Walking in Europe

September 19th was a shorter distance (about 65kms) from Peronne to Bucqouy where we began a journey through an area known as the Somme. This is gently rolling terrain where the Western Front changed position back and forth over a number of years and involved British, Commonwealth, and German soldiers in the hundreds of thousands. The Commonwelath War Graves Commission maintains hundreds of large and small war graveyards and many of them are here. The day was full with a number of stops at graveyards and memorials of all sizes; some in farmers fields , others in beautiful parks and forested areas. Tom and I happened on one by the side of a secondary road that was entirely Canadian: the Sunken Road Graveyard containing perhaps a hundred remains: buried where they died.

Large Commonwealth cemeteries/memorials at Poziers and Thiepval contain headstones as well as walls or memorial structures with thousands of names for which no remains were found following the catastrophe of battle. A particularly moving memorial was the beautiful Canadian memorial to an entire generation of Newfoundlanders wiped out on July 1st of 1916 at Beaumont Hamel. I know I have only scraped the surface but the number of dead across this landscape from a four year cruel and tragic conflict is very hard to make sense of. In one German graveyard alone, Nampcel, there are 11,324 buried, 4 to each cross marker. I’ve updated the new photo gallery and added AD Gillespies letter from September 19, 1915.