• Itinerary Three starts at Amiens Cathedral and heads east across the battlefields of 1918, via the Australian National Memorial at Villers Bretonneux. It continues east into the French sector of the 1916 fighting and then north behind the German second line to the Butte de Warlencourt and ends in Bapaume.
• The Route: Amiens – Cathedral, station area, French National Cemetery, St Acheul; Longueau railway; Longueau British CWGC Cemetery; Glisy Airport; the ‘Nearest Point to Amiens’; first Tank Versus Tank Battle; Adelaide CWGC Cemetery; Villers Bretonneux – Museum, school, Mairie, marker stone, Australian National Memorial and Interpretation Centre ; Corbie – Church Congreve Plaque, Communal Cemetery & Extension, Colette Statue; Von Richthofen Crash Site; Australian 3rd Div Memorial; Beacon CWGC Cemetery; 58th (London) Div Memorial; Chipilly CWGC Cemetery; Bray – Côte 80 French National Cemetery, German Cemetery; P’tit Train Terminus, Froissy; Proyart – miniature Arc de Triomphe, German Cemetery; Col Rabier Private Memorial; Foucaucourt Local Cem; Estrées - Lt Col Puntous Memorial; Assevillers New CWGC Cemetery; Hem Farm CWGC Cemetery; ‘HR’ Private Memorial; Maurepas 1st RI Memorial; V. Hallard Private Memorial; Charles Dansette Private Memorial; Maurepas – French National Cemetery, Memorial; Combles – Communal Cemetery Extension, Guards Cemetery; Guards Memorial, Lesboeufs; Capt Meakin Private Memorial; Gueudecourt Newfoundland Memorial; AIF Grass Lane CWGC Cemetery; SOA Lt Col R. B. Bradford VC; German Memorial, Le Sars; Butte de Warlencourt, WFA & other Memorials; Warlencourt CWGC Cemetery; Bapaume.
• Extra Visits are suggested to: Marcelcave French National Cemetery; Vaire Com Cemetery; Capt Mond/Lt Martyn Private Memorial; Le Hamel Australian Memorial Park/RB Plaque; Heilly Station CWGC Cemetery, Private Memorial to L Cpl O’Neill;, Bray-French National Cemetery, Grove Town, Bray Military, Bray Vale and Bray Hill CWGC Cemeteries; Site of Carey’s Force Action; Heath CWGC Cemetery; Ruined Village of Fay and Memorial Plaques; Vermandovillers - German Cemetery, RB Plaque Lt McCarthy VC, Capt Delcroix, Bourget & 158th RI, 1st Chass à Pied; Lihons - French National Cemetery, Polish Memorial, Murat Monument; Chaulnes – US & French Nurses, Ger 16th Bav Memorial; German Trenches, Bois de Wallieux; Fay – Ruined Village, Memorials to Capt Fontan, Abbé Champin & 41st RI 1940; French National Cemetery & Italian Memorial, Dompierre; Cléry - French National Cemetery/383rd RI Memorial; Gaston Chomet Private Memorial; Heumann/Mills/Torrance Private Memorial; 41st Div Memorial; Bull’s Road CWGC Cemetery; French 17th/18th RIT Memorial; Achiet-le-Grand Comm Cem + Ext, Memorials to Pte C. Cox, VC and Lt Wainwright, RND, Loupart Wood.
[N.B.] The following sites are indicated:
Herleville – Plaque to Lt-Col Daly & 6th AIF; Logeast Wood - SOA T/Cdr Daniel Marcus Beak, VC; Courcelles le Comte – Mem to Pte Hugh McIver, VC, MM + Bar; Foucaucourt - French Cemetery; Herbécourt – Private Mem to Aspirant P. Maistrasse.
• Planned duration, without stops for refreshment or extra visits: 8 hours 45 minutes.
NOTE. This a long itinerary! You may want to split it into two and a convenient place to break it would be before Assevillers New Brit Cem on page 245
• Amiens/ 0 miles/RWC/Map 1/6
Follow the brown signs Parking Jacobin, which is centrally placed and well signed from main roads into the city, and park. Set your milometer to Zero. Note that the time spent in this walk is not included in the overall timing of the Itinerary.
Walk following signs to the Cathedral. En route we advise visiting:
Amiens Métropole Tourist Office (GPS: 49.894579 2.301614).
This is in Place Notre Dame, The Cathedral Square. Tel: +(0)3 22 71 60 50 E-mail: ot@amiens-metropole.com. Website: www.amiens-tourisme.com
Over the past few years the centre of Amiens has undergone a major ‘facelift’, with many of the old façades, monuments and public buildings cleaned and renovated and plenty of pleasant pedestrian shopping areas. It makes an ideal base for touring the battlefield if you follow The Western Approach. This attractive city has just about every category of Hotel and a variety of Restaurants in the Centre and in the suburbs and here you can pick up helpful literature about these, restaurants and camping etc and local events. See also the Tourist Information section at the end of the book.
Open daily: 1 April-30 Sept 0830-1815, 1 Oct-31 March 0830-1715. There is an entrance fee for guided visits. Autoguide in 3 languages €3.
On 28 August the Germans took Péronne and the citizens of Amiens trembled as the enemy fought their way towards the city, then occupied by Moroccan troops who were sent to take up defensive positions at Villers Bretonneux. A fierce fight was put up at Proyart, but the Germans counter-attacked and swept their way into Amiens on 31 August 1914, and, as recorded in a notice posted by the Mayor, M. Fiquet, seized twelve hostages from the town council, who, unlike German hostages taken in other towns, such as Senlis, were unharmed. They requisitioned half a million francs worth of supplies to sustain them on their drive towards Paris. Most of the force, after pulling down the French tricolore and hoisting the German flag on the town hall and raiding the safes in the savings bank, proceeded on their way ‘nach Paris’, but a garrison was installed with a town major on 9 September. A curfew was imposed, motor cars were requisitioned and 1,000 young men were sent into captivity. Following their defeat on the Marne, the Germans withdrew, and on 12 September the French Army, under General D’Amade, returned.
Although damaged by air attacks during the next 3½ years, it was not until the German offensive of 1918 that the city again came under a major attack. From April to June it endured an almost continuous artillery bombardment, most citizens were evacuated and the Pope was asked by the Bishop to intercede with Kaiser Wilhelm to save the cathedral from the shelling. The Germans did not reach Amiens. They were stopped at Villers Bretonneux (see below). On 17 November 1918 a Mass of Thanksgiving was held here to celebrate the end of the war.
Designed by Robert de Luzarches, the Cathédrale de Notre Dame was begun in 1220 as a suitable resting place for the relic brought back from the Fourth Crusade by Walon of Sarton – the forehead and upper jaw of John the Baptist. It also houses relics of Saint Firmin, the first Bishop of Amiens. The cathedral is regarded as one of the finest and most harmonious examples of Gothic architecture and, at 142m long and 42m high, has the greatest volume. Ruskin called it ‘the Bible of Amiens’ as its stone façade and wooden choir stall contain so many carved pictures of Bible stories. Edward III attended mass in the cathedral on his way to the Battle of Crécy and Pte Frank Richards DCM, MM of the 2nd Bn, RWF, author of Old Soldiers Never Die, visited it in August 1914. Richards was ‘very much taken up with the beautiful oil paintings and other objects of art inside. One old soldier who paid it a visit’, he reported, however, ‘said it would be a fine place to loot’. A huge restoration and cleaning project was started in 1994.
During World War I elaborate precautions were taken to protect the cathedral and its priceless art treasures – all portable items (including the stained glass, which was taken by firemen from Paris) being removed for safekeeping. The choir stalls were enclosed with reinforced concrete and sandbags (a precaution that was to be repeated in World War II), as was the principal façade. Although it received nine direct hits by bombs and some shells, none caused serious damage. During the Spring 1918 offensive, when the Germans reached Villers-Bretonneux and Amiens came under such fearsome bombardment that over 2,000 houses were hit and all the inhabitants fled, the British war correspondent Philip Gibbs described it under the moonlight, ‘… every pinnacle and bit of tracery shining like quicksilver, with magical beauty’.
It contains the standard CWGC Memorial Plaque, twenty-eight of which were designed for erection in cathedrals and important churches in Belgium and France by Lt Col H.P. Cart de Lafontaine, FRIBA and made by Hallward. The inscription was written by Rudyard Kipling. The Amiens Plaque was the first to be unveiled (by the Prince of Wales, then President of the CWGC) in July 1923. It is slightly different from the others, as it bears the Royal Coat of Arms alone and commemorates the war dead of Great Britain and Ireland who were killed in the diocese. The Plaques in other churches also bear the coats of arms of the Dominions. In Amiens there are separate Plaques for Australia, Canada, Newfoundland, New Zealand, South Africa and the USA. A replica of the Amiens Plaque is in the reception area of the CWGC headquarters in Maidenhead, and a similar Plaque is in Westminster Abbey. There is a Private Memorial to Lt Raymond Asquith (see Itinerary Two). There is also a Plaque to General Debeney, ‘Vainqueur de la Bataille de Picardie’, who liberated Montdidier on 8 August 1918.
Amiens Cathedral plaques: CWGC (left), US 6th Engineers, Carey’s Force (right)
Nearby are the ****Hotel Mercure Amiens Cathédrale, 21/23 rue Flatters, Tel: +(0)3 22 80 60 60, e-mail: h7076@accor.com and the ***Ibis Styles Amiens Cathédrale, 17-19 Place au Feurre, +(0)3 22 22 00 20, e-mail: h04780@accor-hotels.com. No restaurant but complimentary breakfast and tea/coffee.
Over the River Somme beyond the Cathedral is the picturesque old town of St Leu with some charming Cafés and Restaurants. Boats depart from the quay here for trips on the river, along which hospital barges plied from the battlefields, and the unique Hortillonages (see Tourist Information).
Return to your car, drive out of the car park and turn right along rue des Jacobins. Turn right following signs to SVCF Gare along rue des Otages to just short of the Station.
• Amiens Station/Carlton-Belfort Hotel/0.5 miles/GPS:49.89054 2.30804
The square in front of the station, now covered by a magnificent canopy, and with a car park underground, is the Place Alphonse Fiquet (named after the Mayor of Amiens in August 1914). The station and the 104m, twenty-six-floor-high tower opposite were both designed by August Perret. He gave his name to the Tower, which was once the tallest office building in the western hemisphere and still makes an excellent landmark. A residential block, the Tower is now surmounted by a 7metre high glass cube which is lit up at night, but is not yet open to visitors. The Station Restaurant was once renowned for its gourmet cuisine and the Prince of Wales lunched there after inaugurating the Thiépval Memorial on 31 July 1923. No stranger to Amiens, the young Grenadier Guards Officer had frequently dined in Amiens’ popular restaurants when he had been in the Somme area during 1916. When the Prince himself could not get away, Raymond Asquith borrowed … “Wales’ excellent Daimler” and whipped off to Amiens where he “ate and drank a great deal of the best, slept in downy beds, bathed in hot perfumed water, and had a certain amount of restrained fun with the very much once-occupied ladies of the town.”
The Carlton Hotel, Amiens.
On the corner opposite the station is The ***Hotel Carlton, Tel: +(0)3 22 97 72 22, e-mail: reservation@lecarlton.fr, excellent Brasserie) on the opposite left corner, once the famous Carlton-Belfort Hotel whose façade had altered little since 1918 until a change of ownership and a facelift in the late 1980s. Up to then a wartime sign, ‘No Lorries Through Town’ could still be discerned on the wall to the right of the main entrance on rue de Noyon. Apart from the wartime industrial activity which thrived in the city, its function as staff HQ’s and its many temporary hospitals, Amiens was known chiefly as a place of relaxation for the Allied soldiers. Among notables who visited (and wrote about) the Carlton-Belfort were Siegfried Sassoon, Edwin Campion Vaughan, Robert Graves, Cecil Lewis, and Mick Mannock. Many famous war correspondents and artists were based at or visited Amiens, and other popular haunts were the Hôtel du Rhin (now no longer a hotel but the building may be seen by continuing down the rue de Noyon and turning left when you reach the Place René Goblet, with its World War II memorials to the Martyrs of Picardy and to General Leclerc). A regular patron of the Hôtel du Rhin in the days leading up to ‘The Big Push’ in 1916 was the cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather, who was based at the administrative HQ at Montrelet as a lowly Staff Officer. The very name, he wrote, ‘at once conveys visions to [one’s] feverish mind of the gladdest nights that were then permissible’. John Masefield, commuting between Amiens and Albert while researching for his book on the Somme, ‘dined on duck at the Rhin’ at a dinner given by Nevill Lytton for the US Ambassador, Gen Bliss the US CGS and Calvin Coolidge, the future President.
Sir William Orpen, KBE, RA, describes, in his book An Onlooker in France 1917-19, how he dined at the Rhin with the Canadian General Seely and Prince Antoine de Bourbon, Seely’s ADC. Orpen did a portrait of Seely while his friend, Alfred Munnings, who was official artist to the Canadian Cavalry Brigade, was painting an equestrian portrait of the prince. Philip Gibbs and other foreign correspondents found refuge there on the night when Amiens was under its greatest threat in April 1918. Bombs crashed around the hotel and the guests, who had voted whether to ‘Stay or Go’, stayed, but spent the night ‘in the good cellars below the Hôtel du Rhin, full of wine casks and crates’. Outside raged ‘a roaring furnace’. The Restaurant Godbert (62 Rue des Jacobins, but no longer a restaurant) was a favoured restaurant – ‘The food was excellent and we all had money to burn’, wrote Dennis Wheatley. But when he visited it on 1 April he found it rather like the Marie Celeste. It had closed suddenly when Amiens was being threatened and the Provost Marshal rounded up officers in all the main restaurants and ordered them back to their units at once. ‘Every table in the big restaurant had been occupied and on all of them were plates with half-eaten courses. On some there were only hors d’oeuvres, on others pieces of omelette, fish, game, savouries and ice-cream that had melted. Beside the plates stood glasses mostly full or half-full of red or white wine.’ Perhaps the Godbert’s popularity had something to do with ‘little Marguerite, [who] made eyes at all the pretty boys who craved for a kiss after the lousy trenches’. The poet, Capt T. P. Cameron Wilson of the Sherwood Foresters (commemorated on the Arras Memorial, qv), recalls the therapeutic effect of other waitresses with affection, including ‘Yvonne, bringing sticky buns’, in his delightful Song of Amiens:
Lord! How we laughed in Amiens!
For there were useless things to buy …
And still we laughed in Amiens,
As dead men laughed a week ago.
What cared we if in Delville Wood
The splintered trees saw hell below?
We cared … We cared … But laughter runs
The cleanest stream a man may know
To rinse him from the taint of guns’.
Bairnsfather cartoon, ‘A hopeless dawn. Just back off leave. Amiens is only 34 hours more in the train now. You know that because you can see the cathedral quite clearly.’
Some encounters with the female population of Amiens were not so innocent. When most civilians evacuated in March 1918, a few enterprising girls remained. Wheatley found one such after his disappointment at the Godbert who had remained on duty ‘Because I makes much money now there are few girls here’. It was not his first encounter with the oldest profession and he thoroughly recommended the dignified Madame Prudhomme’s brothel. Such delights had been available in Amiens from the outbreak of war. Private Frank Richards had passed through the city on 13 August 1914 on his way to Mons. At that time General French was staying at the Hôtel Moderne (of which no trace remains) and Richards was billeted in a school, outside which was a fifty-deep queue of young ladies waiting to entertain the soldiers. Richards was ‘sorry to leave’ on 22 August. ‘About the 16th August’, he reports, he had ‘attended a funeral of two of our airmen who had crashed; all the notabilities of the town were present.’ This was the funeral of Lt Perry and AM Parfitt, who are buried in St Acheul Cemetery (see below). He also describes the bringing of Gen Grierson’s body from the railway station to the Town Hall. He was Chief-of-Staff to General French. ‘All sorts of stories were going around regarding his death. One was that he had been poisoned when eating his lunch on the train, but I believe now it was just heart failure from the strain and excitement. We took his body back to the railway station where a detachment of Cameron Highlanders took it down-country.’ Lt-General Sir James Grierson, who was actually commander of II Corps, was buried in his home town of Glasgow.
The 64-year-old French Academician and novelist, Pierre Loti (the nom de plume of Louis Marie Julien Viaud), who had served with the French navy and who was put on the Reserve List in 1910, at the outbreak of war offered his services to General Galliéni as a liaison officer. On 2 October he recorded his ‘first day of service as a liaison officer’ in his diary and travelled through the early battlefields left by the Germans’ rush for Paris. He lunched in Amiens before visiting GHQ at Doullens and returned there that night. He found the town criss-crossed with parades of soldiers, singing, holding flowers that the young girls had given them. He did not return to the area until 1917 (when he again visited Amiens) – after tireless negotiations with the Turks, the Belgians, in Alsace, in Salonika and many parts of the French line, during which work he kept up a prodigious writing output. This indefatigable patriot was eventually forced to retire, exhausted, at the age of 68 on 1 June 1918. Another famous French writer, Jean Cocteau, stayed at the Hôtel du Commerce (32 rue des Jacobins) while waiting to be posted to his hospital near Villers Bretonneux in June 1916 (qv). On the 25th of that month, the Fourth Army Commander took time off from his planning of the Big Push to attend the 167-strong annual Old Etonian Dinner in Amiens.
Return to your car. Continue. Turn right with the station on your left, onto the D1029 direction Longueau. Continue to the large school, Lycée Robert de Luzarches on the left and immediately turn right on the Boulevard de Pont Noyelles, which becomes Boulevard de Bapaume. Ignore the first sign to the left to the Cimetières de St Acheul and take the next left on Rue de Cottency. Continue to the cemetery and stop at the entrance on the left.
• French National Cemetery, St Acheul, Graves of Perry & Parfitt/ 2.0 miles/10 minutes/Map 1/7/GPS: 49.87799 2.31624
There is an Information Board (in French) just inside the entrance. In this French Cemetery, with its impressive memorial incorporating a sensitive sculpture of a mourning female figure, there are 2,739 French, 12 British, 10 Belgian and I Russian soldiers of World War I. The British plot, just inside the entrance and to the left, includes the graves of the first airmen to be killed on French soil – on 16 August 1914. They are 2nd Lt Evelyn W. Copland Perry, RFC, age 23, the personal message on whose headstone reads, ‘First on the roll of honour. All Glory to his name’ and Air Mechanic H. E. Parfitt, age 21, the crew of a Royal Aircraft Factory BE8. Perry was the last of his Squadron (3 Sqn) to take off from Amiens airport at Glisy en route for Mons, when his machine stalled, plummeted to earth and burst into flames. Other contenders for ‘first casualties’ were Lt C. G. G. Bayly and 2nd Lt V. Waterfall of 5 Squadron RFC. They were killed on 22 August, six days later than Perry and Parfitt, but they were actually killed as a result of enemy action on a reconnaissance flight over Mons. They are buried in Tournai Communal Cemetery.
Return to the D1029 and turn right signed Longueau. Pass under a railway bridge, over a waterway which marks the junction of the Rivers Avre, Noye and Somme and then across a bridge over a large railway complex.
Headstones of 2nd Lt E.W.C. Perry and Air Mech H.E. Parfitt, St Acheul French Cemetery
• Longueau/4 miles
This area became a major administrative centre, supplying the Somme battlefront and it was from it that railway engineers worked eastwards to repair the railways destroyed during the 1914 German advance and subsequent shelling.
Continue uphill on the D1029, passing the Hôtel de Ville of Longeau on the right, to a cemetery on the right by traffic lights at the junction of Rue des Alliés.
• Longueau British CWGC Cemetery/4.9 miles/5 minutes/Map 1/8a/GPS: 49.86969 2.35986
Unusually, the register box is incorporated at the bottom of the Cross of Sacrifice in this small Cemetery. It was begun in April 1918 when the British line was re-established before Amiens and used by fighting units and field ambulances until the following August. Plot IV was made after the Armistice by concentrating thirty-six graves from other cemeteries and the surrounding battlefield. Three US, one French and thirty-nine German graves have been removed. Now there are 68 soldiers, and airmen from the UK, 66 from Canada, 65 from Australia, 3 from the West Indies including 1 unidentified, and 14 unknown. Two graves were moved here as late as 1934.
Continue straight through a series of roundabouts (don’t turn right following Autoroute signs) and follow signs to Villers Bretonneux/Péronne on the D1029.
You will pass near the group of hotels which includes the ****Novotel Hotel, ***Campanile and several other hotels at this point (see Tourist Information).
Continue on the D1029 to the airfield on the left.
• Glisy Airport/6.0 miles/Map 1/8/GPS: 49.86830 2.391212
The area was used by the RFC/RAF as an airfield from the first days of the war and is currently both a commercial and club field. In the early 1980s a new bar complex was built and a Memorial to the Red Baron (originally destined to be erected at his crash site (qv) but rejected by local authorities) which used to stand in the old bar, went missing and is now thought to be in the hands of an Amiens collector. During the fighting of March 1918, General Sir John Monash, who commanded the Australian 3rd Division that played such a large part in the fighting up ahead at Villers Bretonneux, had his HQ in this vicinity. Maurice Baring, in Flying Corps HQ, 1914-1918, describes arriving at Amiens by train on 12 August where he was greeted with the scornful statement, ‘Ah! les aviateurs, ils n’ont pas besoin d’aller à la guerre pour se faire casser la gueule ceux-là.’ (‘Oh! airmen – that lot don’t need to go to war to break their necks.’). ‘After lunch’ he went to the ‘Aerodrome’ and arranged supplies of ‘water carts, … pegs for the aeroplanes, … a certain consignment of B.B. Oil’, and then ‘slept on our valises on the grass on the Aerodrome.’ On the morning of the 13th, the first three squadrons of the RFC’s total complement of four squadrons arrived, Harvey-Kelly (see also Vert Galand on page 61) being the first to land in his BE2A. They had taken off from a field above the White Cliffs of Dover, on the road to St Margaret’s Bay. Today a Memorial stands at the entrance to that field, with the inscription, ‘The Royal Flying Corps contingent of the 1914 British Expeditionary Force, consisting of Nos 2, 3, 4 and 5 Squadrons flew from this field to Amiens between 13 and 15 August 1914.’ In the afternoon Prince Murat (qv) reported as their Liaison Officer and on 14 August Sir John French arrived to look at the squadrons. The airfield was also used during World War II.
To commemorate the WW1 Centenary, an important airshow was held here in 2014.
Continue (noting that the road runs due east), crossing the railway twice in the next 5 miles.
Note the tall column of the Australian Memorial which becomes more and more clearly visible to the left along this road.
Continue downhill past a wood on the right to a small crossroads with the D523. Turn right and stop as near to the crossing as practical.
• The Nearest Point to Amiens/10.8 miles/5 minutes/OP/GPS: 49.86974 2.49029
The German attack on 21 March 1918 forced the British and French armies into a hurried retreat, troops pouring towards you on their way back to Amiens. Up ahead of you on the crest is the village of Villers Bretonneux and it was not until 28 March that the German advance (which had begun some 50km away at St Quentin) was stopped 3km east of the village – i.e. the other side to where you are now – mainly due to the efforts of the 1st Cavalry Division. Short of troops, and with Amiens in great danger, Haig looked 100km north to Flanders and ordered down the Australians. Thirty-six hours after the German onslaught began again at dawn on 4 April it seemed as if Villers Bretonneux would be taken, but Lt Col H. Goddard commanding the 9th (Australian) Brigade, newly based in the town, ordered the 36th Battalion forward in a bayonet charge. The advancing Germans broke and withdrew and, before they could attack again, one of their aerial heroes, the ‘Red Baron’ (qv) was killed.
By 10 April, Haig knew the situation was critical and he begged Foch to take over some portion – any portion – of the front held by British and Commonwealth forces, stretched to the point of exhaustion. Foch agreed to move up a large French force towards Amiens. The next day (12 April), still waiting for them to arrive, a worried Haig issued his famous ‘Order of the Day’:
“To all Ranks of the British Forces in France. Three weeks ago today the Enemy began his terrific attacks against us on a 50 mile front …. Many amongst us are tired …. There is no other course open to us but to fight it out! Every position must be held to the last man: there must be no retirement. With our backs to the wall, and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight to the end….”
In the dawn mist of 24 April the German 4th (Guards) Division and the 228th Division, supported by thirteen tanks, tried again. It was to be one of the first actions in which the Germans had used tanks and the first action in which tank fought tank.
This time the enemy got into and through the village, despite the determined resistance by 2nd West Yorkshire Regiment at the railway station, so that by 2000 hours that evening the front line ran at right angles to the D1029 along the D523 (where you now are) across your front to your left and right. It was the nearest point to Amiens that the Germans reached. That evening at 2200 hours the Australian 13th Brigade counterattacked in the area on the right but was caught in fierce fire by German machine guns of 4th (Guards) Division set up in the wood to your right – Abbey Wood.
In a remarkable action which won him the VC, Lt C. W. K. Sadlier led a small party into the wood and destroyed six machine-gun positions, thus allowing the attack to continue. An hour later the Australian 15th Brigade, in the light of flames from the burning château in the village, attacked in a pincer movement through the area beyond the railway line to your left. After the war Sadlier played an important role in the Returned Services League.
Continue on the D523 towards Cachy.
In springtime the banks and woods here are carpeted with celandine and cowslips.
Immediately before the motorway bridge turn sharp left towards Villers Bretonneux.
Continue and pull in and stop just before the de-restriction 70 sign on the right with Villers Bretonneux church on the skyline ahead.
• First Tank versus Tank Battle Monument, Cachy/12.2 miles/10 minutes/Map 1/14/GPS: 49.86060 2.49667
Stop here before visiting the memorial to read the following account and to see where the action took place.
The historic tank versus tank action took place in the fields to your left and to your right on the slope up towards Villers Bretonneux on the morning of 24 April 1918. At 0345 hours German artillery began an HE and gas shell barrage on British positions in the town and on the feature on which the Australian National Memorial now sits. The attack began at 0600 hours and, led by thirteen A7V tanks, the Germans inflicted heavy casualties on the East Lancashires of 8th Division in the area around the railway station. By 0930 four A7Vs were making their way across the fields towards where you now are. Earlier that morning three British Mark IV tanks, lagered in the wood through which you drove from the D1029, were ordered to move to this area forward of Cachy. They too were moving this way at about 0930. Commanding one of the British tanks was Lt Frank Mitchell and in his book, Tank Warfare, he told what happened:
“Opening a loophole I looked out. There, some three hundred yards away, a round squat-looking monster was advancing, behind it came waves of infantry, and farther away to the left and right crawled two more of these armed tortoises …. So we had met our rivals at last. Suddenly a hurricane of hail pattered against our steel wall, filling the interior with myriads of sparks and flying splinters … the Jerry tank had treated us to a broadside of armour-piercing bullets … then came our first casualty … the rear Lewis gunner was wounded in both legs by an armour-piercing bullet which tore through our steel plate … the roar of our engine, the nerve-wracking rat-tat-tat of our machine guns blazing at the Bosche infantry and the thunderous boom of the 6 pounders all bottled up in that narrow space filled our ears with tumult while the fumes of petrol and cordite half stifled us.”
Mitchell’s tank attempted two shots at one of the A7Vs. Both hit but seemed ineffective, then the gunner tried again ‘with great deliberation and hit for the third time. Through a loophole I saw the tank heel over to one side then a door opened and out ran the crew. We had knocked the monster out.’
When the war was over, Mitchell, tongue in cheek, recalling that the tanks were called ‘landships’, and that naval crews are entitled to prize money for sinking enemy ships, applied for prize money for himself and his crew for having knocked out an enemy ‘landship’. The War Office descended into a puzzled silence and then turned the application down.
Before the day was over seven of the new British Whippet tanks charged into the German infantry and the advance stopped. The Germans, however, were now poised on the high ground. If Amiens were to be saved they had to be moved.
Just after dawn on 25 April the two attacking Australian brigades met on the other side of the town, taking almost 1,000 prisoners. It was ANZAC Day and Amiens was safe. After the action the Australians recovered one of two German tanks that had broken down and shipped it to Brisbane as a souvenir. The village was almost obliterated by the fighting and so great was the destruction that a sign was put up in the ruins proclaiming, ‘This was Villers-Bretonneux’.
Walk to the bottom of the hill – it is dangerous to park by the Memorial.
Tank versus Tank Memorial, Cachy
On the left is the small Memorial to the Tank Action with a caption in three languages, English, French and German, stating that ‘Here on 24 April 1918 the first ever tank battle took place between German and British armour.’
Return to your car, turn round, return to the D1029, turn right and continue to the CWGC Cemetery on the left.
• Adelaide Cemetery/14 miles/10 minutes/Map 1/13a/ABT3/GPS: 49.87024 2.49791
Note: ‘Australian Battlefield Tour (ABT) Point 3’ – from Villers Bretonneux a numbered ‘Australian’ tour may be followed using a route described in a commemorative pack issued by the Office of Australian War Graves and available at Villers Bretonneux Museum.
The cemetery, which has the most delightful and varied array of plants, was started in early June 1918 and used by 2nd and 3rd Australian Divisions. By the Armistice it contained ninety graves and then 864 other graves were concentrated here. There are now over 500 Australians, 365 soldiers and airmen from the UK, including Lt Col S. G. Latham, DSO, MC and Bar, age 46, killed on 24 April while commanding the 2nd Battalion the Northampton Regiment, and 22 Canadians. The 113th Australian Infantry Brigade, the 49th, 50th, 51st and 52nd Australian Infantry Battalions and the 22nd DLI all at one time erected wooden crosses here to commemorate their dead in the actions of Villers Bretonneux. In Plot III, Row M, Grave 13 is a most unusual headstone. It records the fact that ‘The remains of an Unknown Soldier lay in this grave for 75 years. On 2 November 1993 they were exhumed and now rest in the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.’
Continue, again crossing the railway, and 800m later there is on the left a
Original grave of the Australian Unknown Soldier, Adelaide CWGC Cem
• Memorial to the Villers Bretonneux Déportés of WW2/14.6 miles/GPS: 49.87059 2.51192.
It is in front of the Site of the Villers Bretonneux Château whose flames lit up the attack of the Australian 15th Brigade on the night of 24 April. After the War it was used as the HQ of the Australian Graves Registration Unit. Local opinion has it that after the war the owner of the château collected a considerable sum of money in reparations and decided to spend it elsewhere. When Henry Williamson returned to the Somme in 1929, he met in an estaminet in Albert the ‘son of a millionaire, who had made his “pile” since the war by buying for “cash down” the sites of shattered buildings, and rebuilding with the generous reparation grants later on’. The speculator himself then owned over fifty houses, shops, and three motor cars.
The ruins of the château were demolished in November 2004 as they were deemed to be dangerous. A housing estate has now been built on the site.
Continue some 300m to the crossroads with the D23 signed left to the Australian Villers Bretonneux Memorial. Turn right along the rue Maurice Seigneurgens. Turn right at the first crossroads along rue Driot to the next crossroads. Go straight over. The road is now called rue Victoria. Stop at the school on the left.
• Villers Bretonneux School & Franco-Australian Museum/15.4 miles/20 minutes/WC/Map 1/15/16/ABT1/GPS: 49.86625 2.51722
A Plaque on the school wall records that the building was ‘the gift of the children of Victoria, Australia, to the children of Villers Bretonneux as a proof of their love and good will towards France.’ 1,200 of their fathers, uncles and brothers gave their lives in the recapture of the village on 24 April 1918. Inside the school is a permanent exhibition of photographs of Australia. The Memorial obelisk in front of the school records the story of the school building project, from the visit by the President of the Australian Council on 25 April 1921, to its inauguration on 25 May 1927. The left wing of the school is marked ‘Salle Victoria’. This hall is panelled in wood, surmounted by individually illuminated carvings of Australian fauna by Australian artist J.E.F. Grant. Large photographs of Australian scenes, donated in 2003, hang above. A Plaque by the entrance records the dedication of the Museum – which is on the top floor – and which was founded by Marcel Pillon in 1975. It was then taken over by the Franco-Australian Association and completely refurbished. It was then run for them by the late M Jean-Pierre Thierry, for many years the Research Officer at the Historial, until his death in 2007 and has a centre of documentation, with a 35-seat video room showing Australian documentaries in English or French and a small book stall. The collection now includes some superb photographs, personal items, ephemera, artefacts, a model of a German A7V tank, (the type which took part in the Tank v Tank battle (qv), was later excavated near the village and transported to Wellington). Only 20 tanks of the A7V, with a crew of 18-20 people and a 57mm Maxim gun and 6 machine guns, were made in 1916. The model was made in 2004 by Franco-Aus Assoc Members Etienne Denys and Bernard Vaquez. Here too is the flag used to drape the coffin of the Australian Unknown Soldier during rehearsals for the ceremony of removing it to Australia. The family of kangaroos once housed in the Town Hall have taken up residence at the entrance here. Further improvements have been made throughout the Museum (re-opened in January 2015). Open: Nov-Feb: Mon-Sat 0930-1630; March-Oct: Mon-Sat 0930-1730. Tel: +(0)3 22 96 80 79. E-mail: neuf.fr. www.museeaustralien.com Closed: Sun and French public holidays. Annual closing: last week Dec-first week Jan. Entrance fee payable.
Return to the crossroads and turn left on rue de Melbourne. Stop at the large Ton Hall on the right in Place Charles de Gaulle.
Villers Bretonneux School memorial plaque on the wall
Bronze model of A7V Tank in the Museum
Interior of Villers Bretonneux Museum
Entrance to the Franco-Australian Museum, Villers Bretonneux
• Villers Bretonneux Town Hall/RB/15.6 miles/5 minutes/GPS: 49.86831 2.51755
The main château in the centre of the town was also destroyed and it has been replaced by the Town Hall and memorial garden on the right. In front of it is a Ross Bastiaan bronze tablet unveiled on 30 August 1993 by the Governor General of Australia, the Hon Bill Hayden. Inside the Town Hall is a room devoted to the various connections between the village and Australia – Villers Bretonneux is twinned with Robinvale in Australia and there are still many joint activities.
Robinvale was named after Lt Robin Cuttle from Ultima, Victoria, Australia. In 1914 Robin volunteered but was inexplicably rejected. Not to be deterred he went to England and applied to join the RFC. Again he was rejected - because of his size: he was 6ft 8ins tall. So he joined the RFA in July 1916 and served as a Lieutenant throughout the Somme battles. Whilst attached to the 9th Scots Guards at the Butte de Warlencourt in November 1916 he was awarded the MC when he assisted in capturing many German guns. In 1917 he reapplied to join the RFC and by early 1918 was flying over France with C flight of 49th Squadron as an observer. Whilst returning from a reconnaissance and bombing mission on 9 May 1918 his plane was shot down. His body was never found and in 1923 members of his family came to France to try and find where he was buried. With the help of members of his squadron and local people they found bomb pieces similar to those carried by Robin’s plane and aircraft wreckage by a crater at Caix near Villers Bretonneux. Back in Australia in October 1924 the expanding railway reached Ultima and a name was needed for the new station. Robin’s mother, Margaret, hung a sign over the station which said ‘Robin Vale’ (‘farewell Robin’ in Latin). The mother’s tribute to her dead son was eventually accepted as the name for the new township which, after initial hardships, prospered. In 1977 Alan Wood the local MP visited Villers Bretonneux and the links between the two townships were formed.
Cuttle is commemorated on the Arras Flying Services Memorial (qv).
To the left of the car park is the beautifully maintained local War Memorial with a stone Memorial to the Australians in front and a sunburst gate.
Return to the crossroads with the D1029 and turn right. Continue to the turning to the D23.
[NOTE. This is the start point for Itinerary Five, the American, Canadian and French actions of 1918. See page 289]
Drive to the parking area by the local cemetery on the right and pull in as near as possible to the small entrance at the far end.
• Villers Bretonneux Local Cemetery Allied Graves (GPS: 49.87051 2.52085), Demarcation Stone 16.1 miles/10 minutes/Map 1/18/GPS: 49.87059 2.52598
Just inside the wall is a CWGC plot containing 6 graves from 1918, 4 of them Australian.
Walk to the marker some 300m along the road.
After the war the Touring Clubs of France and Belgium, supported by the Ypres League, erected 118 official demarcation stones (for a long time it was generally thought that there were 240 stones but detailed research by Rik Scherpenberg defined the number as 118 with a private stone added at Confrecourt later making 119) along a line agreed by Maréchal Pétain’s General Staff to be the limit of the German advance along the Western Front. ‘Here the Invader was brought to a standstill 1918’, is the inscription. Four still remain in the Somme area. The authors, knowing that the Germans had actually penetrated as far as ‘OP1’ on the far side of the village, asked the local Souvenir Français organisation why the stone had not been placed there. ‘They were there for less than 24 hours’, was the reply. Local historians now wish to move the stone to what they consider to be the correct site.
The Villers Bretonneux Demarcation Stone.
Extra Visit to the French National Cemetery at Marcelcave (Map 1/19, GPS: 49.86053 2.55919) Round trip: 3.8 miles. Approximate time: 20 minutes
Continue on the D1029(N29) to a right turn, signed to Cimetière Nationale de Marcelcave on the C203. Turn right and right again and stop at the cemetery on the left.
Marcelcave, ‘Les Buttes’, Cemetery, in the area where Jean Cocteau served, was created in 1916 after the 1 July Somme Battles. It contains 1,610 burials, many concentrated from other smaller cemeteries in 1922 and 1936. It was completely re-landscaped in 1980. Like John Masefield, Jean Cocteau, who had been exempted from military service in 1910 because of his poor health, volunteered for the Red Cross in 1914. Like Masefield, Cocteau continued his writing and other artistic activities during the war, notably writing Thomas l’Imposteur about the French Marines, from his experiences at Nieuport and Coxyde in Flanders. He moved to the Somme in June 1916 and joined Evacuation Hospital No 13 at Marcelcave on 28 June in time for the 1 July Offensive. It was one of the most important French hospitals on the front and a great rail connection. From 28 June to 11 September 27,211 wounded passed through it, of which 4,170 were retained for further treatment, 829 of whom died – hence the formation of the cemetery. During his stay at the hospital, Cocteau wrote regularly to his mother, describing the hospital as ‘le district des plaintes’. He comments on the number of aeroplanes (‘Brouillard épais tissé par mille avions’ – thick fog, interlaced with 1,000 aeroplanes) and takes many photographs on Kodak film. On 16 July he is distressed by the death of Josselin de Rohan, ‘mort tout près de nous’ (killed very close to us) on 14 July. Rohan was the son of the Dowager Duchess of Rohan and brother of Marie Murat. On 27 July Cocteau left the Somme to travel to Italy and to continue work on such diverse projects as the ballet Parade and the revue Le Mot. At Christmas time that year he recalled the horrors he had seen and described, in his poem No l 1916, a ‘war crèche’ where the baby Jesus is all alone because the Three Kings were fighting, Mary was working at a hospital, Joseph guarded a road, the ox had been eaten, the donkey carried a machine gun, the Star was a signal and all the shepherds were dead and buried.
At the high tide of the German offensive of 1918 Marcelcave ended up some 300 yards behind German lines.
Return to the marker stone and pick up the main itinerary.
French National Cemetery, Marcelcave
Return to the crossroads and turn right on the D23 signed to the Australian Memorial which was widened in 2014 to take the increasing volume of traffic on ANZAC Day. Stop by the Memorial.
• Australian National Memorial, Interpretative Centre & Fouilloy CWGC Military Cemetery Villers Bretonneux/RB/17.3 miles/35 minutes/Map 1/11/12/OP/ABT4/GPS: 49.88613 2.50819
NOTE. In April 2007 the Australian Government (qv) announced that they were providing $2.8 million to commence plans for a major Interpretative Centre near the Memorial. Further funding will become available as the project progresses. This was reinforced in 2014 by Prime Minister Tony Abbott who confirmed that the Centre, built behind the Memorial and named after Gen Sir John Monash, would open on Anzac Day 2018. Designed by Cox Architecture, it will provide a leading-edge integrated multimedia experience and tell the story of the extraordinary efforts of the 290,000 Australians who served on the Western Front with distinction. It will offer an evocative and educational experience for visitors of all nationalities and will honour Australian service and sacrifice in France and Belgium during the First World War.
Outside the Cemetery are CGS/H Signboards. When the beautiful old avenue of hornbeam trees that led up to the Memorial was thought to have outgrown its position it was replaced with ‘France Fontaine’, a denser and more compact variety of hornbeam. It was an extraordinary coincidence that the two Australian brigades which encircled Villers Bretonneux should meet in the early hours of 25 April 1918 because three years earlier on that morning, then a Sunday, the Australian Imperial Forces had landed at Gallipoli. What happened on that terrible day lives on in the nation’s memory, and every year young Australians make their way down to the Gallipoli Peninsula to commemorate what came to be known as ANZAC Day (see Major and Mrs Holts Battlefield Guide to Gallipoli). This site, of such emotional importance to Australia, is fast rivalling Gallipoli as the destination of choice to celebrate ANZAC Day by travelling Australians, many of them young back-packers and some 6,000 visitors are expected for 2018 (and until the end of the 1980s Australian veterans regularly visited the village at this time).
Australian National Memorial & Fouilloy CWGC Cemetery, Villers Bretonneux.
Here is the Australian National Memorial which commemorates 10,797 Australians who gave their lives on the Somme and other sectors of the Western Front and have no known grave. The Cemetery, known as Fouilloy Cemetery, has 1,085 UK, 770 Australian, 263 Canadian, 4 South Africans and 2 New Zealand burials. There are some memorable private inscriptions on the Australian graves, which merit careful reading, e.g. Pte C.J. Bruton, 34th AIF, age 22, 31 March 1918 [II.C.5/7], ‘He died an Australian hero, the greatest death of all’; Pte A.L. Flower, 5th AIF, 29 July 1918 [III.B.6.], ‘Also Trooper J.H. Flower, wounded at Gallipoli, buried at sea 05.5.1915’. In VI.AB.20 lies Jean Brillant, VC, MC, 22nd Bn French-Canadian, age 22, 10 August 1918. His headstone, engraved in French, records that he volunteered in Quebec and ‘Fell gloriously on the soil of his ancestors. Good blood never lies.’ His wonderful citation is in the Cemetery Report. There is a hospital named after Brillant in Quebec. Within the lefthand hedge at the edge of the lawn before the main Memorial, there is a Ross Bastiaan bronze Plaque, unveiled on 30 August 1993 by the Governor General of Australia. From this point the heights on the left can be seen, with the tall chimney of the Colette brickworks near which the Red Baron was shot down.
Unveiled by King George VI on 22 July 1938, the impressive main Memorial, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, consists of a wall carrying the names of the missing and a 100ft-high central tower which can be climbed with due caution. If the gate to the tower is locked the key may be obtained from the Gendarmerie on the D1029 at Villers Bretonneux, though during the 100th Anniversary years this policy may change. If you intend to go up, allow an extra 20 minutes. The memorial was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and, due to delays occasioned by lack of funds, it was the last of the Dominion memorials to be inaugurated. The original plan for the Memorial had included a 90ft-high archway, but this was omitted, presumably for financial reasons. It bears the scars of World War II bullets (deliberately retained as an historical reminder) and the top of the tower was struck by lightning on 2 June 1978 and had to be extensively renovated. By facing directly away from the memorial, the cathedral and the Perret Tower in Amiens can be seen on a clear day. How near the Germans came! The war correspondent Philip Gibbs described how,
“The Germans came as near to Amiens as Villers-Bretonneux on the low hills outside. Their guns had smashed the railway station of Longueau, which to Amiens is like Clapham Junction to Waterloo. Across the road was a tangle of telephone wires, shot down from their posts. For one night nothing – or next to nothing – barred the way, and Amiens could have been entered by a few armoured cars. Only small groups of tired men, the remnants of strong battalions, were able to stand on their feet, and hardly that.”
Headstone of Jean Brillant, VC
Later he reported:
“Foch said ‘I guarantee Amiens’. French cavalry, hard pressed, had come up the northern part of our line. I saw them riding by, squadron after squadron, their horses wet with sweat. To some I shouted out ‘Vivent les Poilus’ emotionally, but they turned and gave me ugly looks. They were cursing the English, I was told afterwards, for the German break-through. ‘Ces sacrés Anglais!’ Why couldn’t they hold their lines?”
Gibbs acknowledges that:
“Amiens was saved by the counterattacks of the Australians, and especially by the brilliant surprise attack at night on Villers-Bretonneux under the generalship of Monash.”
In one of the strange coincidences of war, Gibbs was relieved to bump, quite accidentally, into his ‘kid’ brother Arthur who had become lost from his unit and was bringing up his field guns towards Amiens. ‘I had never expected to see him alive again, but there he was looking as fresh as if he had just had a holiday in Brighton.’
Continue on the D23 to Fouilloy. Turn right at the T junction with the church onto the D1 and follow signs to Péronne and ‘Toutes Directions’ towards Corbie. After some 200m there is a sign to the D71 to the right.
Extra Visit to the Private Memorial to Capt Mond & Lt Martyn (Map Side 1/20a, GPS: 49.91158 2.57892), Australian Memorial Park (Map 1/24a, GPS: 49.89977 2.58161), Memorials at Le Hamel/RB (Map 1/24b, GPS: 49.90005 2.56875). Round trip: 11.00 miles. Approximate time: I hour 15 minutes
Turn right, signed Hamelet on the D71 and continue to the centre of the village.
This is ABT5. Some 60 new British Mark V tanks and 4 re-supply tanks of the 5th Tank Brigade assembled here on 3 July 1918 and at 1030 moved south-east to their start points for the battle of le Hamel due to begin at 0310 the following morning, the attack to a first approximation being in your direction of travel. As an entirely Australian idea proposed by Monash, and executed solely under Australian auspices, the success of the operation was a major boost to Australian self-belief. Having trained the infantry and tanks together and making maximum use of artillery and aircraft, the Australians saw Monash’s plan as a blueprint for all future allied success. The action was over in under 100 minutes. Hamel was taken and 2,000 Germans were killed or captured while Australian casualties were some 1,400.
Continue towards Vaire.
In Vaire Communal Cemetery (GPS: 49.91320 2.54291) are four Australian soldiers of 8 August 1918 buried together.
Note that the ‘Red Baron Chimney’ may now be seen at 11 o’ clock on the horizon to the left.
Continue to Vaire and turn right towards le Hamel on the D71.
It was to the right of this road at Pear Trench that Private Harry Dalziel, a Lewis Gunner of the 15th AIF, won the VC, capturing a German machine gun and killing two. He was twice wounded in the action but survived until 1965.
Continue through le Hamel to the T junction by the local War Memorial and turn left. Follow the road to the left signed to Bouzencourt on the C7. Continue to the memorial on the left (4.9 miles).
The Memorial is just before the village and surrounded by a small, well-tended garden. The French inscription translates, “To the memory of Capt Francis Mond, RFA and RAF, age and Lt Edgar Martyn RAF of 57th Squadron who fell gloriously in this area battling against three German aeroplanes on 15 May 1918. Per ardua ad astra.” They were flying their DH4 after attacking ammunition dumps at Bapaume and were brought down at 1250 by Lt Johannes Janzen of Jasta 6, whose Fokker DR.I had been shot down on 9 May by 209 Squadron but survived. Janzen scored 13 victories before he was brought down again during a dogfight on 9 June 1918 with a SPAD during which he shot off his own propeller. He lived until the 1980s.
The dogfight which brought down Mond and Martyn was witnessed by 31st Aust Bn and one of their officers, Lt A.H. Hill, MC, went out under fire, extricated and identified their bodies. He then had them sent down to Bn HQ by river and their personal effects were sent on to Mond’s family. Strangely, the bodies which had been escorted down the river, then seemed to disappear. An extensive search was undertaken by the Australians, by 57 Squadron and the CWGC prompted by Mond’s Mother, who wrote to every officer and NCO who might have any information, and visited over thirty cemeteries, keeping in touch throughout with Martyn’s wife. Her efforts bore fruit in 1922 when she became convinced that two named graves in Doullens Communal Cemetery Extension No. 2 (qv) actually contained the bodies of her son and of Martyn. One grave was exhumed, watched by Mrs Mond and the father of the man named therein, Capt J.V. Aspinall. The body was indeed found to contain Mond so the adjoining grave was opened and contained Martyn, not the named Lt P.V. de la Cour, whose grave turned out to be the next one. Capt Aspinall is now commemorated on the Arras Memorial.
Memorial to Capt Mond & Lt Martin RAF, Bouzencourt
In 1919 Mond’s father Emile had bought the land here where his son’s plane had crashed and erected the monument you see today and surrounded it with chains supported by stone pillars, within which enclosure he planted trees, shrubs and flowers. The family continued to visit regularly, the last recorded visit being by Mond’s sister in 1951. As the family then became untraceable the Commune of Hamel adopted it and they maintain it still. During WW2 the Cross of Lorraine and letter V were scratched on the stone, probably by the Resistance.
Edgar Martyn was a Canadian and came to Europe with the 19th Bn Can Inf before being commissioned into the RFC as a Lt Observer on 12 February 1918.
On the heights beyond the Memorial can be seen the tall chimney of the brickworks in the area where the Baron von Richthofen came down.
Continue to the bottom of the road to turn and return to le Hamel. On entering the village turn left uphill following the sign to Monument Australien, and left again.
There is a barrier and a sign with the park’s opening hours: 0900-1800
1 April-31 Oct and 0900-1600 1 Nov-31 March. Contact the Mayor on +(0)3 22 96 88 06.
Continue to the large parking area on the right.
The Australian Corps Memorial Park, ABT16/OP/GPS: 49.89977 2.58161
The land for this Memorial was acquired by the Australians on the 80th anniversary of the Battle of le Hamel. Following its 2008 renovation and redesign it is now a dignified, informative and pleasantly landscaped area.
Stand in the open shelter and look over the Valley of the Somme. At 1 o’ clock is the CWGC Cemetery Dive Copse (qv). At 12 o’clock on the skyline is the Australian 3rd Division Memorial (the 3rd and 4th Divisions defended this area during the battle of Amiens in 1918), at 10 o’ clock is the chimney of the Richthofen crash site brickworks, at 9 o’ clock are the twin towers of Corbie church, from which broad direction the Australian attack came.
On 4 July 1918 this was a German position known as the Wolfsberg and was on the final objective line for the assault. Apart from being a great success, a novel aspect of the attack was that the Australians were re-supplied by parachute. The choice of 4 July for the attack had been influenced by the hoped for participation of the recently arrived American 131st and 132nd Regiments, but Pershing ruled this out, though four companies did take part incurring 100 casualties. It was from these positions that the Australians set out on 8 August in the Allied offensive that marked the beginning of the end for the Kaiser, a day that Ludendorff called Der Schwarze Tag (The Black Day).
A path then leads towards the main Memorial and recreated trenches, from which the Australian Memorial at Villers Bretonneux may be seen to the right. Along it are Information Panels with maps, photos and individual stories about the campaign and the VCs and MoHs of:
1. Pte Henry (Harry) Dalziel (qv). Driver Dalziel’s VC was gazetted on 17 August 1918 and was for his action as a Lewis gunner, who after silencing the enemy guns in one direction, dashed at gun fire from another direction. There, using his revolver, he killed or captured the entire crew and gun, despite being severely wounded in the hand, finally capturing the final objective. He was wounded again, in the head, and had inspired his comrades and saved many lives. The action took place at Pear Trench (qv).
2. Lance Cpl Thomas (Jack) Axford, MM, 22 years old, was awarded his VC (gazetted on 17 August 1918) for his action in clearing Vaire and Hamel Woods of German defenders. Single-handedly he entered a German trench and took the machine gunners in it, killing 10 and taking 6 prisoners.
3. Cpl Thomas Pope, who served with Coy E of 131st Inf, 33rd US Inf div, the first soldier to be awarded the Medal of Honour in WW1. It was for his action at le Hamel on 4 July 1918 when going alone he rushed a machine gun nest, killed several of the crew by bayonet and held off others until reinforcements arrived and captured them.
The Memorial. The shiny black tiles on the original 1998 Memorial started to drop off shortly after it was inaugurated and in 2006 it was in such a bad state of repair that plans were made to demolish and rebuild it. In March 2007 the Australian Government announced that they were allocating $7.9 million towards a ‘facelift’ for the Memorial. It was re-inaugurated on 8 November 2008. The new Memorial, maintained by the CWGC, is constructed as three blocks of curved granite set in a semi-circle with the Australian Forces sunburst badge in the centre block. It bears a quotation from the speech of French PM Georges Clemenceau of 7 July 1918, “… I have seen the Australians, I have looked in their faces. I know that these men will fight alongside us again until the cause for which we are all fighting is safe for us and our children.”
Further repairs were required in 2014/5.
Australian National Memorial, le Hamel
Beyond the Memorial is a section of original trenches. On the horizon beyond them the distinctive spire of La Motte Church, on the N29 some 2 miles away, may be seen.
Early in August the Australian 1st Division moved down to the Somme from Ypres and continued the chase to the east. Commanding the 3rd Brigade was Brigadier Gordon Bennett, the youngest Brigadier in the Australian Army, who would later be immersed in controversy over his conduct following the fall of Singapore in WW2.
Return towards le Hamel.
On descending towards the village the top of the Australian National Memorial at Villers Bretonneux may be seen straight ahead.
Turn left and then right and stop by the church on the left.
Remnants of Australian trenchlines, behind the Memorial.
In front of the church is a Ross Bastiaan commemorative Bronze Plaque (GPS: 49.90005 2.56875) about the Battle of le Hamel, sponsored by Hugh and Marcus Bastiaan, John and Hazelle Laffin and Carbone-Lorraine Aust. On a wall to the right of the Church is a May/June 1945 Plaque with an anchor to the Senegalese of the 4th Col Inf Div (c.f. similar Plaque in Itinerary 5 at Mailly Raineval) who had a medical facility nearby. This is rue du General Monash.
Return to the D23, turn right and rejoin Itinerary Three.
Ross Bastiaan Plaque, le Hamel
Plaque to 4th Col Inf Div, le Hamel
Continue into Corbie, crossing the River Somme en route and follow signs to Centre Ville passing the picturesque, fairy castle-like Hôtel de Ville and war memorial on the left.
Corbie. The Château was built in 1863 and bought by the town in 1923. The Hotel de Ville and surrounds have recently been restored and landscaped into a pleasant park.
After 100m park in the Place de la République (GPS: 49.90854 22.51219).
Note. On Friday there is a market in the square (now also beautifully landscaped) so it will not be possible to park here. To the left is the splendid ‘Porte d’Honneur’ to the Abbey. The key to the church is held in the Tourist Office on the corner. Its opening hours vary according to the season, but it is usually closed on Sundays - other than in July and August - and often on Monday mornings. It shuts for lunch from 1200-1430. Over the road is the excellent restaurant La Table d’Agathe with superb regional dishes. Closed Sunday night and Monday and the first two weeks in July. Tel: + (0)3 22 96 96 27.
Walk along rue Charles de Gaulle to the church.
Just before it is the restaurant Le Fauquet’s (closed Sun and Mon evening). Tel: +(0)3 22 48 41 17. Good choice of menus, fast service if required.
Continue towards the Church, passing the school. This is called ‘Rose de Picardie’. Continue to the Church.
• Congreve Plaque, Corbie Church/19.7 miles/10 minutes/Map 1/10/GPS: 49.90878 2.51026
Corbie has a fascinating history. It was attacked by the Normans in 896AD, in 1415 Henry V, desperately seeking a Somme crossing, was attacked here by a small force of French Knights, in 1475 the town was taken and burnt by Louis X1, in 1636 it was taken by the Spanish who were chased out by Louis XIII and Richelieu, and it was badly damaged in the French Revolution. In the distinctive twelfth-century church of Saint-Etiennes, whose architecture shows the transition between Roman and Gothic styles, is a Plaque, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, to ‘Billy’ Congreve VC (qv).
Return to the Place de la République.
Across the square at No 8 is the delightful ‘Maison d’Hôte’ Le Macassar (see also Tourist Information below). Five sumptuous rooms/suites furnished in period (from ‘Colonial’ through ‘Art Nouveau’ and ‘Art Deco’) style but with state of the art plumbing in a superb private residence which was extensively renovated in the 1920s and ‘30s. Hosts Miguel and Ian encourage guests (but no young children please – some of the antiques are too precious) to makes themselves at home in the glorious public rooms and courtyard. Tel: +(0) 3 22 48 40 04. E-mail: bookings@lemacassar.com Website: www.lemacassar.com
From the Square take the D1 signed to Péronne, continue past the Hospice de Corbie on the left. Turn right following the green CWGC sign. Park at the cemetery.
• Corbie Communal Cemetery & Extension/20.4 miles/10 minutes/ Map 1/20/GPS: 49.91528 2.52037
Just at the top of the steps leading to the cemetery, a headstone is inscribed, ‘Major W. La Touche Congreve, VC, DSO, MC, Rifle Brigade. 20 July 1916. Légion d’Honneur. In remembance of my beloved husband and in glorious expectation.’
Congreve, affectionately known as ‘Billy’, was the VC winner son of a VC winner father, Lt Gen Sir Walter Congreve VC, CB, MVO (who was commanding XIII Corps on the Somme at the time of his son’s death). A conspicuously brave, and immensely popular officer, Billy Congreve kept a forthright diary until 17 January 1916, (which has been edited by Terry Norman as Armageddon Road). He was killed on 20 July 1916 at Longueval by a sniper (qv). He had been married on 1 June 1916 to Pamela Maude. Her poignant message on her husband’s headstone refers to the fact that she was pregnant. She christened their daughter Gloria. A fellow officer had described Billy as ‘absolutely glorious’.
Roses de Picardie School, Corbie.
Memorial Plaque to Maj William La Touche Congreve, in Corbie Church
Corbie Comm Cem with headstone of ‘Billy’ Congreve, VC, DSO, MC
On the headstone of Lt F.C. Sangster of the R Warwicks the personal message is on a bronze Plaque. Through the archway is the grave of CWGC worker, George Hill, 1946.
Return to the Hospice junction, turn right and continue to the female statue at the Y junction.
• Colette Statue/20. 8 miles/GPS: 49.91668 2.51662
The statue, known as ‘Colette’ (after the young citizen of Corbie who founded the Clarisse Religious Order), was unveiled in the presence of the Bishop of Amiens and the Curé of Corbie to commemorate citizens of the town who were killed in World War I. Colette managed to found seventeen monasteries in her life-time, during the difficult times of the Hundred Years’ War.
Statue of Colette, Corbie
Extra Visit to Heilly Station CWGC Cemetery & Private Memorial to L Cpl O’Neill/Map 1/22/23/GPS: 49.94080 2.54203
Round trip: 4.8 miles. Approximate time: 25 minutes
Take the left fork on the D23 and after approximately 0.8 miles, fork right on the D120 signed Méricourt l’Abbé. After 1.5 miles (driving parallel to the R Somme and railway to the left) turn right following green CWGC signs at a crossroads. (Heilly ‘Station’ is signed to the left).
The railway ran through here from Amiens to the front and Heilly was the site of one of the Casualty Clearing Stations to which ambulance trains were due to run after the battle of 1 July 1916. As you turn right, the station house can be seen on the C11 to the left. This is a particularly lovely cemetery – in a quiet, rural setting, with beautiful flowers and shrubs – and unusual, partly due to the vastly greater number of casualties that arrived at the CCS than were anticipated. Men had to be buried two or three to a grave – a rare occurrence in a British cemetery. There was not, therefore, room to engrave the men’s regimental badges, and so many of them are incorporated into the colonnaded brick wall on the right as you enter. There is also a Private Memorial erected by his comrades to L Cpl J. P. O’Neill of 13th NSW battalion, AIF, who was killed on 6 January 1917 when a grenade accidentally exploded. He had been recommended for a Military Medal.
It was to this CCS that Henry Williamson’s fictional hero Phillip Maddison was brought and there is a totally realistic description of Maddison’s wounding after going over the top at Ovillers, his crawling painfully back to find basic treatment at the First Aid Post, then being wheeled on a stretcher to the Advanced Dressing Station at Albert, being encouraged by an RC Padre, given an injection and then lifted into a Ford ambulance and driven to Heilly. There he ‘was carried into a hut for officers’, laid on a rubber sheet and covered with a blanket, fed tea, bread and butter and jam and given ‘the latest number of The Bystander’. This was the magazine which carried the popular cartoons of Bruce Bairnsfather, known as Fragments from France and which featured ‘Old Bill’ (see page 93).
Return to the Colette statue and continue with the main itinerary.
Heilly Station CWGC Cemetery, showing Private Memorial to L/Cpl O’Neill
Keep to the right on the D1 signed to Péronne and Bray, passing on the right a picnic site (Pointe de Vue de Sainte Colette) with tables and benches and a superb view over the River Somme. Continue to the brickworks on the left with a tall chimney.
• Von Richthofen Crash Site, Vaux-sur-Somme/22.5 miles/5 minutes/Map 1/21/GPS: 49.93248 2.54136
The chimney, now crumbling somewhat at the top, is visible for miles around and makes a good reference point. The precise cause and location of the Baron’s crash is still open to some debate, but many qualified experts place it in the vicinity of the brickworks.
The ‘Red Baron’, Baron Manfred von Richthofen, was credited with eighty kills. His squadron, Jasta II, was known as the ‘Flying Circus’ because of the bright colours of their planes. Richthofen’s own Fokker triplane DR-1 425/17 was vermillion. They were based at Cappy, just south of the River Somme and south east of Bray. On Sunday 21 April 1918 the squadron went up at mid-morning, after Richthofen had posed for a photograph for a mechanic, despite the superstition held by many pilots that being photographed just before a mission meant that one would not return. The Baron did not. After an active dog fight with British RE 8s and Camels led by Capt A. Roy Brown, a Canadian with eleven kills, von Richthofen crashed near this spot, coming down from your right. Brown claimed the victory. So did Australian Lewis gunners of 14th Artillery Brigade near Vaux. Subsequent research gives credence to the Australian claim. Even the angle at which the fatal bullet entered the Baron’s chest – from below, not above (as Brown was flying) – points to a hit from the ground. What is indisputable is that Richthofen’s apparel and possessions and his red tri-plane were soon stripped, as by a plague of locusts, by souvenir hunters. Many items found their way to Australia and several have since been donated to the Australian War Memorial. Von Richthofen was buried in Bertangles (Map 1/5, Western Approach) on 22 April, with ceremony, by the Australians. In 1925 his remains were re-interred in Fricourt German Cemetery (Map J34) and from there were transferred to his family home in Schweidnitz, in eastern Germany. Contemporary accounts claim that only the skull had been removed and P. J. Carisella, American author of a book on the Baron’s death, states that he unearthed the rest of the skeleton in Bertangles in 1969 and that he presented it to the German Military Air Attaché in Paris.
The brickworks near where Manfred von Richthofen (the ‘Red Baron’) was shot down
In the Kent Battle of Britain Museum, Hawkinge, www.kbobm.org there is an excellent von Richtofen display, including a replica of his triplane (made for the film Flying Boys) and a realistic maquette showing the area of the brickworks.
Continue. Park by the memorial on the left.
• Australian 3rd Division Memorial/24.3 miles/5 minutes/Map 1/23a/GPS: 49.93605 2.57959
The obelisk is similar to the 1st Division Memorial at Pozières (Itinerary One). It lists the battle honours of the Division, including The Windmill (Pozières), Bray and Proyart (both the latter are seen on this Itinerary). It stands pretty well on the final line the Germans reached by August 1918 which ran roughly north to south across the road here. The Division, raised in Australia, was formed on Salisbury Plain in July 1916 and reached Flanders under General Monash in December that year and the Somme in March 1918. The Memorial overlooks the ground across the other side of the Somme where four Australian Divisions (2, 3, 4 and 5) attacked roughly parallel to your direction of travel in the early morning fog of 8 August 1918. This side of the Somme were the British 18th and 58th Divisions. It was a remarkable assault, with fine co-operation between infantry, cavalry, tanks and aircraft. Determined efforts had been made to keep preparations for the attack secret and it was launched without a preliminary bombardment.
The British front (the Fourth Army – III Corps under Butler where you are now, to the south, the Australian Corps under Monash and then the Canadian Corps under Currie) stretched about 23km south from around Albert which is over to your north front. The unsuspecting German Second Army of six weak divisions, without a single tank, were suddenly confronted by 360 heavy tanks, 96 Whippet light tanks, 1,900 aeroplanes (against 365) and accompanying bombardment from 2,650 guns and a total force of 16 divisions. In his book, Wings of War, Rudolf Stark, serving with Jagdstaffel 35, tells how he flew over the front of 8 August, and how the sky was full of aircraft:
“There are fights in the upper air. There are fights in the lower air. The numerical superiority of the enemy gives him the advantage, so it does not matter where we fight …. But the ground swarms with men in brown. They crouch in every shell hole and run forward along every hollow. Grey squat things roll through their midst – tanks. Here, there, everywhere.”
Except at the extremities, an advance of more than 8km was achieved everywhere. Although the Germans recovered quickly, and the attack lost its momentum after the first day, for Ludendorff, the German Commander, it was the final straw that broke the back of his determination to win.
In Germany more than 1.5 million workers were on strike, the spreading influenza epidemic was weakening his armies, the civilian population was starving and Ludendorff was suffering from nervous exhaustion. Although the gains by the Allies on 8 August did not compare to the territorial conquests of the Germans in their March Offensive, the ‘Kaiserschlacht’, the shock of 8 August loosened the Germans’ grasp upon the initiative and it passed to Foch.
Around the Memorial are Information Panels, detailing the Division’s casualties on the Western Front – 6,200 killed, 24,000 wounded, etc. By looking across the Somme River towards the high ground the Australian Memorial at le Hamel can be seen and the church on the horizon straight ahead is La Motte Warfusée to the right of the windmills.
Continue on the D1, passing on the right a sign to CWGC Dive Copse Cemetery (Map 1/23b, GPS: 49.92902 2.60492).
This was begun during the 1916 battles and is the cemetery that can be seen from the Australian Memorial at Le Hamel.
Continue to the next cemetery on the right.
Memorial to Australian 3rd Division, Sailly le Sec
• Beacon CWGC Cemetery/26.0 miles/5 minutes/Map 1/23c/GPS: 49.93700 2.61650
The Cemetery report here records that the
“… first fighting in this part of the Somme took place on 26/27 March 1918 when the Third Army withdrew to a line between Albert and Sailly-le-Sec. This line was held until 4 August when it was advanced nearly to Sailly-Laurette and on 8 August, the first day of ‘The Battle of Amiens’, Sailly-Laurette and the road to Morlancourt were disengaged.”
Burials began here as the Third Army withdrew before the German onslaught of March 1918. Others were made by the 18th Div Burial Officer on 15 August. The cemetery was then greatly increased after the Armistice by the concentration of 600 graves from the battlefields and small cemeteries around. There are many almost unbearably poignant personal messages on the headstones here and some proud parental statements in the Cemetery Report of sons’ academic and career achievements. The Cemetery was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and named after a brick beacon on the ridge. There are some 570 UK burials and 190 Australian. At 9 o’clock the Golden Madonna at Albert may be seen and to her right on the high ground the Thiepval Memorial.
Continue over the crossroads with the D42 and turn right at the next crossroads onto the C2, signed to Chipilly and Cerisy. We probably need to point out here that road numbers on the ground do not always match the numbers given on maps!
This road runs down towards the Somme at Chipilly where a spur (roughly a direct extension of this road) juts south into a bend of the river. On 8 August 1918 the Allied assault south of the Somme made advances of 8km or more in the day, but at Chipilly village and on the spur the Germans made a stand. 58th (London) Division supported by 131st Infantry Regiment of the 33rd (American) Division made a joint assault here at 1730 hours on 9 August. The Americans lined up parallel to, and 50m to the right of, this road, having had to march in double-time for 7km to reach the start-line. In the following action, supported by the 4th (Australian) Division attacking the village from south of the river, both Chipilly and the spur were captured – the latter, it is said, by a six-man Australian patrol. Corporal Jake Allex of 33rd Division won the Congressional Medal of Honour for single-handedly destroying a German machine-gun post, killing five of the enemy and taking fifteen prisoners. Allex survived the war and died in 1959. In 2006 a short documentary film called ‘Corporal Jake’ was made about his action.
Continue downhill on the C306 to the church road junction in Chipilly.
Beacon CWGC Cemetery
• 58th (London) Division Memorial/29.0 miles/5 minutes/Map 1/26/GPS: 49.90889 2.64946
There is a CRP Signboard beside the Memorial. This striking Memorial, sculpted by Henri-Désiré Gauque, 1858-1927, a well-known French sculptor who excelled at animal figures, is of a soldier saying goodbye to his dying horse and is reminiscent of the famous Mantania painting Farewell Old Man. Unusually it commemorates not only 58th Division, but also the French, Canadian and Australian action of 8 August. The Americans were not mentioned, presumably because on 8 August they were in reserve. When the Australians came to enter the village from the south they found that the Germans had blown both bridges across the river. With typical Aussie ingenuity they took the girders from the longer bridge and balanced them on the piers of the shorter to restore the crossing.
Memorial to 58th London Division, Chipilly
[N.B.] Cérisy-Gailly Mil CWGC Cemetery (GPS: 49.90424 2.63174). By turning right downhill at the crossroads and continuing over the bridge towards Cérisy, (with picturesque views to each side over the Somme and its tranquil pools - paradise for fishermen) this Cemetery may be reached. Continue through Cérisy village, following signs to Cérisy-Gailly French National Cemetery, with a British Communal Plot attached and to Cérisy-Gailly Mil Cem. This is beyond the Brit Com Plot and to the left.
In it (in D13) is buried Squadron Commander John (‘Jack’) Petre, RFC, 13 April 1918. Before his accidental death (for details see Elsie & Mairi Go to War by Diane Atkinson) this distinguished pilot was due to marry Mairi Chisholm, one of the famous “Two at Pervyse”.
Entrance to Cérisy-Gailly CWGC Cemetery
Turn left past the church and continue uphill on the C7, signed to Etinehem and almost immediately there is the local cemetery on the right with good parking.
• Chipilly Communal Cemetery & Extension/29.1 miles/5 minutes/Map 1/28a/GPS: 49.91066 2.64999
In the Cemetery are a number of British and French military graves from July 1916. The plot was started in August 1915 and used until March 1916. It contains fifty-five UK burials (including Rifleman E. F. Slade, QVR, who was drowned whilst swimming in the Somme, 12 August 1915) and four French. The Extension was used between March 1916 and February 1917 and contains 31 graves. The Cemetery has extensive views over the Somme Valley from the back wall.
Continue.
The route that you are following (which has some delightful bucolic views over the Somme Pools) is that fought along by the American 131st Infantry from 9 to 19 August 1918. Keep to the left of the river and drive to Etinehem village. This was taken by the Americans and Australians on 13 August.
At the junction with the V2 take the C2 signed to Albert along Rue du Moulin. Continue following signs to the French National Cemetery.
Chipilly Communal & Extension Cemetery
French National Cemetery, La Côte 80 (Hill 80)
• French National Cemetery, ‘La Côte 80’ (Hill 80)/32.3 miles/10 minutes/Map M6/GPS: 49.93810 2.69095
As has happened with most of the French cemeteries on the Somme, this is now landscaped ‘à l’Anglaise’, with flower beds in front of the rows of graves. This is a concentration cemetery, which contains 955 French burials and 49 British, as well as the tomb of Abbé Thibaut, Chaplain to the 1st Infantry Regiment. He was a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, and was mortally wounded in the assault on Frégicourt on 26 September 1916 (a night attack near Combles). He died at Maricourt the following day. The monument, erected by the officers, NCOs and men of the Régiment de Cambrai, bears a Plaque with the Abbé’s portrait. To the right and left of it are two rows of Australians from August 1918. The other CWGC graves, of mixed nationality and units, are near the flagpole in the centre and are from 1916. Like many French cemeteries, Hill 80 was the site of a military hospital. Serving there in 1916 was the French humanist writer, man of letters and other arts, and Member of the Académie Française, Georges Duhamel. Duhamel, born in Paris in 1884, studied medicine before being drawn into a literary and artistic life. However, when war broke out, he joined the 110th Regiment of Line as a medic. His experiences are described in Vie des Martyrs (1917) and Civilisation (which won the Prix Goncourt in 1918). In the latter he describes the area around Hill 80: the churned up mud made by 2,200 horses being taken daily to drink from the Somme, the tented city marked by vivid red crosses, the circle formed by 30 balloons, the continual puffs of smoke from lines of artillery fire. His adjutant warns him,
“You will see passing here more wounded than you have hairs on your head, and more blood flowing than there is water in the canal. All those who fall between Combles and Bouchavesnes are sent here.”
Continue to the D1 crossroads and turn right towards Bray. On entering the town go downhill to the German Cemetery (Cimetière Militaire Allemand/Deutscher Soldatenfriedhof) on the left and park near the boules pitch. Climb the steps to the cemetery.
• Bray German Cemetery/33.4 miles/10 minutes/Map M7/GPS: 49.94005 2.71319
Enclosed by a hedge are the 1,079 graves and 43 bodies in a mass grave. A new stone monument surmounted by a black cross bears the names of the missing. There are no flowers in this stark, sad cemetery, with its black crosses which bear four names. There are only three German cemeteries in the triangle formed by the D1029 Amiens-Albert-Bapaume road, the N336 Amiens-Villers Bretonneux-Assevillers road and the A1 Bapaume-Assevillers motorway. In the same triangle there are some eighty British CWGC Cemeteries.
Continue to the church in the town.
German Cemetery, Bray
• Bray/33.6 miles/RWC
Bray was the 1916 junction of Rawlinson’s Fourth Army to the north (the side of the river you are now on) and Fayolle’s Sixth Army to the south. An important administrative centre and railhead, it suffered badly from the attentions of German aeroplanes. In the March 1918 assault it was easily taken by the Germans on 26 March, due to a mix-up in Fifth Army orders. On the night of 23 August, 40th Battalion of 3rd (Australian) Division attacked along the river and recaptured it. Among the units simultaneously attacking along the road from Etinehem was the 15th (London) Regiment, otherwise known as the 1st Civil Service Rifles. It was commanded by Lt Col Rowland Feilding, DSO, whose book War Letters to A Wife, published in 1929, is one of the most telling personal accounts of the war. Bray was adopted by the town of Eastbourne after the war.
There are Commemorative Plaques in the nave of the church to Gen Girodon, Cdt XII DI, and to ‘Prétres Soldats’ [soldier priests] killed in the Bray area.
Extra Visit to Grove Town and the Bray group of cemeteries/Map M8, 9, 10, 11 Round trip: 4.9 miles. Approximate time: 25 minutes
This is the French National Cemetery of Bray-Sur-Somme (GPS: 49.94198 2.71737) in a plot at the rear of the local cemetery, completely renovated in 1990. It contains 1,044 French soldiers, of which 102 are in a mass grave, and one British soldier. Before it, on a well-kept garden and lawn, is a fine Poilu Memorial.
Continue, and take the second road to the right, following the green CWGC sign. Continue to the cemetery, signed to the left.
This is Bray Military Cemetery (GPS: 49.94721 2.71968), begun in April 1916 by fighting units and Field Ambulances. In September 1916, the front line having been pushed further east, it was used by XIV Corps main Dressing Station and in 1917, 5th, 38th and 48th CCS came forward and used it. In May 1918 the village and cemetery fell into enemy hands but were retaken by 40th Australian Bn on 24 August and used again. The Allied counter attack that opened the ‘Hundred Days’ began on 8 August 1918 in the area of the Australian 3rd Div Memorial that you visited earlier and by 21 August had reached here but of course trench lines are not straight! After the Armistice there were more concentrations and it now contains 739 UK burials, including Sgt M. Healy, DCM, MM and Bar and (the extremely rare) Albert Medal, of the 2nd Royal Munster Rifles, 31 Australians, 13 Indians, 3 Canadians, 2 South Africans, 79 unknown and, unusually, 8 Egyptian labourers. Most unusually the Indian and Egyptian labourers have their own plot to the right of the War Stone.
Poilu outside French National Cemetery, Bray
On 1 March 1917 Sgt Healy,
“… with a total disregard for his own personal safety and solely prompted by the desire to save his comrades, rushed to pick up a live bomb which had been thrown by a Private and which struck the parapet and rolled back into the trench near Lt Roe and the Private. Sgt Healy, fearing the party could not escape in time, made a most gallant effort to seize and hurl the bomb from the trench. It exploded, however, and mortally wounded him. This was the last of Sgt Healy’s many acts of gallantry and devotion to duty.”
Headstone of Sgt M Healy, DCM MM and Bar and Albert Medal, Bray Mil Cemetery
Healy died the following day of his wounds, age 25.
Turn round, return to the main road and turn right on the D329. Continue approximately 300 yards to a junction of 3 roads.
Each road leads to a Cemetery and after each one return to this spot to proceed to the next by following the signs (or GPS).
1. Grove Town; 2. Bray Vale; 3. Bray Hill.
1. Take the left fork. The road is tarmacked but pot-holed and narrow. Your sat-nav may be a bit confused at this point but keep straight on to the T junction, turn left and left again.
This remote cemetery needs determination to find but is well worth the effort as it is little visited.
Grove Town Cemetery (GPS: 49.96439 2.68542). This was designed by Sir Edward Lutyens. Among the interesting burials here is that of Maj Edmund Rochfort Street, DSO, 2nd Battalion the Sherwood Foresters who died of wounds on 15 October 1916. Age 40, born in London, Ontario, he was gazetted in 1898 as a Lieutenant in the Hampshire Regiment, served in India and the South African campaign, resigned 1906, gazetted Capt in the Sherwood Foresters October 1914. Also buried here is Sgt Leslie Coulson of the 2/2nd Londons (known as the ‘Two and Twopennies’), 8 October 1916. This unusual war poet, a professional journalist before the war, and whose collected poems (including the bitter Who Made the Law?) were published by his father as From an Outpost, was wounded near Lesboeufs in the same attack that killed Maj C. C. Dickens (qv). His family chose the closing words of Manoah’s elegy for his son Samson from Milton’s Samson Agonistes – ‘… nothing but well and fair, and what may quiet us in a death so noble’.
An unusual rank on a headstone here is that of Shoeing Smith Ernest Arthur Smither of the 21st (E of I) Lancers, 25 March 1917, age 30. Also buried here is Sgt Henry (‘Harry’) Cook, 12th Bn Yorks Regt, 9 January 1917, age 23. He played football for Middlesborough FC from 1913-1915.
The register records the fact that in September 1916 the 34th and 2/2nd Londons established a clearing station here (called locally ‘demi-lieue’) to deal with casualties from the Somme battlefields. It was moved in April and except for a few burials in August and September 1918 the cemetery was closed. It contains 1,366 burials from the UK, 14 Australians, 11 Newfoundlanders, 1 New Zealander, 1 French and, originally, 34 German prisoners who were removed in 1923. It was here, at 20th Inf Bde HQ, that Capt Martin’s ‘plasticine’ model (qv) of the ground threatened by the crucifix machine gun overlooking Mansel Copse was displayed.
Return.
Sgt Leslie Coulson, poet, buried in Grove Town CWGC Cemetery
2. This is Bray Vale British Cemetery (GPS: 49.95501 2.70768), attractively landscaped on two levels. It was begun in August 1918 and enlarged after the Armistice by the concentration of isolated graves. It contains 256 UK, 17 Australian, 3 Newfoundland, 1 Canadian and two unknown burials. On the lower level there are many burials unknown by name, but identified by Regiment, from 1 July to October 1916. Two burials of particular interest are ‘A Drummer of the Great War. South Lancashire Regt’ and Maj G. A. Gaffikin, RIR, killed on 1 July 1916, age 30 who has a quotation from Leigh Hunt’s Abou Ben Adhem on his headstone, ‘Write me as one that love[d] his fellow men’. This, and the following cemetery, were designed by A.J.S. Hutton.
Headstone of Sgt Leslie Coulson, Grove Town CWGC Cemetery
In the late evening sun the beautiful stone wall seems to glow with a yellow light.
Return.
3. This is Bray Hill British Cemetery (GPS: 49.95918 2.71702). This tiny Cemetery was made by 58th (London) Division on 31 August 1918 as they advanced from Corbie. It originally contained forty-one graves and after the Armistice sixty-three graves were concentrated here. The two German graves were later removed. It now has 102 UK (65 of the London Regt) and 2 Australian burials.
Return to the crossroads in Bray and rejoin Itinerary Three.
Bray Vale British Cemetery
Turn right onto the D329 direction A1/Montdidier and Proyart. Some 300m later cross the River Somme. Continue through Froissy and turn left into the car park at the large sign to the P’tit Train Museum.
• P’tit Train/Railway Museum, Froissy-Dompierre/35.1 miles/15 minutes (but allow at least an hour if you take a train ride)/ Map 1/34/GPS: 49.92271 2.72889
The Picardy Association for the Upkeep of Old Vehicles (APPEVA) has lovingly restored 7km of this 1914-18 narrow gauge (60cm) ‘portable’ Decauville track. The system was invented around 1880 by the industrialist Paul Decauville and adopted in 1888 by the French artillery to move guns and ammunition. Verdun, Toul, Epinal and Belfort all had a network connecting their forts to the main Citadel. The Froissy-Cappy line, of which this was a part, was capable of moving 1,500 tons of ammunition per day. Dompierre, at the other end of this stretch of the line, was captured by French Colonial troops on 1 July 1916. Life in and around the trenches at Dompierre in 1914 is described in detail in the letters of Captain F Belmont of the Chasseurs Alpins in ‘A Crusader of France’ published in 1917. He was killed in December 1915.
The present rail route was laid down for use by local industry and the tunnel constructed after the war. Rides can be taken on genuine World War I rolling stock (made for eight horses or forty men) pulled either by a World War I steam locomotive or a Maginot line diesel engine. The zig-zag climb up a steep incline, the haul up the 3km-long ramp, the journey through the 300m-long tunnel – all add to the excitement. 2006 was the P’tit Train’s 35th Anniversary. It is twinned with the Leighton Buzzard Railway.
The Museum has been extended and sophisticated and the entrance to the station is beside it. There is CGS/H Information Board here. Opening hours vary through the season but basically it is closed (other than for reserved groups from April to October) from end September to end May. Then it is open on Sundays in May, June and September and for the rest of the week in July and August. There are special ‘Steam Gala’ days. The fare includes entrance to the Railway Museum, which has the most comprehensive collection of 60cm railway material. Tel: +(0)3 22 83 11 89 for details of special steam days. E-mail: appeva@club-internet.fr www.appeva.perso.neuf.fr (with a wonderful video) Opening times and timetables are somewhat complicated, but basically the trains run from May-September. Please consult the website for details.
Continue on the D329 signed to Proyart.
WW1 steam P’tit Train, Froissy-Dompierre
The road from here to its junction beyond Proyart with the D1029 Amiens-Assevillers road, some 5km ahead, runs across the front of the Australian Division’s attack (from your right) of early August 1918. Following the dramatic success of the first day’s advance of some 10km on 8 August from the start line some 12km to your right, the next 2km – to where you now are – took almost two weeks. On 23 August the 1st (Australian) Division under General Glasgow attacked right to left across this road and in what is known as the Battle of Proyart, the Aussies captured the village of Chuignes (some 2.5km to your left ie. east), a 14in German naval gun and 2,000 prisoners.
Continue to a small junction and turn left following signs to the German Cemetery.
• German Cemetery, Proyart/36 miles/5 minutes/Map 1/28/GPS: 49.89382 2.71142
This is the third of the Cemeteries in the Amiens-Bapaume-Assevillers triangle (the others being Bray and Fricourt) and contains 4,643 burials. Stark black crosses, mostly with four names, bear the name, rank and date of death when known. They are interspersed with Jewish headstones. Most of the burials are from 1918. Unusually there does not appear to be a mass grave.
The infantry start line for the 1st Div 23 August attack was just beyond the back of the cemetery. To their immediate north was the Australian 3rd Division.
Return to the D329, continue and stop at the magnificent Memorial on the right.
German Cemetery, Proyart
• Proyart Miniature Arc de Triomphe Memorial/36.7 miles/10 minutes/Map 1/27/GPS: 49.88870 2.70522
This Memorial, almost incongruously impressive for such a small, rural village, is a replica of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Under the arch stands a Poilu, with the triumphant cry, ‘On les a’ inscribed at his feet. The great French rallying cry at Verdun was ‘On les aura’ (we’ll get ‘em’). Proyart’s Poilu says, ‘We’ve got ‘em!’ Beautifully executed bas relief sculptures flank each side of the arch, a miniature cannon stands on the lawn in front of it and the gateposts are surmounted by bronze Poilus’ helmets and carry the emblem of the Légion d’Honneur. Altogether it is one of the most photogenic memorials on the Somme. It was ‘offered in memory of M & Mme François Normand, sa Marraine de Guerre [soldier’s lady benefactor] from the town of Cognac and the heroic French and Allied Defenders’.
Continue on the D329 to the crossroads with the D1029.
‘Arc de Triomphe’ Memorial, Proyart and detail of the bas relief
Extra Visit to Site of Carey’s Force Action (Map 1/25, GPS: 49.87606 2.57877) and Heath CWGC Cemetery (Map 1/25a, GPS: 49.87297 2.67269). Round trip: 12.6 miles. Approximate time: 30 minutes
Turn right at the crossroads and enter the village of Lamotte Warfusée.
It has the most splendid fretwork-effect Art Deco church spire, renovated in 2013. The church was designed by prize-winning Paris architect Godefroy Tessière with stained glass windows by Jacques Gruber. It was consecrated on 12 July 1931. Many devastated Somme villages were aided after the war by towns and villages in Normandy whose regiments had fought in the area – e.g. the 329th that liberated Lamotte came from le Havre, which paid for books for the new library in the village in 1919. Among their fund-raising efforts was a concert by ‘The Band of HM Royal Garnisson [sic] Artillery’.
At the traffic lights by the small church on the right, turn right on the D42 and after 100m turn left on the D122 signed to Fouilloy. Drive 500m to the first Z bend and stop.
In March 1918 the German advance towards Amiens was so rapid that, fearful for the safety of the city, General Gough decided to occupy an old French defensive position, ‘The Amiens Defence Line’, which had been constructed in 1915. It was 8 miles long and ran across the St Quentin-Amiens road immediately west of this village. On the night of 25/26 March an ad hoc force about 3,000 strong was gathered to occupy the position under the command of Major General C. G. S. Carey and it became known as ‘Carey’s Force’. Among the patchwork of small units involved were two companies of American 6th Regiment Engineers from the US 3rd Division, totalling some 500 men who had been building bridges at Péronne. They were the first American soldiers to fight in a full-scale battle since their own Civil War in the 1860s, and they have a memorial plaque in Amiens Cathedral (qv). The very first American casualties in the war were three soldiers killed on 3 November 1917 in Lorraine and they have a memorial in Bathelemont. Here the Americans occupied the line from the road to the wood about 1 mile to your right (north) and came into action on the night of 27 March against German patrols in the town. You are standing on their front line positions. They resisted German attacks on 29 and 30 March and stayed in the line until relieved on 3 April. The Prime Minister, Lloyd George, referred disparagingly to the rapid withdrawal of Gough’s 5th Army and gave undue importance to the action of Carey’s Force by saying that ‘it closed the gap to Amiens for about 6 days’ and that it had been formed on the initiative of General Carey. In fact it, and other similar forces, had been formed by the much-maligned Gough – Carey’s Force had been created while Carey himself was on leave in England.
Turn round and return to the D1029. Turn left and continue to the CWGC Cemetery on the right.
The ‘fretwork’ Art Deco spire of Lamotte-Warfusée church
This is Heath CWGC Cemetery, so named from the wide expanse of country on which it stands. Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield, it has an attractive, somewhat pagoda-shaped shelter with a tree-lined avenue behind it. Not made until after the Armistice, this British and Commonwealth cemetery (particularly beautiful in early autumn) stands on the site of a French military cemetery, started in August 1914, that contained 431 French and 1,063 German graves which were all removed. After the war, 1,813 bodies were buried here from the Bray-Harbonnières battlefields and it now contains 958 Australian soldiers and airmen, 839 UK, 9 Canadian, 6 New Zealand, 2 South African, 369 unknown and 24 Australian and 19 UK Special Memorials. Among the large Australian contingent, lie Pte Robert Matthew Beatham, VC of 8th Bn Aust Inf, killed 11 August 1918, age 24 and Lt Alfred Edward Gaby, VC of 28th Bn Aust Inf, killed the same day, age 26. Beatham attacked four German machine guns, killing ten and capturing ten men and was killed while bombing a further machine gun. Gaby captured four machine guns and fifty prisoners at Villers Bretonneux on 8 August.
Continue to the crossroads with the D329 and rejoin Itinerary Three.
Headstone of Pte R.M. Beatham, VC, Heath CWGC Cemetery
The pollarded avenue of trees, Heath CWGC Cemetery.
Turn left onto the D1029, direction Péronne, and continue downhill on the D1029 to a bend in the road at the bottom. Stop at the memorial on the left.
Plaque to Lt Col C.W.D. Daly, DSO, and 6th Bn AIF, Herleville
Monument to Col Rabier and the 55th Inf Bde, Foucaucourt.
• Colonel Rabier Private Memorial/Foucaucourt Local Cem/39.0 miles/5 minutes/Map 1/28b/GPS: 49.87436 2.73746
This Monument is to Col Rabier, Commandant of the 55th Infantry Brigade. According to the inscription, which is a message from General Castelnau of the Second Army, the Colonel led, with the greatest energy, the 24 September 1914 attack on Foucaucourt-Herleville. He died gloriously at the head of his brigade.
Continue to the turning to the right on the D143e.
[N.B.] This leads to Herleville (1km), where there is a bronze Plaque below the local war memorial outside the church, (Map 1/49), to ‘Lieutenant-Colonel C.W.D. Daly, DSO and 413 officers and men of the 6th AIF’ killed in France 1916-1918 (GPS: 49.86476 2.74983). It was funded and presented by a former member of the 6th Battalion, The Royal Melbourne Regiment, Ron Austin, in 1992, and is the highlight of his annual pilgrimage. Ron publishes military books through his company Slouch Hat Publications. The village and the woods to the north were captured after very heavy fighting on 23 August 1918 and in the woods Lieutenant W.D. Joynt of 8th AIF won the VC and Lieutenant Norm Tutt was awarded a bar to his MC, won at Gallipoli as a CSM. The 6th Battalion had fought through Gallipoli, the Somme in 1916, Flanders in 1917 and back again to the Somme in 1918. Few original members survived. In the churchyard are buried Pte P. Wiggins, SWB, 7 Oct 1915 and Pte W. Farrell, Leinster Regt, 16 Oct 1915.
Continue to the local cemetery further on to the right.
[N.B.] Foucaucourt Local Cemetery (Map 1/28a, GPS: 49.87424 2.76278). In it is a CWGC Plot of eight graves, all of 1918, at the rear - including that of 2nd Lieutenant Attwater MGC, 22 March 1918, age 29, with the personal message ‘Until we meet. Your little son Mervyn’. Ernest Attwater is commemorated on the Arundel War Memorial. French military graves include Gustave Lemoine who was killed in Paris in the Garde Mobile in 1871 ‘Triste destin de la Guerre’ (Sad fate of war), Daniel Delavenne, 8 August 1916 and Noel Viguane Garin, killed in Indo-China in 1945.
Continue to the crossroads with the D143.
Extra Visit to Vermandovillers - the German Cemetery (Map 1/30, GPS: 49.85607 2.78176), Memorials to Capt Delcroix and 1st Chasseurs à Pied, to P.V. Bourget, 1st & 31st BCP & 158th RI (GPS: 49.85014 2.78360), RB to McCarthy VC (Map 1/30b, GPS: 49.85067 2.78438) at Vermandovillers; Polish Memorial & Murat Monument (GPS: 49.82818 2.77053 and French Cemetery at Lihons (Map 1/29, GPS: 49.82786 2.74790); French and US Nurses (GPS: 49.81492 2.80534), Poilu Memorial (GPS: 49.81887 2.80056), German Memorial (GPS: 49.81939 2.80739), Chaulnes (Map 1/46/47) and German trenches at Soyécourt (Map 1/31, GPS: 49.86729 2.79138). Round trip: 10.6 miles. Approximate time: 60 minutes.
Turn right on the D143, direction Vermandovillers/Soyécourt. Continue over the motorway and stop immediately at the cemetery on the left.
This vast German Cemetery at Vermandovillers is the largest of any nationality on the Somme with 9,400 graves and 13,200 buried in fourteen mass graves. In one of the latter is buried the German expressionist, poet and short-story writer, Alfred Lichtenstein. A Prussian Jew, son of a factory owner, he satirised the life of the bourgeoisie in Berlin. After obtaining a law degree, Lichtenstein entered his year’s obligatory military service in October 1913 and was caught up in the Great War at its outbreak. Serving with the 2nd Bavarian Infantry Regt, which was immediately called to the front, Lichtenstein died of wounds at Vermandovillers on 24 September 1914, after being hit by a sniper. He was 25 years old. Despite his early death, Lichtenstein wrote several powerful war poems, the most enduring being Die Schlacht bei Saarburg (‘The Battle of Saarburg’) written only days before his death. It describes in vivid detail the horrors of being under machine-gun and artillery fire and in it he, like Alan Seeger and many other war poets, anticipated his own death:
I brace myself in the greyness
And face death.
Also buried in Vermandovillers is Reinhard Johannes Sorge, the young, brilliant German Expressionist playwright. Sorge, whose works all contained a strong religious theme, was born in 1892, and by 1914 had decided to become a priest. But in October 1915 he had been called up into the 56th Infantry Regt and was serving in Belgium. On 20 July 1916 he was mortally wounded by a grenade at Ablaincourt. His innovative and influential play, Der Bettler (‘The Beggar’) was produced to enormous acclaim by the famous producer Max Reinhardt on 22 December 1917. After the war Reinhardt worked with Marlene Dietrich.
Among the black crosses, with white, almost fluorescent names, are some magnificent willow trees.
Continue into the village of Vermandovillers and at the crossroads turn left towards the church.
This is Place du Souvenir. Beside the Place sign is a brass Plaque on a stand to Pierre Victoire Bourguet (erected by his sons on 6 September 2000) and to the 158th RI with a sketch map showing the site of their action at Boyau du Duc on 6 September 1916. To the right of the church is a large cross with a calvary. The inscription translates, ‘In this place Capt Jean Delcroix, Commander of the 14th Coy of the 327th RI, Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, fell gloriously for France on 6 September 1916 at the head of the brave soldiers that he commanded.’ This memorial was recently moved here from a field outside the village.
German Cemetery, Vermandovillers
Beside it is a small stone Monument in memory of 11 officers, 24 NCOs and 133 corporals and chasseurs of the 1st Bn, Chasseurs à Pied who fell from 17 August to 23 December 1916 in the battles of Soyécourt, Vermandovillers, Deniécourt and Ablaincourt. The Memorial goes on to describe how on 6 Sept 1916 the 1st Bn of Chasseurs, after a rapid advance of 1,500m, fought a hard battle at Vermandovillers which cost them 8 officers, 10 NCOs and 58 chasseurs killed. They took 200 prisoners, six 240 mm guns and in the face of violent counterattacks held this ground in front of the cemetery until relieved on 11 September 1916. On the side of the Monument is a Plaque with a photo to Chasseur François Lamy, 6 September 1916.
On the wall of the Mairie of Vermandovillers (just round the corner from the church) is a non-standard Ross Bastiaan bronze commemorative Plaque at the top of which is the emblem of the Victoria Cross. It is in tribute to Lieutenant Lawrence McCarthy, VC, whose only child, Lawrence, was engaged to Ross Bastiaan’s mother before he was killed on Bouganville in 1944. She later married and when Ross was born the Australian veteran VC treated him like a grandson, filling his young mind with stories of the Great War and of Australian achievement in it. He was undoubtedly the inspiration for the wonderful series of commemorative plaques that Ross has raised wherever Australians served with distinction in two World Wars. This one was raised at Ross’s sole expense. The Plaque describes how on 23 August 1918 McCarthy showed singular bravery and initiative in single-handedly capturing 460m of German trenches, 5 machine guns and over 50 prisoners at the nearby Bois à Fame.
Turn round and turn left at the crossroads. At the next junction, turn right onto the D79, signed Rosières and Lihons.
Memorial to Captain Delcroix, 327th RI Vermandovillers
The French Front Line of 1 July ran between Vermandovillers and Lihons, at the southern extremity of the line.
Continue to the local cemetery on the left on the outskirts of Lihons.
Turn left immediately past the cemetery up a small but well-surfaced road and follow it round as it bends to the left. Stop at the green metal gates in a laurel hedge on the right, just before the road ends. On the right is
A Polish Memorial Stone to those who served Louis XV, in 1870, 14-18, 39-45, in Indo-Chine etc. It was erected by the 5th Regt of Cuirassiers of the Oise in memory of the Regiment’s action in which Prince Murat took part.
Up a path in a grove beyond is the Private Memorial and grave of Maréchal de Logis Prince Louis Murat. According to the inscription, he was Louis Marie-Michel Joachim Napoléon, born at Rocquencourt on 8 September 1896, volunteer, Maréchal de Logis (this equates, perhaps, to a British quartermaster, a non-commissioned rank, whose functions were to find billets) of the 5th Regt of Cuirassiers à Pied, son of Prince Murat of Pontecorvo, grandson of Joachim Murat (Napoléon’s brother-in-law), grand-nephew of Napoléon 1, died for France on 21 August 1916. ‘Like them, he served his fatherland’. Further inscriptions record how his father, Napoléon, Prince of Pontecorvo, and his mother, Marie Cécile Ney, erected this memorial to their son, ‘because of his faith and his gentleness God chose him for a sacrifice and clothed him with His glory. Although he was the youngest of all, his youth was nowhere apparent in his actions’. Princes Charles and Paul Murat, in memory of their brother Prince Louis, restored the monument in 1961 and gave the site to the commune of Lihons. The local council accepted the responsibility of maintaining the tomb and the surrounding grove – hence the tarmacadam road and the immaculate garden surrounding the Monument. Below the magnificent monument, surmounted by an exuberant Imperial eagle, is Murat’s tomb. Extensive researches in France, the UK, the USA and Canada with the Murat family and the International Napoleonic Society have not established the relationship between Prince Louis and the ‘Prince Murat’ and his cousin mentioned by Maurice Baring at Glisy Airport. Unfortunately Baring gives no fore-names, so the complicated Murat family tree by Prince Lucien, which shows no fewer than nine contemporary Prince Murats, does not help!
Return to the main road and turn left following signs to the French National Cemetery.
Ross Bastiaan Plaque to Lt McCarthy VC, Vermandovillers
Polish Memorial, Lihons
The Lihons French National Cemetery, which was started in 1915 and completely renovated in 1988 and again in 2013, contains 6,581 French and six British graves. There are 1,638 bodies in the four mass graves, in No 1 of which is thought to be the American poet, Alan Seeger (see Itinerary Four). On 5 July 2006 a Plaque to Alan Seeger, organised by the Chaulnes Committee of French Commemoration, was inaugurated at the cemetery by Matthew Dever, US Embassy 1st Secretary in the presence of the Sous-Prefet of l’Aisne and a contingent of Legionnaires. The Plaque is outside the Cemetery and bears a quotation from Alan Seeger’s poem, Bellenglise.
Oh should I fall tomorrow, lay me here
That o’er my tomb, with each reviving year
Wood flowers may blossom and the wood doves croon,
And lovers by that unrecorded place
Passing, may pause, and cling a little space
Close-bosomed at the rising of the moon.
Turn round, return to Lihons and bear right following signs to Chaulnes on the D337.
Memorial to Prince Murat, Lihons
Chaulnes was a heavily-fortified German defensive position, held by them despite many courageous French attempts to retake it, from 29 September 1914 onwards.
Here fought, in January 1915 as Commander of 9th Coy, 3rd Battalion of Reserve infantry Regiment 272, one of the most innovative German Expressionist poets of the Great War, August Stramm, e.g.
War Grave
Sticks imploring crossing arms
Writing timids pale unkown
Flowers cheek
Dusts shy.
Flickers
Tear
Glare
Oblivion.
Plaque to Poet, Alan Seeger, Lihons
He was killed on the Russian front later in the year.
On entering the town continue through on rue Roger Salengro down to the crossroads and stop on the right.
On the opposite corner of rue Ernest Boitel on the wall is an exuberantly painted bas relief figure of a nurse with a sick child round a drinking fountain. It is in memory of the collaboration of the American Red Cross and the Union des Femmes de France and Croix Rouge Française working in Chaulnes, 1917-1919.
Turn round and drive back up to the road, turning second right into a large open square and green. Drive to the church on the right.
Drinking fountain Memorial to American and French Nurses, Chaulnes
Opposite is the dramatic Local War Memorial, erected in 1920, which incorporates two standard memorial designs by Jules Déchin – ‘Victorious France’ and ‘Dying Poilu’.
Continue and turn right along rue de la Sablonnière on the D45 signed to Lille and follow the road to a large grey stone on the left.
This is a rare German Memorial to the 16th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, moved here from a German cemetery (and indeed originally there were important memorials in most German cemeteries) by young German volunteers in 1992. In it was found a bottle containing a list of German soldiers (now in the Historial). Adolph Hitler joined up with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment in 1914.
Return to Lihons and continue on the D79 through Vermandovillers to Soyécourt. In the centre of the village, by the Crucifix, turn left to the church.
Local War Memorial, Chaulnes
The inscription on the Local War Memorial before the church (selected from a catalogue of designs and known as ‘Writing History’), commemorates the contribution to its erection in 1925 by Chatellerault near Poitiers, by the Channel Island of Jersey, by families of those who fell in the area and by public conscription. A contingent of The Royal Jersey Militia (known as ‘The Jersey Pals’) served in France with the Royal Irish Rifles at Loos, on the Somme (at Guillemont and Ginchy for instance) and at Cambrai. In 1918 they served with the Hampshire Regiment in Flanders. The contingent’s losses were very high and their Roll of Honour lists 862 men.
Drive north downhill past the church on rue de Wallieux. At the bottom of the hill turn up the track to the left, just before house No 5 on the right.
Memorial to 16th Bavarian Inf Res Regt, Chaulnes
In the tip of the copse (Keman Copse) to the right are well-preserved German trenches. These trenches at the Bois de Wallieux have been acquired by the CGS/H and have been sympathetically preserved. At the entrance are CGS/H Signboards and a fenced-off trail leads through the tranquil and evocative wooded area, with profuse wild violets in springtime. Wooden bridges pass over the trench lines and craters to preserve them from erosion by too many feet passing through them. Along the circular route are contemporary photographs on stands and you will notice at least two obvious entrances to underground works. The path leads to a crater in which there appear to be some fractured tree stumps. This is the metal sculpture by Ernest Pignon, commissioned by the State (with the support of the CGS) to mark the 80th Anniversary of the Armistice of 11 November 1918.
Continue to the D1029 (N29), turn right and rejoin the main itinerary.
Local War Memorial, Soyécourt with inscription commemorating the contribution to its cost by, among others, Jersey
80th Anniversary Sculpture by Ernest Pignon, Bois de Wallieux
Dugout entrance, Bois de Wallieux
Continue to the crossroads at Estrées Deniécourt.
There are signs pointing to the left to Fay on the D164 and then to the right to Bois de Wallieux (Soyécourt).
Extra Visit to Fay (Map 1/27a, 27b, GPS: 49.88550 2.80757 & 49.88685 2.80417) Round trip: 2 miles. Approximate time: 20 minutes.
Turn left on the D164 following the sign with a poppy to the church in Place du Souvenir Français. Stop.
To the right of the door is a Plaque to Officiers of the Gendarmerie and Capitaine Fontan, Fay 18 December 1914 and to the left to Abbé Ernest Champin, Sous-Lieutenant of the 329th, Fay 4 July 1916 and above a small Plaque to the 41st RI who had a bitter engagement against the enemy here on 7 June 1940.
Continue following the poppy sign to the edge of the village along a rough track to the enclosed site on the left.
This is the original site of Fay, the only destroyed French WW1 village not to have been rebuilt on its original site. Around the landscaped site are CGS/H Signboards showing pictures of the ‘Ancienne village de Fay’, left in its ruined state and rebuilt where you now see the houses and church.
Return to the crossroads with the D1029 and rejoin Itinerary Three.
Ruins of Fay village
Continue on the D1029 into Estrées Deniécourt. Stop at the Mairie on the right and walk across the road to the memorial on the corner to the left.
• Lt Col Puntous Memorial, Estrées/43 miles/5 minutes/Map 1/32/GPS: 49.87519 2.82237
The front line of 1 July was some 2km to your rear (towards Amiens). One of the factors contributing to French success in the Somme offensive was their use of small units in independent actions, moving according to circumstance and terrain rather than in line with a pre-ordained pattern. The action here was typical. The French 329th Infantry Regiment advanced up the road as you have done, led by their commanding officer, Lt Col Puntous, who was killed, together with a number of his officers, NCOs and soldiers, on 4 July 1916. The inscription describes the ‘Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche’ (a phrase originally used to describe Pierre de Terrail, Seigneur de Bayard, an illustrious French officer of the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries) who took Estrées with an irresistible élan.
The village was heavily defended by the enemy who counter-attacked with violence. The brave Colonel resisted all these assaults except that from the left and the Regiment was overcome. The next day it regrouped under Lt Col Albert who, in a memorable bayonet charge, ejected the enemy from the village. The Michelin Guide reports that:
“The village had to be captured house by house. On the evening of July 4, after three days of fighting, the Germans held only the eastern part of the village. For the next twenty days about 200 of them hung on desperately to it, holding back the assailants with machine-guns posted in the cellars, which fired through the narrow vent-holes. To overcome this resistance, which prevented all advance north or south, it was necessary to sacrifice these houses, and for six consecutive hours 9-in, 11-in, and 15-in shells pounded this small area. Only fifteen survivors were found in the ruined foundations; the rest of the German garrisons had been wiped out. This terrible struggle utterly destroyed the village.”
The Memorial was erected by the Anciens Combattants of the 329th RI of Le Havre on 5 June 1933. Today it is beautifully maintained by Souvenir Français.
Continue to the roundabout. Turn left signed to Assevillers and continue on the D146 to the crossroads in the village. Follow the green CWGC sign to the right on the D146E signed to Péronne. Stop at the cemetery on the left just short of the TGV railway line.
Memorial to Lt Col Puntous, C 329th IR, Estrées
• Assevillers New British Cemetery/45.2 miles/5 minutes/Map 1/33a/GPS: 49.89648 2.84254
The Cemetery was one of the later ones to be completed on the Somme and was not finished until the late 1930s. It contains 777 burials and now overlooks the motorway and the TGV railway line. The village was taken by the French on the third day of July in the Somme Battle, retaken by the Germans on 25 March 1918 following the withdrawal of the British XIX Corps and recaptured at the end of August. Just before the Cemetery is an obvious British stone plinth which now bears a local calvary.
Turn round and return to the crossroads in Assevillers.
Assevillers New Brit CWGC Cemetery
Extra Visit to the French National Cemetery & Italian Memorial at Dompierre-Becquincourt/Map 1/33/GPS: 49.90538 2.80142 Round trip: 4.4 miles. Approximate time: 15 minutes
Go straight over and then take the D164E left to Fay/Cappy and fork right at the T junction signed to Becquincourt and immediately left. Follow signs to Dompierre-Becquincourt. Turn left past the small chapel and pharmacie and left on rue de Péronne. Continue through the village to the Poilu memorial. Turn right on the D71 signed to Chuignes. The cemetery is on the left.
The Cemetery was built in 1920 for the casualties from the Somme Battles of 1914-18, concentrating burials from local civilian cemeteries in the region and later exhumations from the battlefield. It contains 7,032 World War I burials, of which 1,671 are in four mass graves.
To the right of the entrance past the usual information board, is an unusual and elaborate Memorial from the Italian residents of Dompierre (stone masons who came to help with the reconstruction) to their French comrades who died for the Fatherland. To the left of the entrance are some beautiful, cone, or shell-shaped fir trees. Also in Dompierre is the terminus (which does not have a station building like Froissy) of the Froissy-Dompierre Decauville railway (see above). The Swiss writer Blaise Cendrars, born in 1887, was a francophile who, after travelling in Russia and the USA, took part in the literary life of Paris and wrote some highly influential avant-garde poems. When the war broke out he joined the French Foreign Legion and fought in Champagne and on the Somme. On 26 September 1915, he lost an arm, but his wartime memories were not published until 1946, as ‘la main coupée’. The book describes his 1915 experiences in the Dompierre-Frise-Feuillières-Curlu area. He describes a night patrol to Curlu to make contact with the next Regiment in the line. It was not until after the war that he realized, to his chagrin, that among its officers was the ‘genial master of Cubism, Georges Braque’, a friend whose hand he would ‘dearly have liked to have shaken’.
Return to the D146 and rejoin Itinerary Three
Italian Memorial, French National Cemetery Dompierre-Becquincourt
Turn right and continue on the D146 through Herbécourt.
This village, in the German second line, had been taken the day before Assevillers in July 1916 and its history in 1918 was a similar story.
[N.B.] Near the Salle des Fêtes (GPS: 49.92223 2.84120) is a beautifully maintained Private Memorial by the crossroads of the D1/D146 to Aspirant Pierre Maistrasse, age 19, 29 July 1916 with a bas relief of his head on an obelisk.
Memorial to Aspirant Maistrasse, Herbécourt.
Continue on the D146 signed to Feuillières going downhill into the Valley of the Somme, crossing the river and its fragmented pools and eel farms in the picturesque village of Feuillières.
The village is a paradise for fishermen getting away from it all in their weekend cabins and has an immaculate local WW1 Memorial.
Cross the lock on the Somme Canal, over the Somme bridge and after some 400m turn left on the D146E following CWGC signs to Hem-Monacu. Continue through the village to the cemetery.
• Hem Farm Military Cemetery/50.5 miles/10 minutes/Map N6/GPS: 49.95368 2.83157
The 5th (Australian) Division crossed the Somme here by hastily constructed bridges during their advance on Péronne of 30 August 1918. The Cemetery contains 138 of their dead, 88 South Africans, 4 Canadians and 1,563 British. There are two VC holders buried here - 2nd Lt George Edward Cates of the 2nd Rifle Brigade, was killed on 9 March 1917 while deepening a captured German trench, when his spade struck a grenade. When it started to burn he put his foot on it and it immediately exploded. By sacrificing his own life he saved those of his companions in the trench. Cates, who was an Assistant Scoutmaster with Wimbledon YMCA, is also commemorated on the Rifle Brigade Memorial in Winchester Cathedral. It is thought that some 17 known Scouts were awarded the VC during the First World War. On 1 September 1918, during the attack on Mont St Quentin, Pte Robert Mactier of the 23rd (Victoria) AIF:
“… rushed out of [his] trench, closed with and killed the machine-gun crew of eight men and threw the gun over the parapet. He then moved to another strong-point and captured six men. He disposed of a third machine-gun, but in tackling a fourth was killed. This action enabled the battalion to capture Mont St Quentin a few hours later.”
Return to the D146. Turn left and continue to the crossroads with the D938.
Personal Tribute at Headstone of Pte M.B. Tully, 1st Regt SA Inf, Hem Farm Mil CWGC Cemetery
Extra Visit to the French National Cemetery (Map O2, & 363rd Infantry Regiment Memorial (Map O3), Cléry (GPS: 49.96293 2.85914) Round trip: 1.4 miles. Approximate time: 15 minutes
Turn right onto the D938 and go over the motorway. Turn left towards the cemetery and stop at the memorial at the entrance.
The Memorial commemorates the feats of the 363rd Regiment between 7 August and 2 September 1916.
Continue up a bumpy track to the cemetery.
The Cemetery contains 2,332 burials, of which 1,129 are in two mass graves and is a concentration of graves from the old front line in this area. At the entrance to the Cemetery are large boards showing maps of all the French cemeteries in the area and of the Somme Battlefield, with photographs.
Return to the crossroads and rejoin the main itinerary.
Memorial to French 363rd RI, Cléry
French National Cemetery, Cléry
Continue over the crossroads for 100m.
• ‘HR’ Memorial/52.1 miles/5 minutes/Map 01/GPS: 49.96334 2.85006
On the left-hand bank of a narrow road junction is a small Memorial, with the inscription ‘HR, 12 August 1916’. [In 2015 there was a chair placed by the Memorial.] It bears a Souvenir Français roundel, but all firm information about the subject appeared to have been lost. Volunteers from the memorialgenweb.org have done a great deal of research to discover who ‘HR’ was, and an entry posted by ‘Anne’ in June 2013 suggests that it might be 31 years old Henri Joseph Rayssiguier who was killed at Cléry on April 12th/13th 1916. The 170th Infantry Regiment was fighting in the Cléry area and lost 54 men on the 13th, so further research is underway to name each one. In order for the dates to match (i.e. August and April), mistakes must have been made in the records. We have already been through that research process with John Kipling which led to our biography ‘My Boy Jack’. We will leave this ‘HR’ work to ‘Anne’!
Continue on the D146 to Maurepas. Stop at the cemetery at the fork on the outskirts of the village.
Private Memorial to ‘HR’, Cléry
• French National Cemetery, Maurepas/53.7 miles/5 minutes/Map L8/GPS: 49.98789 2.85270
This Cemetery was formed in 1921 from two temporary cemeteries at Maurepas and at Suzanne, about 12km away. Besides two mass graves which contain 1,588 bodies, there are another 2,070 French, 19 Russian and a Rumanian burial. The first cross seen on entering the Cemetery is that of Sgt Leclerc. It was his namesake General who liberated Amiens in 1944.
Extra Visit to the Edouard Naudier Private Memorial (Map O4, GPS: 49.98165 2.87363). Round trip: 3.4 miles. Approximate time: 10 minutes.
Turn right onto the road past the cemetery to Leforest on the C5. Continue through Le Forest on the D146E, under the TGV line and the motorway, turn sharp right and continue on a narrowing (and often muddy) road for half a mile to the monument on the left, opposite a junction to the right.
The inscription on the broken column Monument reads, ‘Our beloved son, Edouard Naudier, tax collector, died for France at Hospital Farm. 1890-1916. Eternal regrets of all the family’. The Ferme de l’Hôpital is the farm on the rise to the left of the Monument.
Return to the French Cemetery and rejoin the main itinerary.
Private Memorial to E. Naudier, Ferme de l’Hôpital left rear
Continue to the T junction at the square in Maurepas.
Extra Visit to the Gaston Chomet Private Memorial (Map K49, GPS: 49.98569 2.82991). Round trip: 1.4 miles. Approximate time: 5 minutes
Turn left on the D146B on Rue Général Frère. Keep to the right of the church and follow signs to Hardecourt au Bois on the D146E. As the road begins to rise, the memorial is on the top of a bank to the left and is often very overgrown.
The stone Monument is to French soldier Gaston Chomet of the 160th RI, killed at Maurepas on 30 July 1916. It was restored by the Albert branch of the Souvenir Français (whose rondel is missing) but already has a chipped corner on the inscription panel.
Return to the square in Maurepas and rejoin the main itinerary.
Private Memorial to Gaston Chomet, Maurepas
Turn right and immediately left.
There is a CGS/H Signboard here which describes how the reconstruction of the village, completely destroyed during the battle, was funded by the Pouret family whose son was killed in action here on 30 July 1916.
Continue to the small memorial to the left in the square.
• 1st RI Memorial, Maurepas/54.1 miles/5 minutes/Map L7/ GPS: 49.99134 2.8472
This commemorates the fallen of the 1st (Cambrai) Infantry Regiment who, together with the Zouaves, entered Maurepas on 12 August 1916, taking the areas around the church and cemetery. The village had been strongly fortified by the Germans and it was not until 24 August that, with British help, it was wholly cleared, by which time it was totally destroyed. The inscription reads, ‘To our comrades of the 1st RI who fell in 1916 for the deliverance of Maurepas’.
Continue round the square, to the Poilu memorial on the left.
Memorial to French 1st Inf Regt, Maurepas
Memorial to 9th Zouaves, Maurepas
Beside it on the ground is a Memorial to the 9th Regt Zouaves, July-20 Aug 1916 with their crest (in need of a little care). (GPS: 49.99059 2.84713). They fought at Souchez, at Verdun and later at the Aisne.
Turn left again on the D146 direction Combles. Continue some 1.5 miles to a junction to the right with the D146A. Stop by the memorial on the bank.
• V. Hallard Private Memorial/55.5 miles/5 minutes/Map 4b/GPS: 50.00214 2.86727
The inscription translates, ‘Here lies our beloved son Victor Hallard, known as Tredez, 110th Régt de Tirailleurs who died gloriously 12 September 1916 at the age of 28 years’. It was once cared for by Souvenir Français.
Continue into Combles on the D146 to the crossroads with the D20. Turn right signed to Rancourt and stop at the large memorial on the right just before the High Speed Train line.
Private Memorial to Victor Hallard, Maurepas
• Charles Dansette Private Memorial/56.4 miles/10 minutes/Map L4a/GPS: 50.00716 2.87490
The inscription on this important-looking Memorial reads:
“Beneath this cross, erected to his memory, lies 2nd Lt Charles Dansette, born at Armentières and who fell gloriously for his country on 25 September 1916 at the age of 22 years. This élite officer who had always distinguished himself since the beginning of the campaign by his energy and his indomitable courage fell gloriously on 25 September 1916 leading his assault section against a German trench, which was brilliantly taken. “
There is also a quotation from Victor Hugo, ‘Those who piously die for their fatherland have the right that the crowd should come to their tomb and pray.’ On another side is a citation dated 18 April 1915, ‘On 5 April 1915 during the attack on German trenches in the Pareid Wood proof was shown of an ardour and an enthusiasm which was a fine example for his men’.
Return to the crossroads. Turn right following the CWGC signs and stop at the cemetery on the left.
Private Memorial to Charles Dansette, Combles
• Combles Communal Cemetery Extension/56.9 miles/5 minutes/Map L4/GPS: 50.01059 2.87212
This Cemetery was begun by the French in October 1916, the first British burials being in December 1916 and enlarged after the Armistice. It contains 1,041 UK, 5 Canadian, 1 South African and 13 special memorials.
Turn round, return to the junction, turn right and follow the road down and round into the village to the imposing Hôtel de Ville with its splendid memorial and the CWGC sign pointing left to the Guards Cemetery.
• Combles/57.4 miles/RWC
During their two and a half years of occupation, the Germans had turned Combles into a formidable redoubt in their third line of defence. Much of the strength of the position was due to the extensive catacombs and tunnels beneath the church and under Lamotte Château which stood opposite. (For many years there was talk of opening up these works to the public, but as yet nothing has transpired.) The German writer, Ernst Junger, remembers Combles with dread. He described the daily hour-long bombardment between 0900 and 1000 of a ‘demented violence’, when ‘the ground shook and the sky seemed a giant’s boiling cauldron’. Worst of all, however, was the stench:
‘There floated above the ruins … a thick odour of corpses, for the shelling was so violent that nobody could look after the dead. One literally had death in one’s nostrils … this heavy, sickly smoke wasn’t only nauseating, mixed with the acrid vapour of explosives it inspired an almost visionary exaltation, which only the close presence of death could produce.’
Entrance to Combles Comm Cem
The town held out as the Allied assaults of September 1916 inched their way past on either side. In a set piece attack on 25 September by the British in the north and the French in the south, the 56th (London) Division and the French 73rd and 110th Infantry Regiments cleared the town by the following morning, taking 1,200 prisoners. During 1917 when the British took over the front line down to the Somme, Combles became an important military railway centre and, to conceal the movement of men and material, long lines of high canvas screens were erected alongside the roads leading to the town. Sir William Orpen RA, who was sent to France in April 1917 as an official war artist, drew the screens in a picture called The Great Camouflage, Combles, now in the Imperial War Museum, London.
In the German advance of 1918 Combles fell on 24 March, despite stubborn resistance by the South African Brigade and then, when the tide again turned, it was retaken by 18th Division on 29 August.
The town was adopted by Portsmouth.
Turn left and keep to the left of the church. Continue straight on to the cemetery on the right.
• Guards CWGC Cemetery, Combles/57.8 miles/10 minutes/Map L5/GPS: 50.00586 2.86025
The Cemetery was begun by the Guards Division in September 1916 and at the Armistice contained a hundred graves, nineteen of which were Foot Guards. There are now 150 burials, including Gunner Squire Lawrence Taylor, RHA, service number 111111, killed on 28 February 1917, aged 25. Taylor was with the famous ‘L’ Battery, which at Néry during the retreat from Mons in 1914 won three VCs. Also of ‘L’ battery, but after Mons, is Major Guy Horsman, MC, age 25, 28 February 1917, who served throughout the Gallipoli campaign. Oddly he is not listed in the Cemetery Report. Second Lieutenant L.L. Paterson of the Post Office Rifles, age 24, 1 September 1918, has the inscription, ‘His men wrote a rough cross “In memory of a very brave British officer”’. He had enlisted in Winnipeg as a private soldier. Seven Coldstream Guardsmen lie in a row, all killed on 11 December 1916.
Extra Visit to Private Memorial/Graves to Heumann, Mills & Torrance (Map L6, GPS - at roadside: 50.00260 2.848152). Round trip: .8 mile. Approximate time: 10 minutes
Continue to a farm on the right, where the metalled road peters out.
This is Faffemont (sometimes seen as Falfemont) Farm, although the original farm building was on the site of what is now a copse beyond and on a rise to the right of the present building.
Continue left on a track past the farm to the first pylon on the left. Stop.
The flat stone Memorial (GPS: 50.00395 2.84430) is on private land in the middle of a cultivated field and is now virtually impossible to visit. If the crops should allow it, one must ask the farmer (who calls the pylon ‘la Tour Eiffel’) for permission to visit it. The Memorial is some 450m up the slope to the right, on a line between the pylon and the small copse and is completely invisible when there are tall crops. It is in theory maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and is the grave of Capt R. (‘Dick’) Heumann, Sgt Major B. Mills and Sgt A. W. Torrance of the 1/2nd Londons, killed here on 10 September 1916 during their battalion’s attack on a German trench known as Leuzenake at the southern edge of Leuze Wood (just over half a mile due north of here). They were originally buried in a shell hole. Their burials are listed under CWGC Rancourt. After the war, Capt Dick Heumann’s family (who had French connections) bought the land and the families of all three men erected the flat headstone, then with an elaborate surround, and left money for its maintenance. At the time, permission was granted to maintain a path to the site but sadly this is not the case at the moment. Capt Heumann was commissioned in the Regiment in 1908 and fought with it in France from January 1915, being MiD in June 1916. Sgt Mills was also a regular soldier who had already had awarded his Volunteer Long Service Medal. Sgt Torrance was an enlisted man.
Turn round and rejoin the main itinerary.
Private Memorial to Capt ‘Dick’ Heumann, Sgt B. Mills & Sgt A.W. Torrance, Faffemont Farm. The wreath is inscribed with a quote from Woodbine Willie’s poem, ‘His Mate’
Return to Combles Town Hall. Turn left, continue 100m and turn right onto the D74, signed to Morval, then keep left on Rue de Morval and continue to Morval.
It was the capture of this village and Lesboeufs 2km ahead, both on high ground north of Combles, on 25 September 1918 that ensured the success of the assault on the Combles German redoubt on that same day. The road you are on runs directly across the front of the attacking Fourth Army (they came from your left) among whose troops were Guards, New Zealanders and Birmingham Pals (15th and 16th Battalion, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment). One of the Pals afterwards recalled the euphoria of victory on the morning of 26 September:
“One of our fellows passed by, wounded and drunk. He had been having a rummage round a dugout. Said he had found bottles of beer and by his description, enough to keep the Army going. When he said he had had the lot before coming back we understood. He sold me a trench dagger and a pair of excellent field glasses for 11 Francs. He seemed very satisfied and so was I.”
To the left en route is Morval British CWGC Cemetery, (Map L2, GPS: 50.03182 2.86985) designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield, which contains burials from 26 August-6 September 1918. Its register is in the Guards Cemetery. Morval was captured by the 5th Division on 25 September 1916 and remained in Allied hands until 24 March 1918 and the German Advance. It was regained by the 38th (Welsh) Division after fierce fighting on 1 September 1918.
Continue through Morval to the T junction in Lesboeufs signed left on the C5 to Ginchy and the Guards Cemetery. Follow the signs and stop at the cemetery on the right.
• Guards Cemetery, Lesboeufs/62.7 miles/5 minutes/Map I4/GPS: 50.0376 2.85324
This large Cemetery contains 2,827 UK burials, including 2nd Grenadiers from the 25 September attack, 202 Australian, 11 New Zealand, 4 Newfoundland, 1 Canadian and 88 Special Memorials. At the Armistice, there were forty graves and most of the burials are concentrations from the surrounding battlefield, made after the war.
Continue to the obelisk on the right.
• Captain Meakin Private Memorial/62.9 miles/5 minutes/Map L1/GPS: 50.03544 2.84937
This sadly neglected tall column is to Capt Herbert Percy Meakin of the 3rd Coldstream Guards, attached to the Guards Trench Mortar Battery, killed near this spot on 25 September 1916. It is not a grave, and Capt Meakin is commemorated on the Thiépval Memorial.
Continue to the memorial cross on the right.
Grenadiers on Parade, Guards CWGC Cemetery, Lesboeufs
Sadly neglected obelisk to Capt Meakin, 3rd Coldstream Guards, Lesboeufs
• Guards Memorial, Lesboeufs/63.3 miles/5 minutes/Map K19/GPS: 50.03160 2.84251
The Memorial stands immediately to the south of the German 1916 third line. The Guards Division was formed in September 1915 and was made up from four Grenadier battalions, three Coldstream, two Irish, two Scots and one Welsh. The Memorial commemorates the action of 25 September 1916 when the division, in concert with 6th Division, captured Lesboeufs. On the back is an inscription which states that this memorial replaces the wooden cross erected close to this site immediately after the battle of September 1916. During their three weeks holding the sector they sustained over 7,000 casualties. Ginchy Church can be seen straight ahead.
Return to the village.
The village of Lesboeufs was the scene of a remarkable stand by twelve machine guns of 63rd Machine Gun Battalion during the German 1918 Offensive, but it fell on 24 March. It was recaptured by 10th South Wales Borderers on 29 August.
Turn left past the church and fork left on the D74 signed to Gueudecourt.
The next 7km of this road, up to where it meets the Albert-Bapaume D929 at le Sars, runs effectively 1,000m to the left of and parallel to the 1916 final line reached by the British. The 1916 Somme offensive, coming from your left, finished in November.
Enter Gueudecourt and in the centre of the village turn right on the D574 Rue du Caribou signed to Beaulencourt. Continue to the Caribou memorial on the right.
Guards Memorial, Lesboeufs
• Newfoundland Caribou Memorial, Gueudecourt/66.6 miles/10 minutes/Map 12/OP/GPS: 50.06512 2.85366
Five Caribou Memorials were erected by Newfoundland after the war and they became the responsibility of the Canadian Government when Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949. This memorial stands just in front of the British line of 17 November 1916 (and there are some preserved trench lines within the memorial confines) therefore it is probably the nearest point to Bapaume reached throughout the entire 1916 offensive. Even closer towards Bapaume, probably 50 yards on from the memorial, was the German line known as Stormy Trench. Although the village from which you have come was taken on 26 September, this area was not secured until 12 October – by the Newfoundlanders. The advance stopped here and British and German forces (the latter straight ahead of you) faced each other until February 1917 when the Germans withdrew to the Hindenburg line.
By using the Holts’ Battle Map and binoculars you can orientate from the road outside the Caribou by looking up the road to Gueudecourt church which is at 12 o’clock. To the left on the horizon at 11 o’clock is Delville Wood, at just past 12 o’clock is High Wood, and at 1 o’clock is the wireless mast at Pozières. At 1.30 is the Thiépval Memorial and at 2 o’clock is the Butte de Warlencourt.
Turn round and return to Gueudecourt crossroads, then turn right on the D74 (once known as Cheese Road), signed to le Sars. After some 700m follow a CWGC sign to the left. Park and walk up the track to the cemetery.
Newfoundland Caribou, Gueudecourt
AIF (Grass Lane) CWGC Cemetery, Flers
• AIF (Australian Imperial Forces) Grass Lane Cemetery, Flers/ 67.7 miles/15 minutes/Map H11/GPS: 50.05988 2.83109
Australian medical units that had established themselves in nearby caves began the Cemetery in November 1916 alongside a track known as Grass Lane. After the Armistice it was enlarged and now contains the graves of some 2,800 British soldiers, sailors and marines and approximately 400 Australians, 80 New Zealanders, 70 Canadians, 25 South Africans, 160 French and 3 German prisoners. A measure of the dreadful intensity of the fighting in the area is that two-thirds of the British burials are unknown. One that is known is that of Sergeant Harold Jackson of the East Yorkshires, who won the VC for individual actions in May 1918, four months before he was killed.
Return to the D74, turn left and continue to the crossroads with the D197.
Extra Visit to the 41st Division Memorial (Map H12, 50.04977 2.82147), Bull’s Road CWGC Cemetery (Map H13, GPS: 50.04917 2.82831), 48th Middx (Footballers’) Mem (Map H12a, GPS: 50.04785 2.82151) & French 17th/18th RIT Memorial (Map H27, GPS: 50.04403 2.8190). Round trip: 8.2 miles. Approximate time: 25 minutes
Turn left onto the D197 and drive into Flers. Stop at the memorial on the left.
This is the 41st Div Memorial, an evocative bronze figure of a fully equipped Tommy which was immortalised by being the illustration on the cover of Rose Coombs’ pioneering work Before Endeavours Fade. An identical Memorial to the Royal Fusiliers stands in Holborn. (The village Poilu memorial nearby makes an interesting contrast in styles.) The Tommy is facing the direction in which his Division attacked on 15 September 1916 in Part 4 of the Somme Offensive.
It employed a new secret weapon – the tank. The Official History described how a tank helped to liberate Flers – ‘firing as it went, the tank lurched up the main street followed by parties of cheering infantry’. It was commanded by Lt Arnold who won the MC and his Gunner, Glaister received the MM. The war correspondent Philip Gibbs described the action:
“On that morning of September 15th, 1916, the front-line troops got out of their trenches laughing and cheering, and shouting again because the tanks had gone ahead, and were scaring the Germans dreadfully while they moved over the enemy’s trenches and poured out fire on every side. One of them called ‘Crème de Menthe’ had great adventures that day, capturing hundreds of prisoners, and treading down machine-gun posts, and striking terror into the enemy. A message came back: ‘Crème de Menthe is walking down the High Street of Flers with the British army cheering behind.’”
Memorial to 41st Division, Flers
The small crested china tank popular with collectors is thought by some to represent Crème de Menthe. Sadly, the shock effect of the tanks did not last long.
“There were too few of them,’ Gibbs maintained, ‘and the secret was let out before they were produced in large numbers.”
Turn left following the CWGC sign up the small road to the cemetery.
Bull’s Road Cemetery contains 485 UK, 148 Australian, 120 New Zealand, 2 unknown and 15 Special Memorials.
Return to the D197. Turn left, continue through the village to the church on the left. Beside it is
Memorial to Men of the Clacton Orient Football Club who served with the 17th (‘Footballers’) Bn, 48th Middlesex Regt. This handsome Memorial, funded by Leighton Orient FC supporters, players and RBL in memory of the men of Clacton Orient (as it was known), bears a football on the base to the left and a pair of football boots to the right. It was inaugurated on 21 July 2011 by Supporters’ Club Chairman, David Dodd, ex-player Peter Kitchen and the Maire of Flers. It is inscribed with the logos of Leyton Orient FC and the Memorial Fund. In March 2015 Leyton Orient announced that their players and staff would wear special Centenary Memorial shirts as a tribute to the 41 Club’s ex-players who served in the war. Three died on the Somme: Coy Sgt-Maj Richard McFadden (buried in Couin New Brit Cem) and Privates William Jonas (on the Thiepval Memorial) and George Scott, buried in St Souplet Brit Cem.
Continue to the junction with the C5 to the left and stop at the memorial on the bank to the left.
Memorial to Clacton Orient (17th Bn Middx Regt), Flers
This Memorial to the French 17th and 18th Infantry Regiments of 82nd Territorial Division commemorates the Battle of Flers, Ginchy and Lesboeufs of 26 September 1914 and has a red, white and blue Souvenir Français Plaque.
Return to the D197/D74 junction at Gueudecourt to rejoin the main itinerary.
Memorial to 17th & 18th RI Bns, 82nd Territorial Div, Flers
Continue over the crossroads towards le Sars. As the road bends right and then left in l’Abbaye d’Eaucourt just before the D929 in this area is the site of a Victoria Cross action.
• Site of Action of Lt Col R. Boys Bradford VC/Map H6/approx GPS: 50.06650 2.79493
On 1 October 1916, here at l’Abbaye d’Eaucourt, Lt Col (later Brig Gen) Roland Boys Bradford of the 9th Bn, the Durham Light Infantry, when a battalion suffered very severe casualties and lost its commander, took command of it in addition to his own. By his fearless energy under fire of all descriptions and skilful leadership of both battalions, he succeeded in rallying the attack and capturing and defending the objective, an action which won him the Victoria Cross. Brig Gen Bradford was killed on 30 November 1917 at Cambrai and is buried at Hermies British CWGC Cemetery. His brother, Lt Commander George Nicholson Bradford RN, also won the Victoria Cross in April 1918, but was killed in the action of storming the Mole at Zeebrugge which won him the award and is buried in Blankenberge Town Cemetery.
Continue to the crossroads with the D929 at le Sars. Turn left. Continue to the last building in the village on the left and turn up a small track to the left by a Calvary. Walk about 80m to the overgrown memorial behind the farm buildings to the left.
• German 111th RIR Memorial, Le Sars/70.3 miles/10 minutes/Map H5/GPS: 50.06820 2.77817
This little-visited Memorial is one of the most important German monuments still remaining on the Somme battlefield. It is in the form of a large, sadly crumbling, stone, with fading inscription. A Teutonic cross can still be discerned on it and the words, ‘RIR 111. Einen Toten [our dead]’ and on the other side the battle honours of Fricourt, Mametz, Montauban and la Boisselle. The memorial is illustrated in the original Michelin Guide to the Somme which describes it as standing in a ruined German cemetery.
Turn round and continue along the D929, direction Bapaume.
Le Sars, which was completely devastated during the war, formed part of the German third line in 1916 and was not taken until 7 October when 23rd Division captured it attacking from your left. They attempted to continue right towards Bapaume but 1km further on were stopped by a formidable line of German defences on the Warlencourt Ridge, the last height before the town. Its central position was a solitary 50ft-high mound of chalk, said to be an ancient burial ground, known as the Meakin, on Hill 122, which equated to the British as Mort Homme in the Verdun sector did to the French.
Continue through the village, past the local cemetery on the right.
It bears a CWGC Tombes de Guerre sign and in it lies Sgt R. Hinds, 1 September 1944.
As the road goes downhill out of the village, turn right onto the narrow road that leads to the Butte, which is signed. Keep to the left and park at the foot of the mound.
Memorial to German 111th RIR, le Sars
• Butte de Warlencourt/71.5 miles/15 minutes/Map H7/GPS: 50.07629 2.79501
The site is owned by the WFA and at the foot, which is fenced about, is a bronze sign whose French inscription reads, ‘This site is sacred, respect it. Passers-by you are entering this site at your own responsibility. British soldiers fell in 1916 in the Battle of the Somme and still lie here’. On a tree by the parking area is a Plaque to the 8th Bn, Post Office Rifles, 7-9 October ’16, 47th London Div. A danger warning is repeated in English and says that the Butte is the property of the WFA. There are duckboard steps up to the summit and wooden railings. It can be very slippery if wet.
This position was the very tip of the British advance in 1916. The attack that began just 10.5km back down the road at Tara-Usna on 1 July had gained an average of 77 metres a day to settle here on 17 November. The daily casualty rate averaged over 3,000. That is forty men for every metre of the advance – one man for every inch. Some of the fiercest fighting took place on and around the Butte. Riddled with tunnels, bristling with mortars and machine guns and guarded by waves of barbed wire, it stood firmly in command of the road to Bapaume. It was never taken and held by the British in 1916. Some reports say that it changed hands seventeen times, but it was not until 25 February 1917 during the German withdrawal that it was finally taken by the 151st Brigade.
In April that year the 6th and 8th Durhams placed individual battalion crosses on top of the hill to commemorate an action there on 5 November 1916 and after a protest by the brigade Commander, who said that it had been a brigade action, they were quickly joined by a large cross for 151st Brigade. Not to be outdone, the 9th Durhams added their own battalion cross. All four crosses were brought back to England after the war, the Brigade cross to Durham cathedral, where it rests today in the DLI Chapel in the south transept. A wooden cross was also placed on top of the Butte to commemorate the German defenders and two further crosses were erected at the base of the mound in memory of the South African 3rd and 6th Battalions. Later, in July 1917, King George V and General Byng visited the Butte. For many years after the war an ornate Souvenir Français cross, like the hilt of a sword, and a wooden cross to commemorate the German actions in the area, sat on the mound. They were replaced by an important WFA bronze Plaque which was inaugurated on 30 June 1990, when much of the dense vegetation was removed to return the Butte nearer to its 1914-18 appearance. Ten years later it had all grown up again and the site has proved very problematical to maintain. However a major restoration project for the Centenary was undertaken in 2013 led by Dundee-based Bob Paterson, WFA European Officer, with donations from Dundee companies.
Continue on the D929 to a “small road” to the left. (You will return to this road if you wish to take the Extra Visit.) Continue past a sign that marks the Front Line of 20 November 1916 to the cemetery on the right.
Plaque to 8th Bn (Post Office Rifles) 47th London Division, Butte de Warlencourt
WFA Memorial on Summit
Path to Summit of Butte de Warlencourt
• Warlencourt British CWGC Cemetery/72 miles/5 minutes/Map H8/GPS: 50.08079 2.79911
This Cemetery was not established until the end of 1919 when it was made by concentrating burials from the le Sars-Warlencourt battlefield. An idea of how many small burial plots there were may be gained from the fact that the largest single number of graves moved from one plot was seventeen, and there are over 3,000 burials in the cemetery. Here is buried Sgt Donald Brown, 2nd Bn Otago Inf Regt, age 26, who was awarded the VC for attacking a machine-gun single-handedly in High Wood on 15 Sept 1916. He was killed on 1 October that year.
Continue to the Centre of Bapaume, (but to take the following Extra Visit, turn round after the Cemetery and return to the “small road” to the right).
Extra Visit to Memorials to Lt Cdr Oswald Wainwright, Hawke Bn, RND, Loupart Wood (Map E2/GPS: 50.09841 2.78910)/Private Christopher Cox, VC (Map E2a/GPS:50.11531 2.78248), Achiet-le-Grand Comm Cem (Map 2b/GPS: 50.11545 2.78232). One way trip: 6 miles. Approximate time: 40 minutes
Turn right on the narrow unsigned road (with a 10ton restriction). Keep straight on over several crossings to a house at the edge of a wood (this is Loupart Wood, GPS: 50.09402 2.793322). Drive left round the house on a rough but usable track (in dry weather). The Memorial is some 300 yards into the wood on the left of the pot-holed track.
The Memorial was unveiled on 4 June 2005 to Allée [Pathway] Paymaster Lt Cdr Oswald Johnston Wainwright of Hawke Bn, RND. The stone Memorial bears a Plaque with the Hawke Bn insignia and the French inscription translates ‘Disappeared on this spot 25 August 1918. Passer-by Remember!’ At the colourful ceremony to unveil the Memorial were four generations of the Wainwright family, three resplendent in Naval Uniform, including Ltd Cdr Michael Wainwright, RNR, grandson of Oswald Wainwright, who instigated the Memorial. He unveiled it with André Coilliot, of Arras Souvenir Français, in the presence of many local standard bearers and local dignitaries. Oswald Wainwright had joined the Royal Navy as a young man and served on several ships around the world. When war broke out he joined the RND. Twice wounded in previous engagements, he led an attack through Loupart Wood and was killed charging a German machine-gun post, as were some 20 of his men (some of whom are buried in Bucquoy Cemetery). Wainwright was among those whose bodies were not found (although a colleague had managed to retrieve three silver coins from the body which were on show at an exhibition on the day of the unveiling) and he is commemorated on the Vis-en-Artois Memorial.
Continue on the track through the wood until it emerges at a small T junction (the Wainwright Memorial is signed back into the wood at this juncture). Turn left.
Three generations of Wainwrights: Oswald’s grandson, great grandson and great, great grandson, at the inauguration of the Memorial
In the wood are the remains of important concrete bunkers. Please note that the Wood and the small roads that you will be driving along now are private property and should be driven with discretion. On no account is it permitted to enter the wood which has traps inside. The whole area was a German WW2 airfield and many areas of concrete hard standing still remain.
Continue following the small private road until it meets the D29. Turn left and very shortly right on a narrow unsigned road through the old airfield. Continue to a small crossroads and a memorial against a barn wall on the left.
Memorial to Christopher Cox, VC, Achiet-le Grand
On 17 March 2007 (the 90th Anniversary of the Liberation of Achiet-le-Grand by the 7th Bedfords) a Memorial, built with reclaimed Victorian wire cut Bedford bricks by Paul Roberts and Joseph King-Johnson, was unveiled here to Pte Christopher Cox, VC by his son, Ian Cox. Cox was born on Christmas Day 1889 in King’s Langley and worked as a farm labourer until he enlisted in the 7th Beds in September 1914. He served as a stretcher bearer during the operation on Achiet-le-Grand in March 1915. Cox went from shell hole to shell hole, heedless of fire, treating the wounded from his own and a neighbouring battalion and bringing them in. Cox survived the war and returned to Kings Langley where he was buried after his death in August 1959. The Memorial was initiated by then-SRA Vice-President, Philippe Drouin, who located the exact site of Cox’s act of gallantry, and erected with assistance from the Kings Langley Council who also erected a Plaque to Cox in All Saints Church, Kings Langley. It was a moving and colourful inauguration ceremony with members of the Cox family, of the Somme Remembrance Association, Souvenir Français, local dignitaries and standard bearers and a contingent of the 2nd Bn Anglia Regt, whose Colour Sgt Rob Parry read the poignant roll of Honour of the Bedfords who died in the Battle for Achiet-le-Grand.
Continue. Fork right and continue into Achiet-le-Grand over the old railway line.
Continue to the T junction and turn left and left again on the D7 signed to Achiet-le-Petit, over the railway line and immediately right.
[N.B.] At this point by taking the D32 north to Courcelles-le-Comte a Memorial to Pte Hugh McIver, Mc, MM + Bar, 2nd Bn R Scots (Lothian Regt) age 28, may be reached (GPS: 50.16420 2.77406). It is by the Mairie, close to the Church.
On 23 August 1918 McIver, a Company Runner, under heavy fire killed 6 of the enemy in their machine-gun post, capturing 20 prisoners and 2 machine-guns. Later he won the MM + Bar, only to be killed in action on 2 September. He is buried in Vraucourt Copse Cemetery (qv).
The inauguration of the Memorial on 23 August 2008, instigated by the Somme Remembrance Association, was a splendid occasion, attended by many family members, Regimental representatives, local dignitaries, the RBL and the Somme Pipe Band.
Inauguration of Memorial to Pte H. McIver, VC, Courcelles-le-Comte, with local Maire & Philippe Drouin
Fork left on the rue de l’Egalité and go straight over the crossing following green CWGC signs to
Achiet-le-Grand Comm Cemetery and Extension, GPS: 50.13612 2.77603.
The village was occupied by the 7th Bedfords on 17 March 1917 and lost on 25 March 1918 after a defence by the 1st/6th Manchesters until recaptured on 23 August 1918. During its period of Allied occupation 45th and 49th CCS operated here and the Communal Cemetery and its Extension was extensively used by Commonwealth medical units. The local station was an Allied railhead. In March and April 1918 the Germans used the Cemetery Extension after which it was again used by the Allies in August 1918. After the Armistice the present Plots III and IV of the Extension were made when 645 graves were concentrated here from the surrounding battlefields. Now there are only 4 WW1 graves in the Communal Cemetery and 1,424 in the Extension, 200 of which are Unknown. Special Memorials record the names of those who were buried in other cemeteries and whose bodies were then lost. There are 42 German graves. There is an extraordinary range of nationalities and regiments. Some of the headstones have been replaced with a new type of engraving which highlights the regimental or national insignia. The Extension was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens. It is a most pleasing design with pagodas which are covered in wisteria in season and daffodils that blaze in the spring.
New type Headstone of Pte A. Mitchell, Achiet-le-Grand Com Extension’
[N.B.] By continuing approximately one mile along the D7 one reaches Logeast Wood (Map E2c, GPS: 50.13909 2.76128). Here another VC was won on 21/25 Aug and 4 September 1918 by T/Commander (later Major-General) Daniel Marcus William Beak of Drake Bn, RND. The Naval Division had been part of a south-easterly two Corps attack on entrenched German positions on the Achiet-le-Grand to Bucquoy Spur (see Holts’ Somme Battle Map). The attack began in thick mist just after midnight on 20 August with the help of some tanks, and the Division, passing Logeast Wood, reached the objective of the Achiet-Arras railway line, though the Drake Battalion was held up on the outskirts of Achiet-le-Grand. German counter-attacks forced local withdrawals but Commander Beak stabilised the line. He led his men to the capture of 4 enemy positions under heavy enemy fire. Four days later, although dazed by a shell fire, he reorganised the entire brigade under heavy fire and again led his men to their objective. Accompanied only by a runner he broke up a machine-gun nest, bring in about 10 prisoners. Following the disbandment of the RND Beak joined the Army serving in France and becoming GOC Malta in 1942. He died in May 1967 and was buried in Brookwood Cemetery. During his distinguished service career he won 12 awards, including the DSO and the MC and Bar. His medals were sold at Spinks for a then world record price of £155,000 in November 2003. In October 2006 a Plaque was erected to Beak on the balustrade surrounding the Borough War Memorial in Cheltenham instigated by This England magazine, Cheltenham Borough Council and Cheltenham YMCA (of which Beak was once Secretary.
Now follow signs to Bapaume and pick up the main Itinerary.
• Bapaume/75.4 miles/5 minutes/RWC/GPS: 50.10352 2.84998
Bapaume has had a chequered history, having been burnt or razed over thirteen times. It was the Allied objective on 1 July 1916 and had been occupied by the Germans as they pushed westwards in 1914 and held by them until 17 March 1917 when they retreated to the Hindenburg Line. It was then occupied by the Australian 2nd Division who found the German fires still burning. According to the Michelin Guide:
“As they [the Germans] left they destroyed trenches, devastated the entire district, set death traps everywhere, stretched chains connected with mines across the roads and paths and set fire to shelters …. Not a house was spared.”
A delayed-action bomb even exploded on 25 March, killing two members of the French Parliament, Deputies Albert Tailliandier and Raoul Briquet. There is a Memorial to them in Art Deco style to the left of the Town Hall entrance. Beside it are two Australian Plaques, one to members of the AIF killed in that explosion and the other with the names of the 19 men believed to have been lost in it and the cemeteries or memorials where they are buried or commemorated. They were inaugurated on 26 March 2011. The Australian ‘Government’s Overseas Privately Constructed Memorials Restoration Programme’ contributed $Aus 1,420 to the cost of the Plaques.
The French journalist Serge Basset wrote, ‘It is a town to cry over. Pillage preceded fire in each house. A stench of burning and of corpses, envelopes this assassinated and violated town.’ This systematic destruction, followed by further devastation in 1918, left the town totally destroyed. The Germans returned during the March Offensive of 1918 until ejected by the New Zealand Division, together with Welsh troops, on 29 August. The Town Hall, in the main square, Place Faidherbe, was rebuilt between 1931 and 1935. In it are several memorials, frescoes and paintings which commemorate the 1914-18 War. In the square is the statue which gives it its name – to Gen Faidherbe. This is a replica of the statue, sculpted by the Parisian Jules Dechin that was inaugurated in 1891. Luckily he kept the model for it as on 29 September 1916 the statue was hit by shellfire. The Germans took it for its scrap value, leaving the base. Dechin made the new statue, which was unveiled on 18 August 1929, placing it on the original base which still bears the scars of war.
Bapaume was ‘adopted’ by Sheffield after the war. It boasts a completely modernised hotel, with gourmet restaurant – La Paix, 11 Avénue Abel Guidet, Tel: +(0)3 21 07 11 03. It belongs to the same group as the Royal Picardie in Albert and Le Prieuré in Rancourt. There are also several smaller restaurants which are handy for lunch breaks – but do not leave it much after 1300 hours or you might find that the chef has gone home (presumably for lunch!). See also Tourist Information.
• End of Itinerary Three
Memorial to Deputies Tailliandier & Briquet and Plaques to Australian casualties, Bapaume Mairie