At about 1415 I passed a sign on that same arrow straight road from Bapaume to Albert which said 1st July 1916.
Less than 12km apart and yet over those five months in 1916 hundreds of thousands died. 88,000 Allied of which 56,000 British on July 1st 1916 alone. The French at Verdun is another story.
From August 1914 - November 1918, 750,00 British, 200,000 Commonwealth soldiers, 800,000 French ones. and over 350,00 civilains died along this front. No one seems to want to say how many Germans but over 800,000. 23,000,000 rounds of allied ammunition was expended on this front by the Allies.
I'm sitting here looking out of a window from a new Ibis just outside Albert with a laptop, baguette, cafe eclair, a dozen bottles of Leffe Blonde and the road runs just a few metres away. I can hear the cars. See the road. I'm watching the shadows stretching and the leaves detaching from their branches.
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| This road between the fence and the trees, arrow straight, smooth as silk and not exactly busy. |
Yet this afternoon for the first time it has dawned on me the scale of the slaughter in WW1. If I were to cover all the ground on which British and Commonwealth troops were killed in WW2 I'd be travelling for ages covering continents, traipsing for miles but in WW1 it (nearly) all took place within a very narrow strip of land on this, The Western Front.
It has been a most sobering experience. Two million young men killed, not counting the enemy, in just a few months of a five year confrontation over a strip of land which took me less than 15 minutes to traverse at a legal speed
Two million deaths to take less than 12km of mud and barbed wire. Fighting petered out because of the weather and exhaustion but when it all began in the spring of 1917 those 12kms were lost again.
Driving here past the small neat cemeteries it all looks a bit too neat really, a bit romantic almost but an hour or two in the Somme 1916 museum in Albert destroys any latent romanticism. This was a deadly existence endured by many, survived by a few, forgotten by none.
In one action involving 3500 Canadians tasked with taking a wood one day in that July of 1916 the wood was taken and 143 were left to tell the tale. But they didn't tell the tale. They didn't talk about it. They didn't mention it. They just carried on. Sent to another unit. Another task. Another experience the horror of which I couldn't imagine.
No counselling, no understanding, no respite.
In that museum there's a Kilt and Sporran. Given by the granddaughter of a survivor of the horrors of July 1916. Her Grandad, wounded and unable to get back to his line and would have died but for a wounded Scot who carried him to safety and was further injured in doing so. The Scot, fatally wounded, gave her Grandad his Kilt and Sporran as "he had no one at home to send it to." They donated it to the museum with a photo of her Grandad. No one knows the name of the Scot.
The small neat cemeteries are dwarfed by the monuments on which the names of those with no graves are chiseled. But that's for tomorrow when we go to see the places where my wife's grandad fought his war.
A visit to the Somme 1916 museum in Albert is highly recommended, although ours was enriched by a group of British Primary schoolkids who were a credit to their parents and teachers but spoiled or at least overshadowed by a group of French teenagers accompanied by a thoroughly disinterested teacher whose behaviour was atrocious to say the least.
I'm glad I read "Catastrophe" by Sir Max Hastings and I'd recommend that, too.
A salutary day.
