Western Front Tour: Paris and Fromelles

WESTERN FRONT TOUR

St. Francis Xavier College

DAY ONE to TWO: 4th to 5th April 2009.
We gathered, jittery and excited at Tullamarine at the appointed time, 7.00pm. Check in and all else went smoothly enough. Emirates treated us well and we emerged from the pre dawn stratosphere over Dubai at about 5.30am local time. Freeways snaked across a baked orange landscape. Clusters of apartments slumbered without lights. The landing was perfect.
God it felt good to shuffle off the plane. We were engorged with packaged food and videos. The airport coffee was reinvigorating and helped prepare us for the toilet queues. Dubai reeked of opulence. There was a massive water wall, but there were no urinals to be had.
After being hurried onto the plane to Paris, we sat on the runway for over an hour. In front of us, a group of French students, who seemed to be returning from Australia given some of their clothing and accessories, decided to amuse themselves by tossing heated towels at one another. The attendants disapproved but smiled grimly.
They say that women seem to forget the pain of labour; this, they say, helps to explain the conception of the subsequent children. Perhaps the same could be said of travelling. Tourists must have amnesia about the nature of the journey; otherwise, they would stay at home. With the notable exception of Len Cooke, we seemed to sleep in snatches. Brendan Carney was so bored, he resorted to ringing other passengers. Most of us seemed to watch at least five movies. The food trolleys were looked for longingly, as much for the distraction as for the nourishment they brought. When the plane touched down in Paris at 2.37pm, most were glued to vision provided of the tarmac. The French students broke into spontaneous applause, so glad were they to be home.
Our guide, Beatrice, greeted us with Germaine our driver, when we had cleared passport checks and collected our luggage at about 3.45pm. She expressed admiration for our endurance – twenty-five consecutive hours on a flight to get to Paris. Certainly, she would have agreed with the French students’ sentiments about coming home, except she would have questioned their motives for leaving France in the first place.
The tour she offered of Paris in the bus ride from the airport was excellent. While we were in awe of Germaine’s driving skills, Beatrice enthused about everything from Concord and France’s World Cup victory in 1998 to St. Denis, the headless bishop, and the architectural achievements of Napoleon III. There were all too frequent reminders of the suicidal driving techniques of Parisians. A small blue Citroen had parked with its nose touching the Renault in front. Unfortunately a third car had nuzzled up to the Citroen’s rear; parking too seemed fraught.
Soon the cream limestone architecture and the cobbled avenues and boulevards claimed our attention. We threaded the needle through an impossibly narrow archway into the delightful but exclusive Place Vendome. Sycamores and chestnuts seemed ready to bloom. The weather was mild and Parisians basked on lawns and strolled on the Champs Ellyses with ice-creams. Spring was in the air.
After we had found our hotel and our rooms, Beatrice helped us to navigate the Metro to our first restaurant meal. By the second course, eyelids were heavy. The Seine River Cruise was simply out of the question; we would board the bateau another night. We stumbled back to Hotel Jardins de Paris in Rue de Alesia. The stairs were steep, but the beds were horizontal.

DAY THREE ~ Monday 6th April 2009.

By 9.00 am we were breakfasted and ready. The skies were blue. One group dashed off to the Louvre. Another stayed closer to home. A third embarked on a French Revolution tour which began at the Bastille and went on to La Place de la Concorde, the Tuileries, a Chapel to which the bodies of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had first been buried and the site of the Cordeliers Club.
The Metro was our friend, enabling us to travel swiftly and safely from one site to the next. There were beggars and buskers made the journeys interesting. Most memorably, there was the flamingo guitarist who murdered I Did it My Way. One resourceful soul carried what appeared to be a stuffed cat in an attempt to elicit more donations from travellers.
While the trains were a highly effective means of transport, I began to feel like a small burrowing marsupial by the day’s end; I’d burrow frantically for a time, then pop my head up to draw air and check on my progress. I found it difficult to maintain a sense of direction on the surface. Again, I appreciated the overview the bus had given me yesterday. That said, there was nothing quite like strolling through the gardens and streets Danton, Marat and their friends would have walked in. The stamp of those tumultuous events seems captured in stones, like the shadows of the bomb at Hiroshima.
That night, we ate dinner in a first floor room overlooking one of the narrow cobbled alleyways which in the Eighteenth Century had been major thoroughfares. We did not so much look down upon the road – we would have had to have leant out of the window to do that – as gaze at our neighbours opposite. Their lives would have been less private, less protected than ours.
There was the Metro. There was history. There were heights and, inevitably, there were stairs. Because it was such superlative spring day, crowds swarmed around the pillars of the Eiffel
Tower. The views were spectacular; ample compensation for the queues. The places we had dashed between via the Metro in the morning were spread before us like a carpet in the afternoon. Paris was a shining, vibrant city. The Seine slithered through gleaming buildings. The Hotel d’ Invalides shone gold. Despite the crowds and the ever present threat of pickpockets, the spectacle was dazzling, hypnotic.
The Arc de Triomphe was also crowded. We were in time to glimpse a ceremony at the Eternal Flame involving veterans, current soldiers and primary school children. They sang La Marseilles impressively. We clambered up the spiral staircase to the top and again gazed across Paris. Streets radiated out from Napoleon Bonaparte’s monument like spokes from a wheel. I marvelled at the genius and the determination of another Napoleon, Napoleon III, who with his architect had created the wheel – the sweeping boulevards and broad avenues.
We dined in, of all places a Mexican restaurant. The word “incongruous” was redefined as we ate burritos and sipped Coronas above a street where Danton once strode.


DAY FOUR ~ Tuesday 7th April 2009.

Faust, our new driver met us at 9.00am. We nudged our way through the heavy traffic, past the airport and onto the A1. Spring had vanished. Occasional clusters of gypsy caravans huddled at the roadside. As we travelled northwards, the traffic thinned, but the drizzle increased.

At Compiegne we stepped into the countryside. A path led us to a glade where a replica of the train carriage where the Armistice was housed. The positions of the main signatories, the furniture and even the quills used were lovingly displayed. So too was Hitler’s vengeance. When he conquered France in 1940, he insisted that the terms of his armistice be signed in the same carriage in the same place. He sat exactly where Marshall Foch had negotiated with the so called November criminals who signed the Armistice in 1918. When Hitler knew he was defeated in April 1945, he ordered the carriage burned.

The museum on the site was fascinating and provided a wonderful overview of The Great War. The maps and artefacts were impressive. There was an Australian slouch hat, a gift from a Central Coast Association. The 3D photographs viewed through small wooden rectangular boxes were extraordinary. The simple act of looking through the binocular shaped view finder seemed to draw you into another world. The world was black and white. Horror and destruction were ever present: shattered buildings, harrowed faces, trenches crammed with waiting men and dead bodies.

When we emerged, the skies were suitably leaden and remained so as we continued north to Peronne. One shop displayed an Australian flag beneath which was printed, “We don’t forget Australians.” We snatched a snack before entering the fortifications of the Peronne museum. Again, the displays were sobering and moving. The etchings of Otto Dix stood out among the newspaper headlines, uniforms and rusted shattered memorabilia, which included a number of helmets riven through with shrapnel. Dix was 24 in 1914. He wrote:
The fact is, being young at the time, you just don’t realise how profoundly scarred you are. For at least ten years after the war, I kept getting dreams in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through. The ruins were always there in my dreams.
His etchings are nightmarish; they scream violence and pathos. They made the black and white footage of young men greeting the news on mobilisation with euphoria all the more disturbing.
The movie screened on the battle of the Somme had a similar effect. It juxtaposed the tranquillity and beauty of the river to the noise, destruction and horror of the battle. One was left with an abhorrence of war.
Fromelles was so similar to so many other pretty little hamlets dominated by a church spire we drove through in the afternoon. It seemed in conceivable that the buildings had been rubble and the neat freshly furrowed fields had been so torn and devastated.
The Cobber memorial was easily recognisable. The lawn was manicured but studded with some of the remains of the German line – concrete blocks nine to twelve inches thick. Looking to the north, you could see all too clearly the Australians advance. There casualties were appalling. The fact that they took the line seemed not within the prospect of belief.
The sun shone. The trees were just beginning to bud at VC Corner. The war seemed a world away but the marble and the names were stained with our knowledge of what had taken place there and by the images we had brought with us from the museums at Peronne and Compiegne.