30/08/2023
We took a really emotive trip to some of the battlefields of northern France. We drove across the Somme, stopping at some of the cemeteries that dot the landscape here. I find them so sad, all those lives cut short needlessly. We ended up here at Vimy and the site of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. Here both France and Germany lost hundreds of thousands of lives. The Canadians arrived into trenches some of the British troops had dug in, in 1916. Their arrival and subsequent victory here was a turning point in the First World War. But it came at a huge cost of life. It was incredible to walk the landscape here, riddled with huge craters from shells, lots of the ground still littered with live ammunition and cordoned off. The trenches were reconstructed in the 1920s and are an amazing insight into life here with no man’s land being a mere 25 metres wide at points. This was a really emotional visit for us, weaving through the trenches trying to imagine the unimaginable. I’m so pleased we visited.
