Tag Archives: douai

Sunday 8th July 2018 – WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT …

canada national parks vimy ridge france… that by the end of the day I would have been setting my foot inside Canada?

Only in your wildest flights of fancy would you have imagined it, but nevertheless, here I am. And quite right too if you ask me.

I DID say “never say never”, didn’t I? And where there’s a will there are relatives. So Canada here I came.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here, aren’t I?

As expected, I had a bad night with my noisy neighbours. But not so bad that I wasn’t able to go off on a nocturnal ramble.

A rather distressing one in fact. Two men were trying to extract a piece of wood from underneath a huge pile halfway up a scaffolding at IKEA of all places. The pile titled alarmingly and caused two yellow dumper-type lorries to swerve. One of them crashed into Caliburn and badly damaged him, but the lorries didn’t stop until they were round the corner. I didn’t know which one was responsible for the damage so I challenged them both. But they both denied it. A friend of mine, someone from school, was travelling as a passenger in one of them and he reckoned that it was the other so I challenged that driver but he still persisted with his denial. I tried to explain that I had seen what happened with the wood so they could hardly be blamed and the insurance would deal with it anyway, but they still refused to admit which one of them it was.

premiere class hotel rocourt liege belgium july juillet 2018Awake before the alarm, I did some more paperwork and then tidied up ready to leave.

I had a gentle moan at the receptionist about my neighbours (it was hardly her fault, was it?) so she offered me a complementary coffee.

It pays to complain, if you do it nicely enough.

Round the corner to fuel up Caliburn, to the Carrefour Sunday supermarket for bread and some buns for breakfast, and then on the road in the blinding heat for France, eating my bread rolls and drinking my coffee as I drove.

My route took me all the way down the motorway well into France, and I came off at Denain and headed for Douai.

Regular readers of this rubbish in one of its very first incarnations will recall that I called Denain “The Land of the Living Dead”. All of that area, Denain, Douai, Doullens, they are all old mining and heavy industrial towns and the collapse of Western European heavy industry in the 1980s affected them terribly.

They were bad 20 years ago but now they are even worse than parts of Stoke on Trent, and that really is saying something, I’ll tell you that. Horrible, sad, decaying cities.

I found a place to stop and eat my sandwiches, and then went to book a room in either Albert or Arras. And I don’t know what is happening there right now but prices are through the roof. There’s clearly something going on.

All that I’ve managed to find in my price range is a flea-pit in Lens about 20 miles away from where I want to be. That’s not a good sign.

But anyway, I’m back on the road and heading for this afternoon’s destination. And The Lady Who Lives In The SatNav is doing her best to confuse me.

But before I actually reach there, I’m side-tracked … "yet again" – ed … by something that’s not on my list of places to visit.

tank cemetery guémappe franceI’d heard of the “Tank Cemetery” somewhere in the back of my mind, where graves were laid out in the shelter of an abandoned tank, but that was up north.

So seeing a sign for the “Tank Cemetery” around here at Guémappe, I went for a look.

It relates to inter alia an action on 23rd and 24th March as a continuation, I suppose, of the Battle of the Somme, when the village was stormed by soldiers of the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment, and then subsequently by a couple of Field Ambulance Units until it was overrun in the German “Spring Advance” of March 1918.

And there are 64 Cameron Highlanders buried in one mass grave here.

foncquevillers military cemetery franceAnyway, I eventually reach my destination. This is Foncquevillers Military Cemetery.

Foncquevillers was a British stronghold behind the front line in early 1916 and it’s where part of the british Army assembled to plan its attack on the Somme.

What we are going to be doing over the next few days is to sketch out the plan of attack of 1st July 1916 when General Rawlinson’s disastrous handling of the the Third and Fourth Armies led to a debâcle unparalleled in British history and a disaster second only to Dunkirk.

I’m not going to write too much about it here because there is so much to say and I can go on for ever … "not with a bayonet through your neck you couldn’t" – ed … and besides, it’s going to be spread over a couple of days … "and several fields too" – ed.

So I shall just say that I had a very pleasant afternoon ambling through the sunshine.

And you’ll be surprised at just how much is left to see after 102 years. Most of the stuff has been ploughed away but you do occasionally find some gems.

But from there I headed north to Lens. All 45 kilometres of it and it’s rather a drag.

vimy ridge memorial franceBut Rupert Brooke famously talked about “a corner of a foreign field that is forever England”.

What he didn’t say is that there’s a couple of corners of foreign fields that are forever Canada and I’m standing in one right now.

I came here with Nerina 30 years or so ago, but I’ve no idea where my photos might be, and so I came by again.

vimy ridge memorial franceAnd for those of you who couldn’t see the monument clearly, here’s a close-up of it in all its glory.

It’s a monument not only to the events on Vimy Ridge over Easter 1917 but also to all of the fallen Canadian soldiers who have no known grave – more than 11,000 of them.

And their names are engraved on tablets as we saw at the Menin Gate at Ieper.

vimy ridge memorial franceYou can see why possession of Vimy Ridge was something worth fighting for – if anything is worth fighting for, that is.

The view all over the plain between Douai and Lens is phenomenal, and it’s the first real occasion that the British and French had of actually overlooking the German front lines – the Germans always going for the heights.

But I’ll come back to all of that in a bit.

Right now I’m off to my hotel. I eventually find it by the railway station in Lens. I’m pretty disappointed with this one – not for the least of the reasons being the weird landlady who clearly ought topass the bottle around instead of keeping it for herself.

The room is OK and stifling hot, so I nip downstairs and bring up the fan. That’s much better.

A quick wash of the undies and I sit down to do some work but my heart isn’t in it and eventually I drift off to bed with most of the stuff undone.

I can’t keep it up these days like I used to.