July 1

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Saturday July 1
Next morning I had a shower by pouring water from a large bottle over me. Once again I had a puncture. This time from a thorn. Set off for Compiegne arriving before mid-day. After lunch I cycled through cool forests to the clearing where the Armistice was signed in November of 1918. The railway carriage is now housed in a building and I sneakily took a few photographs of the railway carriage. When teaching at Hemel Hemstead School I chatted with a veteran of the First World War, who recounted the last few hours of the War, and how the shelling continued right up to 11 am. A captain had ordered them to leave a safe position and cross a cross-roads that was being shelled. Not surprisingly no-one wanted the dubious honour of the last Tommy to be killed in the War, so they told him to stuff it, or words to that effect.
One last anecdote: in the front line trench he needed, each morning just after dawn, to have a shit. To access a rear trench for a toilet he had to run up a communication trench in full view of enemy fire. Each morning a shell was fired at him as he ran up the trench but each time he reached the safety of the toilet! I doubt that he suffered from constipation.
The railway carriage was of course visited by Herr Hitler in early July 1940 for the signing of the French surrender. His cockiness in the newsreels is almost perfect hubris but the events of the next five years makes the word inappropriate. I sat chatting with a couple, she from Belgium, he from Germany, and me from Blighty. All we could do was shake our heads with incomprehension.
Nieder Wieder.
Arrived in Soissons at 5 pm. Once again stayed in the municipal campsite close to the city centre. That night I had a Moroccan meal whilst outside, supporters of Portugal, playing I think England in the World Cup, cruised around the town blaring their car horns.

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