Amiens is supposedly really Aussie friendly, the hotel I am staying in has an Aussie flag & diggers hat etc. So I picked up a brochure for a tour of the battlefields as I am still following my great uncles war service, well shat I can remember, I left the dashed letters at home. Anyway for a day tour it was 130 Euros, about $190 dollars. I emailed the woman concerned and asked what that entailed, I was not going to sit on a bus all day and see things as they flashed by like the last tour. Anyway she did not get back to me until too late, lucky as they didn't even provide lunch for $190.. screw that. I got the local train to Villes-Bretonneaux and did the place myself, for 7 Euro, about $10... Yeah I know!!
Villers-Bretonneaux has a lot of Aussie history as that is where the Australians halted the Germans in 1918, it was the Germans first defeat and it was all downhill from there for them. So it is a really important place in our history. Once General Monash got command of the Aussie forces he really made a difference, he altered the way the war was fought, he was a brilliant tactician and apparently they are still studying his battles in military schools all over the world, the dude was brilliant. He expected the battle at Villers-Bretonneaux to last for 90 minutes and it lasted 93... How cool is that, we can be very proud of him, which is probably why so many things in Victoria are named after him, he was from Melbourne I believe, awesome dude.
The local school is called the Victorian School as the children of Victoria raised the money with a penny drive and sent the money for the school to be built as a gift to the French children, pretty awesome I think. There is a sign in the school hall, in French, that says never forget Australia, and one in the playground in English that says, Don't forget Australia. It was quite emotional seeing them. An area upstairs has been turned into a Museum of the Australian war in the area, it was really well worth the visit. I then walked out to the Commonwealth war cemetery, there is an Australian Monument at the back of the cemetery, that was really good too. There are different commonwealth country memorial in different cemetery's this one just happens to be Australian. There are still bullet holes in some of the walls from the second world war, as that is where the French tried to hold off the Germans, but I am not sure if they were successful. They don't do signs in English all that well, the French. I do know the Germans dismantled the Australian monument in one of the towns and it has since been replaced with a statue of a digger. I laughed when I saw the English translation for that, they had digger then in brackets (miner). Obviously not an Australian translation....
It was weird walking around Villers-Bretonneaux, I was walking down Rue Melbourne, Rue Victoria etc. There was a pub called Le Melbourne too, but I didn't get a picture as some men were standing out the front chatting, when I came back through town, they were still there, 3 hours later...
Anyway I had a great day, I really enjoyed it. I was exhausted, I must have walked 5 miles all up and it was hot. There are no pavements out to the memorial, so you are walking on the edge of the road and you have to keep heading bush every time a car comes along, which was quite a lot really.
Anyway I hatched a plan for when I leave Amiens, more about that in the next blog, which will be today as I have already done it!!
I will leave you with some pics
Cheers
Lones
Rue Melbourne. There is something wrong with my camera, as the pixels are crap, you cannot zoom in and it is meant to be 12 pixels, so I have no idea what is going on....
The plaque in the school hall.
The playground, I was a very proud Aussie.
The monument at the war cemetery, it can be seen for miles, well done Commonwealth Graves, it is a lasting memory to all the boys we lost.
The memorial behind the cemetery.
The wall with bullet holes
Part of the plaque at the memorial.
Far too many of these graves, from every nation, known unto God... Poor buggers, a lady told me that apparently they removed a lot of the soldiers ID to send back to family without marking the bodies, so they they had no idea who was who?? Also many didn't have enough left to identify, God what a nightmare, lets pray it never happens again...
No comments:
Post a Comment