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Just after sunset I started the van and headed for the motorway. This short and somehow weird trip was over and I had to get back to work. On a service station just before Amiens I spent the night, getting up early again the next morning and took my usual shortcut via Albert. It was cold, misty and grey and a permanent drizzle made being outside pretty uncomfortable.
To be correct, it wasn´t grey. It was a pale and dirty yellow and brown. This is even worth, some of the most depressing kind of weather one can think of. Just after Albert I reached the first monument just beside the street. It had a small parking and I stopped the van. This time I wanted to have a closer look on the remnants of that “Great War” almost exactly 100 years ago.
The monument looked like a Greek temple from the outside and turned out to be a British war cemetery in perfect rectangle outline bordered by a portico. It was a large cemetery and it´s inside was packed with endless rows of tombstones. The sheer number of these tombstones and extreme accuracy of the alignment of these identical stones struck me despite knowing quite a bit about the slaughtering of World War I and despite having visited the American D-Day monument near Caen some trips ago.
I moved on and after a few hundred meters stopped at the next monument. This time it was a nondescript raising among the monotonous rolling agricultural hills.Calling this hummock a hill would be an extreme exaggeration.
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