I've driven through that area countless times. The Somme is a river and an area. If one takes the small highway between Brusselles and Paris you go through the beautiful rolling hills and quaint villages that were at the epicenter of all of that. It's still not very populated even today and there are many small cemeteries with monuments from that time. Some of the buildings still stand, left as they were, full of munitions damage from those terrible days.
