After a delicious breakfast at Le Macassar, Deborah recommended that we visit the nearby Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux so that’s where we started our day. It has an amazing brand new museum beneath it, with effective video presentations which were a mix of original film from the 1st World War and clips featuring modern actors. You can use an app on your phone to watch these at your own pace. We ended up spending quite a bit of time there because it was so interesting. Then we visited Lochnagar Crater, Thiepval, and Beaumont-Hamel, which we have visited before but it was the first time for Cat. It was good to see them again though; we still had new things to learn about them. For example a guide at Thiepval told us that a boy of only twelve years old had managed to sign up to fight in the Somme (I think he has turned thirteen by he time he got to France) and it was only when his mother found out his whereabouts and sent his birth certificate to the army, that he was sent home in disgrace! Thank goodness he was caught! And Ally used the tour leaflet to guide us expertly around Beaumont-Hamel, where we could see the trenches and nearly every grave was dated 1st July 2016 - the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
Our last stop was the town of Albert where we had a late lunch before returning our hire car and saying our goodbyes to Ally and Cat at Charles de Gaulle airport. I was really sad that our weekend with them was over, it has been really good. Ally and Cat were of course going on separate flights, to Edinburgh and London respectively, but they were only five minutes apart which meant that they had each other’s company at the airport. However James and I were going in a different direction; we jumped on a train into Paris where we checked into our old favourite hotel, the Artus in St Germain.
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