My visit to Northern France, WW1 sites and a mad dash around Europe in a day including Malmedy!
This thread is to share my brief tour of France and Northern Europe with you and bring some of the sights to those who may never get to see them.
There is quite a bit to get through so can I ask you, for the sake of continuity not to post any comments or questions until my tour is completed. cool militaria
Ok, I started off on Thursday 24th in the afternoon by landing in Calais and had a couple of hours drive to my hotel in St Quentin. As I drove deeper into France I started to come across signs to memorials and cemeteries along the way. I stopped by in the village of Souchez, just north of Arras. It is a Commonwealth cemetery called Cabaret Rouge.
The cemetery is one of the largest British cemeteries on the Western Front and was begun as a cemetery in 1916. After the armistice it received bodies from small cemeteries and individual graves on the battlefields of Arras and other points in the Artois area. It holds 6,800 British, 750 Canadian, more than 100 Australian, over 40 South African and 15 Indian graves. The majority are unidentified.
It is also the cemetery from where the Canadian Unknown Soldier was exhumed from and whose body now rests in the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior at the National War Memorial in Ottowa.
