The Somme Battlefields

Yet another post in the Just Back 500 word travel writing competition.  This visit was in February 2011.

SOMME February 2011

France.  A still misty February morning.  Rolling, deep ploughed fields.  The Somme.  Immaculate Portland limestone.  The name reads ‘Captain A.B. Tough’.  Reminiscent of the names of heroes in the comics of childhood, Captain Arnold Bannatyne Tough lies in Queens Cemetery near Serre, a tiny hamlet in northern France.  In silent rows the stones bear witness to the worst single day in British military history, which seems the more unrealistic this morning in Picardy, where nothing moves except a solitary bird and the waves of plough-turned earth around us.   The hero’s end of Tough is known from contemporary descriptions in July 1916, but we know little of his companions who lie near him.  Down in the prosaically named ‘Railway Hollow’ lie others of the ‘Accrington Pals’ of the Great War, including the seemingly literally named ‘A. Goodlad’, who we know something of from his last letter home containing the words which appear on his memorial – ‘The French are a grand nation – worth fighting for’.  The ability of the men in the trenches to make normal the surroundings of the Somme is uncanny.  Just along the tiny road is the track cut in chalk which was named ‘White City’.  A little further along is the village of Auchonvillers, or ‘Ocean Villas’.  Near La Boisselle we find the ‘Sausage’ and ‘Mash’ valleys.  When we journey along Mill Road up to the Thiepval ridge, with its enormous Lutyens memorial to the missing – 73,000 names inscribed on its pillars, the next farm called Le Mouquet was known to the Australian troops as ‘Moo-Cow’ farm, and the British as ‘Mucky’ farm.  Along we go, our car now lastingly caked with the mud of the Somme, the abiding memory of so many who survived.  At the Canadian memorial park in Beaumont-Hamel, on a sunny afternoon, the beautiful fresh face of a young Newfoundland university student is an extraordinary contrast to the tale which she tells as we walk down through the pitted shell holes and the remains of the trenches to the front line of the Y-ravine.  At this spot as at so many others the Germans were so well dug in they survived even the Hawthorn Mine, obligingly detonated at 0720 hours on the morning of July 1^st 1916, thus giving 10 minutes of warning and recovery for the opposition prior to the slow march of the Newfoundland regiment across this 300 metres of cratered ground. The result was predictable.  The world now knows that 19,000 allies died on the first day of the offensive.  The French themselves have moved on – as would anybody with no choice but to continue to earn their living from the richest soil in Europe.  But as we drive from Amiens to Corbie, and onwards to Albert, I can’t help but wonder whether French bureaucrats can appreciate the irony as their large sign advises of the dangers on this road: in English it reads – ‘Attention!  On this road in the last 5 years there have been 5 deaths and 56 wounded’.