Arras and Amiens

Even with the wake-up call we barely made our train to Arras. We did have four minutes to spare. We thought we had lots of time as we hit the street at 7:30 am and the train left at 8:22 am, but we got lost in the Metro, wasted two billets when we had to exit the underground and start again. We had to stop to get directions. Unfortunately, we asked someone who didn’t speak English.

“Arras?” I asked.

He answered with a long drawn out, melodious syllable, pointing. Once his finger pointed the way, we were off like a shot, finally finding our way, running to the RER B-Line platform, three floors down. We made out first train, like I said, with only four minutes to spare and even though it only stopped once before our destination, I checked my watch about every ten seconds or so, my heart squeezing tighter with each glance. We were going to be late, I thought. We weren’t going to make our train to Arras.

The B-line brought us to our station, where there were what looked to be a million people on the move, students capering about, businessmen bustling about industriously or tapping furiously on laptops. Backpackers sprawled across seats, sleeping, oblivious to our or anyone else’s haste.

We ran down the length of the train when we reached our platform, prompted to further haste by the conductor, leaping up the steps to our car once we spotted it, collapsing into our seats, lathered in sweat. Within moments, the train eased out of the station.

There was no need to fret. Simon was not there to greet us when we disembarked in Arras under a sheet of rain. He pulled up forty minutes later, giving me ample time to inspect the cenotaph in the square outside the station while Bev tried to keep warm in the station house. It was a little cool, I thought, blaming the rain and the fog that would rise up with it, and the damp and the breeze that followed, but it wasn’t so cold as to warrant her pulling her windbreaker close and hugging herself, I believed. In fact, it grew muggy and warm as the clouds broke and the sun burst through, and still she wore her windbreaker long after I had discarded mine. I should have realized she was sick, but she didn’t either, not then, anyways.

We departed immediately, seemingly in haste. We had a lot to see, after all: first, a spot where the Nazis shot members of the French Resistance; and then, from then on, maybe too many historical sites of the Great War, battlefields and cemeteries galore, some places that I’d told Simon I was keen to see, others he thought indispensable. Thankfully, the rain stopped before we reached Vimy Ridge.

Another David joined us at Vimy, Canadian, nineteen, enthusiastic about Vimy and its legacy, less enthusiastic about his prospects for the future. He expected to perform high paying labour jobs in exotic places in the winter so he could backpack Europe in the summers. I wished him luck. I was also a little jealous. I dreamed of that sort of thing when I was younger, but I’d done what was expected of me and got a full-time job instead, venturing out only as time and money allowed. It was never enough.

Our guide at Vimy was a Newfoundlander, a self-professed geo-nerd, one living in Sudbury, attending Laurentian, working at Science North, but taking the summer to work abroad for Parks Canada. Small world.

Small talk aside, we toured the trenches, descended into the depths of the tunnels, and marvelled at how far and how close the trenches actually were, two-thousand meters apart to the south, yet only twenty or fifty meters at times to the north.

Beaumont Hamel was sadder to behold, by far. Whereas we Canadians had only taken 9,000 casualties all told at Vimy, the weight of the first 50,000 casualties taken on the first day of the Somme by the British and Newfoundlanders pressed down on me, the magnitude of the loss horrifying and humbling.

The cemeteries were overwhelming. There were so many of them, and so many headstones and crosses, each nation setting them so differently. The British preferred to bury their dead at the sight of battle that felled them. Some sites, like the Somme, were huge, the headstones too numerous to count; others were small and intimate; almost all were drenched in sunlight, some few shaded by majestic elms. The French brought their fallen to huge sunlit cemeteries, with two soldiers buried to a cross. The Germans preferred quiet, somber, shaded sites, the crosses black, the soldiers arrayed four to a cross, an enormous cross at the center, the only spot not shaded under a lattice of overhead boughs that left the burial site in a blanket of sorrow. No matter the method, the numbers were mind-boggling, the sheer immensity of them overwhelming. They brought tears to my eyes. So many men, young and not so young, laid to waste for no gain, for no reason, except maybe to prop up a dying age.

We had supper in Amiens, in the court before the Hotel d’ Cite, lingering over our meals, enjoying a glass of wine and coffee and dessert, sure that we had time to spare before we had to make our train back to Paris. We spoke about the Great War and my great-grandfather; we spoke about Simon’s recent holiday to Poland and Auschwitz.

Bad news. We were stupid. We did not read our return tickets well. Even Simon had misread it. We had 9:20 pm on the brain when, in fact, the train left at 9:12 pm. We raced to meet it, only to hear it pull away as we made for the platform. We checked when the next train was: 5: 20 am.

Simon offered to drive us to the edge of the city, where the RER B-line began at Charles de Gaulle Airport. This was no small thing: it was a two-hour drive by the autoroute.

I felt guilty, but I grasped at the lifeline offered, just the same. A godsend, that Simon Godly.

I craved a beer as the RER deposited us back at St. Michel, but all the cafes and bars were closing shop for the day as we came upon them.

To bed then. Tomorrow was another day.

Bev woke with a cold.

Were it only a cold.

It was the flu.

And it would only get worse.