I never thought I would find myself thinking...

... "I am so sick of ham, cheese, and bread..."

But then again I never thought I would find myself thinking "On the train a Frenchman's ferret was eyeing me suspiciously"

I guess France will do that to you

So, a lot of catching up to do my good people, as you may have deduced I have been off the grid somewhat for a few days, apologies also to anyone who tried to email, that has failed due to confusion over what country I am in... I still have my phone if anyone needs me, seems to work. Except for my data, which has also failed to make the transition to Europe. Ah technologies...

Contented this evening in a hotel room in Belgium would you believe. My stars the things that go on these days. I have a bottle of red wine and just demolished a pizza because that was the best I could do for food apparently, short of going Full Belgian and going for fruity beer and chips with mayo. But that's ok, the place doesn't seem too bad. Apart from many reasons I will probably get to in a "What really grinds my gears" rant at some stage. I knew my body had gone into travel mode when I pondered trying to find food when everything was closed and almost flagged it, and then realised that  in the last three days I have only eaten a continental breakfast, a baguette, a gas station sandwich and a tube of Pringles. I had to, they were a weird French cheese flavour. I am being culturally diverse. But fear not, I am fed and now C.W. Stoneking is on my headphones and the party is right here... Give him a listen and once you are done read his story, which is actually pretty remarkable.

So anyways... Quite a lot to recap. I think it would probably be wise to break  it down into days... Or  would it... Hmm... Ok, so when we last left my adventures, on to day 3 of the tour...

The tour was I guess you would say punctuated by quite a lot of emotions. Granted not something I do a lot of, but it was interesting to see people from all walks of life together because of a common interest. While I worried that the wrong guide on a tour could make it a misery, or that getting a group of people together like that could potentially be utterly painful, I was, I would have to say pretty lucky. There was perhaps one Nigel No Mates "war tour enthusiast" who was something of of a twonker, there was one dad with his uber annoying 11 year old, but the dad himself was a good guy (ex RAF also, no surprise there!)... But most everyone had a connection to the war via relatives or had served or had an interest in that part of history, and that common thread made it really interesting, and created a weird common bond among people who would never otherwise associate.

One of the guys, who we shall call Dave, a four foot wide, shaved headed, chain-on-wallet and  stomping boot wearing, Ross-Kemp-But-Actually-Scary looking guy of about 50 who spent the first three days blending quietly into the background eventually figured that I was also one of the few non-RAF types around. After sizing me up with a few questions we started chatting and he told me a bit about his Army history. Which was pretty serious business in itself, but which unfortunately finished badly when it turned out that due to Army clerical errors he ended up paying off a huge tax bill and he left the career he loved with a huge burden to carry and no answers. Later in conversation with some of the others he revealed that as well as driving milk tankers, he was also now involved in Help for Heros and as a case officer for returned soldiers with mental health problems. By the last night, which was a bit of a blowout after a fairly heavy week, he told a few of us how the shared emotions of the trip had helped him come out of his shell, as he was usually fairly quiet, and found it hard in groups, as a mortar attack in Afghanistan had left him almost totally deaf with tinnitus that he could only sometimes control. Finally when one of the older ladies was talking about the sadness of men of WW1 with shell shock, Dave quietly reassured her by explaining his experience coping with diagnosed PTSD. Stuff like that just floors me.

One of the less serious side affects of this journey has been that a good number of us have ended up with what Gary the Guide calls 'Shell Fever'.. every spring  the farmers of France reap what quickly became knows the 'Iron Harvest', when they

Also

apologies for all the typos and formatting issues, I know they are there, things are not running very well on this here old Apple product and I can't go back to fix things, or even scroll back over what I have already written. You get the gist.

I keep meaning to...

... Have an early evening and come back and write something properly, but to be honest it's far more interesting to stay in the bar. Granted the people on the trip are generally older and that makes some things painful as you would expect, like trying to get everyone off and back on the bus many times a day. But as I learned very early on as a young fella, age may not make people more exciting, but it makes them damn interesting.

By some random coincidence there are at least seven RAF guys on the tour. Obviously not Spitfire flying aces of old, but in fact all guys who crewed and maintained jets in the Cold War era. Now I love all things with an engine attached, it's no secret, and I have full respect for the pilots who take the reigns and ride these beasts of machines. But as any good pilot will admit, they only really borrow their planes from the men who build and rebuild and service and maintain them. And those boys get none of the glory. There is no movie made about the man who spends his career repairing the bits that go on the plane that the pilot relies on to both get the job done and keep him alive.

We are all here because we are honouring the men who came to this place to do what they did and all the things that happened. But several of the guys I have been drinking with in the bar have their own phenomenal stories which probably nobody will ever travel a mile to pay their respects for. We were talking about officers, both the good and the bad ones, and one of the RAF boys, now in his sixties, told a story about an exercise he did back in the Cold War era when he had to down tools and go get a rifle and prepare to defend their base. Afterwards a Squadron Leader happened to talk to him and asked how he thought the tactical exercise went. He told him "Well, honestly sir, I don't give a sh!t". The officer was taken aback, and said "Well how can you say that, you must care how the unit does, and how we are graded?"... He said "Sir, holding a rifle and guarding the base is not my job, and nobody cares how good I am at it"... The officer kept on - "But you must understand the bigger picture, obviously if you are called on to do something like that it is for good reason..."... And this chap turned to him and said "Sir, I am not good with a rifle. I service and load nuclear ordnance on to long range bombers. If I find myself standing at the gates with a gun, that means we have loaded our gear onto the planes, and they have departed. If the bombers have departed in anger, the pilots of those bombers know that after they have completed their mission, they will not have a base to return to. I know that once our bombers leave they will not come back, and if I am sent outside with a rifle to stand at the gate, my only job is to wait for a bright white flash, and then I don't have to worry about guarding the base, or anything else, ever again."

Funny how some people have a way of putting things in perspective.

The old lady who sits next to me on the coach is called Winifred. When we talked about why we were on the trip she said to retrace the journey of her father. Bear in mind this is WW1... I am here
for my great grandfather, Winifred was a late baby. She is everyone's picture of a lovely old lady. She is a bit dottery, a bit slow, she is quiet. I help her up and down the stairs. She lags behind, she makes her own way, but she doesn't complain. She didn't want to remind the guide about going to where her fathers unit fought because she didn't what to be a bother. Even though that's the entire reason she came one the trip. She showed me photos and cuttings of her father and told me what he had told her.

Today we went to where Winifred's dad and his chums were on Somme. Gary, the guide, bless him, told the story of the spot and then came and took her aside, and led her out into the field away from the group, and told her all about what had happened. Her brought her back and asked if she wanted to tell everyone, and she told us of how her father, at eighteen years of age, had stood some where near there and prepared to go into the war. From where they were, a massive tunnelled explosive charge went off adjacent, and her father was partially blinded. When they prepared to advance, to go as they famously say "over the top", her father's commander came down and told him he was obviously excused from the charge, but still half blind he took his rifle and said he had to go with his friends, and together over they went. Today we also saw the graves of the boys he went over with. We got back on the bus and sat down, and as we drove away Winifred quietly looked out the window, as she tends to do. After about ten minutes she turned and said "I'm sorry,  I will pull myself together in a minute.." And I realised she had been quietly sat beside me weeping.

There is a Welsh couple on the trip, Taff and Mrs Taff (obviously),  he ex RAF like, apparently, most people... The kind of couple you would love to be in your 60's, always laughing, mostly at each other, always making the rest of us laugh, never a bad word about anything, but Taff the kind of grizzled career  Senior NCO you know would not take any stick from any man. We visited a cemetery today (there are literally cemeteries everywhere  here, on every road there is another battle site and another cemetery for another unit)... We were hearing the story of an English unit, the Devons, as we stood amongst their headstones and Taff turned to me aside and said "Ey this boy is Welsh, there's an inscription on 'is 'edstone  .." I said "What does that say then?".. He said "Well let's look.. It says 'Daniel my...' " and his voice just suddenly cracked and he turned away and looked at the ground and took a sharp breath.. And he apologised and took a moment,  and turned back, and read  "Daniel... my precious boy... sleep now in peace, for you will rise again"

That is the kind of place it is though. There can not be anywhere else in the world where the very air seems to hang so heavy around you with a sense of what has gone on here before.

Anyway, enough of this for now. I promise soon there will be more photos for those who struggle with long sequences of words, and I will obviously in due course regale you with stories of the French and all the ways they are stupid, apart from obviously just losing wars.

A long day today on the battlefields...

Given my brain decided I should only have four hours sleep... Not usually a major issue given my normal patterns but coupled with about 40 hours travel in the last 50 to get here, feeling a tad jaded. You may have to wait a bit for anything in the way of photos for when I have time to try to couple the various technologies involved.

Today was on the tour bus and into it proper. The guide, Gary, he of impressive mo/burns (what did they used to call it, when the mo was attached to the sideburns? Stirrup sideburns?) is an encyclopaedia of knowledge on everything re war, in any era. As the bus ran over the rolling French countryside he literally just stood up the front, all day, with a story or three about every hillside, gully, creek, village and patch of trees. I will sit down at some point and try to explain where we went and what we saw, but even in one day it was so many dozens of things that it is hard to take it all in. 

Being here does make it all very real though, in any book or doco or website it is just photos or maps or a few camera shots. Famous names of famous battle which you know, but which make no real sense as an actual place. Today at Beaumont Hamel, one of the few preserved sites, I stood in a British trench, surrounded by craters as deep as a man, made by the incoming artillery, and looked down from the ridge to the German lines.

From there I walked down the hill and stood where the Germans stood, looking back up, on the spot where the German gunners were firing on the advancing Allied troops. You can picture a machine gun sitting mounted in front of you, and looking through the sights at the figures of men appearing against the skyline out of the trenches above.

The story of that ridge is one of the great tragedies amongst many of the Somme, as it was where fresh and keen Canadian boys, all from the same area in Newfoundland and new to the war, massed keen and eager, ready to advance in the big offensive. On that day someone, unknown to history, mistook a white German signal flare for an Allied flare meant to indicate that the British assault had been successful and they should advance in support. The  German flare in fact was calling in an artillery barrage on their position, just as they all leapt forward out of their trenches. 

That story is only one of many though, the scheduled timeframe for many of the attacks on that day had the Allies taking certain positions within hours or at most a few days. Which seemed realistic, because being here you realise many of these famous battles are literally within sight of each other, from one gently rolling hill to the next. But in reality some of these battles started on 1 July and meant to be won by 4 July were not finished one way or the other until six or more months later. 

The other sobering thing as you drive through all these quaint French villages and look at all the old brick buildings is you think, as you would in the UK or elsewhere 'hey, this place looks interesting, must be  some ancient stuff here...' But in reality nothing here is older than 1918, because anything older than 100 years was wiped off the map. Every house, barn, church, shed, factory, and in many places even every tree, was gone by the end of the Great War. 

I promise more interesting stuff sometime soon, for now it is 1am and apparently, suddenly, it is time for sleep. Stay tuned gentle viewers 

Somehow still seems odd...

Being in France... Don't ask me why, I guess I always knew I would get here sometime, and yet it's not somewhere I ever really pictured being.

Obviously I recently crossed the great oceans and that trip was long, so very long, and painful, but then I think about why I am here and those who came before me and I remind myself just to shut up and not even think about complaining about my first-world 21st century whinges of airline food and rubbish seats that don't fit me. Or all of my technology issues and the fact my email doesn't know who I am and won't talk to me because I am not in the right part of the world.

To get here I have done planes and buses and a short ride on a big boat. To get here my forefathers had to take a long, long boat ride. Or two. And some trains. And also stopped off for a time at Gallipoli.

So I am on my tour, and tours are not something I have done before, or wanted to do, or expected to enjoy, and for the predictable reasons I am still not sold on them... but for the time I have and for the sake of learning as much as I can in that time, I decided to bite the bullet and spend half my time here on a tour bus. So far it has been ok, the folk on the bus are nice and the guide knows a great deal. I spent some enjoyable time over a beer with some of the group this evening listening to three of them share tales of their time in the RAF in the 70s and 80s. It should set me up well for future trips.

I would regale you with stories of the day, the queues for the ferry, and of the disdain of the French waitress when she learned I did not speak Froggish, but right now the clock says it is 1am and my body and brain really have no idea what the time is... Tomorrow is the first day proper of another very real pilgrimage for me and I go into it with fascination but also with a heavy heart. While the history is intriguing the reality of it is almost too much to take in. Standing on the railing of a ferry in Dover today and watching the White Cliffs recede into fog was something of a moment, thinking about the ones who have sailed away from 'Mother England' toward France over those same waters.

Note fun dirt spot on my camera sensor I only noticed later.

It is bizarre to think that even before we head out tomorrow to look at memorials and battle sites and monuments, this very hotel I am sitting in, in a motorway service centre next to a gas station and some sketchy chain cafes, is probably built on a spot where men fought and died... For this is a place where every square metre of the gently rolling landscape is probably one of those places.

Best I get some sleep I think. I assume by the time I wake up the French government will have drafted some kind of surrender letter and had it delivered to my room. My first order will be that they should learn to make beer. Addyoo!!