Somme Battlefields 1 - Lochnagar Crater and Newfoundland Memorial Park

We didn't find any poppies in Flanders (if you had seen the amount of mud you would understand why) but we found this lonely one by the side of the road near the Somme River in Northern France.

After the Remembrance Day service at Thievpal we visited the Lochnagar Crater near La Boiselle. Coinciding with the infantry attack on the German front line which commenced the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, the British exploded several underground mines. One of the craters created by those explosions was the Lochnagar Crater. The crater is about 20 metres deep and unlike the Spanbroekmolen Crater in Belgium which filled with water, this crater remains a huge scar on the landscape.

The cross you can see in the distance in the photo above, is made from reclaimed timbers from a church in Durham, England. Many of the men who died in the area on 1 July 1916 were from Tyneside in the north-east of England. The men recruited from Tyneside were generally miners and were often deployed with the British tunnelling companies. The Memorial to the Missing at Thievpal records the names of all those who perished above and below ground and have no known grave. As recently as 1998, the remains of a British soldier were found near the rim of the Lochnagar Crater.

The other place we visited before lunch was the Newfoundland Memorial Park near Hamel. This park is one of the few World War I battle sites which has remained untouched since the end of the war. Newfoundland was not part of Canada at the time and so fought under their own flag. And yes, that is a statue of a moose on a rock!

Unfortunately, the Newfoundland Regiment suffered severe losses when they attacked the German frontline on 1 July 1916. The regiment's commander ordered the detonation of a mine 10 minutes before their planned attack which alerted the Germans to their position. Around 90% of the regiment  (around 5500 men) died in the attack. After the war, the government of Newfoundland purchased the land as a memorial to the regiment. The tree in the photo above, which is known as the Danger Tree, marks the spot in the park where the greatest losses occurred.

The interesting thing about the memorial park is that all the original trench lines and markers have been retained, exactly as they were.

Consequently, you get to see the German and Newfoundland positions and why it was so easy for the Germans to defend their position because there was so much open ground between them and the Newfoundlanders.

After visiting the memorial park we drove a few kilometres down the road to Albert (pronounced Al-bear). This is the Church of Notre-Dame de Brebieres in Albert. On top of the church is a statue of Mary which in 1915 was hit by a German artillery shell. While damaged, the statue hung in an almost horizontal position until 1918 when the church tower was destroyed. In fact, the whole town of Albert was completely destroyed and was rebuilt after the war. We had a French bistro meal for our lunch in a small bar just down the road from this church.