The Western Front of Northwest France

Vilers-Faucon, France

November 20, 2017

Latitude 49.98˚ 3.21 N

You know it’s a small world when a text reads “meet you in front of the St. Quentin train station at 3:30 on Wednesday.”  This when one person is on another continent, on the other side of the Atlantic, 3,000 miles away.

And so it was that we did meet at 3:30.  A pleasant reuniting of two old friends—one Dutch, the other American.  For 35 years our friendship, started in Plattsburgh in 1981, has sustained distance and time.  What a gift!

Our goal was this north-west corner of France, directly on the Western Front of World War I.  It would be the second time that Lomme and I had done this—the first two years ago when we explored the area around Ypres, Belgium, with wonderful forays into France and other corners of Belgium.  This would be another adventure.

But my goal was far more specific this time.  I was in quest of learning far more about two young men—Harold Gordon and Nicholas LaVarnway— who died at Bony, France on September 29, 1918.  An accidental finding at Riverside Cemetery a year and a half ago brought me to this place.

Our first day was spent with the superintendent of the American cemetery in Bony.  His assistant, Cedric, and he were absolutely essential to locating information about the men and the events that occurred on the day they died.  If anything, it was over kill with far too much information to absorb at one point.

On day two we returned to the cemetery.  There comes a point when there’s too much information.  I was in overload, so the best thing to do was switch gears and be a tourist.  For the next two days we visited two lovely small French cities—Noyon and Laon, both famous for 13^th Century Gothic Cathedrals.

It was impossible to spend any time in this part of France without encountering a cemetery or a monument.  Nowhere else in the world except for South viet nam have I seen so many.  They were around every corner, around every bend in the road.  It was more than sobering.  1,000,000 young men, and some women, died fighting here between 1914 and 1918.  114,000 young Americans died between May and November of 1918. I have ceased to ask why.  I am content with embracing mystery these days.  I know that most were pulled in through conscription.  Young lives with so much more to live for.

I wish those Americans screaming USA, USA USA would come here, spend some time in battle fields where craters can still be seen, where evidence of trenches still exist.  I wish they could see the monument in honor of the Somme Offensive of 1918 where 80,000 names are inscribed of men whose bodies were never found.  I wish they explore cemeteries where crosses read Known But Unto God.  The out of control nationalism under the current “president” is beyond frightening.

But it was not all battlefields, cemeteries and monuments.  It was nice tooling around the northwest of France with Lomme, where scenic stretches of open, rolling land, twisty country lanes and vast open fields lay all around us.  This is farm land and the land is vast and wide.  Little villages were intersected by a few miles of narrow road.  It was beautiful countryside and it was hard to think that the huma remains of thousands and thousands still lie below the earth.

But enough of politics.  This ends chapter 1 of this trip.  On to Eastern Europe—Latvia and Lithuania.