THE
SOMME
Two nights
were spent in Amiens. The first afternoon I hired a car and went to
my uncle's grave at Daours.
Pte
Ernest Robinson
1st Bn.,
Australian Infantry, A.I.F
died of
wounds on 21st July, 1916 These wounds were received fighting at
Pozieres.
The entrance
to the cemetery at Daours
The rows of
graves
The grave I
was searching for
We then drove
onto the impressive Australian
War Memorial
at Villiers Bretonneux. The tower is engraved with the names of
10,982 soldiers who went missing in action. and have no known
grave.
the graves seen from the top of
the Memorial
the town of Villiers
Bretonneux as seen from the Memorial
before
returning to Amiens
On Wednesday
we traveled by train to the town of Albert and met Brian our guide
from Salient
Tours.
He drove us with a couple from Dubbo on a fascinating tour of part of
the Somme battlefields.
First to the
Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial. the
British
trenches
are in front, the German
trenches
are near the trees
Then onto the
Ulster Memorial
Tower,
the first to be erected on the Western Front in 1921, is a replica of
Helen's tower near Bangor, County Down in Northern Ireland
we had
refreshments in the tea room before going onto
Thiepval Memorial
with the
names of 73,367 British and South African soldiers whose remains were
never found.
The Thiepval
Anglo-French cemetery
where most of
the gravestones are marked either 'Inconnu' or 'A soldier of the
Great War known unto God' like so many graves we saw over these three
days.
Nearby is
Mouquet
Farm (the
Aussies called it Moo-cow Farm)
In 1916 it
was a German stronghold and was first attacked by the Australians
with 6,300 casualties. The farm was eventually taken by the
British.
We moved onto
Pozieres and the British
Tank Memorial
We returned
to Amiens for the night and the next day traveled by train to Ypres
in Belgium
Onto
Belgium and Ypres
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