How, I almost sobbed to myself, had it come to this? As I sat in the driver’s seat of the Peugeot, parked, I listened to Leslie tell me through the side passenger window what the helpful gate attendants to whom she had just spoken had given her by way of directions. To our immediate right was the Gare de l’Est, one of several major railroad stations in Paris. Big enough to contain a quartet of Zeppelins and enough people to make a profitable gate return for a Rolling Stones concert, the Gare itself was not our destination – a rental car return office somewhere inside it (possibly), under it (perhaps), nearby (maybe), or for all I knew, hovering a hundred feet straight up in the air, was. To our immediate left were three solidly-packed lanes of traffic flowing around the station in a clockwise direction. And beyond them lay three lanes travelling in the opposite direction. What Leslie was telling me was that the workers said we needed to be in those lanes going the other way, and had told her simply, “Just turn around.”

Having already steered through Leslie’s near-flawless navigation across over 200 km of country roads and a good 25 km of progressively more frenetic Parisian traffic and interchanges that carried us from the French capital’s suburbs to close to its core, suddenly I felt a bit like those guys in “The Mummy II” who had just battled several hundred god-dog soldiers (I guess that would be the Army of Pharaoh Palindrome), only to straighten up, exhausted, and notice that the distant desert dunes were turning black with several thousand more of them approaching on the run.

“Turn around????” I asked. Croaked, actually. “Turn around,” she repeated for about the fourth time, with infinite patience and not a little sympathy.

How, I asked myself again, had it come to this?

Well... since you ask.

(The following actually covers two days’ drive touring, with our last overnight at the Chateau in between. We weren’t crazy enough to log this much mileage in just one day.)

When we pulled out of the Chateau, the only reason we knew that the sun was struggling upwards into the sky was because we had seen the ball dimly outlined in the early morning fog. (But if you recall my previous post, it resulted in a couple of beautiful photo-ops on the Chateau grounds. Here’s another.)


We were headed for a town named Selestat, located at one end of the Alsace wine route. The drive to Selestat turned out to be rather slow for two reasons – the aforementioned fog for 80 or so of the 100 km we had to travel to get there, and the fact that the route carried us along a tight, winding path far up into the Vosges Mountains and then carried us back down along much the same kind of road on their other side. As we crested the range, we found ourselves above the fog line and were rewarded with several wonderful views of autumn-coloured tree-covered steep slopes.
(For the record, the Vosges are bigger than Hamilton’s “mountain”, but they’re not the Alps. A typical peak rises 500 to 1000 m, and they’re all well within the altitudes at which trees thrive.)

We arrived in Selestat while it was still morning, albeit closing in quickly on noon and, after a delightful café au lait and croissant, headed back up one of the nearby peaks to an astonishing work of would-be mediaeval reconstruction called the Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg.

The history of the property is remarkably colourful. It was first built for the same reason many such castles were built around the 12th century – a hilltop fortification that was intended to be impregnable. Unfortunately, the castle’s builders hadn’t reckoned on that most formidable of foes that occasionally are employed even today – a coalition – and in the mid-1400s, just such a union of rival cities attacked it and burned it to the ground. A rebuilding effort was successful only for a time and the castle was once more razed by Swedish troops after they laid siege to it for almost two months in the early 1600s during the Thirty Years War, one of some 2,000 castles they destroyed in the name of spreading the love and joy of Lutheranism by smashing the trappings of the Holy Roman Empire into the ground.

The castle pretty much existed only as ruins for almost 300 years until some well-intended Selastatians, no doubt rubbing their hands together with anticipated-development glee, came up with what they thought was the brilliant idea of giving it as a present to Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1899. Alsace had only recently been absorbed into the German Empire following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 when it was annexed by the victorious Prussians. The Kaiser accepted the gift, apparently assuming that taking ownership of the castle would help strengthen what he thought to be the (ahem) natural bond between the Alsatians and Hohenzollern Germany.

He had also been floating the idea about for some time of finding a site where he could re-create his vision of the grand old days when Teutonic Knights roamed the land and life was good and chivalry was the order of the day. The Kaiser, in other words, was out to mythologize nothing less than a Prussian version of Camelot. And Haut-Kœnigsbourg (literally, the “High City of the King”) would be its name.

(As students of history have come to know, it was exactly these sorts of cross-Channel jealousies and family one-upsmanships among the various Royal Houses of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that eventually erupted into World War I – “You have a dreadnought; well we have two dreadnoughts. What do you think of that?” “You have a colony in South Africa; well, we have a colony in Central Africa. Hah!” “You have an Archduke Franz Ferdinand... well... uh, apparently, we don’t. Well then, neither will you!” And the rest is history.)

Haut-Kœnigsbourg today is a beautiful, massive, perfectly-sited, hundred-year old vision of one man’s take on how people lived in the 1400s. It’s now French again, because Alsace-Lorraine was ceded back to that country as part of the reparations claimed from Germany in the Treaty of Versailles that followed World War I – a treaty signed, ironically, five years to the day after the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated.

All of that history is simply to lay down the background for these next few photos. Although they show a wonderful castle in the sky that, on a clear sunny day, commands a view of thousands of surrounding square miles – not to mention a view of Leslie, too – just be advised that it is not what it appears to be.






From Haut-Kœnigsbourg we descended (because “down” is pretty much the only direction you can go from there) to the Alsace wine route. Because it was Fall, even the vine leaves below the castle were showing off their Autumn colours, painting yet another wonderful Impressionistic work across the landscape.
Several kilometres farther along the route, and after passing dozens of various-sized wineries, we stopped at another little town, once again simply because our guide book informed us it was picturesque. Riquewihr (pronounced RICK-veer) was everything the guide book said it was. Alsace is a happy blend of things German and French, an amalgam that is reflected in Riquewihr’s architecture, its restaurant menus and its store windows festooned with little signs proclaiming “Deutsch hier gesprochen” and “We speak English” alike.


We had a wonderful lunch at a place called the Dime. During our ordering, I probably should have noticed that our waiter’s eyebrows shot up when I asked for a side of sauerkraut in addition to the schnitzel cordon bleu plate I had ordered. It already came with spaetzle, those irresistible little dumplings that look like elbow macaroni and, to my mind anyway, are as essential to German food as rice is to Asian. Sure enough, what was plunked down in front of me turned out to be two meal-sized platters of food because the sauerkraut, which arrived on a plate about half the size of a Hummer’s hubcap, was itself accompanied by a generous serving of boiled potatoes.

For the second time in our dining experience so far in France, we also observed the apparent freedom with which pets, in this case a very friendly dog, are permitted to roam about the premises – not simply in the foyer, but from table to table throughout the dining area. Given that bread is a finger food in France, I refrained from giving him a friendly scratch behind the ears because I still wanted to savour another slice from the delicious baguette basket without an accompanying “essence de chien”. Leslie did ask the dog if he would consider joining us later for the return trip back to Canada, but he confessed that his passport had expired. (Just what was in that House Gewürztraminer?)

Funny thing about House Gewürztraminer in an Alsace restaurant – it’s utterly fantastic and was served to us en carafe at the perfect temperature – chilled, but not to the point of vapourizing its flavour and aromas. We left Riquewihr with a trio of bottles from the Ernest Preiss winery – a Gewürztraminer, a Riesling, and a Muscat.

Our final drive of this trip (at least in the rental car) was a scenic run from Alsace into Paris. We travelled by way of Epernay and yet another little-known local wine region – Picardie and les Caves de Champagne. I saw a recent television documentary about this same region and was flabbergasted to discover that, despite its relatively small geographic dimensions of roughly 32,000 hectares, Champagne is home to no fewer than 300 production houses and 15,000 (!) separate vineyards, from great signature names like Moet et Chandon, Veuve Cliquot and les Caves de Dom Perignon to pick your “any” of dozens of lesser-known houses and thousands of lesser-known (but not necessarily “lesser”) varietals.

Oh, if you’ve ever wondered how to tell the difference between a wine grape and a champagne grape, well wonder no more, because here is the answer. This is what wine vines look like.


And in the second photo are champagne vines.


Baby Duck: maintaining our policy to provide education with our entertainment.

(OK... So the real trick is to find a nearby sign that identifies just what the heck it is growing in the field beyond.)


Once again I got a queasy feeling when, as we also crossed both the Meuse and Marne Rivers, as I had when we crossed the Somme I thought again of the many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of soldiers who battled across this same terrain in WWI in the fierce advance-and-retreat fighting that eventually battered both sides into to a four-year-long trench warfare standstill on what history would forever call The Western Front.

We had one more rural highlight to experience before finally immersing ourselves in the urban bustle of France’s capital. As we rolled along, at one point we both realized about the same time that it was feeling a bit like time to pull over for perhaps a bite of lunch (this was the day after our monster Bavarian feed in Riquewihr). For some peculiar synergistic reason, we both confessed a craving for fries, no doubt sharing the sentiment that perhaps some comfort food was in order after so many purely local meals. Then as we whirled around a corner, we both burst out laughing at the same time – there on the edge of France’s renowned Champagne district was a large – and I am not making this up – McCain factory. It was effervescing the smell of freshly French-fried potatoes across a wide swath of the French countryside and it was that aroma that had insinuated itself into our heads, triggering shared hunger pangs at exactly the same time.

Fortunately, a few minutes later we came to Dormans, a town that is home to a wonderful brasserie called The Luxembourg. Not only did they provide a delicious sausage and fries platter, they also served an unbelievably good draft-brewed product of the Belgian Abbaye Affligem, a red fruit wheat beer that seemed to blend hints of both raspberry and wild cherry with its light wheat base.

The half pint of Affligem wheat beer was a fortunate bit of resolve-steeling for what was to come next.

As we approached to within 25 km of Paris, the road landscape changed from quietly rural to ever more frenetic urban. Leslie kept up with a tremendous stream of navigation, while I kept up with a tremendous stream of oral invective about the hopeless inconsistency in the way the French identify their streets as you approach each new intersection. Whether driven by some madcap sense of whimsy, or simply a regret at having missed any local parallels to the Spanish Inquisition and wishing now to instil a home-grown version of the same torture on tourists who dare to venture into their environs on rented wheels, the French seem to think that each new city intersection is best appreciated as a creative puzzle to solve.

Let’s see – is the streetname’s sign on a post on the sidewalk, or is it a diminutive, hand-lettered hundred-year old plaque affixed to one of the buildings? And which one? (We would soon find that this was often difficult to discover even when we were walking!) For even more fun, will it be painted a colour that blends in with the building, or a high contrast colour you can not only spot, but actually read as you drive through the intersection when the light changes?

Finally, we reached the massive rail terminus where we had been told to return the car – the Gare de l’Est. And after driving around fully half its perimeter without a single visible hint of where to return the rental car, we pulled over to solicit some directional help from a crew of workers at what looked like a gateway into the Gare.

Which brings me full circle to the first paragraph of today’s entry, and the discovery that we were parked on the wrong side of three solidly flowing streams of traffic – ACROSS which we now had to turn to enter the stream flowing the other way, a manoeuvre we were assured would return us to the gate labelled simply “P”, where used rental cars apparently go to die.

What followed was a combination of blind luck, probably sheer stupidity and not a little fingers-crossed courage with which I suspect I will be able to regale lunch companions for months, if not years to come.

Pulling the steering wheel around a full couple of circles, I turned the rental car literally 90 degrees to the traffic flow and inched forward. The first vehicle I encountered was an oncoming car that actually slowed enough that I continued forward to the next lane, whose position was about a half second away from filling in with a city bus. Like Nelson crossing the T at Trafalgar, I inched ahead, rolled partly into the path of the oncoming bus -- and it stopped! Darting ahead, I realized that the bus almost completely obscured what lay on its other side, but in for a penny, in for a pound, and so I pushed the nose of the rental into the next lane.

I was rewarded with the simultaneous screech of brakes and a blaring horn as the car that had been moving to pass the stopped bus found its lane suddenly blocked by the front half of our rental car. At this point, I could see the car’s driver and could see, too, that he was winding up for a good-sized Gallic explosion. Miming frantically, I bashed myself on the chest, made a sweeping upside-down “U” motion with my arm, pointed to the lanes just beyond flowing in the opposite direction, then pressed my hands together in a gesture of prayer.

And he laughed! And with humour, not vindictiveness. Then, with the gesture of one of the “Price Is Right” showgirls unveiling a new prize package, he mimed a huge “Go right ahead” sweep of his own arm and waved me across.

The gods of traffic, I gratefully assume, by this time had obviously decided either that I’d suffered enough, or perhaps had gotten away with as much as was reasonably allowed any tourist, because a quick glance to my right revealed the oncoming lanes momentarily were completely empty, held up by a wonderfully timed signal light a few yards farther along to the right. Hauling the wheel once more tightly to the left, I swung into the nearest lane and suddenly we were pointed the direction in which we needed to be heading.

And think of it... I had only aged ten years in as many seconds! A small price to pay. (I have since been advised that the Paris Bureau de Circulation has already issued the necessary work order to have a plaque commemorating our unbelievable feat readied for installation at the point on the round-the-Gare road where we made the crossing.)

But we weren’t done yet. I referred moments ago to the gods of traffic. They obviously were working at cross purposes with the Gare’s security guards because, when we got back to the “P” entrance to where we had been told the rental car return lot was located, there was a solid barricade of closed gates. But at least there was a guard. I rolled down my window, leaned out and yelled (because he and the gate were on the left, across those same three lanes I had just crossed to get back to this point): “Retourne d’un auto... Location... Europcar?”

And at the very moment the oncoming traffic stopped at a second perfectly-placed red light, he moved the gate aside! Now I felt like an Ali Baba who has suddenly discovered the French for “Open Sesame!”. As we entered the garage, we were not surprised to see not the slightest visual indication anywhere telling us where EuropCar returns were to go. But once again, we spotted help in the form of a trio of construction workers patching a concrete pillar and were told by them “Cinquième étage en bas – all da way to da boddum”. At least they helpfully pointed to a descent ramp we now saw in one corner of the garage.

Navigating that proved also to be an exercise in back-and-forthing. The corner to enter the “down” ramp at each level of our descent was so sharp and narrow it appeared to have been designed for bicycles rather than cars, requiring my getting halfway through the turn, straightening the wheel, backing up half a car length, then finishing the turn so as not to collect a crisscross of Gare de l’Est concrete gouges scraped into the driver’s side of the car.

At level 5, our arrival at the “boddum” was confirmed by the absence of any further “down” ramps – finally! We saw one lowly EuropCar sign hanging from the ceiling and discovered that the same traffic gods who’d blessed our dramatic U-turn decided to re-enter the picture one last time. They created for us what was, I swear, the absolute last parking space left in the entire underground garage, and by the time I shut the engine off, we had no more than 12 inches of space on either side. I didn’t care. If I had to, I’d exit by the side sliding door. I was not moving this car ever again.

As we lifted the rear hatch to unload our bags, the hatch door cleared a concrete pillar (as had I, apparently) by not a micron more than the breadth of a human hair. Wishing a silent “Good luck” to whomsoever next had the misfortune to be responsible for getting this vehicle out of the garage, I pressed the “Lock all doors” button on the keychain and gave the car an affectionate thank you pat. When we got the bill a few weeks later, we saw we’d logged over 2600 km (with the single mishap of my lightly backing into a parked car in Arras one day, fortunately leaving not a mark on either car, but prompting an “Oh-la-la!” from our host Franck, who was in the passenger seat at the time to navigate me around the block to the Corne d’Or’s parking lot).

After searching throughout much of the station itself, we finally found the EuropCar office – it turned out to be located on a different underground level of the Gare. We handed over our keys, merely nodded at the gasp of appreciation from the clerk when we told her we’d actually managed to place the car in an honest-to-goodness parking space instead of simply abandoning it in the traffic lanes (as we noted not a few other people had done), and decided to wait right there for the 30 minutes still left until the driver with whom we had pre-arranged a ride to our Parisian home in the St Germain neighbourhood of the Seine’s fabled Rive Gauche (Left Bank) for the next week was scheduled to show up.

And for the first time in over an hour, I exhaled.

...

Oh... AITOI (As I Think Of It)

I overlooked a service point in my previous description of our lavish meal in the Chateau Anonénil – something that I’d heard about, but this was my first-ever experience with a practice that I have since seen described as “musty”, if not downright sexist. When Leslie and I received our menus, we noticed they were identical, except that hers had no prices listed for anything on the entire menu. Only mine did.

I had a theory about that and, when we returned home, I looked about the internet for verification of my guess that it was actually intended as a courtesy for a couple so that the woman, assumed to be the guest, would be able to feel free to order whatever she wished, without any consideration of cost even entering into her choices. It also allowed the man, assumed to be the host, to blanch when he did the quick mental arithmetic after hearing what his “guest” ordered, then to quickly embark upon such stimulating table talk as, “Did you read that article last week about the amount of calories that are in lobster with drawn butter?” He could then gaze meaningfully at her hips before asking, “Are you sure you want to order that? What about consommé and a couple more of the complimentary breadsticks? They’re amazingly fresh, you know!”

Here’s what the New York Times “Diner’s Journal” blog had to say in April 2006 about the ever-more-rarely-encountered practice. For extra fun, browse the comment stream that follows the column – obviously the practice has both its supporters (“How charming”) and its detractors (“particularly insulting to my intelligence”). And then, as well, there’s the “Are you sure you don’t just want a couple extra breadsticks?” vindication: “My parents were treating us to dinner and my boyfriend was practically choking when I ordered my meal. As he had prices, and I did not, I was unaware that I had ordered a $75 salad.”

Next: Even when you’re a passenger, Parisian traffic is scary. Settling into Paris tourism, and discovering that the only thing separating me and master Parisian photographer Eugene Atget turns out to be about 108 years. (While the only thing separating Leslie and Hitler turns out to be about 68 years!)

I haven’t yet mentioned where we actually stayed in Arras. Well, as effusively as I went on about the charm and hospitality of our Utah Beach gite, you can take the same measure and then some for a wonderful, and surprisingly old (this place survived World War I’s gradual demolition of the city’s core) five-room property that has been a labour of love for its host, Franck Smal and his wife, Isabelle.
It’s called la Maison d’Hôtes – la Corne d’Or and, despite its centuries-old history, it has very nicely kept up with the many cyberspatial advantages of having a website – here.

Our room was La Suite Nature (which no, did not mean “clothing optional”).

Franck is the half of the couple you will see most. In fact, wife Isabelle is a full-time teacher, a family link to the profession that has created in Franck some rather passionately held, and not entirely complimentary, views on the current wave of Sarkozy government-instituted educational reforms presently underway in France. (To its opponents, the reform program will mean turning the entire system over to “accountants” and running it like a business, at the expense of the quality of education. For the pedagogically-minded in the room, the issues, from an understandably left-wing point of view, are summarized in this April 28, 2008 article from the World Socialist Web Site / WSWS.)

But even more passionate as a subject of interest for Franck is the history of the property he and Isabelle have turned into a small hotel. While we were there, he showed us copies of some fascinating documentation tracing the property’s ownership as far back as the registration that was mandated under the Napoleonic Code in the 1830s. He also told us that he has found some archival “traces” of evidence that date its construction to the late 14th century.

But he hasn’t let history consume the time required to run a first-class accommodation in Arras. Canadians – depending on your own political leanings – may or may not take it as high praise that he was selected to host a luncheon for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his officials when they stayed in Arras in 2007 to participate in ceremonies marking the 90th Anniversary of the Canadian attack on Vimy Ridge.

For a modest few extra Euros, you can enjoy a breakfast that Franck lays on that provides more than enough fuel to see you well into your day trips in and around Arras. Front and centre on the beverage sideboard was a pod-espresso machine and there were probably 15 different types of coffee, from powerful, full-bodied through a range of progressively gentler caffeine kicks, and even a couple of de-caffs from which to choose. If you’re unfamiliar with the pod system, it’s ridiculously simple. (Although you probably don’t need to go as far as the “Krups 15 Bar Pressure Thermo Block Pump Trouble Free Espresso Cappuccino Maker” I saw advertised in a recent pre-Christmas “Best Gifts at the Best Price” ad in the Globe and Mail.) The espresso machine stands at the ready, with a reservoir of fully pre-heated water. You select the pod you want – a small sealed pack that looks like a metal-covered chocolate – place it under a lever, position your cup under the spout, then press the lever. The action simultaneously punches a ring of small holes into the vacuum-sealed pod’s case, and pushes the water through until you release the lever. (This allows for a “long” or a “short” espresso – more or less water – depending on your preference. And the freshness, of course, is incredible, given you’ve introduced air into the coffee pod just seconds earlier.) And if coffee isn’t your preferred morning jump-start, in a side china-cabinet Franck had about 30 different teas and tisanes.

There was always a bowl of fresh fruit salad and a large pitcher of fresh-squeezed orange juice on the table. Cereal options included a couple of traditional – corn flakes, for example, and also a muesli / granola style. But what really set Franck’s breakfast table off was the enormous basket of fresh baked pastries, croissants and breads. The first morning we were there, he placed several slices of a nutty muesli bread that was so fresh and warm, it actually settled a bit as it sat in the serving basket.

His pastry source revealed itself when another family at the table that morning asked if there were any more croissants. Without missing a beat, Franck said, “Just a minute”, darted out the front door and was back in about four minutes with a half dozen, straight off the shelf of a lovely patisserie just across the street. Franck never admitted it, but the nearby presence of what he said was the best bakery in Arras might well have been a motivator in his and Isabelle’s decision to buy the Corne d’Or in the first place. (After all – location, location, location.) Lord knows it was certainly our motivator for making sure we never missed breakfast. The capper was a daily offering of a fresh hot entrée in addition to all of the foregoing – French toast one morning, fresh-smoked filet mignon (!) the next.

The morning after our Vimy visit, we happened to mention our underground sojourn in the la Grange Subway and when Franck heard how interested we had been, he said, “Then you have to visit the Wellington Quarry.”

I confess I am not a little embarrassed, now in the hindsight of having seen this place, at never having even heard of it before Franck mentioned it. In my Vimy post, you may recall I mentioned how much of the Vimy preparation was conducted underground. It turns out the Vimy digs were a relative drop in the bucket compared to the Wellington Quarry. Despite the repetition of describing a few points of yet another WWI underground network, a few of the Quarry’s logistics are worth a mention here.

Underground Arras is nothing new. Chalk has been mined from dozens of pits dug deep under the city for literally hundreds of years. “Pits” is deliberate. In mediaeval times, the stone was dug by simply excavating a small hole at ground level and gradually working down several storeys into the rock, gradually creating a sizeable cave in the earth until a specific pit was deemed to have been sufficiently quarried. Then another would be opened, and so on. Eventually, limestone became Arras’s building material of choice and the chalk pits were simply capped over and forgotten.

Then along came World War I and its attendant need for shelter from the shelling, and for a safe place in which to prepare for a coming battle. Add the presence on that section of the front of a unique regiment of some 500 New Zealanders – including native Maoris and nearby Pacific Islanders – who, to a man, came from a mining background. And within the almost unbelievable span of about a year, they dug no less than 20 km of tunnels linking all the mediaeval chalk pits at a depth of about 70 feet below Arras.

The Wellington Quarry today is both a tourist-accessible section of the network and a museum honouring the New Zealand miners,
and also the soldiers who fought and died in the fighting that took place in and around Arras, culminating in the massive offensive launched in April 1917 that, coincident with the Canadians’ attack on Vimy, saw fully 25,000 British soldiers spill from openings dynamited from five different exit sites tunnelled up close to the surface. The British attack overwhelmed the Germans in the nearby trenches. So complete was their surprise, and so thoroughly were the Germans shocked, the attack in its first day achieved the until-then-never-achieved success of pushing the Germans back no fewer than 11 km across the entire Arras section of the front.

It was as unexpected to the Allies as it was to the Germans and in short order they outstripped their own supply lines. Unable to keep their guns in ammunition and their bodies in water and food... they simply stopped. The delay was sufficient to allow the Germans to rush reinforcements and reserve troops forward and they, in turn, pushed back, undoing pretty much all of the Allies’ gains. In a film presentation at the end of the tour, you hear the utterly disheartening news that the German supreme commander, Hindenburg, said that 24-hour delay on the Arras front probably “saved” Germany from likely having to capitulate entirely, and sealed the world into the fate of a further 18 months of World War I, and Germany into a deep post-war economic catastrophe that gave rise to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party.

Here are a couple photos I took in the Quarry and the Museum. It’s hard to appreciate from these pictures the size of the mediaeval caverns that the New Zealanders linked together, for the simple reason they were too large for my flash to illuminate. But it is an amazing place, the more so to me for adding an entirely new chapter to my World War I knowledge.


(The carved chalk steps lead up to one of the wartime exits through which the attacking British emerged that surprising April 1917 morning after dynamiting an opening through the final couple of feet to the surface. The dark circle on the step in the lower right is a 90-year old helmet.)

Outside, on a long concrete wall at the ramp that slopes down to the Quarry’s entrance, the units that fought in the Battle of Arras are immortalized.
If you zoom in on the bottom row in this photo, you’ll see the names of the many Canadian Brigades who took part in the Vimy assault.

And with that, I said a most thoughtful goodbye to the many wartime sites I’d seen on this trip. (But not entirely to militaria. Be advised that a visit to Paris’s Musée de l’Armée is still to come.)

The ocean-removed perspective of Canada necessarily confines one’s appreciation of the impact of two World Wars to readings and what you see on TV or in movie theatres. And no matter how eloquent the TV script or the book writing – whether by historian or participant (or both in the case of a writer like Edmund Blunden) – there is nothing to make it all seem so real as a simple sign in a glade telling you there are still unexploded munitions about, or a single poppy stuck in the wall of a garden in tribute to a dozen Canadian soldiers who were executed on the very spot on which you are standing, or an equally poignant poppy wreath placed in a German soldiers’ cemetery by British schoolchildren, and the countless plaques telling me that I was where so many of the events in my many years of readings actually happened.

From the miles-long sweep of a Normandy beach to a nameless soldier’s two-inch by two-inch pencilled drawing on a chalk wall deep under Arras that was his best memory of the woman to whom he hoped one day to return, I am deeply glad of the experience of having seen all of these places.

Out of Arras and on to Alsace. (Let’s face it – all France is poetry.)

(Oh, and an Arras footnote. On our last night there, we opted for an ensuite dinner consisting of some wonderful local food shop finds. I had never before heard of white Bordeaux, but I am here to tell you now it is a fantastic wine!)

When I was but a lad of 7 – 11, Dad was stationed at the Royal Canadian Air Force base at 2 Wing (Grostenquin) France. The civilian residences – PMQs (for Permanent Married Quarters – although I never did find out whether it was the permanence of the marriage or the quarters that earned one’s family a place to live therein) – were located about a dozen kilometres from the base, in a town named St Avold. At one point in our day’s drive out Arras, we passed a sign that told us St Avold lay about 45 km away, but I resisted a 90-minute or so side trip merely to point to a couple windows on the fourth floor of a four-storey apartment block and say to Leslie, “We lived there for four years”. She never actually said thank you, but I think she appreciated that even my nostalgia has its limits. (But as we passed signs for Nancy, Metz, Toul, crossed the Moselle River and drove through Pont-a-Mousson, I couldn’t resist telling her we were in my old neighbourhood.)

One thing I really liked about French highway signs is that when you are exiting a ramp off a highway, they have a very effective way of giving you an early indication of the sharpness of the ramp’s curve. As you enter a ramp, if you see a quick succession of signs that stage from 110 to 90 to 70 to 50 over a relatively short distance, you will be wise to ease up on your speed, because the ramp is a sharp turn. By contrast, if you enter the ramp and see only one sign on the shoulder – 110 – it means the ramp’s turn is so shallow that you barely have to nudge the steering wheel to carry you onto your connecting road without reducing your speed at all. It’s especially helpful when you’re driving in fog and can only see a limited section of the exit ramp.

Our destination today was a place Leslie picked solely for its proximity to the Alsace wine region. In recent years, we’ve discovered we quite enjoy Riesling and Gewürztraminer white wines, both of which coincidentally are hailed around the wine-lovers’ world when they come from wineries in Alsace. Of the place – the Chateau d’Adonénil in Lunéville, Leslie would only say, “I think you’ll like it”.

Uh huh. 1. Late afternoon

2. Early morning

And 3. inside our room.


That evening, we decided to treat ourselves to dinner in the Chateau’s dining room. Here (and be warned, there’s really no way to characterize the meal description you’re about to read as anything other than a gustatory orgy) is what we both agree is probably the most lavish meal we have ever eaten in our lives. Leslie ordered “agneau” and, eventually, a dessert. I ordered “sandre” and, also eventually, a dessert. I’m sure you see a pattern that might even sound a little tiresome here: Leslie: lamb; me: fish (“sandre” is pike). But I’m leaving a great many meals out – and we do both tend to revert to our consistent restaurant favourites, especially when the setting, or a host’s recommendation, tends to suggest a superior quality on both items.

So here’s how our four-item total order transpired...

The moment we arrived, we were faced with a tabletop battery of cutlery, china and glassware that would have drained most single-family domestic kitchens. (Fortunately, the staff was most helpful throughout the meal. As each new serving would arrive, they would position the applicable utensil on the plate. All that was missing was, “Ready, set, go”.)

On our table was a martini glass filled to the brim with a mix of roasted and glazed cashews, hazelnuts, pumpkin and sunflower seeds. After we settled in, admired the meticulously arranged decor, a waiter (all of whom were dressed to the nines) appeared and offered us a choice of four different fresh-baked breads – a traditional mini-baguette, a country wheat bread, a raisin loaf and a walnut bread. A few minutes later, a platter of three appetizers arrived – for each of us. One was a mushroom purée on a thin crisp; the second was a purée of tomato sitting on a thin slice of chorizo sausage and the platter was rounded off with a miniature baked pastry that had the texture of warm pretzel dough. No sooner had the doughy warmth cleared our palates when bowls of soup arrived that was like nothing either of us had ever experienced – it was as though someone had perfected the formula for liquefying fresh parmesan reggiano and ladled it over two more baked items, a thick slab of baguette and a sweet gaufrette wafer.

More bread arrived and with it, a waiter to take our order. (By this point, it had completely slipped our minds that several appetizers and soup into the meal, we had still to officially order anything. The fact that we were each a good glass and half into a beautifully balanced Alsace Riesling might have contributed to our temporary amnesia.)

Leslie, as I mentioned earlier, ordered the “agneau” and it arrived, if you can believe it, as three flawlessly prepared chops and a side (a side!) of a filet mignon steak. The balance of her plate was filled out with asparagus, a medley of finely chopped vegetables pressed into a brownie-like square and, in a separate bowl, a garlic mousse that we were unsure whether it was intended to be a wholly separate side dish, or a garnish for the asparagus and veg.

Meanwhile, while we were waxing rapturous about the garlic mousse, which we both had sampled the moment it arrived, my own plate was slid into position. My “sandre” was a large, thick disk of beautifully flaky fish, cooked to perfection. Two separate side dishes included, in one, a thick sauce of a wild and domestic mushroom blend, probably including truffle or morel but I have had such rare experience with either, I wasn’t completely sure. The second side dish was a sauté blend of pearl onions, mushrooms and chick peas, all lightly charred on the outside, hot and steaming inside. Yet another side bowl landed and it carried another of those wonderful concoctions – richly cheesy in my case – that left us unsure as to whether it was a side dish, or a sauce. (I confess that I am someone who makes no bones about asking in circumstances like this when I am unsure and the waiter delivered the most perfect of answers – “Whatever monsieur wishes...” So I spooned it onto the sautéed vegetables and it was a marriage made in heaven.

We took our time and savoured every last morsel, occasionally passing a nibble to each other’s plate with an “Oh wow... you have GOT to try THIS!”

We also settled the food with a steady, but temperate, flow of the Riesling, supplemented by generous quantities of Evian mineral water that the staff ensured never fell to less than half a tumbler’s worth.

The main courses done, we mused about whether we had room for dessert and agreed that, given the promise indicated by what had so far gone before, we simply had to.

Then a separate platter of what the waiter informed us were “amuse-gueules” was brought to the table. Not a choice – the entire platter. We each savoured a sweetened puff pastry that was like a miniature Yorkshire pudding in texture, a chocolate mousse square with actual gold leaf flakes garnishing it and a disk of something we never did identify. Suffice to say it was blue-grey in colour; it looked for all the world like a scale model of a curling stone but since it was garnished with a fresh raspberry where the stone normally carried a handle, we correctly took it to be the third of the “amuse-gueules”. It was delicious, and I suspect its flavour root was some sort of wild berry -- black, blue or huckle. Its texture was like a pudding-cake.

At this point we began to let our conversation slide in favour of using our throats to gasp for breath. And suddenly, there was our friendly waiter again, this time placing something in front of us that he informed us was a “pre-dessert”, a cup of lemon-ice “granité” that turned out to be an icy foam infused with a lychée liqueur in addition to the lemon.

At this point, he asked us what we wished to order for dessert!

In response to my request for “Oh, OK, but just something light”, the waiter recommended a Grand Marnier soufflé. When it arrived, of course it couldn’t just be a magnificently puffed and lightly browned soufflé almost floating out of the ramekin in which it was served, it was accompanied by something I recognized as having come straight from the kitchens of master French chef Jacques Pépin (because we have one of his cookbooks and Leslie has made this very thing) candied citrus peel – a mix of sugar glazed orange, lemon and grapefruit peel sections and a second side (Even the dessert had side dishes!) that consisted of a hot, sweet slice of egg loaf layered with a delicious filling of currants, nuts and something – light maple syrup? – to add a perfect degree of sweetness.

And I don’t know how you measure a great restaurant, but when the waiter left the entire bottle of Grand Marnier brandy with me to slather as much as I wanted onto my soufflé, I knew we were in the presence of culinary greatness. (Insert increasingly foggy-eyed smiley here.)

Leslie, meanwhile, had ordered a strawberry / raspberry ice, which she foolishly assumed would also be a “light” dessert. When it arrived, it was surrounded by an amazingly constructed meringue that appeared to be a cage of delicate pink rings forming a complete arch over the ice. (In fact, it looked a little unsettlingly like the rib cage of the legendary rare dessert-beast of Big Rock Candy Mountain-opolis.) And to further top off that presentation, the dessert was itself nesting on a checkerboard pattern of raspberry coulis with a side of sliced strawberries.

We had also decided to end with coffee and of course it also came with yet another tray of mini-sweets – cubes of cotton candy made in-house, and four marshmallow squares we were told were made from a Japanese fruit that most closely resembled a cross between a lemon and an orange.

And finally, believe it or not... the waiter came by once more with yet another tray covered with a beautiful variety of chocolates, chocolate truffles and the like. “Please... as many as you wish...” We confined ourselves to one each. What a surprise – they were superb!

Our departing form of locomotion could probably best be described as a waddle, and we opted for a late night “digestif” stroll around the grounds of the Chateau (There’s something you don’t get to say every day!) At one point, rather than let a black cat complete its trajectory across our path, I cajoled it into coming over for a friendly scratch behind the ears, a greeting it endured for about six seconds before clamping both front paws fiercely about my arm and sinking its teeth into my wrist. After shaking it off and determining that I wouldn’t bleed to death in the time it took to get back to our suite, I muttered something about thinking that a long ago feline acquaintance named Toby of similar appearance and temperament (at least in his youth) had obviously been reborn on French aristocratic soil, and we returned to our room, where I gave my forearm a long, warm-water soak and a thorough cleansing.

Next: The difference between wine grapes and champagne grapes, what Disneyland might have looked like if it had been designed by Kaiser Wilhelm II instead of Walt Disney, and we bid our rented wheels adieu in absolutely the last parking space left deep below the Gare de l’Est in Paris.

Our drive from Honfleur into Arras followed a path with names that have profound echoes for someone who, like myself, has an interest in military history. I’ll mention just one here, because even though it was a beautiful sweep that took us down into a valley to an overpass that crossed the Somme River, it was still... the Somme.

Among the many horrors that World War I calls to mind, none are more easily called to mind than those associated with the Battle of the Somme. It was the first day of the Battle of the Somme that made July 1 in Newfoundland forever a day of mourning rather than a day to celebrate the birth of Canada. On that date in 1916, the First Newfoundland Regiment was all but wiped out in an attack on a section of the Somme front called Beaumont-Hamel. 733 out of 801 men, a future province’s entire generation, died or were badly wounded in the space of 30 minutes.

Our destination today, Arras (pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable – “ah-RASS”), is not far from the most significant of the many Canadian World War I memorials in Europe.

Arras is a very old town, but it is a new old town. “Old”, because it traces its history at least as far back as when years were measured in two digits, and possibly as far as numbers requiring a “BC” in front of them. (I found at least one reference that relates how, as the already established Roman town of Atrebatum, it was converted to Christianity late in the 4th century by Saint Diogenes.)

But “new” because it had the geographical misfortune to be located at a position on World War I’s Western Front where the war pretty much settled into its bitter trench war of attrition for four years. During that time, it was for all intents and purposes flattened and the rebuilt Arras you see today, while quite beautiful in many respects is also quite new, by European standards.

For example, I found this online photo of the artillery-smashed ruins of the Arras City Hall, which sat (and today sits again) on one boundary of the main town square. (Source: cache.gettimages.com) It’s hard to believe that the Hall, as you see it now, is less than a hundred years old. Similarly, this wider photo shows the main square – “la Grande Place” – in 1919.
(Source: mstation.org)

And here are, in turn, the City Hall and – in a photo taken from its bell tower – "Place des Héros", a second square just yards from la Grande Place, in October 2008.


From the perspective of the tower, we discovered Arras’s secret: the reason that the town was so quickly rebuilt after The Great War. Obviously it was done by the same folks who do those “Puzz-3D” jigsaw structures of places and objects the world over, both famous and ordinary. In Arras, the only difference is that they did it up life-sized.


On to things less flippant. Just 20 minutes or so to the north of Arras is a 7-km long escarpment known as Vimy Ridge.

You can’t be a Canadian without having heard of Vimy Ridge. The subject of innumerable essays, books, TV and film documentaries, Canada’s successful assault on its heights during WWI after both the British and French had failed is most often characterized as the event that marked our “coming of age as a nation”. For the first time in our history, Canadian soldiers acted as an entirely “Canadian” Corps – four Divisions numbering about 98,000 men – rather than as a wing of a larger British army. (In fact, they were bolstered by the addition of the British 5th Infantry Division for this attack.) On the downside, that “aging” process cost some 3,600 dead and over 7,000 wounded over the battle’s four days on April 9-12, 1917. Vimy is the stuff of heroism on a grand scale and around it swirl so many of the unanswered wartime “Why?” and “How?” questions such as, What possibly is it that gives mere human beings the inner fortitude to rise up and march forward against a hitherto unbeatable and still heavily armed enemy?

The Canadian Memorial at Vimy sits atop what in 1917 was known as Hill 145, the highest point of land on the entire escarpment. Although much of the gently rising approach to the Memorial today is surrounded by patches of forest, this was not the case in WWI and from its height, even today, you can instantly appreciate why it was so strategically important. You can see literally for miles in all directions. In the stagnant daily grind into which the war settled for four years, the Germans who were dug in on Vimy could watch vast swaths of Allied battle preparation so as to be ready when each new attack came.

Without turning this entry into a lengthy dissertation on military tactics, what drove the Canadian success seems by modern warfare standards to be forehead-slappingly obvious, but was entirely new in 1917: incredibly detailed planning, rehearsal and up-to-the-hour intelligence. Canada’s troops spent the months leading up to the attack visiting enormous plasticine scale models of the battlefield well behind the lines. Each unit’s objectives, therefore, were not simply lines on a map. They were painstakingly accurate three-dimensional representations. The battle plan was known by every single soldier in the army – another Canadian innovation. (Prior to Vimy, maps and the full plan were entrusted only to senior ranks. This led to two obvious problems – first, the uppermost among the higher ranking officers “fought” from protected headquarters sites well behind the lines and communicated their commands via radio, semaphore, human runners and even carrier pigeons. That required not only getting their orders forward to the fighting troops, it also made those orders often already outdated because rapidly changing battle information was frequently hours old by the time it got back to headquarters. Second, even though a great many officers were also in the front lines, when they were wounded or killed the full battle plan died with them.)

Finally, Canadian troops rehearsed and rehearsed – eventually perfecting – an infantry attack support tactic called the creeping barrage. This was when the exploding shells of the supporting artillery fire from your own guns moved forward on the line of attack, often as near as just 100 yards ahead of the advancing troops. The blasts kept your enemy’s heads down, indeed kept them deep in their shelters and, when the creeping barrage moved on, before the enemy could recover and move back into their defensive positions above ground, the attacking troops were already in their trenches.

Here endeth the War College Primer. If you have a hankering for greater detail, I do recommend Pierre Berton’s book, “Vimy”, a very well-written account of the fight that doesn’t wallow in “militaria” but describes the battle in ordinary language from the participants’ point of view. It is at the same time both a sadly moving and an uplifting read.

Wikipedia also has a very thorough summary (albeit with much more detail about the units involved, and the place of the battle in the larger strategy of the War on the Western Front). It is here.

But beyond the battle itself, what makes the site today especially meaningful for Canadians is the truly stunning memorial that has been erected there. It sits on land that was granted in 1922 to the people of Canada “in perpetuity” by the Government of France. And like so many other war memorials, it pays tribute not only to those who fought on this particular battlefield, but to those who fought and died throughout the entire war. The Vimy Memorial serves as our national overseas WWI memorial and is carved with the names of 66,000 Canadians who died, over 11,000 of whom have no known grave.

We visited it on a beautiful Fall day and our first view of the monument itself was framed through a “window” of autumn-coloured maples.


Every feature of the monument is possessed of a heavily symbolic meaning, from each of its 22 sculpted human figures
to the simple decision to build two towers to represent Canada and France.
In this photo, the figure “Canada Mourning”
also gives you an appreciation of the view that Hill 145 commands of the Douai Plain (the twin mounds in the distance are enormous slag heaps from coal mines several kilometres away).

The site, in addition to this awe-inducing monument, offers a slightly more intrepid visitor the opportunity to view a small portion of a part of the battlefield that was crucial to WWI warfare, especially on a battlefield where much of it was under the constant watch of enemy observers on the heights – the underground tunnels that soldiers dug deep in the native chalk.

The Vimy memorial site today includes – about a kilometre from the monument – a restored section of this huge and complex underground tunnel network; it’s known as the La Grange Subway and snakes along some 10m below ground. “Restored” is perhaps a bit misleading. The tunnel has been considerably more heavily shored than was the case during the war, and absent is the smell that thousands of cloistered, terrified, heavily-equipped men packed shoulder-to-shoulder for several days at a time would have generated. Absent too was the darkness. The La Grange in wartime was lit only by the occasional candle stuck on the wall every 20 feet or so, while its tourist-navigable portion is today flooded by electric lighting. Also absent the day we visited was the cold – it snowed the April 1917 morning the attack was launched. And finally, we did not have to endure the frequent, terrifying, violent “bumps” of shells bursting on the land immediately overhead. But even in the relative comfort of peacetime and more than 90 years removal, it is still a close, damp place, not for either the claustrophobic or the asthmatic (as we discovered when one such member of our tour group had to return to the surface after just a few minutes underground because of her asthma).


In the second of the two tunnel shots, our guide is faintly visible on the left. She is a delightful young lady named Brianne whose presentation balanced just the right amount of sobriety with humour. At one point, she referred to the relative ease with which the miles of tunnel could be dug because of the softness of the surrounding chalk... “or for the benefit of our visitors from Liverpool today – ‘choke’” (her take on the last word giving it a Liverpudlian twirl that would have done Paul McCartney proud).

Vimy’s guides are all Canadian students who have given up essentially a whole semester of their university programs to work at the site. In a recurring visit from the “small world” world, we spoke for a time with another named Caitlin who worked in the Visitor’s Centre. Caitlin turned out to be from Burlington (where Leslie and family lived for many years), is presently a student at the University of Western Ontario (where Leslie got her Library degree) and has a sister enrolled at Carleton (where Leslie works and Katie is presently on the way to bolstering the ranks of the world’s aerospace engineers).

Finally, a couple of other Vimy tidbits. Zoom in on this sign.
As completely surprised as you might be (I know I was) to discover this, almost a century after World War I passed from this landscape, there are still large portions of its major battlefields where one is aggressively warned not to tread for the reason given on the sign. One of the more sobering examples of just such delayed munitions is not far away from Vimy, across the border in Belgium on a section of the front known as the Messines Ridge. On July 31, 1917, the Battle of Passchendaele was launched with the simultaneous detonation of 21 massive separate mines – large caves tunnelled deep under enemy lines that were packed with explosives. At Messines, a total of 455 tonnes of highly explosive ammonal went off, instantly killing an estimated 10,000 German soldiers, and not surprisingly relegating many of those poor unfortunates to the post-mortem ranks of “no known grave”.

That at least was what was supposed to have happened. In fact, two of the huge mines failed to detonate, their existence being unsuspected until July 17, 1955 when a lightning strike in what was fortunately only a farmer’s field caused the 20th mine, buried deep below its surface, to explode. Its only victim was a haplessly grazing cow. The 21st mine’s exact location is unknown to this day (but apparently is suspected to have been found, I read recently. It’s not been removed because of the almost nitroglycerine-like sensitivity of ammonal.)

Things like this give me serious pause when I think how many tens of millions of much smaller but no less lost anti-personnel mines have been buried in terrain ranging from more firmly defined boundaries, such as that which divides North and South Korea, to the tens of thousands of “anywhere”s that have been the sites of the world’s countless brush wars and factional fights in the many decades since this especially ugly and impersonal little killing machine was invented.

Support your local landmine ban / mine removal group.

And the second Vimy tidbit? When the Germans – this time as Nazis – once more swept across Belgium and northern France at the start of WWII, a great many war memorials were destroyed either by German commanders acting on their own initiative or under orders from Hitler. Because of course they mostly commemorated Allied victories / German defeats. But Vimy, dedicated in 1936 after 11 years of construction, was near the battlefield on which the future Fuhrer of the Third Reich, then a lowly Bavarian corporal, also fought. In fact, Hitler actually posted Wehrmacht guards at the Vimy memorial to prevent its defacement by German troops. Which led to images such as this “How I spent my French vacation” snap
from June 12, 1940 that the French (and no doubt a great many descendants of Canadian veterans), given the chance would likely wish into oblivion. (Source: cachegettyimages.com)

Hmmm... I think I digressed there. Back to Arras.

Arras, like so many old (or old / rebuilt) towns in France, is wonderful to just walk about, day or night.


We forced ourselves to enjoy yet another wonderful French dinner. (We also learned something. Apparently France has a law guaranteeing that workers receive at least one day in seven off. This has largely shaken out as an almost country-wide closure of tourist-related and service type businesses on Monday. The rationale, of course, is that more people are likely to use such businesses on the weekends. But it also means a lot less choice on a Monday. So rare is a Monday opening, in fact, that it becomes a feature for a restaurant to self-promote on the menu board out front – “Ouvert les lundis”. Our host in fact pretty much suggested only one place to us for dinner on the Monday night we were in Arras – the Bistrot du Boucher. After we each opened with French onion soup (deliciously validating our theory that if anywhere is going to produce amazing French onion soup, it’s going to be a place in France), Leslie opted for (Surprise!) lamb, accompanied by a wonderful thick disc of chorizo sausage, all on a bed of something neither of us could put a name to, but which seemed like coucous with the mumps (referring to its size, not its flavour). I also repeated an earlier success and opted for seafood – salmon this time, accompanied by a side of fettucine in a fantastic smoked salmon alfredo sauce. And for dessert we had a “tarte au citron meringuée”.

I know what you’re thinking – “C’mon you dummy; you had a piece of lemon meringue pie!” Well yes, but it actually was a tart – made of a crust that was flakier than the House of Commons, filled with a lemon filling that flawlessly balanced the citrus’s acidity with beet sugar sweetness (unlike the House of Commons) and topped with a cloud-like meringue that had to have been scorched by a kitchen pyromaniac wielding a blowtorch, because no broiler in my experience is going to yield the nearly-but-not-quite-burned surface over a firm but sticky under layer. Wine tonight? A medium-bodied red Chateau des Tours Brouilly that nested perfectly on the fulcrum midway between the “Great with lamb; great with salmon” extremes). And rounding out a perfect dinner experience, our VISA gold card – complete with six-digit PIN – worked!

Next: one more brief view of Arras (I was tempted to insert a bikini shot here -- *Slap* *Slap* Bad Mike! No cookie!) both above and below ground, then on to Alsace – Lorraine, where French and Germans have always gotten along just fine.

I realize that I am probably overworking the number of references to “The Longest Day” here, but (a) we are, after all, on the D-Day beaches; and (b) “The Longest Day” so far is still number 1 on most people’s lists of “Best D-Day movies”. (And no, “The Americanization of Emily” doesn’t count. Or shouldn’t anyway.)

Our last D-Day stop was above the cliffs where, in the movie, the American Rangers are launching grappling hooks attached to long lines of climbing rope, while others are scaling those same cliffs using lightweight, collapsible ladders.

That scene was actually filmed at the precise location on the Normandy beaches where the attack took place in 1944 – Pointe du Hoc. Invasion-wise, it was a fearsome objective. Unlike the hundreds of yards of flat sand the troops at Utah crossed, the beach at the base of the hundred-metre tall cliff was barely ten metres in width. The point thrusts into the English Channel like a fang. From it, you can look miles to the left across the farthest stretches of Utah Beach, while to the right there is an equally panoramic overlook of Omaha Beach.

Needless to say, the Germans fortified it to an almost unbelievable density with heavy-artillery bunkers and machine gun positions, while just as needless to say, it had an extremely high priority as an Allied target. In a singular irony of the battle, shortly before the landings the Germans had actually removed several of their heaviest guns from their Pointe du Hoc clifftop shelters in order to prevent their destruction by the huge pre-invasion air bombardment. But fortunately for the Allies, the Ranger attack and D-Day itself took place before the Germans could return the guns to their bunkers.

(In a second irony, one of the prominent US Ranger parts in “The Longest Day” was played by a very young and very Canadian Paul Anka, who also composed the main musical theme for the movie.)

On June 6, 1984, President Ronald Reagan spoke at a special ceremony honouring the US Ranger battalion that scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc. He lavished praise on the small unit, noting that of the 225 who landed and carried out the assault, then held off no fewer than five very determined German counterattacks made to try to re-capture the site, only 90 Rangers were fit for duty two days later. At the site today, there is a huge bronze semi-circular plate commemorating the 1984 Reagan speech.

As you stand on the Pointe today, you can’t help but feel a multitude of sensations. The ruins of several massive bunkers give you the feeling that the Germans, before the attack, must have felt invincible here. The dozens of closely packed shell and bomb craters, on the other hand, coupled with the fact that so many of the bunkers are utterly wrecked, also give you a feeling of the intensity of the Allies’ efforts at wiping out the many defences packed into such a small patch of land. With nowhere to run, the Germans must have suffered a great many casualties in both the pre-attack blasting and during the Ranger assault itself.

As thorough a recounting of the attack as you’re ever likely to read is here.

Here’s what it looked like when we visited:



The “rolling” look of the terrain here is actually the result of the countless shell and bomb bursts. In the first picture, the structure with the viewing platform on top is the only structure on the Pointe that survived the pre-invasion blasts pretty much intact. It is an observation post.

Here’s Leslie looking straight into the business end of one of the lesser-damaged German bunkers.


And here’s a shot illustrating just how successful the Allied pre-invasion bombardment was. The photo also gives you an appreciation for the thickness of the reinforced concrete used in the bunkers’ construction.
Nothing less than a direct hit was going to cause any serious damage. But fortunately for the Allies pouring ashore to the left and right of Pointe du Hoc, there had indeed been a great many direct hits made on these defences in the 48 hours before the invasion, effectively taking all of the Pointe's big guns out of the picture.

With our departure from Pointe du Hoc, we also said good bye to the D-Day portion of our trip. (On a parting semantic note, the “Hoc” in the point’s name is actually pronounced like the garden implement: “hoe”.)

We had a long drive ahead of us the next day, so we decided we’d spend a leisurely afternoon in and around our gite. We lunched at the Roosevelt, and over a delightful beverage called a “kir Normand” (a blend of cassis and Normandy country cider), we dialled up the cyber-world via the café’s internet link and wrote a few postcards, mailing them from the post box mounted on the outside wall of the café.

Which brings me to the European French keyboard.

I confess I had simply assumed – in my white, male, English-speaking way – that computer keyboards the world over are all driven by not only our alphabet, but also by our peculiar “QWERTY” configuration of its letters. Surely, I thought, Bill Gates, or Wally Underwood, or Fred Selectric – somebody – would have mandated that this be so. The discovery that this was not, in fact, the case in much of French-speaking Europe came as a bit of a shock. The keyboard in use in many places there is not enormously different, but it’s different enough that it reduced Leslie – who is touch-typing trained – to the tried-and-true method of keyboarding known as hunt-and-peck.

(My own typing speed was considerably less affected, because I look at the keys. One downside of my style is that, as I flail away with eyes on the keys, if my computer mysteriously shifts out of the document into a window demanding, oh, say, the text that I wish to have translated, I can actually key several dozen characters before glancing up to discover that, for whatever fat-fingered, irreproducible key combination reason, I have inexplicably left the document in which I had been working several dozen characters earlier.)

Here are the essential differences: A and Q trade places, as do Z and W. M sits to the right of L (where our colon / semicolon key is typically found. The numbers 0 to 9 are still on the same keys, but to get to them to produce the digits, you have to press the "Shift" key. (Hitting the digits without hitting "Shift" is the path to an array of lower-case characters with accents.) Where the real fun begins is when you search for anything that is not a letter or number – the “@” symbol that is the heart of every e-mail address, for example. We finally had to ask for help to get the period – discovering that it actually required two keys to be pressed simultaneously. So here’s another travel tip for you. If you plan to travel to a place where you’ll be doing some keyboarding on something other than your own laptop or Blackberry – a Cyber-Café, say, take along a guide to the standard AZERTY keyboard. You can find it simply by Googling it under that name. But here’s what it looks like, along with some effort made to explain why.

(The preceding has been a public service announcement from the Society to Prevent the Tearing Out of Keyboarders’ Hair / SPTOKH).

Meanwhile, in addition to kir Normand, we also discovered another wonderful Norman alcoholic beverage based on, no surprise here, the apple as well. It’s called pommeau and is typically a blend of apple juice (to be completely correct, unfermented cider) with its more fiery derivative – Calvados apple brandy. It is as varied as the many forms in which both apple juice and Calvados are produced in the region, but generally the end result of pommeau is a tipple in the 17 per cent alcohol range. The flavour is like a light to medium cider, which of course means it goes down far too smoothly and you can find yourself quite quickly light-headed, depending on factors like just how sunny the day is, whether you’re simply in beverage consumption mode or are drinking it with a meal, and just how relaxed you are feeling while you enjoy a glass or several. (It might, I realize in hindsight, also have made a not insignificant contribution to the erratic internet character production I generated via the AZERTY keyboard... but I digress.)

Onward.

The next day, we left ourselves plenty of driving time in order to allow a side trip to a town that Leslie had read was worth a visit, simply because it is picturesque.

“Picturesque” turned out to be an understatement, even by Europe’s many, often lavish examples of what is worth having a camera pointed at. Honfleur is a seaport, with a mirror-perfect basin in the centre of town that creates a setting which makes you feel like you’ve strolled smack into an Impressionist painting.

We spent a good couple hours wandering its streets, whose photogenic structures suffered not a whit for being removed from the waterfront.

And continuing with the trip’s ability to pitch often wonderful little surprises at us, we noticed that one very old-looking building set at one corner of the basin was flying an especially weatherbeaten flag . Take a close look at the uppermost banner on the rooftop in this picture.
You’ll note that the wind has shredded about 25 per cent of the flag’s outer edge, but in all other respects, it is the Province of Quebec’s Fleur de Lys flag.

Turns out there’s a reason for that. The building is the last surviving section of what was once a walled fortification that encircled the entire town. This particular structure was home to the King’s Lieutenant, the man who would have granted permission for Honfleur to serve as a point of embarkation for a westward voyage of exploration in the year 1608 by one Samuel de Champlain. Champlain, of course, founded the City of Quebec and hence the wind-scarred fabric tie to the town in which we were now standing. Champlain’s departure in the “Don de Dieu” (Gift of God) 400 years before we arrived for lunch had in fact been commemorated just a few months earlier – on May 11, 2008 – with the installation of this plaque on the wall of the old structure.

I mentioned lunch because our lunch on this day deserves mention. We read a couple streetside menus and selected a lovely little café called the Bistro Chez Laurette just yards from the building adorned with the Champlain plaque. Leslie had what she said was a beautifully prepared lamb shank after an appetizer of oysters. For my part, I had a “Salade Normande” as an appetizer that placed a number of the most unlikely ingredients together on a single plate: tomato, apple, radicchio, crisp dried discs of Brie cheese and bacon. (I love any society that declares bacon to be a salad ingredient.) I followed this with a fabulous “fricassee de lotte”, which the server assured me was food from the water, but not shellfish (to which I am seriously allergic). Lotte, I discovered later in the day when I found a translation dictionary, is French for burbot, which cleared up absolutely nothing for me until I was able to get hold of Google again – it’s a freshwater cod. And on a plate with a light cream sauce, it is utterly delicious!

A small shared carafe of the white house wine turned out once again to be a vinicultural treat and we wrapped it all up with a “feuilleté chocolate au biscuit de noisette”. I thought it was a pretty fancy name for an oversized KitKat bar, but it’s the French way.

On the way out of town, en route to our next temporary residence, we crossed a magnificent bridge – the Pont de Normandie, which crosses the Seine between Honfleur and Le Havre. It is called a “cable stayed” bridge and when it was opened in 1995, at just over 2 km it was, for a time, the longest such bridge in the world. (It’s since been surpassed by ones in Japan and Greece.) It is an astonishing blend of amazing architectural strength and visual elegance. The best views are seen as you approach it, but as we barrelled along and finally got to thinking, “This would make a nice picture”, the approach views were already behind us and we were on the gentle curving rise of the span itself. Leslie had the presence of mind to grab this shot looking straight out the windshield.
I especially like it because the graphic structure of the bridge and its cables has an accidental (although Leslie swears she planned it) geometric visual “anchor” in the black lines of the windshield wipers at the bottom of the frame. Not bad for a snap captured at about 90 km/h.

But just so as not to leave you feeling deprived after that glorious preceding description, here is a thumbnail of a shot taken from one of the approaches, just not by us.
(Source: Structurae, Nicholas Janberg’s International Database and Gallery of Structures: Images for Normandy Bridge)

I don’t know how Michelin characterizes Honfleur, but in our tour book it definitely gets a huge “Worth a Diversion”.

Next: Arras, and among the scars of that other world war – the War to End All Wars (that would be the one that ended just 21 years before Hitler marched into Poland to ignite World War II) – above and below one of the most breathtaking battlefield memorials you will ever see. And it is Canadian.