Today we finally get to sleep in Discorama, our perhaps inaptly named motorhome! Don’t get me wrong, it’s been a blast spending the last week chilling out in a French farmhouse with another family, but we set out to have an adventure in the van, and it feels like it’s finally about to start!
Basically we’re gonna head north. The idea is to see a bit of Scandinavia while it’s still summer, because my wife is not a great fan of chillier climes. We have a rough idea of where we wanna be and when, as per our location page, but really we’re sort of winging it. What we do know is that we need to be in Billund in Denmark by August 24th, as that’s Hunters birthday and we have tickets booked for legoland (thanks Nigel x). So our route is going to take us straight through northern France on our way up to Holland.
An ideal place for us to stop over seemed to be in the Somme region of France, so we found a great little campsite called Camping du Château & de l’Oseraie in Feuilleres. This location gave me the perfect opportunity to subject my family to one or two more WW2 sites of interest on the way through, the first of which being the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval.
The French department of Somme, named after the Somme river, was the scene of many bloody battles fought over several years in the First World War. The infamous Battle of the Somme that we all know about was fought over the period between 1st of July and 18th November 1916, and was famously the most catastrophic in terms of loss of human life, resulting in a million troops either wounded or killed. This was followed by numerous further campaigns over the following months and years, but these first few months saw the worst of the fighting. The very first day of the battle saw the British army suffer its worst ever loss with 19,240 men killed in one day.
These numbers are so horrendous that it’s really hard to grip the reality of what actually occurred here. This monument highlights one of the more heartbreaking parts of this historical atrocity – the fact that so many of these young men that lost their lives here were never given a burial because their bodies were never recovered or never identified. Specifically 72,337 British and South African men whose families never had the closure of knowing their final resting places. The names of every single one of these men adorn the walls of this monument, chiselled in stone so that we might never forget their sacrifice.
Despite the fact that this memorial was built to commemorate the British soldiers lost to the Somme, there is also an Anglo-French graveyard at the foot of the memorial in recognition of the collaborative nature of the battle. 300 French and 300 British men lie here. The graves are mostly unmarked (simply “inconnu” or “a soldier of the Great War”) and consist of bodies subsequently recovered from the battlefields during the years it took to build the memorial, then reburied here.
After wandering through the grounds of this incredibly poignant monument for a while, we were ready to retreat to our campsite for an evening swim and a movie before bed time before continuing our journey the next day.
Our next few days are going to be spent in the Netherlands, but before the long drive across Belgium and up to Amsterdam, we decided to go and check out the WW2 memorial at Vimy.
The topology of Vimy ridge provides a perfect natural vantage point with views for tens of kilometres in all directions and was consequently very desirable from a strategic point of view, but it had unfortunately fallen under German control very early in the war. The allies had tried and failed to capture this stronghold several times already when, on April 9th 1917, it fell to the four divisions of the Canadian Corps to launch their offensive in what became known as the Battle of Vimy Ridge. The intense battle was meticulously planned and employed ground breaking tactics which, after 4 days of bloody fighting, saw the ridge finally fall under allied control on April 12th.
The site here today is comprised of 250 acres of former battlefield, scarred with craters which are, for the most part, cordoned off with electric fences as they are still littered with unexploded munitions and underground tunnels. This incredible terrain has largely been planted with maple trees as a fitting nod to those brave Canadian troops. There are also several large preserved sections of allied and German trenches on either side of the cratered no-man’s-land, and guided tours of the underground tunnels are still available as well.
Wandering these trenches is a truly bizarre experience. The proximity of the opposing sides is truly incredible, and apparently on a quiet still night they could even hear each other across the 40 metres of dirt.
The monument here is also pretty breathtaking. Perched atop Hill 145, the highest point on the ridge and comprising two 30 foot solid stone pylons adorned with 20 human figures. The monument is carved with the names of the 11,285 Canadian men who were killed during the Great War and whose final resting places are unknown. Another sobering visualisation of the absolute horror of the war fought in these fields all those years ago.
So that concluded our stay in Northern France, and we were now left with the 4 hour drive straight across Belgium and up towards Amsterdam and our next home for 3 nights – the De Sport Camping campsite.