How far have we really come?

We had an early start on Friday for our day trip out to the WWI battlefields of the Somme which necessitated us braving the French railway system outside the standard Metro set-up. To say I was stressed when we reached Gare du Nord would have been an understatement.

Paris has three separate train systems:

1. The Metro, fast light rail that zips around the city, with trains leaving every three minutes
2. RER lines, your standard, two-level suburban trains to travel outside the city centre
3. Main Line, built for longer journeys into the rest of the country with a little more speed and a little more luxury

Sadly, there are a few stations in Paris where all three types of trains and many of their various lines converge - like Gare du Nord. Having anticipated a certain level of stress and a certain level of not knowing where the hell we needed to get to I had built in wiggle room with our departure time. After much wandering and seeking help from officials, we had our tickets and boarded our Main Line train for Amiens.

The train ride was uneventful and upon arriving in Amiens - about 120km out of Paris - we met Olivier, our guide for the day. Olivier used to work in HR before he decided 16 years ago he was sick of people complaining to him. So, as he puts it, he switched careers and started his one-man guide company where no-one can complain except himself and if he's complaining then it's ok because he's right.

A wild poppy growing on the Western Front.

Olivier had a wealth of knowledge about WWI across the entire Somme region and how the allied forces pushed back against the invading German army. He could point at ridges or forests or valleys or roads and tell you what happened there on what date with how many soldiers. He ferried us from place to place in his car which had an iPad loaded with the British trench maps for the region and our GPS position moving over it.

Olivier's main source of business is Australians looking into the part our country played in this region, but he gets many other nationalities as well and can tailor the day to take in places and battles of importance to your country. When the empire of Great Britain went to war that meant her dominions were at war as well so the presence of Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and India are strongly felt also.

We began the day by driving straight to the Australian memorial outside Villers-Bretonneux where we walked through the cemetery and inspected the walls of the lost. Many of the graves are unmarked because there was no way to identify some of the soldiers who fell. The thousands of names on the memorial wall are those of the missing. They either rest in one of the unmarked graves or their bodies are still out there, beneath the fields, where they fell in battle.

The Australian memorial.

The memorial flies the Australian and French flags but many headstones carry the insignia of the Canadians or other countries. Great Britain believed a soldier should be buried where, or as close to where, he fell. That is why most of the villages throughout the region, or scenes of significant battles, have similar cemeteries.

Sadly, the work of the memorial is never complete. Only a few weeks ago, Olivier told us, another name was carved into the wall. An Australian soldier who fought in the Somme and was never found. His information, in the chaos of war, was lost to time until some sort of research or uncovering of old documents highlighted the error. Last month, more than 100 years after WWI, Lance Corporal J.S. Moore of the 1st Infantry Battalion was added to the memorial wall alongside his fallen brothers.

This soldier's name was only added weeks ago.

The memorial tower provides a sweeping view of the cemetery and surrounding area. The sandstone tower is scarred with hundreds of bullet holes, the result of French forces using the memorial tower as a viewing post during WWII when German forces swept through the region once more. While the memorial was repaired following the end of WWII but the bullet holes were left as a historical reminder.

Behind the memorial itself is the Sir John Monash Centre, a museum dedicated to Australia's involvement in WWI. We spent a couple of hours exploring the museum's interactive video exhibits which detail how Australia came to be in the region, the part we played, and the catastrophic number of casualties we suffered.

You can see the bullet holes in the tower's facade.

We had lunch at the museum before heading into nearby Villers-Bretonneux. Australia is deeply ingrained in this village because of the part our soldiers played in the Great War. The village sits high on a hill and was viewed as a place of strategic importance for the Germans. It changed hands a number of times throughout the war but the village considers itself indebted to Australia.

In March-April 1918, the Germans launched their Spring Offensive, an onslaught that was meant to break through British lines along the Western Front and push the empire out of the war. Part of this offensive was Operation Michael, a plan to push through the Somme region and capture the strategic transport and communications hub of Amiens. The Germans knew if they could take Villers-Bretonneux then Amien would be within reach.

On April 4, 1918, they made their first attempt. German soldiers began their push towards Villers-Bretonneux and were met by weary British forces and a number of Australian battalions that had been rushed to the region to back up the Brits. German forces came within 400m of the sleepy French village but were eventually repelled. Twenty days later, they tried again.

The view of the cemetery from the top of the memorial tower.

On the morning of April 24, 1918, German forces returned to Villers-Bretonneux but, this time aided by tanks, they punched holes through the allied defenses and the village was overrun. Fighting continued throughout the day but the Germans had captured the village. It wasn't until that evening, as night fell, Australia would move to reclaim the village. As light faded, Australian forces surrounded Villers-Bretonneux and cut off German support lines into the village. By dawn on April 25th, Anzac Day, three years since to the day since the blood-soaked beaches of Gallipoli, Australia had retaken Villers-Bretonneux.

Australia is everywhere in the village. From Melbourne Street, or Victoria School where the playground proudly displays a sign that reads 'never forget Australia', or in Adelaide Cemetery where many of the soldiers who died in the battle for Villers-Bretonneux are buried.

Australia's Unknown Soldier, whose final resting place now lies in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, was likely a man who died fighting to save Viller-Bretonneux. He was buried in Adelaide Cemetery on the outskirts of the village before being exhumed in 1993, 75 years after the guns fell silent in 1918, and repatriated to Australia as a symbol of the loss and sacrifice and bravery of war. A headstone in honour of the Unknown Soldier remains standing in Adelaide Cemetery.

The original resting place in France of Australia's Unknown Soldier.

We visited a number of other significant sites throughout the afternoon, including the scene of the first tank battle in history at Pozieres.

We also saw the Lochnagar Crater, a huge depression in the ground caused by allied forces attempting to dig beneath German lines and filling it with thousands of kilograms of explosives. Unfortunately, the British soldiers ran out of time and didn't dig far enough. The missed the Germans on July 1, 1916, in a battle that became one of their worst casualty losses ever. 

Pictures don't do the crater justice. It is 20m deep and 100m wide.

One of our last stops was a Newfoundland memorial where allied trenches have been kept intact. They are covered in grass now but you get a sense of what it was like to walk through one, how little distance there was between opposing trenches but, conversely, how large that distance must have seemed to a soldier running through open space without cover as bullets flew through the air.

As we drove towards St Quentin, the end of our trip, we saw a couple of German military cemeteries where every cross was dark grey. Olivier explained white crosses and headstones were only for the victors.

We also saw a memorial for the Second Australian Division. A large statue of an Aussie digger stood atop the memorial. Olivier told us that statue had only been erected in the 1990s after German forces in WWII toppled the original. The original statue was a little more... shall we say, graphic? It depicted an Australian soldier bayoneting an eagle he had pinned to the ground. The eagle was a symbol of pride for Germany and the soldier pinning it to the ground with his boot was meant to represent the humiliation German forces suffered in the region. German soldiers in WWII, somewhat understandably, didn't appreciate the image. They destroyed the statue but left the memorial and its brass plaques intact.

Original trenches from WWI.

We eventually arrived at the station in St Quentin and boarded our train back to Paris. This was a day trip I had wanted to do seven years ago but time was against us.

The scale of destruction and loss across the Western Front is sobering. The distances don't seem vast by today's technological standards but for soldiers on foot in mud it was another world. It's all the more depressing to see the memorials and graves and know we haven't really learned anything. Conflicts across the globe continue despite the hard lessons these places try to teach us. How far have we really come?

Not really sure what we are doing tomorrow. Might try to keep it light.