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EUROSTAR:
CALAIS TO LILLE
To
make your Eurostar journey more interesting, here are a few pointers about
what you are passing as you hurtle through the seemingly
featureless countryside of this bit of Northern France.
This is a a tantalising glimpse of the interesting sites and places that
await you when you have time to return by car on
another occasion, for a more thorough exploration of this fascinating region.
The first thing you spy from the windows on the north
side of the train, is likely to be a distant view of
the belfry of Calais. Top-heavy,
with a slender pointed roof, it resembles a toadstool more than anything.
Photograph
Calais belfry,
with
Rodin figures. Photograph: Angela Bird
As the Eurostar builds up speed again, you will notice
woodland. You are passing through the Forest
of Guines, and almost alongside
the site where two intrepid aeronauts landed in 1785 after accomplishing the
first Channel crossing by air – in a hot-air balloon. Sadly, the train passes through a cutting
just here, so you do not have a chance to see the Colonne Blanchard – a
monument that commemorates the extraordinary deed.
Nor, alas, will you have a glimpse of the site of the
Field of the Cloth of Gold, which lies to the south-east of Guines. Just north of the train’s route, mid-way
between Guines and Ardres, is the plain where the French king Francis I and
the English monarch Henry VIII met in 1520 and set about dazzling one another
while parleying about a possible military alliance against the all-powerful
“Charles Quint” – the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Charles V.
With a curve to the north, the train skirts another
forest – this time that of Eperlecques. Hidden among the trees – and
invisible from the train – is a vast blockhouse begun in 1942 by Hitler for
the launching of V2 rockets on London. Thousands of slave-workers laboured to
build it –but before it was finished the RAF bombed it intensively, reducing
its function to a factory for liquid oxygen rather than the launch site that
was planned.
Eperlecques
blockhouse: model of V2 rocket, inside (left), and launch ramp for V1
“doodlebugs”. Photographs: Angela Bird
A little way past this, you will see a splendid windmill
dominating the countryside. This is Watten mill, which stands alongside the
ruins of an ancient abbey, overlooking the canalside village
of Watten which lies at the
junction of the river Aa and the Canal de la Haute-Colme.
Now you have moved from the Pas-de-Calais into the Nord département,
and are rocketing through French Flanders. (To those who see the train from
the ground, the sleek, white engine and carriages make an extraordinarily
modern sight as they skim past fields and byways on their dedicated track.)
As the train curves slightly south again, look out on the north side for the
hilltop town of Cassel. It is
easily recognisable, as you can make out a church and a cluster of rooftops
on top of a hill known as “the Everest of Flanders” (though only 176 metres
in height). It is a pity you cannot stop here, and stroll around Cassel’s
cobbled square – but you can understand what a marvellous vantage-point the
hill has been for military leaders - from Julius Caesar to Marshal Foch.
 
Cassel: Marshal Foch. Photograph: Luke Smith Cassel:
rooftops. Photograph: Bonnie Robinson
Shortly after le Mont Cassel, you
see another, more distant hill known as the Mont
des Cats, crowned by a giant communications mast. (The Cats were an ancient
tribe that once lived in the area.)
Look more closely, and you will make out the pinnacles of the abbey on
top of the hill where 60 Cistercian-Trappist monks lead a life of prayer and
contemplation - and produce some delicious, circular cheeses. (Look out for
these on the cheeseboard, if you are staying in the Lille
area.)
The slender spire discernable in the distance, after the Mont
des Cats, is that of Bailleul, an attractive little Flemish town known for
its beer.
Bailleul. Photograph: Angela Bird
Just before you approach Lille,
you slip past Armentières to the north, and the river Lys
to the south – an area that saw many battles and much loss of life during
World War I.
EUROSTAR:
TRAVELLING SOUTH FROM LILLE
The first part of the Lille-Paris journey also crosses an
area covered in the book.
Mingled with the industrial sprawl to the south of the city, are tall,
conical pit-heaps – vestiges of the area’s coal-mining era. Though the mines are no longer worked,
retired miners give fascinating tours of some of them. In acknowledgement of
their importance to local industrial heritage, many of these remaining heaps
that you will glimpse from the train are now listed monuments. In fact the
whole coal basin is at present a candidate for Unesco World Heritage status.
Skimming past Arras,
with never a chance to see the cobbled squares and their arcaded houses, you
head south and begin to cross the battlefields of the Somme
– a byword for senseless slaughter today. In fact you are running down the
exact mid-line, between the front line of 1 July 1916 and that of November 1916. An extent of
just 12km that killed and maimed1.2 million men of all sides.
Spare a thought, especially, as you pass:
One
of five caribou memorials commemorating the terrible losses
of the Newfoundland troops
in WWI. Photograph: Angela Bird
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Bullecourt – resting-place of so many Australians
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Bapaume - ………
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Guedecourt (Newfoundlanders), with one of the famous caribou
sculptures similar to the one above (from nearby Beaumont-Hamel)
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Delville Wood (South Africans, Scottish and New Zealanders)
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Péronne – home to the excellent Historial de la Grande Guerre,
below, which gives an overview of the Great War, its causes and its aftermath.
Historial
de la Grande Guerre, Péronne. Photograph: Luke Smith
From here onwards, south of the river
Somme, the train rushes through a sector that was in the disputed between
French and German troops during World War I – and then on to Paris.
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