Land and its stories by Gillian Polack

When I was a child, my mother (a science teacher) tested her excursions during the school holidays. We didn’t just go to Ballarat (an old gold town in Victoria), then, we visited the town and the museum and then walked through an old mine. We went to Vaughn Springs and panned for gold and gems. I normally sum this up as going to the beach to study the ecology of rockpools, but today I’m not interested in rockpools. 

What I saw when I was a child was what mining did to landscapes. It created tunnels and hills and dredged streams deeper or reshaped them. In one of my childhood landscapes, the streams had been destroyed entirely in the search for gold. I looked at small hills and, as a child brought up on English books, I loved them. Then Mum explained those hills and I found out that, in the making of a tiny hilled landscape, everything had been destroyed. The water from local streams had been targeted to help force the gold out under pressure. Those small hills everywhere were the refuse from the urgent search for gold. There was so much destruction in the old goldfields that it wasn’t until later that I learned how to interpret landscapes. Mining can leave land permanently changed.

Interpretation is important. And one never stops learning. Earlier this year, I read Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu, Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? This book questioned the way we interpret the Australian landscape historically. I realised that I’d factored mining into my interpretation of agriculture, but hadn’t considered the wider ramifications of farming before the early 1800s in exactly the same place. The mining had obliterated a lot of the evidence of farming, but Pascoe found more evidence in explorer’s journals and records from early European settlement. 

This was in my mind when I went to Amiens this July. I only returned last week, so it’s very fresh.

The cathedral in Amiens. It survived the wars.

I was investigating a heap of things for a heap of reasons, but when I began my research a few months ago, I realised that the debris of World War I lies on Somme landscape the way the debris of goldmining lies on the Victorian goldfields. I needed to understand three periods in that region (the Middle Ages, the seventeenth century, and the end of World War II) but before I could interpret them, I had to understand World War I.

My big advantage in the interpretation is that it’s a centennial year: everyone was willing to talk with me and the museums were stuffed with information. There were pictures of before and after, for example, for bombed sites and for major battlefields. I could take all this out and catch a train and visit a once-destroyed town and check out the fields and wander the streets of Amiens and interpret… everything.

I thought you might like to see some of the things I saw. This is not a complete guide. Not even close to one, in fact. This is one small element and even that element is something I’ll be processing what I saw until I’ve finished the novels I’m working on. Maybe longer. It will take far more than a blogpost to explain that landscape.

My focus today, then, is on the effect of World War I on the area of the Somme around Amiens. I went up to two trainstops away in more than one direction to see what I could see.

The first thing that struck me was the missing places. There are some complete landscape changes in the region. Some of it is the usual (villages deserted because the people moved elsewhere) but in the Somme region, there is a very disturbing type of desertion. The satellite map shows places where trains and roads still do not go. This is the worst remaining parts of the Zone Rouge. The Zone Rouge was much larger a hundred years ago, but the web tells me it will take 700 years before every part of the battlefront region from World War I is liveable again.

The Red Zone is that part of the front line that was so destroyed by battle that it needed to be mended before it could be lived in. I visited part of it that had been mended and looked at maps of those parts that I can’t get to.

This is a street in a torn named Albert, which was rebuilt almost from scratch. 

“You can’t live here, it’s dangerous” was the official word. 

“It’s home,” said the locals and rebuilt.

I visited because that rebuild was so important to me for so many reasons. It reminded me that houses are not the only thing in a hometown. Places of beauty and places of awe make a difference, too. Albert has all of these. It was mostly built in the 1920s, but it remembers the earlier past through its landmarks.

Each place in a ruined landscape makes different decisions or has decisions made for them. I talked to a potter in Amiens, and he told me about his family. Their town was never rebuilt. There’s a museum there, he said, but there are no trains or buses. Also no residents. His family moved to Amiens because there was nothing left for them.

Not everything is destroyed on or near a military front line ,even one as destructive as that in World War I. Amiens was partly destroyed, Bits of it are old. Bits of it are new. Bits of it are rebuilt in older styles, in an attempt to not lose its past. Amiens has an important history and a lot of rebuilders commemorated that history by having houses that have an earlier ‘feel’ or that take  stones and carvings from the rubble and make them part of a home. I have hundreds of pictures of Amiens, because its way of balancing survival and rebuilding and moving forward is very much its own. This means that the city’s character emerges in all the sectors of the town, whether they’re the once-a-citadel or whether they’re tourist sections or whether they’re remnants of the nationally important seventeenth century place.

Amiens added to this complex streetscape as part of its commemoration of World War I. It has photographs of the war telling stories using the streetscape. Those pictures show us who fought; they show us the damage: they remind us that scars do not heal easily.

It’s easier to think that war is past if one lives on the other side of the world. It’s harder if one sees a new house where the family home once rested. It’s much harder still if one looks at a plantation of pines that once held the town one’s family had lived in for generations.

Something that tangles the Somme landscape is the sorrowful tourism for families of soldiers.  People from outside the region want to see the destroyed landscape. Only some of them have interest in the region itself. Right now, there are Aussies everywhere, retracing the tracks of their fallen relatives. It’s become a replacement industry for the region, making up for everything that was lost in World War I and then World War II.

This is not new. The extent of the tourism is something that’s only a hundred years old, but the memory of war in what used to be Picardy is not new at all. This landscape is scarred because of where it is and how rich the soil is. Some of the best farmland. Old cultures, cool people. And so it has suffered in war after war after war. The stuff, in fact, of stories. Some of the great French battle epics are set in this part of France. English-speakers think of the English/French interface. Readers of Dumas think of La Rochelle. Everyone thinks of Paris. But this area has a special history and the landscape is much harder to read because of this history. 

What looks like fields and forest may also be layers of buried sorrow.

This day in 1916 - by Katherine Langrish

 

Photo courtesy of New Zealand History online http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/photo/co-ordinated-attacks-western-front

On this day in 1916, the battle of the Somme was four days old. I'd like to commemorate that terrible slaughter quite simply by transcribing a passage from the classic WW1 memoir 'Sagittarius Rising' by Cecil Lewis, first published in 1936.

All you need to know is that Lewis was twenty years old in 1916, having joined the Royal Flying Corps in February 1914, while still only seventeen and just out of school. He was sent to France with 13 hours of flying experience. At that time, the average lifespan of an RFC pilot was about three weeks.

This is his account of what happened to him and his observer, Pip, that fine summer morning exactly 98 years ago.

Wikimedia commons. The Somme battlefield from the air: British gas attack 1916

Dawn over the trenches, everything misty and still above, with the prospect of heat to come; even the war seemed to pause, taking a deep, cool morning breath before plunging into action. We were out to find the exact position at Boiselle, for even now, on the fourth day of the offensive, the Corps Intelligence did not seem clear on the point. We sailed over the mines and called for flares with our Klaxon. After a minute, one solitary flare spurted up, crimson, from the lip of a crater. It looked forlorn, that solitary little beacon, in the immense pitted miles around. We came down to 500 feet and sailed over it, trying to distinguish the crouching khaki figures huddled in their improvised trenches ... when suddenly there was a crash, and the whole machine shook, as if at the next moment it would wrench itself to pieces.

[With his engine hit by shellfire, Lewis got the plane down:]

Where to land?  Five hundred feet over the front line, the earth an expanse of contiguous shell-holes! ... By now we were down to 100 feet, and the contours of the earth below took on detailed shape. I saw – God be praised! – that the green patch that had caught my eye was the side of a steep hill. There was no wind. I swung the machine sideways and pulled her round to head up the slope.  She zoomed grandly up the hillside.  The speed lessened. Now we were just over the ground, swooping uphill, like a seagull on a steep Devon plough. ... The hill rose up before me, and at last she stalled, perched like a bird on the only patch of hill free of shell-craters, hopped three yards – and stopped! 

With a gasp of amazement and relief – for no one could have hoped to have got down in such a place undamaged – we jumped out of the machine.  It was Pip’s twenty-first birthday.  Suddenly I remembered it. ‘Many happy returns!’ I said

We stood looking at the machine - for nothing, perhaps is quite so awkward and useless as an aeroplane that can't fly.  It would have to be dismantled... at that moment came the 'Wheeeeee... wheeee....whee-ow... whow...whow...whow... zonk!' of a German shell.  They were evidently going to dismantle it for us.  We dived for a trench... It was five o'clock.

From the air we could have found out way home from any part of the line; but the earth was a strange country. We set off along the duckboarding at the bottom of a deep communications trench, unable to see over the top. We turned left at a junction, right at another, They were all deserted. We were lost. So we climbed out of the trench and walked down to a neighbouring copse where ... a battalion of infantry was waiting to go up into the line. ... They sat about on the fallen tree trunks, on overturned wagons, on dud shells, silent and resigned in that blasted wood under the glory of the summer morning.  Then the thunder of the guns began, south at the Somme, and rose and rose as the nearer batteries took it up. It was like jungle drums beating the rhythm of tremendous news, rising, falling, echoing, repeating, till the whole air was shaking with it. The officer looked at his watch. The men rose, and shook themselves into order.

‘Good luck!’
‘Good luck! We’ll keep a watch out for you on patrol!’  We turned away up the hill towards Albert, he through the gully of the wood up towards the line.  

We trudged along in our heavy sheepskin thigh-boots, long leather coats, mufflers and helmets. ... How different it all looked from the ground! It was a desolation, unimaginable from the air. The trees by the roadside were riven and splintered, their branches blown hither and thither, flanking the road... like a byway to hell. The farms were a mass of debris, the garden walls heaps of rubble, the cemeteries had their crosses and their wire wreaths blown horribly askew. Every five square yards held a crater. The earth had no longer its smooth familiar face.  It was diseased, pocked, rancid, stinking of death in the morning sun.

Yet (Oh, the catch at the heart!), among the devastated cottages, the tumbled, twisted trees, the desecrated cemeteries, opening, candid, to the blue heaven, the poppies were growing! Clumps of crimson poppies, thrusting out from the lips of the craters, straggling in drifts between the hummocks, undaunted by the desolation, heedless of human fury and stupidity, Flanders poppies, basking in the sun! As we stood gazing, a lark rose up from among them and mounted, shrilling over the diapason of the guns. 

We listened, watching, and then, I remember, trudged slowly on down the road without a word.  That morning seems stranger than most to me now, for Pip is dead, twenty years dead, and I can still hear the lark over the guns, the flop and shuffle of our rubber-soled flying boots on the dusty road; I can remember, set it down, that here on this page it may remain a moment longer than his brief mortality. For what? To make an epitaph, a little literary tombstone, for a young forgotten man. 

For months we worked together daily on patrol. His life was in my hands daily and once, at least, mine was in his. He was the darling of the Flight, for he had a sort of gentle, smiling warmth about him that we loved. Besides, from the old rattling piano he would coax sweet music – songs of the day, scraps of old tunes, Chopin studies, the Liebestraum, Marche Militaire.  I believe he had talent. Well, that does not matter now and it did not matter then. He had enough for us, to make us sit quietly in the evening, there in the dingy room where the oil lamp hung on a string thick with flies, and listen.

In September I went on leave; Pip carried on with another pilot. One morning on the dawn patrol they, flying low in the arc of our own gun fire, intercepted a passing shell. The machine and both the boys were blown to bits.



You can see original film of 'The Somme from air and land' , and an interview with Cecil Lewis at this BBC link:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/learningzone/clips/the-somme-from-the-air-and-land/12735.html

 Cecil Lewis