But I have already Obscure Music Referenced Mark Lanegan sometime previously in history... Still, keep thinking of that line every time I see one of the million crows that lurk around these parts.
So I sort of managed to fix the previous mess, it would seem the longer the posts get the more unstable they become so may have to post multiple shorter ones. I am now losing track of days myself so to clarify, it is now Monday night in U-rope and I am only up to Thursday in terms of updates... So let's run through that real quick...
Thursday was the last day of the tour proper, given days 1 and 5 were travel, so Thursday was day 4 of the tour but only the third day of actually seeing stuff. We stopped again in the town of Albert for lunch and the French again tried to kill me with something they call an Americain... Something or other. It's apparently a local specialty and involves a baguette with "meat" of some sort like hamburger or frankfurter with Sauce and then covered in about a kilo of fries. They are obsessed with fries over here, and given I am not a huge fan to begin with, I am now somewhat over it.
Albert is nice enough, albeit with a distinct feel of small town decay and more than a hint of gyppo. I was warned the French of the north are their own breed. They do have a nice church, 90% destroyed during WW1 of course, but now rebuilt. Standing atop is a giant shining gold statue of The Virgin which is visible for miles across the gently rolling countryside, and famously a priest or some such knower-of-things predicted that if the Virgin fell whoever was holding Albert at the time would lose the war. Unfortunately for the British they were occupying Albert at the time and the Germans gave the church a good pasting with artillery until the Virgin was tilted and only barely hanging on... There is a famous photo. Conscious of local morale the British engineers scaled the precariously unstable tower and chained the Virgin by her feet to the structure. Albert was later retaken by the Germans, and, somewhat coincidentally I am sure, the Virgin fell to an Allied barrage.
Albert Cathedral by the end of the war
The cathedral restored
I am going to fight the urge to edit anything I have already written at the moment as that is when things go haywire, bear with me if it doesn't read that well.
So the last day of the tour proper covered some interesting stuff, notably Delville Wood (otherwise known as Devil's Wood, given the Allies gave nicknames to everything) where the South Africans got a good pasting, High Wood (which I previously named as the place some Newfoundlanders had a rough time, apologies that was incorrect, that was somewhere else and have fixed that) and the area around Flers and Longeuval, which is very significant to New Zealand and is the location of the NZ national monument.
NZ Auckland soldiers at Flers 1916
Flers village from vicinity of NZ Memorial, typical countryside
NZ Memorial, Devil's Wood in background
Devil's Wood 1916
High Wood was interesting as the site of more particularly bloody fighting, sitting on a high point from where the Germans could cover the battlefield with intense machine gun fire, and still looking unusually dark and foreboding even today. Even Gary the Guide, who travels all over Europe and further afield doing tours and looking at war history from all eras, said that High Wood always felt to him somehow uncanny. In fact the word he used was "evil". The story goes that two officers on a recon trip after an Allied assault found High Wood empty and free for the taking, but due to the delays in communication in those days it took two days for the advance into it to be ordered, and when the Allies went in the Germans had sent back in troops to hold it, resulting in something like 8000 deaths on both sides from what could have been a bloodless conquest if things had moved faster. High Wood was also, heroically and tragically, the site of the only cavalry charge on the Somme.
The day and the tour ended on a touching and in some ways very high note when the crew diverted the coach to a little out of the way cemetary that even Gary had never been to, to find someone for the lovely Welsh couple. They had bought some flowers in Albert but didn't tell anyone why as they weren't sure if we would be able to go or not. They had initially intended to jump off the coach and have a quiet personal moment, but Taff later said that they felt they had bonded so well with everyone that they invited anyone who wanted to be there to come along. The whole coach emptied out. We all stood back quietly and watched as they placed their flowers on the grave of Mrs Taff's grandmother's brother, the first family members who had ever been to find him. He was, remarkably, the winner of a DCM, two Military Medals and The Albert Medal, all high level gallantry medals which are significant to have just one of. Gary read aloud the citation for his Albert Medal.. On 1st March 1917 during trench fighting a fellow soldier mis-threw a grenade which bounced off a beam and landed back in the trench. Sgt. Michael Healy jumped in to grab the grenade and attempt to save the men around him. The grenade went off in his hands and he was mortally wounded. All that and three more gallantry medals before. He was 25. Historians now contend he doubtless should have been awarded a VC.
Taff said they had always worried about him being out there all alone and forgotten, but seeing all the graves all around him, knew now that he was in fact surrounded by his friends. Certainly now nobody on that coach full of people will forget him.
As mentioned the day ended in a bit of a blowout and tension-release in the weird lobby bar of our in-luxurious but adequate motorwayside hotel, with some good laughs and yarns till we were closed down around 2am. And with that, Mr iPad is clearly starting to struggle so I will cut this one off before it all goes wrong. Cheers all.
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