11.
France, Dear France.
The anger and upset that I had felt at the French Cemetery in Gallipoli had been slowly waning throughout my journey. I still required an answer, as I had promised the dead that I would find one, but my initial anger towards the French had gone. This wasn’t because Gallipoli seemed like a long way away, but because I had been following the hundred year old ghosts of the French army across the continent of Europe.
The French had been at my initial starting point at Kumkale, then at Gallipoli, where they had held the southern side of the front at Helles. I met up with them again at Lake Doiran, where they had fought alongside the British in those bloody hills. Further north inside Macedonia, they didn’t have the same reluctance as the British commanders, who ordered their troops to (not really) help Serbia, whilst the French headed north along the Vardar River to try to help the retreating Serbs. The British then wanted to abandon the Macedonian Front, only staying due to fierce protests from the French.
Meanwhile, further to the west, the French fought with tenacity and courage alongside the Greeks during the pivotal battle of Skra-di-Legen and the Serbs during the battles of Kajmakchalan and Dobro Pole, which led to the Bulgarian retreat of 1918.
After the Serbian Army’s dreadful retreat through Albania, the French alongside the British reorganised and re-equipped the Serbs, so that they could rejoin the fight to free their country.
Further North in Montenegro, they were involved in the fighting on Mt Lovcin. Whilst in Italy, they helped the British and Italians stem the German and Austro-Hungarian advance of autumn 1917. All of the above was done despite (or because of?) the majority of the Western Front being fought in northern France.
I’m an Englishman and us English seem to have a historical dislike of the French for some reason? (I haven’t said British, because the Scots seem to get on well with them!) Well, that’s not the case for me anymore, as you couldn’t find a better friend or neighbour than one who is more than willing to help her allies, even when the situation at home was so dire.
Also, I would like to mention that the reception I got from the ordinary French people was amazing. It probably helped that the translation card that I carried, stating the reasons behind my journey, actually made sense to them! But their generosity and encouragement made my journey a lot easier, especially when I was really struggling during my first few days in France. Thank you so much.
After crossing the border, I headed west towards the small town of Pfetterhouse and the start of the Western Front. There were many bunkers and trenches in the woods to the east of the town, but my starting point was the location of the boundary stones which marked the old pre WW1 borders between France, Germany and Switzerland. After a few moments of peace, just listening to the birds in the woods and once again trying to imagine the past, I headed north along the Western Front, towards my next destination: The town of Cernay and the Vosges battlefields.
The woods in this area are full of wartime bunkers and blockhouses, so after about ten diversions from my intended route, I had to tell myself that I couldn’t stop and see everything as I really needed to get to Cernay before dark.
Food (or lack of) was also becoming a bit of a problem. As it was early summer, there were a lot of green edibles which I could forage, such as nettles, dandelions, sorrel and bistort, although they were getting past their best and becoming quite bitter. Boiling them helped but it also made them smaller, so I needed a lot to make them worthwhile, which was a problem when I was trying to do other things at the same time. (Cycling and visiting places.) Trapping and fishing was out, as I didn’t want to get done for poaching and I never even considered stealing crops. No, I had a big, big problem which was just going to get worse the further I travelled into France.
On the way to Cernay, I cycled past a bakery. Outside was a vending machine selling baguettes. They looked just wonderful and at a Euro each, they were really good value. After emptying all of my bags looking for loose change, I could only find 79 cents, plus a lot of change from all the other countries which I’d been through. My happy go lucky mood crumbled and I could have cried, but I managed to snap myself out of it and came up with a plan to get my hands on some of that tasty looking bread.
I realised that as there was a boulangerie (bakery) just about everywhere, the French obviously preferred fresh bread and I wondered what did they did with the old bread. The bakery was closing soon, so I waited around the corner in a small park for a while, before returning when I thought that everybody had gone home. The tears were running down my face as I opened the lid of the dustbin to hopefully find some bread. It was full of rubbish and not a baguette in sight. As I turned around to go, I saw a woman watching me from the back entrance. Not being able to understand much French didn’t matter as the tone of her angry, shouting voice made perfect sense.
After apologising in English I continued to walk away, only stopping when somebody else asked me in English why I was going through their rubbish. I started to answer, but they obviously couldn’t understand my Yorkshire accent. It was a younger woman; maybe the daughter? The laminated French translation of what I was doing there must have made sense, as the young woman told me to wait before returning with a carrier bag of food, kissing me on both cheeks and saying, “Merci.” I was the one who should have said thank you, but I was in shock and she disappeared back inside before I could get my words out. Thank you now, whoever you were.
Cernay seemed like a nice enough town as I rode through. I didn’t linger, though, as I needed to find somewhere to camp before dark. As I headed east, along a track next to the river, I came across a circular wooden tower on the edge of a nature reserve which looked like a good location to spend the night. After setting up a hidden camp near the tower, I climbed up the stairs to the top to watch the sunset and see what the women had given to me? Two baguettes; each cut in half, two apples and a packet of Roudor French biscuits. Wonderful!
There was no feast for me that evening as I watched the sun set behind the wooded summits of the Vosges hills, as I didn’t know when or where I would be getting more food from. So after eating half a baguette and an apple, I carefully sealed the rest inside my waterproof map case to try to keep it as fresh as possible for the next few days.
The Vosges Battlefields.
As it was now the height of summer and not knowing what the time was due to keeping my phone switched off to preserve the battery, my body clock had got used to sleeping when it got dark and waking at first light. So the following morning I was off at an hour that I would rarely see in my normal life.
The streets were deserted as I headed north towards the forested hills of the Vosges. On the outskirts of the town was the largest French cemetery that I had seen since Macedonia, I don’t know how many graves there were, probably a couple of thousand? One grave was conspicuous though, a lone British grave amongst thousands of French. He was with friends, but I still felt sad, especially seeing as he had died after the war had ended. Accident or the Flu epidemic, I don’t know and it doesn’t matter, as the war was the reason he was there, so he was still a casualty of it.
After leaving a poppy, I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast of a few mouthfuls of bread and my other apple, before heading to the junction near the village of Uffholtz, which would take me to the top of the first hill in the Vosges range, Hartmannswillerkopfa (also called “the Mountain of Death” by the French infantry.)
The Battle of Hartmannswillerkopf, like a lot of other battles during the Great War, resulted in a stalemate with neither side being able to claim victory. In reality, it was a series of battles fought between August 1914 and January 1916, in order to try to gain control of the high vantage point which overlooked the Rhine plain. Approximately 30,000 men from both sides were killed on or near Hartmannswillerkopf during the war, with most of them dying during the first two years. Later in the war, it became a backwater as most of the fighting happened further north, with only artillery barrages and small skirmishes taking place in the south.
The past few days had taken a toll on my body, as I found it impossible to ride up the steep switchbacks which eventually led to the summit, which at a height of 3,000ft, was low for Europe, but it felt like a long way up for me that morning.
Whilst struggling to push my bike up the road, I was overtaken by a strange convoy of vehicles: two passenger coaches escorted by a tank, two army lorries and a few lighter trucks. I found out later that they were going to a memorial service at Hartmannswillerkopf, but by the time I managed to get there it had finished. Just as well really, as if there had been VIPs involved, they might not have let me in?
The area around the top is designated as a French National Monument, complete with memorial, cemetery, museum and the preserved battlefield. After leaving my bike chained to some railings next to a small kiosk, I headed to the memorial.
I was correct about there being a service there that morning, as the chairs were still laid out and there were several French and German wreaths left on top of the plinth at the centre of the memorial, which totally drowned out the single poppy that I left. It can’t have finished that long before I got there, as they’d left a few crates of bottled water which was still icy cold. I was sure that they wouldn’t have missed a few bottles, but I still felt guilty as I took them. There was no choice really, as it was a very hot day and I’d drunk most of my water on the way up.
To the east, at the back of the memorial was the French cemetery. Like all the other French cemeteries that I’d seen, it was a sad but beautiful place. It was obvious that a lot of thought had gone into its creation after the war, as when looking at it from the memorial, my eyes were drawn to the massive flag pole, with its Tricolor fluttering in the wind. The base of this is planted in a grassy avenue bordered by small hedges. The thousands of graves are in neat lines either side of the avenue. About half a mile away, In a straight line behind the flag pole is the summit of Hartmannswillerkopf, the place that cost those men their lives.
I sat and rested for a while at that location, thinking about the lives of the men from both sides that had been wasted trying to conquer the Mountain of Death. Who were they and what could they have achieved for the world if they hadn’t been slaughtered in those bloody battles? What of the children who were never born? Fate is inexorable. I remember thinking that the journey really was taking its toll on my mind, I would never quite be the same again...
After visiting the dead, I set off up the short but steep slope towards the battlefield. Small trees now covered the blasted and shattered hillside, but it was still possible to see the old shell craters amongst the undergrowth. Further up, I came across the first trenches, which were no more than shallow grassy ditches that weaved through the woods. These were the French positions.
Nearer to the top of the hill, the remains were much more significant: trenches, bunkers and dugouts which hadn’t changed that much since they had been abandoned nearly a century before. Barbed wire (mostly reconstructed, but some obviously original) still adorned the top of the trenches or stretched through the steep woodland. Like a lot of the other battlefields which I had been through, most of the best preserved fortifications were built by the Central Powers and this old German position was no exception. They were built to last and last they have!
After about an hour exploring these positions it was time to go, as I still had a fair way to travel before nightfall. After returning to my bike, I set off down the road which descends the hill towards Col Amic. About halfway down, I came to a memorial from World War Two, which was placed there to commemorate the Canadian crew of a Halifax bomber that had crashed at that location. At the base of the memorial were some weather beaten poppy crosses, the paper poppies had long since rotted away, so I carefully replaced the paper parts with some of the spares I was carrying.
Col Amic is a mountain pass in the Vosges. It is named after Captain Paul Amic who was killed in the locality whilst fighting in 1915. After leaving a poppy at his memorial stone, I somehow found the energy to cycle up the road which led towards the summit of the Grand Ballon, which at a height of 4,671ft is the highest point of the Vosges mountains.
It took me a while to get to the summit, as every time I went around a corner I saw more trenches next to the road that needed to be explored. Once again, I had to tell myself that I couldn’t see everything and that I needed to get a bloody move on!
From the summit of the Grand Ballon it was possible to follow the French trenches north by using a series of paths and tracks through the high meadows and forests. I did this for about 5 miles, until just before dusk, when I headed east towards the old German lines on Le Petit Ballon, where I intended to camp. With my tarp once again stretched over the collapsed remains of a century old trench, I watched the sun dip over the distant horizon, whilst eating the last of my bread. (It was going stale, so it had to be eaten.)
It was wonderful to be back in the hills and mountains, as I thought that I had finished with them in Italy. On that long and difficult, hot, but wonderful day I fell in love with the Vosges Mountains. They looked more like forested hills really, but their summits were higher than the highest in Britain, so I will call them mountains.
As the orange glow of the sunset receded to the dull glow of the night, my mind drifted back a hundred years to the German men who had lived, fought and died at that beautiful location. I’m sure that they too appreciated wonderful sunsets from that high vantage point, especially after 1915 when the fighting died down in that area.
The following morning I was just so tempted to carry on north along the ridge from Le Petit Ballon and down to the valley bottom near the village of Sondernach, where a lot of heavy fighting took place during 1915, before heading north east along the valley towards the town of Munster. It would have been a good day with lots of battlefields and cemeteries to visit, but no, I had somewhere else to go. I therefore headed east down a series of switchbacks on dusty tracks and paths until I reached the road at the bottom of The Vosges, before heading further east to the town of Soultzmatt where I had a special cemetery to visit.
Just before I reached the outskirts of the town, I turned onto a road which headed south and after about a mile, I reached my destination: the Romanian cemetery of Val du Patre.
Although Romania didn’t fight on the Western Front, the cemetery contains the remains of 2,344 Romanian soldiers who died whilst living in German Prisoner of War camps in the region after being captured on the Eastern Front. There are over 500 individual graves, whilst the rest are buried in two mass graves. Like all of the other cemeteries on the Western Front, it is a place of peace, beauty and serenity. At the back of the cemetery is a Byzantine cross with some inscriptions in French that tell their story. (These plaques were brought to the cemetery when all of the Romanian graves were moved to that location at the end of the war.)
Although I can’t speak much French, for some strange reason I don’t have much trouble deciphering written French (the French might disagree!) Below is my ‘translation’ of one of the inscriptions, which I wrote in my diary:
“The 687 Romanian war prisoners, asleep in the cemetery, Dead from January 1917 until the end.
They knew hungry, hardship and torture.”
It’s not a perfect translation by any means, but you get the gist of it. It touched me, as although I knew nothing about torture, I could relate to the hunger and hardship. They got some poppies before I headed north towards the city of Colmar.
I reached Colmar with two things on my mind: food and water. My food situation was becoming critical again, as I was down to just four biscuits and was also out of water. I wasn’t sure about what I could do to improve my food situation, but I thought that obtaining water would be easy as there’s usually a drinking fountain of some sort in every French settlement. There was, but they’d all been turned off, for some reason! My translation card became useful again when asking for water at a restaurant near the centre.
Food, or lack of, was another problem in itself. Any pride which I had had before went out of the window as I searched through dustbins outside shops, where I quickly learnt that the French don’t waste much food. So, I headed north along a main road, hoping to find somewhere a bit more secluded to camp and maybe something to eat?
Opposite the airport, a few miles away, I set up camp in an area of small trees and bushes, next to a lake which was probably formed from opencast mining, as it was very blue. There was a restaurant nearby and the smells wafting my way in the wind were driving me bloody crazy, so after waiting until dark, I went through their bin. It was mostly full of general waste and sealed bags of gone off meat (which I didn’t touch.) But I still had a good result, a very good result: an unopened 2kg bag of red lentils. Some of them had started to sprout and that’s probably why they’d been thrown away. I didn’t care though.
After getting a fire going, I had a very nice meal of mushy lentils. I’d never cooked them before so I just boiled them to death for a while! Finding those lentils was a game changer as it meant that the following day I could get back on track without overly worrying about where my next meal was going to come from. I headed back west to the town of Munster and reconnected with the frontlines before heading north again. My next destination being the battlefield called the Linge.
The Linge (Lingekopf) ridge is a series of summits, about 3,000ft high, which are approximately three miles north of Munster. At the beginning of the war, the front lines in this area of the Vosges were ill defined and the French decided to change this with a plan to capture the main German held summits in 1915. Unfortunately for them, the Germans had a similar idea to capture the French positions on some other hilltops, which they executed on the 19th February 1915, capturing the summits of the Barrenkopf and the Schratzmannele.
The French Attack took place on the 20th July 1915, their objective was to capture all of the high German positions in this sector. It didn’t quite go to plan for the French, as although they did manage to re-capture the summits of Barrenkopf and Schratzmannele, they were repulsed from their other objectives at a great cost to the lives of their soldiers.
The fighting was hard and bloody with most of it being fought hand to hand, the French never realised their objectives and when the Germans re-captured the two summits during August, the French wasted the lives of even more of their soldiers trying to once again re-capture them. The fighting carried on until the 15th October when they finally realised that it was hopeless.
Both sides saw that a breakthrough in the Vosges would have been next to impossible, so the rest of the war was mostly fought further north, with the Vosges sector become a backwater, where exhausted troops from Verdun were sent for a rest!
The road up to the Linge was a bit steep and, lacking the energy to cycle up, I pushed, struggling with the steep gradient. My body was a mess. I don’t know how much weight I had lost at that point but bones that I’d never seen before were sticking out beneath my skin and my muscle mass had noticeably shrunk. My bones and joints were aching and I still had piles, which had started about a month previously and made riding somewhat painful to say the least! I was also slightly worried about the chance of getting Scurvy. I’d been eating quite a few greens (mostly Dandelion), but I didn’t know if these contained vitamin C, so I’d also been drinking pine needle tea at least once a day since Italy.
As I rounded a bend on the Linge road, I saw a freshly cut pile of pine tree logs. Not very remarkable to most people, but they were a gift from the gods for me, as I was going to eat them. (No, not all of them; just the inner bark.)
Now I’d never done this before, but I’d read that some Native American tribes used inner pine bark as a staple food, so I knew that it could be done. After using my knife to make a slit through the bark the whole length of the log, I carefully prised it away from the wood. It was quite easy as there was a slippery layer underneath. After removing it, I then had the slightly messy task of separating the outer bark from the inner, before slicing it into strips and storing it in my food bag ready to somehow cook it over a fire later. Knowing that I might have something else to eat later, spurred me on to reach the top.
Next to the road, in the shadow of the old battlefield on the summit of Schratzmannele, is a German cemetery. That one, just like all the other German cemeteries were built out of necessity at a time when Germany was mourning the loss of both the war and over two million dead, they also had in excess of four million wounded soldiers. This all had to be paid for somehow, not leaving much left for the construction of the cemeteries. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still beautiful places, just a bit more sombre than the pristine white French and British cemeteries. But that’s how it should be really.
Hohrod German cemetery was no exception. Thousands of individual black crosses stretched in straight, neat lines as far as my eyes could see, before merging with the trees at the edge of the cemetery. The final resting place for 2,460 of the Germans who were destined to remain on the Schratzmannele battlefield, at least it was a peaceful place now.
Afterwards, as I walked up a path towards the summit, I felt a familiar shiver down my back. The same sensation had bothered me nearly every time I’d come across an old battlefield. The first time had been in Macedonia, in the hills above Doiran: a feeling of dread accompanied by an icy shiver at the top of my back. I had ignored it at first, putting it down to an overactive imagination, but time and time again it had appeared. I suppose that I was tuned into something, the vestiges of human suffering? It had also helped me to identify that I was on an old battlefield, especially when I wasn’t entirely sure where the heck I was!
The summit of Schratzmannele was beautiful but slightly depressing at the same time. The concrete bunkers, trenches and shell holes still covered the area but now they were accompanied by trees and bushes which have re-grown from the forest below. There wasn’t time to linger, though, as I needed to visit the Linge before finding somewhere to sleep.
My time at the Linge was cut short due to the impending dusk. I will return one day, as it’s one of the most interesting but saddest battlefields which I visited on my journey. Like a lot of the other battlefields in the hills and mountains, everything had been left as it was, as a memorial to the dead. Unlike the other battlefields, white crosses dotted the area, where the remains of French soldiers had been discovered in recent years. There are probably many more, who haven’t yet been found...
At this point, I suffered the second of only two punctures that I had to deal with during my journey. Not too bad for having ridden 3,500 miles. It delayed me for about an hour and although it was getting very late I didn’t mind, as it was just one of those things....
In the last light of dusk, I came to the French cemetery at Col du Wettstein, which was about two miles west from the Linge. Although I was becoming desperate for somewhere away from the battlefields to camp, I couldn’t miss out that cemetery. The graves of 3,538 Frenchmen stretched out before me, their white gravestones slowly disappeared into the gloom of the encroaching night. After leaving a poppy, I walked into the neighbouring woods and camped just out of sight of the cemetery, content and sure that they wouldn’t mind another man joining them near to their resting places, just for one night, in stark contrast to their eternal sleep.
After getting a fire going, I attempted to cook the inner pine bark which I had harvested earlier in the day. After cutting it into small strips, I tried boiling it for a while. After about ten minutes in the pot, I thought that it would be done. It wasn’t! I suppose it tasted alright; slightly sweet but starchy but it was impossible to chew so I ended up boiling it for about half an hour, until the water ran out. I was hoping for it to end up a bit like pasta, but the extended boiling time didn’t seemed to have any effect on it, as it was still impossible to chew.
I then tried a different approach: roasting it on a flat rock over my fire. This seemed to work, but when I tried to eat it, it just turned to dust in my mouth and offered no nutritional benefit at all and it tasted like burnt wood. “Eh, how the heck do you cook it?”
It was then that I remembered about a small bottle of olive oil which was in my first aid kit. I’d used it earlier in my journey to lubricate the ‘bits’ between my legs when they became sore from rubbing on my wet clothing in the rain. There was only a little bit remaining, but it was enough to enable me to fry some small strips in the bottom of my pan. This method worked and a short while later I ended up with a pile of chips. They tasted a bit funny, but at least now I had something to eat whilst travelling throughout the day.
My evening meal that night consisted of burnt bark sprinkled onto mushy lentils with a portion of bitter Dandelion leaves on the side. (It tasted as bad as it sounds!)
My destination for the following morning was the village of Bonhomme, which lies on the northern slopes of another heavily fought over hill in the Vosges, called Tete de Faux. The steep, heavily wooded slopes hide the remains of trenches and bunkers, as well as a few thousand men from both sides, either in cemeteries or lost in the earth for the past century. I didn’t see the battlefield itself, as I was becoming concerned that I was running out of steam in my half starved and decrepit condition. I was getting behind in my schedule and needed to get a move on.
I reached Bonhomme just as the sun rose above the surrounding hi