Thiepval and Amiens, France

From Albert we drove to Amiens, stopping at Thiepval along the way. The Thiepval Monument really is enormous, and can be seen far in advance of any approach since it’s on high ground. I couldn’t look at high ground anywhere along the Somme River or Front Line without imagining it might have been the place where countless men lost their lives. The names of about 73,000 British missing are carved into the walls of this monument.
The crosses to the left are French graves, the white monument style to the right are British.
This is the landscape around Thiepval, the landscape of the Picardy region of France. Wooded areas were often fierce battlegrounds, and on occasion you might see a sign posted on a particularly large tree marking it as the only one that survived the war. This close to Theipval, which was high ground where so many men lost their lives, it’s likely all of the trees, above, date after the First World War.

In a separate building that’s part store and part museum, the Thiepval Monument also offers a little theater with a series of films on the war, along with a gallery of photographs and a data base station to trace any names or perhaps relatives who might have who fought in the war.
This is the church in the town of Thiepval. I was particularly interested in the churches of smaller towns, since that’s important in the book I’m writing. I needed to count the doors, notice the placement, see if there were basements. Most have clocks in their towers, rather than just bells.

After leaving the monument, we finished our route to Amiens. We picnicked again, this time in a lovely park in the city of Amiens.

It was a Saturday and we saw the first of six brides that day. The bridal party to the right is in front of the Amiens Hotel de Ville, or Town Hall.

I must say we didn’t really do this city justice, since we were there for such a short time. To give you a sense of just how far back its history goes, the first name of the city, Samarobriva (Bridge on the Somme), dates to the 1st century B.C. At the close of the 1st century A.D. this Gallo-Roman settlement had probably 25,000 residents. Needless to say, there have been plenty of wars, plagues, power struggles, and intrigues taking place in this city.
There was a wedding rehearsal going on in this cathedral, and it was here that I heard the lovely Pachebel’s Canon. It seemed fitting to see so many weddings that day, and then hear the same music we had at our own wedding.

Every big city has a Notre Dame, for “Our Lady” — of whatever city it’s in, and Amiens is certainly big enough to host many cathedrals. This city also has canals and horse and buggy tours to see the many sites. For science fiction fans, Jules Verne married a woman from Amiens and settled there when he was forty-three, living in Amiens until he died in 1905. His house is open to the public (although, sadly, we didn’t have time to visit).

We also planned our route to Paris for the next day, stopping at a Tourist office to ask about train schedules. We learned we could leave our car free of charge if we took the train from the nearby suburb of Longeau rather than going from the bigger city of Amiens. So we took a trial run to find Longeau, since we planned to catch an early train the next morning. Finding towns and cities is easy, as I recall someone mentioning in the blog comment section. The sign posts point you in the right direction. It’s finding spots within the towns and cities that proves challenging. We ended up stopping in a little drug store for directions to the train station, where I ended up communicating via pictures. It felt a little like Pictionary—remember that game? Pictures really are worth a thousand words—more than that when the people involved don’t speak the same language.