The Western Front: Crécy, Azincourt and the Somme

Editor's note

One night at Port-le-Grand, beside Abbeville. The collegiate church of Saint-Vulfran, begun on 7 June 1488, is one of the most complete examples of Flamboyant Gothic in maritime Picardy, and the Musée Boucher-de-Perthes, beside the belfry of 1209, is named for the man called the father of prehistory, who found Acheulean tools here. The Bagatelle, a folly built after 1752 for Abraham van Robais, is open with its gardens. Then the thread begins. On 26 August 1346, between Crécy and Estrées, Edward III's outnumbered English army crushed the knights of Philip VI. Edward is said to have watched from a windmill; a viewpoint there looks over the battlefield, and in the town square a memorial honours John of Luxembourg, the blind King of Bohemia, who died fighting for France.

Editor's note

One night at Thiembronne, between Azincourt and Montreuil-sur-Mer. On 25 October 1415 Henry V's outnumbered English army, most of them archers, routed the French at Azincourt. A centre opened beside the field in 2019 tells the story with more than 400 medieval objects and a large model of the two armies, and a signposted circuit with an observation tower shows where they stood. Nearby are the ruins of Fressin, built by Jean V de Créqui in about 1430–1450, and Hesdin in the Canche valley, birthplace of the abbé Prévost in 1697. Montreuil-sur-Mer carries the thread forward: 3km of ramparts remodelled by Vauban, the town Victor Hugo gave to Monsieur Madeleine, and the British army's headquarters from 1916 to 1919, marked by Paul Landowski's equestrian Haig of 1931.

Editor's note

Two nights at the municipal site at Plouvain, close to Arras. The ridges north of the town were fought over from October 1914 to September 1915, and three nations' dead lie a few kilometres apart. On Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, at 165 metres, the French national necropolis inaugurated in 1925 holds about 43,000 men round its basilica and lantern tower; beside it the Ring of Remembrance, there since 11 November 2014, carries 579,620 names without distinction of nationality, rank or religion. On Vimy Ridge, Walter Allward's memorial bears 11,285 Canadian names, and at Neuville-Saint-Vaast 44,833 Germans are buried. In Arras, the Flamboyant belfry of 1554 rises above the arcaded Place des Héros, and beneath the streets the Wellington Quarry holds the chalk tunnels New Zealanders cut for the battle of 1917.

Editor's note

Two nights at Albert, in the middle of the 1916 battlefield. On 1 July, the first day of the Somme, a huge mine was blown at La Boisselle, and the Lochnagar Crater it left is still there to stand beside. The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, finished in 1932, carries more than 72,000 names; at Beaumont-Hamel the Newfoundland Memorial Park keeps its preserved trenches, and at Longueval the South African National Memorial stands in Delville Wood. Two days is not long for this, and it repays walking rather than driving. Measured against the single viewpoint at Crécy and the field at Azincourt, a few hours here show what changed between a battle fought in one afternoon and one fought for months.

Editor's note

A last night at Aubencheul-au-Bac, within reach of Cambrai. On 20 November 1917 the British launched the first mass attack with tanks here, and at Flesquières the Mark IV Deborah was knocked out by a shell. Buried after the war and dug up in 1998, she has had her own centre in the village since March 2018, and the British cemetery beside it holds the graves of her crew. In Cambrai, the belfry built as the bell tower of Saint-Martin in 1447–1474 and raised to 62m in 1736 is UNESCO-listed, the last of the towers that mark this route after Abbeville and Arras. The town's mint sweets, the bêtises, with their stripe of caramel, come from a mistake in the making.