Monday 24 August - From The Somme to Arras

There was yet more to see at The Somme but even then we could still only scratch the surface of what there is to see. The bikes came into their own again and we set off independently to cover ground that was important personally. For M1, the impressive Newfoundland Park which housed not just the tributes to the Newfoundlanders (who went into battle on that fateful day with 801 personnel of whom only 68 survived unscathed) but to the Highland Division, the Danger Tree, Y-Ravine and overlooked the Hawthorn Ridge mine crater which had presaged the attack on 1st July 1916. From there to Beaumont-Hamel, Beaucort, Mouquet Wood and on to Pozieres where there was a wonderfully simple and dignified monument to the brave Australian forces who eventually took and held the Pozieres Windmill despite huge losses. This is opposite the Tank Corps Memorial to commemorate where British tanks were used for the first time. At Authuille, near our night stop, McD explored the moving tributes to the British soldiers who held the front line through the village for much of the War. In walking the cemetery there, he found the grave of Private J Walters of the Royal Fusiliers aged just 16 when he was killed on 1st July 1916.

After reuniting at the campsite, we cut the umbilical camping cord then pottered in the van past High Wood, Longueval (German Cemetary) to Delville Wood (South African Memorial) then Flers, Gomiecourt past Bapaume and on to Arras for a comfortable last night on tour in individual rooms in the Campanile Hotel.

It is not possible in this blog to convey the irrationality of this War, the intensity of the battles, nor to understand the crazy loss of life and the casualties for very little military advantage. Neither could we have visited all the sites although we are closer now to having absorbed the full, sobering enormity of this dreadful War. That so many people of all nationalities still visit the battlefields in quiet reverence is an important tribute to the fallen of both sides for wich the cemeteries, memorials and battle sites serve as a sharp focus. We were enormously grateful for the kindness of RLGC members Michael Postlethwaite who gave us detailed accounts and maps of the Somme, and Don Wilson III who gave us not only the informative guide books from Major and Mrs Holt but moving books 'Never Such Innocence', an anthology of poems compiled by Martin Stephens and 'The Great War' by Paul Fussell.

Many WW1 soldiers were impressively literate, some famously so, and recorded their feelings in their poetry, letters and newspapers such as the Wipers Times. We cannot do better than to repeat one of these poems by Carl Sandberg (1878 - 1967), an American poet, which had particular resonance to our visit, bleak though it is in reminding us all that war is a near permanent state somewhere in the world:

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.

Shovel them under and let me work.

I am the grass: I cover all.

And pile them high at Gettysburg

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.

Shovel them under and let me work.

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:

What place is this?

Where are we now?

I am the grass.

Let me work.