Bonjour
We will never forget Remembrance Day in 2018. It was the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Armistice to end WW1 and we were fortunate to be able to get tickets to the service at Villers-Bretonneux.
This area is about 4 hours drive from Cherbourg so we took off last Saturday and stayed nearby at Amiens. The town was fought over both during First and Second World Wars and suffered so much damage that there isn’t much left that looks like a typical old French town. The place was full of tourists because of the Remembrance Day service, and the rain stopped for a while so we could stroll around.
The River Somme cuts right through the town and there is a network of canals that feed off the river. It sort of looks like a cross between an English town and parts of Holland.
And then there was Remembrance Day. There were many services around the world, especially in Paris where many world leaders attended, but at Villers-Bretonneux we had Minister for Veterans’ Affairs (Darren Chester) and MC was Major General Mark Kelly (Repatriation Commissioner for DVA).
The first couple of hours was filled up with power point presentations of stories of soldiers who lost their lives, singing and musical performances by the RAAF Band and Voices of Biralee and readings. Just as the service started the rain also started and stopped when the service stopped. In the words of Justin Trudeau “as we sit here in the rain and thinking how uncomfortable we must be as our suits gets wet, and our hair gets wet, and our shoes get wet, I think it’s all the more fitting to remember on that day in Dieppe, the rain wasn’t rain. It was bullets.”
We didn’t take many photos but we hope to get back there sometime without the crowds and have proper look at the Memorial and the John Monash Centre.
Au revoir
L & M.
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