Just back.
Done !
Just come back from my first visit to the Somme. All I can say is wow.
We only had 3 days or so to explore, in expert hands, but the things we saw, and heard were So moving. From the ever present Iron Harvest from the fields, to the mass graves, and the memorial to those still missing. We stood out in a preserved section of the trenches, close to the Newfoundland memorial, it was bitterly cold, with an icy blast cutting straight through. We tried oh so hard to imagine what it must have been like to stand there in all of the carnage, for weeks at a time. Intersting snippets supplied by our host included the fact that a lot of the casualties lay in the fields from June to November, before their remains were recovered, imagine that, and that 80% of the German casualties were never recovered, so a lot of the artefacts (of the human type) are now German. Over a 3 day period 1,750,000 rounds were fired. He talks now about finding boots by the edge of the fields where the farmers put them, and toes (or at least toe bones) tumbling out. It was such an eye opener to see just how many people died, and terribly moving.
The ploughs have cleared most of the debris from the top 9 inches or so of the fields, but dig any deeper and you are still into the carpet of human, horse and military material on a huge scale. When Copper prices rose a couple of years ago, the fields were full of families collecting the shell cases to be melted down.
The lasting memory is just the scale of the destruction, I had absolutyely no idea until this week, highly reccomended, and I'll be back for a more detailed look, when it gets a bit warmer.