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