The Great War

We broke our epic 660km drive from Alsace to Bruges with a stop at Verdun in Lorraine. Verdun is remembered for the horrors of the 1916-1917 Battle of Verdun when about 1 million men and civilians died in almost a whole year of continuous fighting and bloodshed. Nine villages were obliterated without trace in the devastated region. The area is sobering. The terrain is really lumpy, full of craters made by the hundreds of thousands of shells that landed all over the place.

We walked up to one of the fortifications through pretty woods - it was incredibly muddy, all sticky and slippery at the same time. Got so much mud on the soles of our shoes, we must have been a good inch-and-a-half taller! Makes you think what it was like for those men living in all that mud with absolutely no trees or greenery around. One very moving memorial was the Trenches of the Bayonets. On 12 June 1916, two companies of the French army were sheltered in their trenches waiting for a ferocious artillery bombardment to end. It never did - incoming shells must have created a massive explosion that covered them in mud, burying them alive. They weren't found until three years later, when someone spotted several hundred bayonet tips sticking out of the ground. The soldiers were left where they died and a memorial to them was established at the spot.

Spent some time in Ypres in Southern Belgium. which was used as a supply depot for the British army during WWI. The Germans shelled Ypres to bits but like so many of these towns and cities, the town was rebuilt to its earlier design after the war, including a replica of the massive Cloth Hall. Part of its interior has been turned into the Flanders Fields museum, which explains, only too graphically, the horrors of that war. The names of over 50,000 British and Commonwealth troops who died in the area but who have no resting place are inscribed on the Menin Gate into Ypres.

We went to some of the war memorials and cemeteries in the area - it's hard to drive through such beautiful countryside and imagine it totally devoid of trees, just huge swathes of trenches, artillery and mud. The cemeteries are all beautifully maintained. Tyne Cot is the largest Commonwealth cemetery in the world. It's also the most important reminder of Passchendale. During the British offensive in 1917, tens of thousands of soldiers died there in a period of 100 days for a gain of barely 8km. Between 1919 and 1921 specialised exhumation companies brought in many thousands of bodies from the surrounding battlefields. Only 3,800 could be identified. It's all just so sad.

We went to a German military cemetery at Langemark. More than 44,000 soldiers lie there, nearly 25,000 of them in a mass grave.

We also went to a small town called Le Quesnoy, where a NZ contingent liberated the town from the Germans in 1918 after four years of occupation. A heavily fortified city with its huge ramparts, the battle involved flaming petrol bombs and using ladders to scale the walls. All sounds like a bit of a No. 8 fencing wire story. There's a Rue Helene Clark, previously known as Rue Marechal Joffre - I wonder how happy he'd have been about his street being renamed? Still, I guess he's got quite a few streets named after him in France!