Postcard from Picardy

Last week we went to pay our respects. I took my Triumph Tiger. Felix also owned a Triumph; there’s a picture of him on it. After he died the Alexander family gave it to the gardener, but every time he rode it to the house, Gunner, Felix’s black Labrador went berserk with joy in anticipation of the return of his master. In the end they asked him to park it at the gate.

You get to do a lot of thinking on a long motorcycle journey; ear plugs in, with just the muffled roar of the wind and the engine. I gingerly rode off Le Shuttle carriage (thanks guys) onto a pre-planned route comprising ancient tree-lined Routes Nationales, under big skies filled with swifts, those dark scimitars of the air. Going fast at times, but you have to respect the small towns and villages that look like the villes we learned about as children in French lessons. The Marie, the boulangerie, the charcuterie, red brick houses with ornate soldier courses above the windows and doors, big commercial garages with Judas gates in the huge wooden doors and of course, a well-tended war memorial at the crossroads in the centre of town. A lot of people came to this part of the world to die.

Edward, my youngest brother, is also on a Triumph Tiger, William on his 1970s Yamaha XT500 booming its single-cylinder way across the undulating fields stitched together with farm houses, rows of wind-break poplars and rivers.

Talking of which, in 1916 the first day of the Somme started with a boom, one of the biggest imaginable. At 07:28hrs the Lochnagar mine, 27 tonnes of high explosive placed in tunnels stealthily excavated over eight months by teams of miners, was detonated. It was one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever created, left one of the largest man-made craters on the Western Front and was allegedly heard in London. One of several mines detonated that first day, the Lochnagar crater is our first destination and its quiet dignity is a credit to Richard Dunning MBE who owns the site and the many volunteers who maintain and tend to it.

I ease the big Triumph onto its side stand and on a perfect spring day, walk round the edge of the crater on wooden duckboards, each board carrying the name of the victim of the battle. The information boards are moving beyond endurance. Victims: soldiers; civilians; men; women; French; German; and British tell their stories.

Cecil Lewis described the detonation in Sagittarius Rising, his 1936 autobiography. He bore witness from the cockpit of his Morane Parasol monoplane from about five miles away.

‘We were over Thiepval and turned south to watch the mines. As we sailed down above all, came the final moment. Zero! At Boisselle the earth heaved and flashed, a tremendous and magnificent column rose up into the sky. There was an ear-splitting roar, drowning all the guns, flinging the machine sideways in the repercussing air. The earthly column rose, higher and higher to almost four thousand feet. There it hung, or seemed to hang, for a moment in the air, like a silhouette of some great cypress tree, then fell away in a widening cone of dust and debris.’

And a few minutes later the British troops advanced over the parapet. The untried ‘Pals’ 34th Division took some of the brunt comprising the 15th and 16th Royal Scots, 10th Lincolns, 11th Suffolks and eight battalions of the Northumberland Fusiliers.

There’s a board at Lochnagar with recollections of Charles Frankish of the Grimsby Chums. ‘After two minutes we went over the top into the churned mud of No-Man’s-Land. The small arms and shell-fire was very heavy. I had not gone far when a bullet struck my equipment and spun me round like a top, but I was none the worse. It was very hard going as I was also carrying two trench mortar bombs in a sand bag. About half way to the German trenches I received a terrific blow on my left forearm. I collapsed into the nearest shell hole, my arm quite useless, apparently broken.’

In the first 450 metres of the attack, of the 840 fighting strength of the Grimsby Chums, 500 were casualties, 180 of them dead. Walk briskly over that distance and imagine seeing 100 men fall every minute, 1.6 per second; one of them was my great uncle.

And once they’d walked through withering machine gun fire, those brave, unwitting men walked into the inferno created by German flame throwers and bullets fired at them in enfilade (which means from the side so you can’t avoid it). For the Germans had counter-attacked and British soldiers were forced into the crater while being pounded by both German and their own artillery.

They were just boys, strong country lads and it’s hard to imagine what horror it must have been to see comrades, friends and relatives cut down and blown to smithereens. The cries of dying men must have been unbearable – yet somehow black humour survived.

By the end of July The Somme Times, a satirical magazine produced for enlisted men in the trenches, was reporting that the fictitious Contalmaison Opera House was offering ‘the great spectacular drama’, entitled: There’s One More River To Cross. The editorial talked of finding better post-war profits in ‘mining instead of farming’. And in the back pages there were satirical adverts for ‘Optimism Cures’ – ‘Do you suffer from cheerfulness? Do you wake up in the morning feeling that all is going well of the allies? Do you sometimes think that the war will end within the next 12 months? Do you consider our leaders are competent to conduct the war to a successful issue?’

You get the picture; the spirit of Swift, Pope and Hislop thankfully lives on.

Overwhelmed, we climb onto our machines and ride to Thiepval. A-level history told us about the causes of The Great War; the botched aftermath of the Balkan Wars, the ludicrous alliances and imperial ambitions, the cretinous politicians and generals, and as Harry Patch the last surviving trench-fighting tommy who died in 2009 put it, ‘a family row’ between King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II.

‘Archduke found alive – World War One fought in error,’ goes that old joke headline. These days there’s a fashion for television historians (you know who you are) to write Buzzfeed-style articles listing 10 reasons why The Great War wasn’t really so bad after all. I wonder how they would have reacted as their feet sank to the top of their puttees in the mud of No-Man’s-Land, bullets singing like bees around their ears and all around their childhood friends being turned into human aerosols by artillery fire.

Lutyens’ monument is more dignified by the families seeking names of their fallen relatives than its presence. Awe inspiring and beautifully kept it most certainly is, but it’s also the sort of place where venal politicians come to lay wreaths for the cameras before going off on manoeuvres with their own box of toy soldiers.

We find Archie and Felix’s names and beat the retreat.

I took the Queen’s shilling and well remember one training sergeant telling me if you suffer more than 50 per cent casualties in a unit, discipline becomes very hard to maintain. One of the cards at Lochnagar tells of the 230,000 Courts Martial held between 1914 and October 1918. There were 3080 death sentences issued, with 346 executed, often of those suffering from shell shock or PTSD as we now call it. They are remembered at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.

My father always said The Great War was where the British upper classes lost the right to command the lower ranks; 10 years afterwards the National Strike brought the country to a halt as Britain’s population sought better reward for their sacrifice and hard work. Yet 20 years later Europe was at it again and I wonder what the World War Two German soldiers must have thought as they advanced past the Lutyens monument to the dead of World War One.

Dad was of a generation that saw the effect of the ‘missing generation’ of young men at first hand. I never saw Joan Littlewood’s Oh What A Lovely War on stage, but Dad had and spoke of the controversy. The British establishment drew battle lines and conducted a skirmishing war. Not all of them, however, and after a first Stratford theatre show, one of the stars, Victor Spinetti, recalled a royal visit. ‘One evening Princess Margaret came with Lord Cobbold, who as Lord Chamberlain was also the theatre censor,’ he recalled. ‘Afterwards Princess Margaret came backstage and said, “Well Miss Littlewood, those things should have been said many years ago – don’t you agree, Lord Cobbold?”’

Instead I read Alan Clark’s Donkeys, another controversial book about the role of British generals in World War Two, referencing that phrase: Lions led by donkeys. Gramp told me that he’d been given a white feather during The Great War (he was too young to join up), but everyone knew what a horror show it had been out in France.

I wheel the top heavy Triumph in front of the museum for a photograph and one of the staff comes out for a gasper. In creaky French I explain I have two relatives on the monument, killed at each end of the battle and that one of them rode a Triumph.

’Almost 20,000 men died that first day,’ he says sadly, staring at the horizon.

‘Yet they’re still at it even now,’ I reply, my voice catching in my throat. ‘There’s none so careless of a soldier’s life than a politician on the up. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon and Iran, and the United Nations has been laid waste. Nearly two million soldiers have died in Ukraine and whatever you think of that Russian invasion, every one of them is some mother’s son. For God’s sake…’

White-hot tears of anger streak my grimy face. He puts an arm round my shoulders and we stare up at the swifts carving up the azure sky.

Perhaps Archie and Felix died hoping of a better world. I hope so, yet in over a century we seem to have learned nothing.

That night we dined in a tiny restaurant, Brasserie Le Beverhouck near Hondschoote, hosted by two lovely women, and a very capable young waitress. The tiny place, on the border between Belgium and France, was the epitome of good cheer with natives of both countries eating food cooked with love, drinking ferocious Belgian beer, chatting and as welcoming to we-three brothers as it’s possible to be. And when we had eaten our fill, the billiard table came out and the customers danced to a juke box. All ages, sexes and nationalities having a lovely evening.

Perhaps that’s what those young men fought and died for but I’m not convinced. As the Triumph’s big engine bore me home I tried to remember the words from Laurence Binyon’s poem For The Fallen but somehow that Jerome Kern number from Oh What A Lovely War kept spinning though my head: ‘And when they ask us, how dangerous it was. Oh, we’ll never tell them, no, we’ll never tell them.’

Since then I’ve felt seared and scratchy, unable to get to sleep and when I do, dream of climbing an endless wooden ladder, a Lee Enfield over my shoulder and booming in my ears.

I dropped the Triumph on the way home, my mind elsewhere, which is never a good thing on a motorcycle, though it would be nice if car drivers learned how to use their indicators.

It’s too heavy for me, but I kept it because of the connection with Felix, which seems like a ridiculous affectation now and I’ve bought a more practical Honda VFR. I’ll not go back to Thiepval; too many ghosts and it’s enough that over a century on, Archie and Felix’s names are up there on the walls and being well cared for.

‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.’

I’ll do my best, boys.

Thanks to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Thanks also to the staff of Le Shuttle for the tunnel tickets. They run regular trains between Folkstone and Calais.