France - Etaples

We set off in the morning to look for another Creswick digger, driving through some very lovely countryside.

Gorgeous view

Our little car

Then on to the Etaples Military Cemetery. Etaples is near the coast, and was a British military base, training and reinforcement camp, and military hospital with 20,000 beds. Most of the soldiers who are buried here died in the hospital. Some died as late as September 1919. Over 11,000 people are buried here, including 20 women (mostly nurses), 660 Germans, and 120 soldiers from WWII. This cemetery, the largest CWGC cemetery in France, is all that remains of the military base of Etaples.

It doesn't look all that big from the road

But once inside......

......it's enormous

We were looking for Matthew William Borradale. Thankfully, the CWGC provides maps, so we took one with us as we went searching. It still took a while.

We spent quite some time wandering around the cemetery. The sheer number of gravestones was tragic; when one thinks of all the other cemeteries and memorials, the scope of death is incomprehensible.

The gravestones of the German soldiers are a different shape

A Belgian grave

And here are a selection of individual headstones that caught our attention.

Even Brigadier Generals......

This chap died on the day the war ended

A matron, one of a small number of graves of women killed in the war

This Polish man was one of the WWII casualties

South African Native Labour Corps graves

A handful of Hindu soldiers from the Indian Forces

A solitary Chinaman, a member of the Chinese Labour Corps

And a surgeon

France - Hallines

Some more shots of our lovely BnB in the small village of Hallines.

We suspect all the houses on the island were part of the mill complex

Our BnB was the furthest building

Our back garden. Our room is the top left windows

Great place for a picnic

Threatening skies on the second day, so we stayed close to the door

Grey clouds

Torrential rain

Followed by mist on the river Aa

And from inside - gorgeous weather

Mist

And threatening skies

On the morning of our departure, we visited the church in Hallines, which was just around the corner from the BnB and remarkably large for such a small village.

On the way in, we noticed a small sign saying there were some Commonwealth war graves here, so we asked someone in the church, and he kindly took us throught the communal graveyard (which is closed due to dangerous deterioration of monuments), and showed us two graves. Both were Englishmen.

France - Borre and Bailleul

Our first stop today was a small cemetery in Borre. We had reloaded our file, so we knew exactly where to look for Edgar Reynold Townsend.

Borre British Cemetery

The headstone on the right belongs to a Belgian soldier. Note the different shape

The spacing of the graves is interesting - sometimes separated, sometimes very close to each other

The second of today's two soldiers, Albert Edward James Merriman, lies in the Outtersteene Communal Cemetery Extension - an add-on to the normal town cemetery. What we noticed about this cemetery was the large number of unidentified soldiers. In the row of 60 in which Merriman lies, 47 were unknown. Of all the burials, 892 were known and 497 unknown.

Writing in the Guest Book

A member of the Chinese Labour Corps. We hadn't realised that there were Chinese involved in the war

The graves of two French soldiers

The other interesting thing here - up the back were a number of headstones saying: "Known to be buried in this cemetery" or "Believed to be buried in this cemetery".

This soldier was also very interesting. "Believed to be" Tom Corby, and at the bottom it says he was found in Merris (a village within 3km) in 2003.

We continued on to the town of Bailleul (pronounced By Earl) and had a look around.

La Mairie, the Town Hall

And a giant statue inside

A ruined chapel as a war memorial

And around the back

We wandered through the church. Inside, the story of Bailleul was told by 28 stained glass windows. Only the last referred to the Great War.

And a picnic lunch in the park