Trip to remember
Siobhan McNally takes a tour of war zones and memorials in France
Well, I’ve eaten in some strange places, but sitting among ghosts in deep, dark, winding tunnels under No Man’s Land, was putting me off my breakfast of congealed baked beans.
It was a replica of the last breakfast eaten by British soldiers before they launched one of the most audacious attacks of the First World War on German lines behind the Western Front. But I was beginning to think we might have won the war a bit earlier if the chaps had just used the hard-as-bullets beans as ammunition.
Just then a hand touched my shoulder, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Mum, can we go now? This is spooky,” moaned the teenage daughter.
You can always rely on the youth of today to bring you back down to earth, even if it was 66ft deep in the
Wellington Quarry, under the town of Arras in Northern France.
After the French struggled to hold back Germany’s invasion of Belgium in 1914, and three million British and Commonwealth men answered the call to arms, Arras was the centre of a cunning plot hatched by the French General Nivelle.
While heavy shelling devastated the town’s beautiful 17th-century Flemish-style buildings above ground, the plan was for New
Zealander tunnellers and Welsh miners to dig underneath the enemy. But incredibly, in a scene made for movies, the tunnellers broke through into a long-forgotten vast medieval chalk quarry.
A staggering 24,000 British and Commonwealth troops lived underground before launching their surprise attack in 1917.
In the end, the Battle of Arras failed to achieve as much as Nivelle had hoped. But the immersive
experience taught Jesse, 13 , who’s studying the history of both world wars, more about the horrors of war than all the battlefields and war graves on our tour of Hauts-de-France put together.
Like with many Brits, Northern France had been somewhere we had previously just passed through on the way to the Alps. But all those signs off the autoroute – Amiens, Arras, Saint Omer – were now stops on our mum-and-daughter road trip…
Day 1 Calais 6 Amiens
We caught the early shuttle to France on the first day of autumn half term, but then so did everyone else, which meant delays and eating our packed lunch before 10am out of boredom.
This meant a rush at the other end to meet our guide before it got dark in Amiens, the capital of the Somme department of Hauts-de-France.
But surprisingly, the vast interior of the pretty medieval town’s Notre Dame cathedral was so bright, we needed sunglasses (cathedrale-amiens.fr/en, free entrance).
It was a miracle that shelling barely touched the stunning Gothic building during the war, and Amiens grew wealthy from Allied troops on leave spending their cash in the busy cafes and bars.
We also stopped to try the local Picardy delicacy, almond macarons, at 150-year-old family-owned shop Jean Trogneux (trogneux.fr) in town. It’s fair to say they taste better than they look – like belly buttons.
We stayed in a bright and functional Ibis hotel which was very central and next door to the train station.
And in the evening, we walked along the fairylit canal before stopping at Le Quai (restaurant-lequai.fr) for a Picardy speciality of ficelle – pancakes filled with ham, cheese, mushrooms and lashings of cream.
Don’t forget to bring your heartburn tablets.
Day 2 Amiens 6 Beaumont Hamel Albert 6 Arras
6
After bribing the teenager to get up, it was a 30-minute drive to Thiepval Memorial (historial.fr, free entry to memorial, museum costs £5.30 adult/£2.60 child) in Albert to meet our guide Olivier.
I don’t think either of us were prepared for the scale of the magnificent memorial, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, to the 72,000 missing British and South African soldiers, many of whom were buried where they fell in the Battle of the Somme.
Much of the landscape remains the same, but Olivier said many French landowning families never returned to the area, and jobs are still scarce.
The blood-soaked soil has been giving up its gory secrets since then – military artefacts to the museum nearby, and recovered bodies of soldiers to The Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC).
We found the last living tree of the Somme at the Newfoundland Memorial at Beaumont-Hamel particularly affecting, especially when a lone piper in the distance mournfully paid tribute to the Newfoundlanders