. The sound of gunfire here in the rolling landscape of northeast France, with the River Some flowing its sluggish course five miles to the south, held an irony we could well appreciate.

The Bois D’Engremont did not appear by name on the military map in my hand; it was labelled instead as “Bois Francais”, the nickname by which the soldiers of Kitchener’s army came to know and gear it. The gunfire that rattled among those trees at 7.30am on July 1, 1916 brought no smiles from the men of the 7th Green Howards and the 7th East Yorks, advancing towards a violent and horrible death as they attacked the village of Fricourt just over the ridge.

The Holt’s Tours coach had dropped us off below the wood – 39 visitors from all areas of Britain, on the first evening of a four-day walking tour around the first world war battlefields of the Somme. Some were seasoned veterans of Holts’ tours; two of our party had done more than 50 expeditions with the company, visiting battlefields all over the world from Waterloo to Gettysburg by way of Marathon. Others, like me, were rookies on our first tour, glad to absorb details of the Somme battles from professional experts such as Church and his co-guide, Isobel Swan, as well as drawing on the seemingly bottomless wells of information among our fellow travellers.

Standing under the trees by the grave of Corporal O’Brien, one among dozens of plain white headstones in the military cemetery of Citadel Camp, I learned from Tom Irving, a 50-tour veteran, the story of Siegfried Sassoon’s heroic rescue of the corporal. “Sassoon went out to look for O’Brien, who’d been reported missing,” Irving said. “He found him in a 25ft-deep crater, shot through both arms and legs. Sassoon sent for two strong men and a rope, and they got him out and back here to the camp. Sassoon got the Military Medal for that; but O’Brien died anyway.” Later, back in England the disillusioned poet-soldier threw his medal into the River Mersey; he, like so many others who had been through the desperate experience of the Somme at the behest of generals and politicians far removed from the slaughter, could temporarily take no more. Yet Sassoon and most of those others returned to France to face the hellish scenes once again. What drove men such as these to such heights of endurance, and such depths of despair, was something I had come to France to get clearer in my own mind, here on the ground where they suffered.

On the edge of Bois Francais two big, rusting artillery shells stood on end under the trees, placed there by the farmer who had dug them up during the ploughing. Nearly eight decades after the battle, tons of unexploded ordnance are still unearthed each year from the chalk and clay of the Somme farmlands. “Shall I sit on one?” someone offered skittishly, posing for a photograph, “God, no,” said her companion, sharply, “they’re still live!” She gave a little scream and moved hastily away. Almost eighty years had passed since the shells thumped into the churned mud of the wood, but they still held a potent threat.

Fricourt lay clustered round its church spire beyond the ridge, a charming huddle of dark brick houses under red roofs. The village had been fortified German strongholds, spaced out along the 18-mile front where 100,000 men of the first attack wave-climbed out of the British trenches and set off at a disciplined pace across no man’s land into storms of machine-gun, sniper and shell fire.

At first, looking from the ridge across the sunlit sweep of peaceful woods and fields, it was hard to picture the setting at 7.30am on the July morning in 1916. but soon the battle scene, ingrained on my inner eye through reading and by images from flickering black-and-white cine films, sharpened into focus; Fricourt a mass of rubble, its countryside a wasteland of mud and splintered trees, shell holes and tangles of barbed wire into which the waves of attacking soldiers fell like scythed corn.

Now I could appreciate the lie of the land: how the German defenders commanded all the high ground, how the surrounding woods gave such excellent cover to their machine gunners; how this Somme country holds hidden dips and valleys that slowed the heavily laden British troops as they struggled uphill towards Fricourt. I knew from my reading that the Green Howards had lost 108 of the 140 men of A company, that C and D companies of the 7th East Yorks had lost 23 men in three minutes of the afternoon attack. Now, by seeing where, I could understand how.

Holts’ Tours are congenial affairs. In the Novotel at Amiens that evening, the talk flowed over dinner and the wine flowed with it. There’s nothing like walking in company for making friends of strangers, and there was plenty of leg-pulling about oversleeping and its relationship to good red wine when we boarded the coach next morning. As we drove south towards Maricourt, the starting point for our morning’s walk, Church talked about the Pals battalions who had gone over the top side by side on this extreme right wing of the British attack: volunteers from towns around Liverpool and Manchester, friends and neighbours who would die or survive together.

Half a mile out of Maricourt, we crossed the line of the British trenches. “The sheer scale of the slaughter was what brought it home to people back in England.” Church said as we walked between the quiet stubble and beet fields of no man’s land, past German’s Wood and Machine Gun Wood. “Hundreds were killed from the same few streets in the northern towns. After the Somme, the Pals battalions were discontinued.”

Yet the Liverpool and Manchester pals of the 30th Division, volunteers to a man, achieved their objectives more successfully than any other units along the entire battle front on that first day. They captured the ruins of Montauban and halted with a clear view over empty country beyond. There were no further orders to advance, however. They had suffered 3,011 casualties for the sake of a mile or so of devastated ground.

What made these drapers, clerks, railway porters and factory hands keep going as the machineguns and artillery shells cut down their chums all around them? “It was the only thing they could do,” said Church, “The safest place was in the German trench ahead of you. Get there, kick them out and take shelter – that was the incentive.”

Among the fields of the Somme countryside are clusters of small woods, peaceful places today where finches and warblers sing. From mid-July 1916 onwards they become the splintered, leafless killing grounds for tens of thousands of British and German soldiers – Mametz Wood and Caterpillar Wood, Trones Wood, High Wood and Delville Wood, names the fighting men came to know all too well during that summer and autumn as the second Allied advance got under way.

Our afternoon walk took us to three of the woods, dark stands of oak, chestnut and ash that rustled in a gentle wind. This quiet whisper of thousands of leaves became the defining image of the Somme for me, and almost unbearably poignant sound.

Each wood had its own tranquil cemetery, crammed with headstones. There were more than 5,000 at Delville Wood; over 1,500 – including three pairs of brothers – at Flatiron Copse cemetery in Death Valley under Mametz Wood; nearly 4,000 at High Wood, where German machineguns sliced down the Glasgow Highlanders as they tried day after day to penetrate the deadly shadows under the trees. High Wood temporarily scabious. I walked across a 300-yard strip of no man's land, still pockmarked with hundreds of shallow shell craters, towards the great brown caribou that lifts its bronze muzzle in a silent bellow above the trenches of the Ist Newfoundland Battalion. The Newfoundlanders were farmers, foresters and fishermen, men who had scarcely heard of France before they volunteered for service overseas. 752 went over the top together on July 1, 1916; 684 were killed or wounded.

I had learned a lot during these few days; but imagination had yet to cope with the still-unanswered question. What was it that kept the men of the Somme going forward, in a situation in which I could only imagine myself running abjectly away?

'They didn't whinge or mutiny,' said Isobel Swan. 'They went forward exhausted, soaked through, louse-ridden, in boots that didn't fit, to kill men they had no personal grudge against. Comradeship is an outmoded word, but that was the ideal they held - to look after the man next to you, share what you had with him, die for him if you had to.'

She paused, then added simply: 'They were better men than us.'

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