Those who have read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulkes will have learned of miners being used in WWI. I certainly knew nothing of this activity until I read that book. The miners’ job was to dig tunnels several metres below ground towards the enemy lines. As they neared their objective, silence was necessary because the enemy was listening. Bayonets were used to prise out flints buried in the clay and helpers would catch the flints as they fell. A chamber at the end of the tunnels was then excavated and packed with masses of explosives to be detonated in the hope of devastating the enemy defences. This seemed incredible to me when I read about it.

Just a few kilometres to the west of Albert lies the small village of La Boiselle and site of “La Grande Mine”. This is the Lochnagar Memorial Crater, a privately owned enormous hole in the ground left by the detonation of one of the WWI tunnelling activities. To the owner’s credit, it is free to see. The detonation of this mine and a second of its kind was followed up by yet more canon-fodder troops being ordered to walk towards the German line mostly to their deaths. Some of the infantry took shelter from the machine-gun fire in the mine’s crater. Like many memorials in this vicinity, it is a spine-tingling sight. Having read about it, I’m glad I’ve seen these remains.

This is our last full day in France, which may be a good job because I don’t know how much more evidence of man’s insanity our nerves can take. Tomorrow we make for Calais and the ferry back onto home soil. It would be good to think that we’ll be returning to normality but recent history is making normality somewhat uncertain. Mercifully, it should not be as uncertain as it was for the poor saps who were forced to sacrifice themselves in the European carnage, parts one and two, of the 20th century. The western world is, however, suffering a potentially dangerous nationalistic backlash, of late.

Worrying times.

Our journey back up through France, deftly avoiding a return through Belgium by crossing the Rhine at Saarbrucken, has led us along much of the 1914-18 western front. We moved on from Verdun, which was largely a French and American bloodbath, to Albert on the Somme, which was largely a French and British bloodbath. Today we hopped on our bicycles to puff and pant around some of the veloroute de la memoire.

The country roads between Albert and Bapaume are dotted with 400 mostly relatively modestly sized Commonwealth cemeteries, lying in fields or on the edges of woods. This, I believe, was largely because there were field hospitals scattered around the lines and the poor unfortunates who didn’t make it were taken outside to be buried behind the medical facility. We stopped first at Blighty Valley cemetery which may have been one such. Now between a wood and a maize field, it contains just over a thousand graves. Many of the headstones are for unidentified souls and simply bear the inscription:

A soldier of the great war; known unto God

Further up the road, and I do mean up, is the imposing Thiepval Memorial designed by Edwin Lutyens, a towering brick edifice supported on four massive square – maybe more like cubic – columns inscribed with some 73,000 names of the British missing of the Battle of the Somme. It is fronted by a cemetery for both French and British fallen with crosses for the French and headstones for the British. A few names on the monument are now crossed out, a result of bodies having been later found and identified.

On our route back we passed a tower, a replica of Helen’s tower near Belfast, commemorating the Ulstermen who took part in the carnage.

Nearby, though we didn’t visit it this time around (we’ve been there before), is a memorial to a band of Newfoundlanders. Of the 1000 of them sent “over the top”, just 16 returned unscathed. Such was the lunacy of ordering infantry to walk hundreds of metres across open ground towards an enemy line heavily barricaded by barbed wire and defended by raking machine gun fire.

Emotions can take only so much of this stuff and we chose our route back to our Albert campsite, passing another modestly sized  cemetery beside the road.

The Battle of the Somme was launched on 1st July 1916. The first day cost the British 57,000 casualties, 20,000 of whom were killed. It remains the worst day in British military history. [Ed: Bloody good job, too.] The battle was brought to a halt in November 1916 when the weather became so bad that no further action was deemed possible. The total casualties for this senseless insanity amounted to 415,000 British, 195,000 French and 600,000 German – 1.2 million in all.

According to our guide book, the land around Albert had no particular intrinsic value nor was there any long term strategic objective to the action. The Battle of the Somme was designed to relieve pressure on the French army fighting its 10-month action at Verdun 300kms away.

Madness.

I must be making up for lost time. Having arrived at Albert, a centre for the bloody and senseless Battle of the Somme, yesterday, we needed supplies. It’s only a 10-minute walk from the camping municipal site to a super-U supermarché, so we slung rucksacks on our backs and went in search of lunch and tonight’s dinner.

For the last three weeks it’s been too hot to contemplate cooking inside our caravan so our gas BBQ has been working overtime. I’s still too hot to cook anything substantial in time but Francine and I are both fond of a warm gésier [gizzard] salad. They come in the form of a confit and just need warming through in a skillet so that should work well enough. We got a few lardons to go with them. I’ll give the BBQ a day off.

For lunch, Francine found a prepared salad but I kept looking longingly at an andouillette sausage. Resistance was futile so I bought one. From what I can make out, to make an andouillette, you roughly chop pigs intestines and then stuff them into more pig’s intestines in the form of a sausage skin. Yummy! Ya just gotta love the inventiveness of the French cuisine de terroir. I thought it was very good but it’s not one of Francine’s favourites.

After lunch it was time to go and investigate the Somme, not for the many military graveyards (we’ve done that before) this time but for dragonflies. After failing to find any sign of a few étangs marked on the map we wound up at Vaux-sur-Somme. The main branch of the Somme is navigable at this point but it looks managed, almost canalized. We found what I think must be a related small, well vegetated channel that was noticeably lower than the main river. Here we found a goodly and varied selection of critters including Small Red Damsels (Ceriagrion tenellum) for the first time this trip.

The main river did provide two extra species not seen on the small side waterway but the small habitat was most fun. Here’s the list, a reasonably impressive 15 species:

• Calopteryx splendens (Banded Demoiselle)
• Ischnura elegans (Common Bluetail)
• Coenagrion puella (Azure Bluet)
• Erythromma viridulum (Small Redeye)
• Erythromma lindenii (Blue-eye)
• Ceriagrion tenellum (Small Red Damsel)
• Platycnemis pennipes (Blue Featherleg)
• Anax imperator (Blue Emperor)
• Gomphus pulchellus (Western Clubtail)
• Somatochlora metallica (Brilliant Emerald)
• Orthetrum cancellatum (Black-tailed Skimmer)
• Libellula fulva (Blue Chaser)
• Sympetrum sanguineum (Ruddy Darter)
• Sympetrum striolatum (CommonDarter)
• Crocothemis erythraea (Broad Scarlet)

It’s difficult to come to this neck of the woods without becoming involved in the WWI obscenity that was the battle of Verdun. We are camped a few kilometres south of Verdun but the main military action was centred just to the north of it. We drove up to look.

Our guide book says that the battle of Verdun lasted 300 days, so let’s say 10 months. It began with a German artillery barrage that went on for 10 hours and expended 2 million shells. By the end of the 10-month carnage, 700,000 men were dead, missing or wounded.

We began our sobering tour at the Fort Souville, where some advanced technology of the time made 15.5cm guns rise from the ground, fire, then disappear back into the protection of what was essentially a silo. The ground is now forested but remnants of the fortifications can still be seen in the ground left cratered and undulating by the explosions of shells.

Nine villages were completely eradicated by the actions. We drove off to where one stood but there is nothing now to be seen. I went expecting that I might see something along the lines of the ruins of the WWII martyr village of Oradour-sur-Glane, near Limoges, where the SS murdered the entire population in June 1944 shortly after D-Day but apparently, these villages near Verdun were so completely razed that no trace of them could be seen in aerial photographs taken shortly after.

We finished with rightly shredded emotions at the Ossuaire de Douaumont which, standing in the middle of the battlefield, serves as the main monument to the Verdun terror and holds the bones of many thousands of unidentified bodies. After the battle, some 120,000 French bodies were identified, being about one third of those killed. The Ossuaire is fronted by a suitably regimented graveyard where 15,000 dead are buried.

I’ve often wondered about “missing” and “unidentified” but I think it must go like this. Bodies litter a battlefield. If they weren’t blown to bits when they were actually killed, continued shelling where they lie subsequently does either blow them to bits or throws up wads of earth from nearby which falls over the corpses and ends up burying them.

I considered myself blessed to have been part of what I believe to be the first generation not to have been plagued by a European war. Verdun has had a tumultuous history featuring in the Franco-Prussian War, WWI and WWII. The EU was formed following WWII, which was really part 2 of the first atrocity, to prevent further European bloodbaths. The theory was that nations that trade together would not try to wipe each other out and it has proved very effective. The EU may well not be perfect but anyone doubting its usefulness really should see these monuments to the terrors of what used to happen before its existence. Surely preventing such senseless carnage is worth a degree of imperfection.

What a difference a border makes. Our first full day back in France and we needed some shopping so we zoomed about 8kms down the road to a slightly larger town with a supermarché – not one that we’d heard of, Colruyt, but a supermarché nonetheless. Gone was the German restriction to pork, chicken and beef [lamb is almost as rare as hen’s teeth in Germany]; now we were faced with the luxury of choices including guinea fowl legs and quail halves marinated for the BBQ.  We were like kids in a sweet shop and bought some of each of those to keep us going for the next two days.  The quail halves being quite small, I supplemented them with some saucisses aux pimentes d’Espelette. Well, you get addicted to sausages after a few weeks. Oh, and I couldn’t resist some of France’s wonderful Rillettes du Mans (potted pork) for lunch.

After our most enjoyable shopping trip for three weeks, we discovered that our memories had not been playing us false; the local fields of France immediately knocked wildlife spots off anything that we saw in our entire time in Germany. On a brief drive through country lanes on the side of les-côtes, we stopped at a sloping roadside verge smothered in wild flowers. Francine was particularly pleased at last to find an orchid in the form of a small cluster of Fragrant Orchids (Gymnadenia sp).

Many of the flowers on the roadside bank were Field Scabious (Knautia arvensis), which is particularly attractive to butterflies. So, apparently, was a type of Knapweed. Both the Scabious and the Knapweed were absolutely smothered in Marbled Whites (Melanargia galathea) butterflies – I counted 20+ on just one Knapweed plant but there must’ve been 50+ in total scattered along the bank. There were also handfuls of Large Whites (Pieris brassicae) and Meadow Browns (Maniola jurtina) but the Marbled Whites won the contest easily. As we drove back along the lanes,  butterflies appeared almost every 10 m or so, disturbed from the verges or just flitting across the road to the next patch of potential food. It was a vision completely unseen in Germany. Indeed, this one trip probably outnumbered all those we’d seen during our entire German trip.

We were out looking for likely dragonfly habitat and, after a couple of false starts finding inaccessible ponds on private land, we arrived at les Etangs du Longeau. It looked a bit private with a small campsite and café on the land but there were fishermen beside one lake so we bit the bullet, parked and bailed out. What a find it turned out to be. In about an hour and a quarter, we racked up an astonishing collection of 17 species:

• Calopteryx splendens (Banded Demoiselle)
• Ischnura elegans (Common Bluetail)
• Enallagma cyathigerum (Common Bluet)
• Coenagrion puella (Azure Bluet)
• Erythromma najas (Large Redeye)
• Pyrrhosoma nymphula (Large Red Damsel)
• Platycnemis pennipes (Blue Featherleg)
• Aeshna cyanea (Blue Hawker)
• Anax imperator (Blue Emperor)
• Anax parthenope (Lesser Emperor)
• Onychogomphus forcipatus unguiculatus (Small Pincertail)
• Cordulia aenea (Downy Emerald)
• Somatochlora metallica (Brilliant Emerald)
• Libellula fulva (Blue Chaser)
• Orthetrum cancellatum (Black-tailed Skimmer)
• Sympetrum sanguineum (Ruddy Darter)
• Crocothemis erythraea (Broad Scarlet)

Walking back through woodland from the two lakes, we came across one bush playing host to at least half a dozen Silver-washed Fritillaries (Arginnis paphia), too.

What has Germany done to its clearly beleaguered wildlife?

This, we hope, will be our last full day in Germany. Tomorrow we head over the border into France.

We are on the so-called Weinstraβe, which was established in 1935 as another marketing ploy, this time to boost local wine sales. We’ve had a short drive around a few rather less than interesting villages but finished up at Deidesheim where we decided to have a spot of lunch, skilfully avoiding the haute cuisine Deidesheimer Hof featuring menus ranging from 128€ – 229€. Nein danke.

Hitherto “a spot of lunch” has proved rather difficult because full blown meals appear to be the German order of the day at lunchtime. Here in Deidesheim, however, we found a delightfully shaded courtyard at a café/bistro offering uncharacteristically modestly sized bites to eat. Francine was drawn in by a chalkboard offering Quiche Lorraine with salad. The ice-cream menu was much more extensive than the savoury menu but I eventually decided to try a Flammkuchen, Greek-style. As I suspected, it turned out to be a sort of German equivalent to a pizza which was actually very thin, crispy and delicate. All good. Francine could not resist following up with yet another iced coffee. So much for a light bite.

Incidentally, there’s something of a collection of subject Straβen in Germany. Francine spotted another on the map as we trying desperately to travel on the autobahn: the Schuhstraβe. So, come on all you shoe fans, hasten there with all speed.