Circuit de Souvenir
France > North > Flemish cities > Arras and the Somme battlefields > Albert > Circuit de Souvenir

The Circuit de Souvenir conducts you from graveyard to mine crater, trench to memorial. There's not a lot to see; nothing, at least, that is going to satisfy any appetite for shocking atrocities or scenes of destruction. Neither do you get much sense of movement or even of battle tactics. But you will find that, even if you start out with the feeling that your interest in war is somehow puerile or mawkish, you have in fact embarked on a sort of pilgrimage, in which each successive step becomes more harrowing and oppressive.

The cemeteries are the most moving aspect of the region – beautiful, the grass perfectly mown, an individual bed of flowers at the foot of every gravestone. And there are tens of thousands of gravestones, all identical, with a man's name, if it's known (nearly half the British dead have never been found), and his rank and regiment. In the lanes between Albert and Bapaume you'll see the cemeteries everywhere: at the angle of copses, halfway across a wheat field, in the middle of a bluebell wood, moving and terrible in their simple beauty. What follows is necessarily just a selected handful of some of the better-known sites.

A good place to start is the station at HAMEL (7km north of Albert), where the 51st Highland Division walked abreast to their deaths with their pipes playing. Just across the river, towards the village of THIEPVAL, the 5000 Ulstermen who died in the Battle of the Somme are commemorated by the incongruously Celtic Ulster Memorial, a replica of Helen's Tower at Clandeboyne near Belfast (information bureau open Mon–Sat 11am–5pm; closed Dec & Jan). Probably the most famous of Edwin Lutyens' many memorials is south of Thiepval: the colossal Memorial to the Missing, in memory of the 73,357 British troops whose bodies were never recovered at the Somme. A half-hour hike north of Hamel station is the memorial to the Newfoundlanders at BEAUMONT-HAMEL. Here, on the hilltop where most of them died, a series of trenches has been preserved, now grassed over and eroding, where German faced Canadian a few paces apart. It all seems so small-scale now and almost more appropriate to the antics of parties of schoolchildren who run around here shooting each other with their fingers, than to anything as obscene as what took place.

Five kilometres east at POZIÈres, on the Albert–Bapaume road, Le Tommy café has a World War I permanent exhibition (daily 9.30am–6pm; free) in its back garden, consisting mainly of a reconstructed section of trench and "equipped" with genuine battlefield relics. It's a bit amateurish, but worth a look if you're passing through. The guide had first collected objects from the battlefield as a boy to sell for pocket money. Farmers apparently still turn up about 75 tonnes of shells every year – not really surprising when you think the British alone fired one-and-a-half million shells in the last week of June 1916.

Another fine Lutyens memorial stands near VILLERS-BRETONNEUX, some 18km southwest of Albert near the River Somme itself. As at Vimy, the landscaping of the Australian Memorial is dramatic – for the full effect, climb up to the viewing platform of the stark white central tower. The monument was one of the last to be inaugurated, in July 1938, when the prospects for peace were again looking bleak.

In PÉRONNE, on the River Somme, some 50km southeast of Arras, a fascinating museum has been set up to commemorate the war – the Historial de la Grande Guerre (May–Sept daily 10am–6pm; mid-Jan to April & Oct to mid-Dec Tues–Sun 10am–5.30pm; 6). All kinds of exhibits – such as newsreel and film footage, newspapers, posters, commemorative plates, Otto Dix drawings and artificial limbs – combine with displays of hardware to provide a broad view of the whole catastrophe. There's a TGV station about 15km away from Péronne – the Gare Haute Picardie – which is thirty minutes from the Eurostar stop at Lille-Europe; for a taxi to or from the station, call Mouret (tel 03.22.84.15.83) or Fouque (tel 03.22.84.52.49).

There's not much else to keep you in Péronne, although it's pleasant enough. The tourist office is on rue Louis XI, opposite the museum (June–Aug Mon–Sat 9am–noon & 2–6.30pm, Sun 10am–noon & 3–6pm; Sept–May closed Sun; tel 03.22.84.42.38). If you want to stay the night, you could try the old-fashioned Hostellerie des Remparts, on the opposite side of the main square at 23 rue Beaubois (tel 03.22.84.01.22, fax 03.22.84.38.96; 40–55; restaurant from 16), or the modern Campanile (tel 03.22.84.22.22, fax 03.22.84.16.86; 40–55), just out of town on the N17 to Roye and Paris.