Picardy and the Somme

The rural fire service website says that for now you are ok, which is a relief because when we left at 6.00 this morning we were aware that there was still a hot afternoon ahead of you. 

There were 8 of us - 6 Australians and an American couple. Joe from Philadelphia was a Great War enthusiast and I feared he would turn the Great War into the Great Bore. My fears were unfounded. Joe was clearly in poor health and his main impact on the trip was that he kept dropping and forgetting things, which kept Lyn occupied anyway.

Julien was our guide and proved a true multitasker. His English was proficient in that charming French way. "The Eenglish are attacking at Poitiers zo zat zay are coming around Peronne" etc. His driving was only disconcerting because it was terrifying, not because he was doing anything that all the other Parisians weren't doing.

I am grateful to have seen these places at last. Rural France is much more rural than the bits of Britain we saw. We liked the space around us at last.

Villers Bretonneux

The plaque is out the front of the school. Inside is a small hall with carvings of Australian animals.

 

Pozieres. Bean wrote that this site, "is more densely sewn with Australian sacrifice than any other spot on Earth".

 

The British memorial at Thiepval. Note the abseiling restoration workers.

 

German crosses are iron, French are white and the rest have the familiar tombstone markers.

The good little Western Front museum at Peronne.

My most thoughtful moment, of many today, came when I found this tombstone - bear with me.

If you can't make out the inscription...

P.J. Ball died on 25 March, 1918. The place, date and battalion suggest that he died stopping the last German offensives on the Somme in the last year of the war. He was 23. He was already a Sergeant and had won the Military Medal. (At this time the MM was given to enlisted men who had done something extraordinarily courageous - but not so crazy that you could get the VC.) He "got knocked" in March,1918, no doubt in the effort to halt the great German Spring Offensive. His surviving family chose the epitaph:

"I fought and died in the Great War to end all wars. Have I died in vain?" 

Lyn survived the day, and even found bits to appreciate.