Somme and Arras – Maps, the Missing and souvenirs

I’ve already mentioned our guide, Jeremy Banning’s expert knowledge - he didn’t simply know where the English, French and German trenches had stood but also produced maps and panoramas to get us to understand. So we’d be standing in the middle of a field and like a magician he’d unfurl a long photographic image showing us what it would have looked like in 1916. Mostly the photographs were taken from the German trenches looking out over No Man’s land and in one, horrifically you could see scattered black dots which were the corpses of men from the previous day’s fighting. The basic features of the landscape, the woods and the slopes have changed very little in the last hundred years apart from some of the towns expanding so it was easy to be transported back.

As we crossed and criss-crossed the farmland on minor roads we saw piles of roots at the corners of fields. Some were recognisably potatoes but what were the other gnarled white-ish things – were they turnips? “Sugar beet” Jeremy said when asked and later we passed a sugar processing plant. It is a long standing industry in the area and there was a sugar refinery, St Rohart’s factory on the Cambrai road near Vis-en-Artois was an objective for the troops to reach in 1917.

These fields yield a different harvest too. Farmers are still unearthing munitions. We were warned not to touch anything metal that looked intact as even after the passage of nearly a century they can still explode. The shells and grenades are marked with fluorescent paint and left by the roadside for the French authorities to dispose of safely.

The remains of the missing men are also still occasionally found. Jeremy told us of the considerable efforts of the Canadian authorities who succeeded in identifying one of their soldiers whose bones were found in 2002. This took some years and involved facial reconstruction, DNA matching with descendants before he was buried with full military honours. The Canadian government’s stance was that if you’ve given your life for the country then no effort is too great to find out who you are and give you a decent burial. 

And to return to the piles of sugar beet. On our walk back from Cuckoo Passage cemetery we passed some left over beets where the rest of the pile had been taken away. I found myself picking up a small one, rather chopped about and damaged, which had probably not been worth taking for processing. I wrapped it in the paper napkin that had come with lunch and put it into a side pocket on my rucksack. Back at our digs at Chavasse Farm I did try to persuade myself that I had quite enough to carry onto Eurostar. I should leave it behind in France and no doubt there are rules forbidding this sort of thing. I was in fact asked by the customs officer at St Pancras if I’d gone to the battlefields to look for shrapnel and the like.

So back it came to Britain with me. I’ve planted it in a pot and with the warm, wet weather we’ve been having recently it’s started to grow again and has put up a flush of new green leaves. It is a completely and utterly daft thing to have brought back from the Arras battlefield but still…

Somme and Arras day 2 - the world turned inside out

I woke early on the second day to the sound of a cockerel crowing somewhere nearby in the village. This was to be a day of the woods - Mametz, Mansel copse, Delville (known as Devil's wood to the soldiers), and High Wood.

I have an affection for woodland which goes back to a childhood of messing about in a nearby Beech copse; dredging and damming streams and having my first encounters with the scent of bluebells. On the drive out I was surprised to notice a sign in Welsh directing us to the Mametz memorial - a feisty Welsh dragon. I hadn't expected to encounter Welsh in the middle of France.

We didn't go into Mametz wood itself - it's privately owned but stood on the slope opposite as Jeremy told us where the trenches would have been and about the attack which started on the morning of 7th July 1916. The Welsh had the objective of taking the wood but the trees were full of Germans with machine guns. One of the things which made the weekend different was Jeremy's detailed intimate knowledge of the terrain. So we were standing on the side of the hill having walked up to the ridge in the pouring rain and we're looking down into Mametz itself as Jeremy is explaining that as the Welsh come over the ridge with the dawn light behind them they are clearly outlined against the horizon - sky-lined - and most of them did not even get as far as the wood itself. I'd always thought of dawn and the coming of daylight as something to be welcomed but not for these men.

It was a sobering moment.

Somme and Arras - the dead

Sometimes when another writer dangles an opportunity in front of your nose you have to say yes even if it doesn't necessarily square with your other plans nor with the time you have available. So on the first Friday of October, thanks to Vanessa Gebbie, I found myself on Eurostar early in the morning heading for Lille and the battlefields of the Somme and Arras. (October being the month I'd promised my publisher the completed manuscript of my second world war poems). In my rucksack I carried Lyn MacDonald's Somme, the Penguin anthology of first world war poems and Denis Winter's death's men. I had not had time to do much more than skim the first chapter of Somme but this was enough to make me realise how little I had prepared for this trip.

Our guide was the military historian Jeremy Banning and shortly before leaving I'd watching the programme, Who do you think you are, which he did with Hugh Dennis . I was quietly impressed by the programme. I'd never watched the series before, mistakenly believing it to be yet another version of the celebrity/reality TV shows which seem to fill the airwaves. This programme about Hugh's grandfathers who fought in the Great War had serious historical research behind it.


We dropped off our bags at Chavasse farm where we were staying and headed off into the battlefields. At this point I was still expecting the usual sort of writers' retreat that I've done before; lots and lots of time to write, good company, lovely food, the chance to get to know some of my fellow writers a little better but with the benefit of some Somme mud thrown in. I thought I knew about the first world war. I did Wilfred Owen's poetry at school and then went on to study history at university so I knew about the horrific casualty figures, 60,000 on the first day of the battle of the Somme. I didn't think that I was going to learn anything new but all this was about to change.

The first place that we stopped at was an out of the way cemetery surrounded by trees and there they all were - row after row of headstones. Normally graveyards can be pleasant places to visit, peaceful with flowers on many of the graves. So why did this one feel completely different? It was because each headstone represented a young man and there were close on a thousand of them. I walked between the rows reading their names and regiments - some headstones were almost touching where they'd all been killed on the same day and buried next to each other. Name after name and I could see them lying in piles waiting to be buried. You don't normally think of what lies beneath the turf but in this place it was inescapable.

 Then I got to the headstones without names - an unknown solder - known only to God. I found myself seized by the strangest of impulses of wanting to hug these gravestones, to reach out to these unknowns - each one somebody's son. I thought of their mothers at home receiving that telegram but never having a grave for which they could chose an inscription and I was overwhelmed.


And for an more eloquent comment on why it is important to visit the cemeteries as well as the battlefield sites you should read Vanessa

Home Straight

I’ve spent the morning pacing around the house, manuscript in hand, growling (I have a sore throat) the poems aloud. I’ve finished the final poem about the Gloucester Sea Gladiators and polished some of the others.

Even my hairdresser, Juliet got in on the act earlier. The manuscript went with me to the hairdressers first thing so she could see the cover – Bill Lazell’s wonderful photograph. Before I could blink the manageress had taken the whole thing out of my hands and was reading aloud one of the poems about Taid being bombed in Grand Harbour. “This has given me goose bumps,” she said and wants a copy of the book. I suppose this is known as marketing although I did explain it isn’t finished.

So I’ve sent it off in the ether to a critical reader.

What do I do now…..?

One of my Poems has been travelling…

Well there I was posting about not being able to let go of my poems when a message appears in my in-box reminding me that I did let one of them, Sirens, out earlier in the summer.

Oh my, what an adventure this poem has had. I was responding to an invitation from Nicelle Davis over on the Bees Knees blog to send her poems to take to New York.  Nicelle believes in letting poems roam freely and finds lots of wonderful ways of making this happen using coffee cups, T-shirts, plant pots,  the sides of cars - there are no limits.

She is also a reassuring sort of person to leave a rather shy written-from-the-point-of-view-of-an-eight-year-old-girl-poem with. As her blog says her hope is for poems to thrive. She wants her poem kids to play with your poem kids. She wants them all to drink purple kool-aid together and climb trees.

So my poem has not only been to New York but also to San Diego – coast to coast no less as part of a red Poetry Flash coat together with other poems. It sounds such fun. I am almost jealous having never been to the States. I suspect it probably won’t be back any time soon but it may send a postcard you never know.