After leaving Paris, Wayne and I boarded a train to head to Amiens. On the first night we wandered around MORE Christmas markets and then went to the evening illuminations on the façade of the cathedral. While it was very good, it paled in comparison to the illumination spectacular I saw in Avignon at the Palais des Papes a number of weeks ago.
I had done a Battle of the Somme tour three years ago and Wayne was also keen to visit this area. I booked back with the same tour company as I travelled with three years ago because I had enjoyed it so much (Terres de Memoire). Along with five other Aussies and our guide, Sylvestre, we discovered important sites relevant to Australian involvement in World War I. Our first stop was the memorial at Villers-Bretonneux. Sylvestre told us the story of Sergeant D Badger who was killed in action and his body never recovered. He had written a letter to his parents marked, “to be opened when I am dead.” He gave directions for his personal effects but also asked his parents not to mourn him because he had done his duty and he would do it all again. He concluded with the message, “All I ask is that you send another in my place.” So his parents sent his younger brother.
We then visited the Victoria School whose construction was funded after World War I by Victorian school children. It is undergoing quite a bit of renovation at the moment (in fact a lot of sites were in preparation for the 100th anniversary of the Somme battles in 1916), so part of the museum has been temporarily moved to the school hall. School halls really don’t exist in France; this school has one because of its connection to Australia.
After this, we visited a German cemetery which was quite different from those of the allied forces we had seen. Sylvestre explained that unlike the cemeteries and memorials of the allied soldiers, German cemeteries were always on little back roads with little sign posting to show their existence. After the end of the war, when the Germans requested to bury their dead in this area, they were allowed to do so, but the crosses had to be black. Being World War I, there were also a number of Jewish headstones in the cemetery.
One of the ladies on our tour had a grandfather who had served in World War I as a medic and we visited the château which was the dressing station where he had worked.
Next we went to a giant crater which was the result of underground mining by Welsh troops. They would dig under the German line and set explosives. Under this particular section of the front line, 28 tons of explosive were used. The photo doesn’t really show the depth of the crater as we saw it in real life. There were a number of these types of mining operations and it sometimes took many months of digging to reach their objective. “Beneath Hill 60” is an Australian movie which recounts the story of Australian miners doing the same thing in a place not far from where we visited.
We then visited Pozières. This site was where there was a two week struggle for the village which cost 23000 young Australian lives. According to Australian war historian Charles Bean, Pozières ridge “is more densely sown with Australian sacrifice than any other place on earth.”
We then headed into farmland where we came across a German bunker which had acted as a command centre. Sylvestre joked that the Germans aren’t very funny but they do a good job with concrete. The thickness of the concrete and its reinforcing (e.g. part of a railway track) meant that it was indestructible.
Sylvestre then told us it was time to go “souvenir shopping.” We walked across the road and started foraging along the edge of the ploughed paddock. It wasn’t long until we all started to find pieces of shrapnel and other bits of metal that were the remnants of old shells. Sylvestre even found the bottom half of an old bomb casing.
Our final two stops were the memorial at Thiepval which has the names of over 73000 missing British soldiers and then a Newfoundland memorial where we were able to actually walk in a front line trench.
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