That's because through two world wars (and numerous conflicts before) these broad, rich agricultural lands have been the contested mid-point between battling powers. It's hard to believe now, when the adjective "sleepy" is the one most likely to come to mind and there seems little in the way of chateaux or great cathedrals to tempt you off the motorway. But history is about more than sights. It's also human stories, sacrifices and tragedies; and on that front this is one of the most historically significant places on earth.
After four years of WWI commemorations, and with the 100th anniversary of the armistice nearing, we thought this was the perfect year to break our journey in the region and explore some of the memorials. We concentrated on the Somme, particularly the Lochnagar Crater and the Thiepval War Cemetery and museum, and also took a side trip to visit the grave of one of my husband's ancestors. I found visiting the whole area to be profoundly moving.
We also discovered that stopping here is tremendously practical for a quick get-away from England. You can work a full day, hop a channel-tunnel crossing after work and be in Arras for dinner. The town is just a little over an hour from the Channel Tunnel port in Calais and a few minutes south of the A26 motorway. Getting this far after work allows you to wake up in France on your first full day off, feeling like you're already properly on holiday rather than in transit.
The houses have Dutch gables. There's a rather stolid neo-classical cathedral and a slightly more interesting early-20th century neo-gothic church, Saint-Jean-Baptiste, that shows off a rather magnificent Rubens. (It's a convenient 5-minute detour after breakfast at the IBIS.) The fanciful spires and dormer-studded roof of the town hall are distinctly Flemish. I expected someone to be hawking waffles on streetcorners. Instead, we stumbled onto a culinary outpost of Gascony. Le Domaine de Chavagnac is exactly the full-on French experience you want on your first night in the country, from checkered tablecloths and baskets of perfect bread to a chalkboard full of top-quality yet reasonably-priced wines. The unseasonably cold drizzle and architecture might have been saying Northern Europe, but the foie gras, duck and armagnac took us south. I suspect the Arras-IBIS-Chavagnac nexus may become our new M.O. for starting a journey across France.
Central Arras is in beautiful shape now, and dramatic lighting makes it magical at night. But it doesn't take long in the daylight to spot pockmarks from bullets and artillery in most walls. The front line surged back and forth around the town throughout WWI and most of what you see now was rebuilt from total devastation. These were the more somber thoughts that framed our explorations the next day. A 20-mile drive south takes you into the heart of the Somme, and the grim contemplation that this may just be the biggest battlefield in the world.
For mile after mile the monuments appear. Some are humble obelisks or stone markers. Some, like the British war cemetery at Pozieres (photo top), enclosed on four sides by impressive walls and colonnades, are so striking you're compelled to pull over and explore. Signs reveal the resting places of French, Brits, Germans, Indians, Australians ... emphasising that this was the first world war. Signs along the road mark where the front line was on certain days. There are a lot of them, and sometimes they're only separated by a few hundred yards. Villages along the way are neither charming nor characterful; though there are some local architectural touches it's obvious that almost everything you see was either new or rebuilt in the 20th century. In most places, the evidence of trench warfare has been ploughed flat beneath enormous fields of potatoes, cabbages and wheat. But not all. As you approach La Boisselle you see strange undulations. Grass has been allowed to grow back but the land still rises and falls in bizarre ridges that suggest the scars of war.
Just behind the main village of La Boisselle you'll fine the Lochnagar Crater (or, as it's called in French la grande mine). It is, quite simply, an enormous (98' x 330') hole in the ground left when the Brits set off an enormous explosion to start the advance we now know as the Battle of the Somme. Holes in the ground are not usually worth a detour. This, however, was one of the most evocative war memorials I've ever visited, second only in my experience to the Documentation Centre in Nuremberg.Englishman Richard Dunning bought the land here in the 1970s, after the crater had been used for years as a rubbish tip and a cross-country biking spot. He set about cleaning it up and erecting memorials. Today you circle the crater, reading boards that tell the story of 1 July 1916 from the perspective of individual soldiers. There's the crazy, claustrophobic bravery of the sappers who spent weeks digging inch-by-inch closer to the German lines. The awe-struck descriptions of the never-seen-before devastation at detonation. (Thought to be the loudest noise made on the planet until that time, people claim to have heard it and felt the ground tremble in London.) There are first-hand accounts from soldiers who survived, and about many more who died, including the tale of one who described his vision of the heavenly host welcoming him as he expired in his friend's arms. Survivors, friends and family have added additional markers over the years, like the section of decking around the crater rim where each plank bears the name of a different former student from just one school in the north of England. It's a disturbingly long section. And most of all, there are the horrible statistics, of more than 11,000 casualties and little ground gained in that one action. Of a day that was supposed to be decisive, but opened a horrific four-month battle that devastated both sides with little result.
Fortunately, there are also quiet gardens with benches for reflection. Because, about two-thirds of the way around, I needed to just sit down for a while and sob. Lochnagar manages to commemorate both the horrible waste of war and the nobility of love and sacrifice people can achieve when they're defending what they treasure. It is both wonderful and horrible. And, like Nuremberg, the world would probably be a better place if everyone spent some time here.
With Dunning's private purchase and its intimate, small memorials, Lochnagar is a place of extremely personal reflection. At neighbouring Thiepval, you can see how governments do official, public remembrance.
This is the memorial to the dead of the Somme who are not buried or commemorated elsewhere. Given that you seem to have driven by scores of graveyards on the way to this place, it's hard to imagine there'd be many left to worry about. Wrong. The white stone walls at the base of the memorial, towering well above your head, are dense with the names of 72,337 Brits and South Africans who never returned. The structure itself is magnificent: architect of empire Sir Edwin Lutyens piled monumental arches one on top of another to reach dizzying heights. You can see it for miles, including from Lochnagar. Normally, such arches get the word "triumphal" stuck in front of them, but that's not the mood here. There is nothing triumphant about a mass of names so dense and vast your eyes have difficulty focusing. It is noble and dignified, especially standing at the altar at the centre of the arches. But by massing the thousands of names into a communal sacrifice for the good of empire, it lacks the emotional sucker punch of Lochnagar.
It does, however, have an excellent little museum embedded into the hillside behind. It provides a helpful overview of the Battle of the Somme, thus putting the memorial in context. There's a free section which goes over the basics, but if you have time and don't mind spending a bit of cash, it's worth paying to go into the restricted entry section for some particularly useful graphics (the time-lapsed map of the moving front line is great), fascinating photos of the devastation, collections of soldiers' letters and memorabilia and a WW1 aircraft. Most visually striking is a modern interpretation of a trench, laid down the centre of a gallery that's covered with black-and-white cartoon illustrations of life on the front from the innocent merriment of soldiers on leave to the dismembered body parts and dead animals of trench warfare. Stand on the glass above the trench and look down at some of the artifacts they've excavated out of such places, including a German machine gun.
Thiepval, Lochnagar and the exquisite cemetery at Pozieres provided quite enough to think about for one day. It was time for a break from war. But we had one more stop to make on our return journey. Laventie Military Cemetery is typical of the scores of burial grounds that dot this landscape. Not much bigger than the plot beneath a large suburban house, established to house and honour the dead of just one three-day battle nearby, miles from any main road and surrounded by a tiny modern farming village whose residents have no personal connection to the men buried there, you'd think that such a place would be moldering and ignored. Not so, thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
This organisation cares for the graves and memorials of almost 1.7 million men and women killed in the two world wars, maintaining 23,000 locations in more than 150 countries and territories. Every spot we visited was pristine: carving still sharp on tombstones, marble spotless, grass mowed. And in front of all the graves, gardens full of classic British plants. Though I didn't spot one of the CWGC's 850 gardeners, I didn't see a weed or a tuft of grass that needed trimming. Flowers bloomed, perennials were carefully managed and bushes pruned. That's a very British kind of respect.
But by the 10th of March the following year, John's dead body was hanging half way through the barbed wire he'd been struggling to push through to reach the German lines. Every officer and many men of that battalion of the Garwhal Rifles died in that battle. Most of the bodies had been collected and dragged back to the field that became Laventie. John had been hurriedly buried where he fell, and his grave was later lost beneath further battles. He's commemorated on a stone at the back of Laventie, where 494 others are commemorated with him. Just another day in a horrific conflict that was to last three and a half more years.
Thanks to our little side trips in Northern France, this coming Remembrance Day will be so much more than words to me. When we say "we will remember them", them will have names and faces, places and stories. That, after all, is what remembrance really means.
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