Christmas 2022, Fri, 16 Dec 2022 | written by Simon
Jemma and Simon at a Graveyard, Museum in Europe, France

We parked for the night in Dinant in Belgium and walked into the town centre the next morning. It is super cute! It’s on the river Meuse, and the town on the east side is really thin as it’s sandwiched between the river and a rocky valley side. Pretty picturesque! We admired the views (even though it was really misty there this morning) and visited the church, which has an unusual pear shaped bell tower.

After our short visit to Dinant, we hit the road and headed to France. Our intention was to drive to Amiens, but whilst we were en route to a petrol station, we saw a sign for the Somme 1916 museum in a nearby town called Albert, and decided to change our plans. On our way to the museum we stopped at some war graves for a moment, as there are many dotted amongst the landscape here. It must be really strange and eerie to live somewhere where you are surrounded by constant reminders of so much death. The museum was really interesting and (of course) really depressing. At the beginning of the exhibit, there was a video talking about all the different war memorials in this region for the different divisions that fought here. So that’s where we are now, parked near Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, so we can visit this and other memorials tomorrow before continuing our journey to Amiens.

We also visited the church, Basilica of Our Lady of Brebières, at Albert. This is a neo-Byzantine church and quite beautiful. There is an interesting story about the statue on top of the church – during WWI, in 1915 German fire damaged the church and knocked the statue of the Virgin Mary statue sideways so it hung off the tower. A soldiers’ legend grew around this, that when the statue fell from the tower, the war would end. Although it actually didn’t fall and a new statue was recast when the church was reconstructed.

The next day was eventful. We decided to visit some of the war memorials and graveyards in the Somme region, starting with the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. This is a colossal monument and carved with with the names of 73,367 British and Commonwealth soldiers who fell during the Battle of the Somme who have no known grave, and beyond is a large cemetery. This, as well as the other sites, were deeply depressing places to visit. The experience was intensified by how incredibly cold, frosty and foggy it was today.

Next, we briefly stopped to look at Ulster tower, Northern Ireland’s National War Memorial. We briefly spoke to the guy who lives there, who was a British military expert. Then we went to the Newfoundland memorial park. This place is really amazing, as some of the battlefield has been preserved, including the trenches, shell holes and poles for barbed wire. You can see how close the Allies and German lines were. It has a monument of a Caribou for the Newfoundland Regiment who suffered appalling loses here on 1st July 1916. At the other end of the park is the monument for the 51st Highland Division.

We visited two craters, Hawthorn and Lochnagar, created by mines planted by the British and detonated on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Finally, we visited two Australian memorials: the one for the 1st Division at Pozières, where they held the village for four days of constant heavy artillery bombardment from the Germans, and the large national monument near Villers-Bretonneux. Needless to say, this was a very emotional morning.