Lens of history – Day 56

I was kind of killing time because I couldn’t check in until 1600. These check in times were getting silly, and later and later as I travelled north. 

That morning. Rush hour Paris. I had a very close call with a scooter driver. I had been checking all mirrors very carefully because the bikes were flowing through the cars at three times the speed. This guy was on my left passenger window. I indicated then moved right. In a split second he had braked and come up on my right. Gesticulating at me. I shook my fist at him…idiot. A very close shave for him.

There are the quick and the dead. And then there are the dead quick. Or at least a bloody long time in hospital.

Peripherique Fluide. Merci!

The the A1 north very tight but still moving fast. After Charles de Gaulle the traffic thinned out to a more relaxing level.

The Canadian memorial on the ‘Ridge’, north of Arras is one of the most affecting monuments to the tragedy of war.  Check Day 1 of this blog. It has the right balance of elegant beauty, hauteur and impenetrable sadness that makes it impossible not to be emotionally involved. 

Typically big limbed – and breasted – grieving mothers – or angels – in the revolutionary style adorn it.

It was blowy and cold. Just a trace of rain in the air slapping my face sideways. I took the long way round. 

‘You’ve not brought very good weather with you!’ 

I hadn’t heard the monument guardian behind me because of the wind and he startled me. He’d addressed me in English which I suppose was a safe bet.

‘No, I left it behind in Paris. Sorry about that.’

I told him that I’d had dinner on the street yesterday and he said that that the weather was always extreme here. 

The easterly blowing towards us was compresed by the slow slope of the ridge it was similar to a tsunami effect and certainly kept the flies off. 

We bantered a bit and then a young couple with two girls  came up looking for their great great grandfather’s name. The guide gave the girls Canadian flags to wave and they ran around the monument with the innocence of their youth. 

I detoured back to the 14-18 Museum. This was a relatively new black box of a WWI experience centre and quite well done.

There were a few really telling graphics.  Especially one showing troop losses for French, English and American troops versus those of the Germans. Huge spikes for our offences against steady but far lower  numbers for the German defenders. We were out in the open while they were dug in waiting for us.

They were still digging up bones and ordnance here 100 years later.

There was a lovely tribute to Wilfred Owen and his poem Dulce et Decorum Est written out in full. It should be taught to every schoolboy the world over.

He’d died right at the end of the war, a week before the armistice.

Outside there were cemeteries everywhere. And trenches and craters, now covered with pines, furred over with grass cropped short by sheep.

I looked out across the salient. Was this the only way this campaign could have been fought?

On the skyline several, gigantic pyramids. Google told me these were coal mine tailings. Basically slag heaps that had now received UNESCO listing. What?

After the war the towns were devastated. It took until the end of the 20s to get any semblance of reality back. This massive basin of coal needed men to mine it and Polish immigrants were brought in by the hundred thousands to do so.

I dropped back to Arras. Cemetery after cemetery. Some with the comic bravado of names such as Cabaret Rouge.

Along the way big combines were harvesting the sugar beet. It was piled up in pointed barrows kilometres long. The colour and resemblance of human skulls. 

Arras. You could see the Flemish influence.  Two major squares with mansions and bell gables all around. Not to my liking but impressive all the same. 

They were tooling up for a film festival at the end of the week. So I parked underground and made for my room. 

That night. Drunks shouting in the square below echoing against the old merchant buildings.  But then some lumpy rain made them clear off to their beds. I’d actually been woken by the banner advertising the film festival flapping in the wind outside my window. I went out onto the balcony to secure it onto the railing. It was a wild night and I stood there for quite a while in the lee of the building watching the festival’s marquee luffing up like Cutty Sark making a tack.

After a while I couldn’t feel my feet so I put on the cashmere socks that Spaniard had given me and got back under the duvet.