The Battlefields of the Somme (Peronne)

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Today is a rest day. After six days of riding I think everyone is ready for a day out of the saddle?! Breakfast was at 8.00am as usual, but we then had about an hour to finish getting ready to leave the barge rather than the half an hour we have been getting between finishing breakfast and heading off on our bikes.

We were due to be picked up for our tour of the Somme battlefields at 9.30am. We wandered up to the bridge over the canal at about 9.15am and Brian arrived in the minivan at about 9.20am. We headed first to the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux. The memorial is an imposing white stone monument that was unveiled on 22 July 1938 by King George VI. It bears the names of 11,000 Australian soldiers who perished on the battlefields of France, but have no known grave.

Also situated in Villers-Bretonneux is the Victoria School, a school that was built in Albert with money that was raised by school children in Victoria, Australia. The school retains strong links with Australia and has lots of Australian memorabilia that is sent to it by school children in Oz.

Situated on the first floor of the Victoria School is the Franco-Australian Museum which was opened on 25 April 1975. The museum concentrates mainly on Australians who were on the Western Front in 1918 - which is well after my grandfather was captured. While we were at the museum Brian explained to me how my grandfather's machine gun battalion would have fitted into the Australian 4th Division. He was also able to tell me that as a machine gunner he would have been in a team of six men who operated a Vickers machine gun. A Vickers machine gun had to be broken down to be moved and its component parts were more than one man could carry.

Next we drove via Corbie and Dernacourt to Albert where we made a brief stop at the "Somme 1916" museum in Albert so that Brian could show me a Vickers machine gun. If we had realised sooner we would have been better to have explored this museum than the Franco-Australian Museum as it concentrated on the July 1916 period of the war.

From Albert we headed along the road to Bapaume until we reached Ovillers-la-Boiselle where Brian took us to see the Lachnagar Crater. The crater is 100 metres in diameter and 30 metres deep and one of a series of explosions deployed on 1 July 1916 by the British to mark the commencement of the Battle of the Somme.

From the crater it was just a short drive to Pozieres where we had lunch in the Tommy Cafe. Dominic who runs the Tommy Cafe has an impressive collection of photographs from WWI. 72 544x376

After lunch Brian took us to the area of the Somme battlefield where my grandfather was captured on 7 August 1916. From the village of Pozieres we drove up to the site of the windmill that was on Pozieres Heights. The windmill was captured by the Australian 2nd Division on 4 August 1916, but more Australian soldiers were lost during this action than on any other battlefield during the war. After the capture of this strategic point, the Australian 4th Division began relieving the 2nd Division.

From the site of the windmill, Brian was able to point out 'The Elbow' which he thinks would be very close to the area in which my grandfather would have been captured on 7 August 1916 during a German counter attack. He picked up a couple of pieces of shrapnel on Brind's Road for us and we kept the smaller piece as a souvenir of our visit to the battlefield. Quite eerie to think that I could have been walking very close to the footsteps of my grandfather some 95 years after him.

We didn't actually stop at the Franco-British memorial at Thiepval, but we could see the imposing 45 metre structure from virtually every other site that we stopped at. We stopped briefly near the Ulster Tower dedicated to soldiers from the 36th Belfast Division who were caught between artillery fire from the German and British guns on 1 July 1916. We didn't go into the tower, but photographed the field of Flander's Poppies nearby. At the moment the poppies are flowering everywhere alongside the roads.

To end our tour of the Somme battlefields we visited the Newfoundland memorial at Beaumont-Hamel. In addition to commemorating the 29th Division (to which the Newfoundland Regiment belonged) and the 51st Highland Division the site contains some well-preserved trenches of the First World War. It is unbelievable just how close to each other the Allied and German trenches were. From Beaumont-Hamel we returned to Peronne.

With tonight being Sander's night off from cooking we had to find somewhere to eat in Peronne. We joined some of the Canberrans - Clayton, Sharon, Bob and Frances - at a small restaurant in town. It was quite challenging ordering in French, but we managed to choose meals that we all enjoyed despite not being quite sure exactly what we had ordered?!

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