Visit to the Somme
The D163 is a quiet rural road in eastern France that runs from the village of Auchonvillers east towards the small town of Beaumont-Hamel. This is farm country, in a ‘department’ (shire) named after the river Somme which flows nearby. Tranquil and bucolic, the region’s many ridgelines are marked with huge wind-turbines, a recent addition to the scenery. Scattered all over are compounds with low stone walls each surmounted by a cross bearing a sword. These are the cemeteries that dot the landscape in this part of France, a mute reminder of the immense death toll that was extracted here between 1915 and 1918 when the ‘Western Front’ marked the boundary between German and Allied forces during the Great War.
Known as the ‘Cross of Sacrifice’, the emblem of a sword and cross was supposedly designed by Rudyard Kipling, the famous author, whose only son was killed during the Battle of Loos. A trio of Britain’s most famous architects of the day designed the monuments which are maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). These graveyards house the remains of soldiers, sailors, airmen and civilians from the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa who died in the First and Second World Wars. Every corpse is commemorated by a name (where available) and a headstone. All the dead are honoured uniformly and equally, irrespective of rank, race, religion or belief.
