Re: Motorbike trip from Lausanne to Calais
Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2025 12:55 pm
And on Wednesday I found myself west of Arras following a section of what I now know to to be the Arras Battlefield Mermorial Route, passing a load of memorials and cemetaries of the British, Sth African, Aussie, Canadian. No German (or "other empire"!) so not sure what they did with their dead (I've looked it up for germans, there are a few small cemetaries but mostly they were "mass graved") and cogitating the huge waste of life from which we seem to have learned very little when, into my head popped a memory that my brother had said my Great Uncle Albert was somewhere near Arras. I vascillated but got to a junction of a major road with a pull-in just before it so stopped and got my phone out. Identified him and his location and then mapped it and he was 3.4km down the main road. Felt churlish not to be the first Lester to visit Albert. They never found his body, but he signed up as a Private in October 1914, was in Egypt, Gallipoli and on the Somme for an age, and finally, after getting the Military Cross in March 1918, went missing in May 1918. We have his citations, medals, the letter to his parents from the War Office announcing him dead and so on. Kensington Batallion of the London Regiment - was born very close to Borough tube station.