The Somme

On Tuesday morning we visited a few memorial sites around the Somme area. We started with the Canadian Newfoundland Memorial at Beaumont-Hamel. A friendly young Canadian guide told us about the battle, which started on 1st July 2016 and finally ended in November of the same year, with only a couple of kilometres of ground gained. She was very informative and I felt that I learned a lot. We walked round the battlefield on our own afterwards and you can still see the trenches and shell holes, although due to the erosion of time they are less deep than they once were. You could see the layout of the battlefield very clearly. At the Highlanders memorial a pupil from a secondary school in Alloa was playing the bagpipes to honour all of these young men who died when they were only a few years older than he is now. A small graveyard had the most gorgeous yellow roses in full bloom; I’m still struggling with reconciling the undoubted beauty of these memorial sites with the horrific battles that happened there. I try to imagine what it must have been like but it’s too peaceful and verdant (even the graveyards, which are beautifully tended.) On a lighter note, James was at the little lookout post in a bend of one of the trenches when he spotted Heather on the path and said "Hände hoch Heather!" which I thought was very funny!

Thiepval was our next destination and we looked for and found the name of Heather’s relative, Neil Chisholm, a solider of the Middlesex regiment, who is commemorated there because when he died aged twenty-three in 1917 his body was never identified. Nearby, we visited Lochnagar Crater which is huge, and has been turned into a memorial too. It was created by the British setting off explosives that had been tunnelled in beneath the German lines on the first day of the battle of the Somme.