The Kiwi Day

Day 13 … The Kiwi Day

Yesterday we followed the route taken by my Aussie grandfather from Amiens to Pozieres.  Today we went to visit an ANZAC from the other side of the family.  My Gt Grandmother (on the Ballantyne side) Margaret was the eldest (I think) of a relatively large family.  Her youngest brother Charles Allanton Kerse was only a few years older than Margret’s son Doug (my grandfather) and enlisted in 1914 with the Otago Regiment.  He saw action on Gallipoli and on the Somme between 1916 and 1918, rising through the ranks to become a 2^nd Lieutenant.  On 25^th July 1918, in a lull in the fighting,  Charlie and his Sergeant Dick Travis wandered along one of their trenches and sat down to chat with some of their men when a shell exploded, killing them both.  Travis had earlier been awarded the VC and the pair of them were buried with full honours in the tiny cemetery at Couin.

Heavy rain the proceeding few days meant mud-spatter on their headstones

 From Couin, which is a tiny blip on  the map, we drove north through more of the flat Somme landscape to Vimy intending to visit the Canadian Memorial and check out the preserved trenches there.  The weather, however had other ideas so we headed back to Arras to check out the Wellington Tunnels.

In the 1700’s & 1800’s the good folk of Arras built houses and public buildings from chalk stone, sourced from huge underground quarries.  In 1916 these quarries were linked together with a huge network of tunnels dug by about 500 Kiwis from the Wellington regiment. The town of Arras was, in all reality pretty much on the front and on 1^st April the first of 24,000 allied soldiers began to gather in the tunnels in preparation for a surprise assault on the German line set down for April 9^th 1917.  At 5.30am they emerged from one of about 18 exit tunnels for what was the start of the Battle of Arras.

We took the 4pm guided tour, donning our replica helmets and equipped with an audio guide we followed our guide 20m underground.  Some of the commentary came via Camille the lovely bi-lingual guide (the two others on the tour were a French couple) and some via the audio-guide headset and projections on screens throughout the tunnels.

  

It was still raining when we got back to the surface but Arras has what is supposed to be the Biggest Christmas Market in Northern France so there was no way I was leaving town without investigating.  On the Helen Moore Index of Christmas Markets, it scores about a 6.  Pretty, but having experienced some German markets, and with a nice market here in Amiens, and with awful weather we were left a little deflated.  So we had coffee and a waffle in a lovely little ice-cream shop and made the somewhat hairy night drive back here to Amiens.