Great War Battle Fields and Memorials - Northern France

After we arrived in Beauvais which is an hours north of Paris after leaving Glasgow, we picked up our hire car and headed off north to the old battlefields of the Great War to pay our respects to the Australian and Commonwealth soldiers who gave their lives there over ninty years ago.

The feeling was of great respect and admiration to these mostly young men who gave their lives for the motherland which was in those days so far away from the isolated island of Australia. The maginificant monuments standing tall on the fields where some of the most devastating battles of human history were fought remind us of the strength of Australian spirit and mateship. The war graves stretched on into the distance with cemeteries littering the countryside. We visited one of the most intensely fought over towns in the war which changed hands many times in just a few days, the Australians ended up taking back the town but lost many men. The campaign on the Somme took many more Australian lives then in Galipolli which shows the devastating size of the loss to such a small country at the time. Lest we forget.