ON THE bloody fields of the Somme, the men of Dorset ran to their deaths through piles of corpses.

Now they will have a memorial of their own.

Fundraisers have spent four years collecting £25,000 to honour the First World War dead of the Dorsetshire regiment with an obelisk made of Portland stone.

The memorial was put in place on April 5 at a farmers field near the French village of Authuille and around 80 people are travelling over for the dedication ceremony at 11am on May 7.

The idea came from Major Tim Saunders, a former soldier with the Devon and Dorsets turned military historian and a guide with Shaftesbury-based Old Country Tours.

The memorial will honour all of the 4,500 men from the regiment who died on battlefields as far afield as India and modern day Iraq.

It was shaped by Stoneform near Dorchester and carries the crests of the Dorsetshire Regiment, Dorset County Council, and records the regimental battle honours.

Major (Ret) Roger Coleman, 74, from Northbourne in Bournemouth, a member of the Dorset and South Wiltshire Western Front Association, helped with fundraising. He said the first battalion of the regiment had been based around the Authuille on the night before the Somme offensive began on July 1. Around 19,000 British soldiers died that day.

Mr Coleman said: “The battalion was in the second wave and it lost 350 men. They attacked stumbling over the bodies of the battalion that went in front of them.”

The dedication ceremony will be held in the presence Mrs Anthony Pitt-Rivers, The Lord-Lieutenant of Dorset, and General Sir John Wilsey, President of the Regimental Association.

The ceremony will be followed by a vin d’honneur in the village for all present hosted by Mayor of Authuille Regis Schoonheere.