I,m no one trick poney

After landing in Paris, we headed North to the Somme to do a quick tour of the battle in 1916 that cost the British 150,000 casualties in three months-60,000 on the first morning of the attack. It was Don's first trip to a WWI battlefield, and something I had not done in a while, so we decided that we would hit some of the highlights. First was Lochnagar Crater. Don and I can both now testify to the fact that 30 tons of explosives makes a VERY big hole in the ground. From there it was to Delville Wood, where the South African brigade suffered terribly. The whole area has been preserved intact and in addition to the shell holes, trenches, etc. they have an excellent museum and bookshop-here I go again. Next was New Foundland Park and Y ravine. ON July 1, 1916, the Royal Newfoundland Regiment suffered 800 casualties in 30 minutes. The scene of their sacrifice has been preserved and we could see all of the trenches, shell holes etc. We then walked across "No Man's Land" to Y Ravine, which was aken by the 51st Highland Division.

The monument to the "Ladies from Hell" is at the end of the park and I was about to head back to the car when DOn spotted a recently tilled field and his lust for rusty bits of metal drew us both into the field like magnates. The field was, as I expected, thick with shrapnel. Of the two of us, however, I think I did the best, finding an intact British shell. Other discoveries were dozens of pieces of shrapnel of various sizes and a spent bullet.

Then we drove on to the Thiepval memorial, where the names of England's 75,000 unknowns from the battle are engraved, and the Ulster monument, where Northern Irishmen scored one of the offensives only success of the first day. A walk through the fields around the Ulster monument netted more shrapnel, the head of a British Tommies shovel, British issue horseshoe and a piece of a German stake for stringing wire. I had a blast, it brought back many pleasant memories of old battlefield walks. It was also great to find so many relics. It is really amazing to think that things like that are still to be found almost 100 years after the battle. I know Anna thinks I'm crazy, but I get a real charge out of picking something up out of the ground-even an old piece of shrapnel-that has not been touched by a soul since the battle. Cool.

We finished up the day at Poziers, wehre the Australians finally battered down some extremely heavy German defenses. It is also the site of a monument to the Royal Tank Regiment that says much about the 20th Century. Constructed in the 1920s to commemorate a battle of the 1st World War; today you can see the damage caused to the monument by Allied fighter planes during WWII.

Well, I think that is about is for now. Tomorrow it is on to Vimy Ridge and the Canadian tunnells. Time, and weather permitting, we are also planning to check out the American battlefields at Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood and the forest of Compiegne, where the Armistice was signed in 1918 and where, in 1940, Hitler humiliated France by having her representatives sign their nation's capitulation in the same car that the Germans had surrendered in at the end of WWI.

The past couple of days have surely proved that fact is often stranger than fiction...