Many Allied troops were lost breaking the Hindenburg Line, last & strongest of the German army's trench defences in Picardy
During the last month of the First World War my grandfather was an officer in the 284th Siege Battery of the Royal Garrison Artillery which was advancing notheastwards across Picardy in Northern France. He was gassed and taken to a field hospital to die but it seemed that on the approximate day of his injury his unit were seeing action on the road to Montbrehain. Of course there is little to actually see now but there is plenty to feel, ghosts are everywhere. The Aisne landscape is essentially the same albeit without the ghastly war torn character that is so familiar in the contemporary photographs of splintered trees, the soup of sodden earth, bodies and blood that constituted the uncertain ground. Instead, the ghostly November light illuminated endless piles of beet stacked up in the mist and everywhere the same terrible mud, the same sticky clay that smeared both the beet and the feet. These arable trophies were everywhere stacked up like skulls and bones exhumed from the mass grave that still offered up the dead a century later.
Size: 3400px × 4600px
Location: Aisne, Picardie, France
Photo credit: © John Heseltine / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: 1918, army, battlefield, british, france, fresnoy, fresnoy-le-grand, front, german, grand, great, hindenburg, landscape, line, memorial, nord, northern, owen, picardie, picardy, poppy, slaughter, somme, war, western, wilfred, world, ww1
