Lens - Amiens, France

Tuesday 16th November 1999

We awoke to see ice on the inside of the windows and the thermometer reading 0.3°C. The weather was telling us it was time to finish. We scraped the ice of the windscreen and headed back to the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge. The occasionally snow-flurry blowing across the road.

After spending some time checking emails and writing to agencies in England we reached the memorial. We got out of the van and found ourselves surrounded by a busload of French school children. In the toilets they were screaming and laughing so much that Anita found their teacher and asked him if he could control his students.

They headed towards the information building so we walked along the path to the memorial. A light snow was falling and the wind was bitterly cold. A reminder of the conditions for the men in the trenches in 1917. Vimy Ridge was a highly strategic point of the German front line that ran from Belgium to Switzerland. The task of capturing the ridge was given to the Canadians. After months of preparation the intense fighting lasted just a few days before the Canadians were successful.

We walked around the memorial to the 60000 Canadians who lost their lives in World War I. Inscribed on the side were the names of the 11000 whose bodies were never recovered. Some still lay on the battlefields around us.

We walked back down the path towards the information building and found the school children coming the other way. As they approached the memorial they were joking and laughing with each other. I was furious and yelled to them to "Be silent!". It seemed to have a temporary effect but I think they'll return to their school having simply enjoyed a day out of the classroom. It was deeply saddening to see such a lack of appreciation of the sacrifice made in these hills. As much as people might wish to put the events behind them it should not be forgotten that real people died in these trenches and the generation that fought here are with us still. It is too soon for these events to be consigned to the pages of history.

With these sobering thoughts we went in to the information building and saw a reconstruction of the battle to capture the ridge. We then walked a few hundred metres to some trenches that were still accessible. The whole ridge was just as it was at the end of the war but most was off limits due to unexploded shells. The lines of trenches and shell craters were visible all around.

We reached the trenches and saw how close the two front lines were. No more than twenty metres apart. Huge shell craters, twenty or thirty metres in diameter, lay between the trenches, showing that nowhere was safe. We spent some time trying to imagine what it must have been like to be here, but it is impossible to do. Nothing in our experience can be compared. As we left another party of school children arrived but this group was quiet and thoughtful, restoring our faith a little.

We walked back to the van and began to drive south, towards Amiens and the Somme river. All around were small memorials and cemeteries from the war. This was the area of the Battle of the Somme, an Allied offensive in 1916 where British, Commonwealth and French troops went "over the top" along a 34km front. On the first day alone 20000 British troops were killed and a further 40000 were wounded. Mown down en-masse by German machine gun emplacements. By the end of the offensive, some four months later, casualties on both sides had reached 1.2 million. The front line had moved 12km.

In the face of such numbers it is easy to see how after the war people felt sure that "never again" would such destruction occur. Yet only twenty years later Europe was once more engulfed in war. It seems incomprehensible.

With such thoughts in mind we drove past Amiens and began looking for a place for the night. We soon find a small patch of forest on a quiet side road and settled in for the night. One of the last of our journey.