By then it was Friday

I woke to another breakfast of ham, cheese and croissants and bid farewell to the coach load of nice British folk as they headed off back to Blighty via the obligatory stop at the cheap French booze outlet. From there, I was out on my own... As I said to my lovely better half, now picture the episode of Family Guy with the montage of them capering around Paris as Muppets.

We had had a bit of a crisis the night before when I realised the Internet had lied to me yet again and there was no train from the local station to the next big town.. The station was in fact only for the high speed TGV which had entertained me during the week as I watched out my window as it rocketed towards the hotel and then disappeared underground at a great rate of knots. Crisis was averted when I made a new plan and got a taxi to pick me up, and take me to the train station, where I caught a local bus driven by a Frenchman who looked like he had probably spent the 80's as lead singer in a French New Wave synth pop Alice Cooper tribute band. It was also on this bus that aforementioned Frenchman's ferret gave me the evils. 

This habit of the French to flounce around the country with various livestock in tow caught me somewhat off guard, I had kind of got used to their idea of taking dogs to restaurants, but then there was the ferret, in his little wooden travel box, and later in the day there were several people at the train station with cats, some in travel boxes but some just hanging out wandering around, or on leashes. I am not sure why the French maintain this insistence on making everything they do ridiculously and needlessly, and often classlessly, overly flamboyant. They are annoying enough as it is without constantly looking for ways to emphasise it by throwing in an added extra dash of twattery.

Anyway. I just went to listen to something on YouTube and forgot what it was. Hate that. So I put Father John Misty on instead. Not a major fan yet of what I have heard of his new album but listen to the previous two... Although have to say his live cover of NIN was awful, and I am on the fence re what he did with 'Heart Shaped Box'. Some things should never be sung by anyone else. But then again there are some covers better than the original. There is a cover of 'Mad World' going around on the radio over here with some bird singing it, but nobody should ever be allowed to sing that song again, there is nothing anyone can ever do with it that is better than the Gary Jules cover version.

But I digress. New Romantics Goth bus driver pilotd me and ferret to Amien efficiently, and I had 20 minutes or so to look around... Nice looking town, nice centre, nice cathedral, as most of them tend to have. I decided to forgo a decent lunch to walk over and take a photo of it... These are the questionable choices I make in travel mode.

I grabbed a dried out sandwich from the shop at the train station... Ham and cheese... (hey, I have eaten many dodgy things but even I am not dumb enough to opt for the 'Seafood salad' sandwich option in a train station kiosk). Then it was on the train and motoring southward, hoping to arrive in Rouen a couple of hours later. It was good to be on a train and covering countryside again. Like everywhere I had seen so far the countryside was rolling and rural and pleasant, if unremarkable. I did have the familiar moment of concern when the train slowed to a crawl on the outskirts of the big town and I wondered if it terminated at some other isolated station that I wasn't aware of, leaving me stranded miles from the centre... But we got there in the end. 

Making my way upstairs I walked outside for a few minutes and took in the sunshine and traffic and French people with cats (I am not making this up) arriving to catch trains. I paid money to use a toilet after a homeless man. Ah yes, France. Then I went back into the station to find the rental car place. Which for some reason had a queue of people outside it, although I didn't realise they were a queue at the time, I thought they were a random assortment of people waiting around in a train station, so I wandered over and tried the door. It was locked. A French lady in the queue made some resigned, apathetic comment. Of course, this is Europe.. the rental car place was closed for an hour and a half for lunch. Honestly, nothing is ever open for more than about three hours a day, no wonder the place is going down the toilet. Luckily I had arrived shortly before re-opening, as I would have been well hacked off if I made a point of arriving early to find it shut. 

Through her ok-ish English and my really very poor French the lady and I managed to negotiate our way through the car hiring process which ended with me getting an 'upgrade'.. (Ok I got upsold, but at a very reasonable rate!! Honest!!)... Which I thought was a good deal until I discovered I had ended up with a Toyota hybrid called an Aurus or some such ridiculous thing... But it was pretty much brand new and would do the job, and the thought of thrashing the life out of a hybrid was sort of appealing given anything in my price range was going to be anemic and gutless anyway.

I climbed into the wrong side of the Aurass (where the steering wheel is in France) grateful for having spent a lot of time driving left-hookers elsewhere, and cut it lose on the streets of Rouen... Which were for some reason fairly packed. I have no idea why there are so many people on the road when clearly nobody is ever at work.. I suspect they all drive round all day claiming traffic has made them several hours late and then arrive at work and leave to drive home again. My attempts to get where I needed to go were turned into something of a farce by a lack of any street name signage in any language, which turned my usual 'do a quick circuit of town to see the sights' into a series of circuits, until I eventually came to the conclusion that the place I was going was not in fact even in the area of the same name that the few rare signs I followed were pointing to, and the single sheet map the rental car lady gave me was not cutting the mustard. Once again I decided to ignore the French and just branch out in the direction I remembered it being in on the map at home, which worked remarkably well, and before long I was there. Well, almost. I arrived at the rear and then had to navigate another maze of narrow French streets to find the actual entrance.

EVENTUALLY I arrived at the gates of St Sever Cemetary, grateful to see it was in fact still open, for this was the entire reason I came to Rouen at all, and a major part of the reason for the trip. If it had been closed I would have had to stay the night. I wandered through the impressive entrance up the leafy lane dividing the huge French civilian cemetary filled with graves and tombs from through the ages, and to the huge Alled WW1 cemetary. I had seen a lot of cemetaries by this stage. But this one was large. The impact of seeing that many rowed white headstones stretching off into the distance never really gets any less.

Some of St Sever. Note wall in far distance gives some idea of scale.

The grounds were, as always, beautifully and immaculately kept by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Trees heavy with white and pink blossom shaded some of the graves. Spring flowers gave little bursts of colour. Large and impressively stoneworks paid tribute. In the far corner the familiar Cross of Sacrifice, bearing on it a large bronze sword, stood high overlooking the graves. Beyond the far rear wall the distant sounds of unseen children laughing and yelling on a massive football training field added a strangely poignant counterpoint to the silent stillness of the thousands of young men around me. 

Given the size of the place it took some looking to find the right area, and the right row in that area, but after walking among the 11,400 or so others, I found the headstone that bore the familiar name I had been seeking. I found Percy. Percy my great grandfathers cousin, who lived in the same house where they grew up together. In a tiny place, not far from where I was born. Percy who, with his brother and my great grandfather, and other family, and many others, set out together to do their bit and fight in this great new war. Percy who fell with my great grandfather, on the same day, in the same place, wounded, adding their blood to that of so many others who fell and bled on the fields of the Somme. Percy who didn't make it home, while my great grandfather so fortunately did. Percy who stayed there in France. Surrounded, as Taff said, by his mates. 

The Spring sun in the late afternoon was warm, the sky was a rich blue. A soft breeze scattered a few wayward blossoms. Somewhere far away children laughed. I sat down on the lush green grass next to Percy. We stayed there, quiet, for a long time.

Love is a medicine good...

... Is a crow flying eight miles high over wire and wood...

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

Unlike many of the others which are on main roads, the NZ memorial is very nicely located in an isolated and peaceful but prominent spot in the middle of a huge field, on the line the Kiwis attacked across in their 1916 blooding-in at the Somme. Interestingly they fought alongside tanks in the first massed tank attack in history.

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.

Kicking dirt...You may note...

That the last ramble ended suddenly, apparently the ghost of Steve Jobs had had enough. I also note that it is posting on some other time and date than the one here. Go figure. Anyway bear with me this may take a few posts. And yes, I promise pictures, good ones, once I move to some better hardware. Anyway...

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 still reap what quickly became known as the 'Iron Harvest', with hundreds of tons of shrapnel, unexploded shells, ammunition, weapons, wreckage and various other scrap being dragged up out of the fields every time they prepare to sow crops. Given there were at times literally millions of rounds of artillery being fired a week, let along rifle bullets, this is hardly surprising. The result is that even today one hundred years later, bits and pieces can still be found. On the first day the bus stopped several times so we could look at random large rusty artillery projectiles left on the side of the road by farmers for the authorities to pick up. 

Piles of fired artillery shells, Flers 1916

At first none of us were too sure of the protocols, but once Gary, who now lives in France and apparently has quite a phenomenal collecting of artefacts himself, started poking around in the dirt of fields adjacent to the sites we were visiting, all bets were off. It started off with one or two of us, the ladies with husbands rolling their eyes at we single guys off "kicking around in the dirt".. By the end their husbands were with us as well and there were about twelve guys taking every opportunity to poke at things with sticks in the freshly dug up (but not sown... Don't go tramping on a rowed or sown field unless you want shot). 

But what, you ask, do you realistically find after 100 years of weather and tractors running back and forth and farmers throwing stuff away? Well, not as much as they used to obviously, but to put it into perspective, a cafe in one of the villages has a wall made from 12,000 stacked unexploded artillery projectiles (defused and safe of course).

Part of a small collection at the Ulster Division Memorial cafe

So we started poking in the dirt. I was initially sceptical myself but sure enough we soon started pulling from the dirt chunks of rusty metal, one after another. Then someone found a fired rifle cartridge. Then someone found an intact buckle, with a piece of leather strap still attached with rivets. The shrapnel in some places was sobering. A century later some fields were still so peppered that you could pick up one or two chunks of steel the size of your thumb every step or two. And that was just what was on the surface. 

We soon figured out that the prize is not in the hundreds of millions of bits of unidentifiable shell fragment, but in things you can actually attribute to an object, or a unit, or a country. As Gary confirmed, the greatest treasures are things like cap badges etc, something tangibly associated. Or things, like rusted bayonets or rifle remnants. But those sorts of things are rare, and highly sought after by cynical field scavengers who sell them on EBay and the like. In many places I imagine the fields have been well picked clean, but every so often a huge tractor towing a plough still turns up something new, and that's what we were looking for. Just a little piece of history we could say we discovered. 

A couple of the guys did well. Dave found a corroded German ammunition clip with three cartridges still attached. I found an unfired .303 round which I was quite happy with but which Gary immediately confiscated... They don't allow anything undischarged on the coach since an incident with a guy who found an unexploded grenade and caused a standoff with staff and several of the passengers when he insisted he was going to take it home. Gary proved his point by breaking the bullet out and igniting the 100 year old cordite propellant with a lighter. Fair call though, may have upset the airline people later. One of the guys topped the charts with the brass nose cone off an artillery round which will polish up to good as new and make a brilliant paper weight. 

That is, of course, until yesterday. And yes, I am jumping ahead of the timeline here, but we will digress later. This is the way my brain works. Out on my own yesterday I returned to the ridge of Pozieres, site of a particularly famous Australian battle, to take a couple of photos I couldn't get when the tour went there, and , of course, to poke in the fields  a bit more. I had a good look round in some places we didn't go previously with no luck, and walked empty handed  back toward the car across ground about ten of us had kicked around before... Ground which is literally only metres  from the Australian national memorial where hundreds of coach loads of people must go every year. 

Just as  I admitted defeat to myself I noticed about three inches of rusty steel rod sticking out of the pale churned up soil.  I almost kept walking, thinking it was just another bit of unidentifiable scrap, but something in my mind clicked and I looked back. There was something identifiable on the end of that finger of steel. It was a foresight. I looked at it for a minute in some disbelief. But it was. I realised I had found the end of a rifle barrel. Unbelievable. I reached down to snatch it out of the dirt but it didn't break free. I tried again with a bit more effort, still expecting it to spring free and turn out to be a piece of old hay rake or something, but suddenly,  out of the earth,  I dragged an entire rifle... Certainly one  with the wood stock rotted off and the barrel bent, but a whole rifle nonetheless, still with bolt rusted in place. A German Mauser.

I pondered this for a bit, given I was standing next to a major historical battlefield feature, being the German fortification called Gibraltar,  which much blood was shed to eventually conquer. It was one of more than a couple of moments for quiet reflection on this little trip I have to say. 

Jimminey Christmas

I wasn't finished with that and it went haywire again. Attempted to fix it, can't. It's late, going to call it there for now. Apologies. It you haven't read the last one perhaps wait until I have somehow repaired the thing. It seems there are a fair few people reading though so cheers for bearing with. Take care out there.

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