Paying our respects

Today we visited the grave of James’ great uncle Hugh Anderson at Fins New British Cemetery for the second time; this time to mark the centenary of his death. I found the experience very moving and I know that James did too. We had brought a little purple heather from Scotland which we planted at his grave, in the hope that it will flourish there. Heather kindly watered it with her water bottle as the soil was rather dry, and we also left a little wooden cross with a poppy on it. Heather and Ewan were very supportive of how much this visit meant to us and especially to James. Then we left the neat little cemetery with its rows of white gravestones bright in the sunshine and continued on our way towards Amiens.

We had strolled around the centre of the pleasant city of Mons in the morning; I rubbed the head of the brass monkey at the magnificent town hall with my left hand in order to earn a whole year of good luck! A couple of kilometres out from the centre we visited the monument marking where the forces of the British Empire fought both the first and last battles of the 1st World War in 1914 and 1918. And we also visited the nearby St Symphorien cemetery, where the first and last soldiers to be killed in the war are buried just across from each other. On this sunny morning, St Symphorien cemetery, with its glades of trees and little hills, looked too lovely to be a place of death. And yet maybe these young men deserved their final resting place to be beautiful.

Then we crossed the border to France where we found our way to tiny Honnecourt sur Escaut, where Hugh Anderson was wounded in September 1918 while attempting to cross the St Quentin Canal (he died of his wounds a couple of weeks later.) It was lunch time but the hamlet had no café, so on the advice of some friendly locals we set off to Gouzeaucourt, where we were promised a choice of cafés and restaurants. How wrong that advice turned out to be! The village was well and truly closed for lunch! Nothing daunted we went into the delightful Boulangerie Soufflet and bought ourselves an excellent picnic. Opposite the boulangerie we noticed a potato dispenser set into a wall - a slot machine for potatoes - I have never seen such a thing before! We consumed our picnic while sitting on the low wall which separates the cemetery at nearby Fins from the surrounding sugar beet fields, before paying our respects to Hugh Anderson.