Our first stop on the tour today is to where the battle of Fromelles took place. It is where the Australians first saw action on the Western Front alongside the British. Australia suffered 5,500 casualties including 1500 killed in one single day. This, to put it into context, is equivalent to a quarter of the men killed at Gallipoli over a seven month period. The losses here for Australia is quite significant. At the VC Corner Australian Cemetery these men are buried in mass graves with a single large cross on the ground above the approximately 410 men buried here. We then made the short trip up to Pheasant Wood, Fromelles where the Germans’ had moved the bodies of some 400 Australian troops to by train to bury them in a mass grave. These men have been exhumed recently and most of them identified using DNA or by items of identification, ie dog tags which were on still their body. As we made our way back up the mown grass path with green fields around us, a beautiful blue sky above and bird song in the air it was hard to imagine this lovely serene place was one a living hell on earth. I also wondered where the birds would have gone back then to flee the war.
Then we made our way to the new cemetery where these exhumed men will again be laid to rest. The new Cemetery has not yet opened but is mostly finished and we could see it from the bus and the viewing hut. The new cemetery is about 100 metres from where the men were originally buried in the mass grave. Coincidently the names of these men appear on the memorial wall at the VC Corner Australian Cemetery on the site of the Battle of Fromelles, which was the first cemetery we visited today.
During the bus transit to our next stop our guide Vic read out the numbers of each surname of those on the bus killed during the Great War. According to the British Records there were 1016 Wilkinson’s killed in the Great War. This data was only taken from the British register and did not include Australians with the surname Wilkinson!
We made a quick stop to the Canadian Vimy Ridge National Historic Site of Canada where we could see original trenches, mine craters and upheaved ground where men once fought. Just up the road stands the awesomely huge memorial to the Canadian Troops on the top of Vimy Ridge which over looks the towns beneath.
Between the two locations there is a great deal of land fenced off with electric fences and red signs warning of ‘No Entry Due to Undetonated Explosives’. Inside the fences there are sheep that graze and evidently just sometimes find a mine. Poor Sheepy’s!!
German cemeteries are dark, sombre and basic. Just a dark cross marks each grave and there are no flowers or poppies. In a German cemetery, we drove past but did not stop at, held 40,000 men – it was a staggering sight.
Vic our guide told us a famous quote “In war there was only one winner; war itself”.
We stopped in the town of Arras for lunch. There were markets on in the large cobble stone square. They were selling all sorts of things from shoes and clothes to food and fresh produce. One line of stalls included all sorts of cured meats and fresh poultry. Another sold all sorts of spices. The smells were intoxicating and the sights delicious (and some not quite so)!
Following lunch, still in Arras, we visited the memorial to the Battle of Arras. Here we watched a short film detailing how the battle came about and the devastation to life because of it. We then were taken on a 1 hour tour of the tunnels dug out of the limestone chalk by New Zealand and British Engineers. Here they worked quickly and in just 8 days had joined many disused quarries which could then house up to 24,000 troops. The tunnels and the feats of these engineers are quite impressive.
On the bus we saw a pictorial description of the war at Ypres taken by CAPT Frank Hurley, Official war photographer. Watching the pictures and hearing the accompanying stories you can’t not shed a tear or two. With such suffering and loss and as was heard on the film one troop cried out to a fellow troop “What are we fighting for?” After seeing such death and destruction and learning about some poorly executed battles I can’t help but ask the same question. So many parents, siblings, wives and girlfriends were left heartbroken and feeling no comfort at all knowing that their loved ones died a hero or for the freedom of another country.
Our last stop for today was a visit to pay our respect to the Bullecourt Digger. The statute of the Digger looks out over the fields where in April and May 1917 around 10,000 Australian Soldiers were killed and wounded in the first and second battles of Bullecourt. A significant loss indeed for what is described s a “small, tactically useless piece of ground”.
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