Artois Battlefields: Lorette, Vimy and the Largest German Cemetery in France

Required Activities

• From the lantern tower at Lorette, look north over the coalfield and south over the plain of Arras and work out why a hill of only 165 m cost 188,000 lives in a single year; go down into the crypt under the tower to the ossuary, where the unknown soldier of the Indochina war was laid in 1980, and read the line from the Book of Samuel cut over the basilica door

• Walk the whole 345 m of the Ring of Remembrance past its 500 gilded panels and find the two ends of the alphabet: A Tet, a Nepalese soldier of the British army, and Rudolf Zywitz, a German — the letters are 12 mm high, and the list runs without regard to nationality, rank or religion

• Walk the reconstructed trench lines at Vimy — rebuilt while the memorial was going up, and only a fragment of the network that ran the length of the Canadian sector — then stand under Allward's memorial, unveiled on 26 July 1936 before 30,000 people, and look closely at the stone: Seget limestone from the only known quarry, on the island of Brač in Croatia, the same stone as Diocletian's palace at Split. Every tree on the ridge was planted by a Canadian for one dead soldier

• Walk the 29 plots of the German cemetery at Neuville-Saint-Vaast, the largest in France with 44,833 burials from more than a hundred regiments, and notice that each metal cross carries two names on each side; then find the 129 memorial stones cut in Hebrew for the Jewish soldiers among them