battlefield

Even a Donkey can Dream

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Leaving Versailles, DonQui navigates his way around Paris and then heads towards Calais and home. 

He breaks his journey for an overnight stay at Azincourt, better know in English as Agincourt — the site of the 1415 battle where Henry V’s vastly outnumbered English decimated the flower of French chivalry. 

DonQui spends the night at the delightful Au Repos du Roi in the tiny hamlet of Maisoncelle. 

Now a working farm, this is the very same place that King Henry V spent the night before the battle in 1415.

As a young colt DonQui quite fancied himself as a stout yeoman archer standing firm and loosing arrow after arrow against the advancing knights. Of course had he actually been there it is far more likely he would have been assigned to the baggage train to haul supplies. Still, even a donkey can dream the impossible!

“From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered,

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

For he today that sheds his blood with me,

Shall be my brother.” (Wm. Shakespeare, Henry V)

There is a small visitor centre in Azincourt which gives a good orientation to the battle and the events leading up to it. 

The actual battlefield is — well a field. This is the view from the far right of the English position looking towards the French. The woods that hemmed in both sides of the field in 1415 have now been mostly cut down. 

After a last fabulous French breakfast, DonQui heads off on the very last leg of his road trip.

The border controls on the French side of the channel tunnel are far less chaotic than they had been on the English side. 

After one month and 3000 miles, DonQui is soon back home in Suffolk

A Pause for Thought

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On the way to the Autoroute which will take him to towards Strasbourg, Donqui passes dozens of First World War cemeteries. It seems as if there is another one every couple of hundred  metres.

He decides to stop off and pay his respects at the Vimy battlefield where in 1917 the Canadian Division captured a prominent ridge now topped by a colossal monument. 

A section of the trenches have been preserved with concrete ‘sandbags’. DonQui paces out the distance between the original frontline Canadian and German trenches. They are only 50 metres apart! Between them are a number of craters formed by shells and the larger ones by mines set off in tunnels dug underneath the trenches.

DonQui takes the evocative guided tour of a section of the tunnels — now reinforced and better lit than they would have been in 1917.  Parts of the tunnels served as field headquarters as well being a relatively safe way of moving between positions. 

One mine tunnel still exists, dug deep to work its way under the German trenches. This one was never blown. The big crater below was caused by an exploded mine.

Vimy is an amazingly evocative and sobering battlefield site — preserved, staffed and maintained by Veterans Affairs Canada.  DonQui had only expected to make a brief stop but ended up staying several hours. It gave him lots to think about.