Battlefields of The Somme and Belgium

Today our tour starts at our first class hotel in Paris, close to shops, cafes and restaurants. This evening we meet in the hotel bar for a welcome drink and dinner. Overnight in Paris (D)

After breakfast at the hotel we will catch the TGV fast train to Lille, where we will be picked up by our private bus and taken into the pretty historic centre of the town of Lille for a short visit and to buy lunch.
Then it is on to see the enormous Spanbroekmoelen Crater, one of 19 craters exploded in the Battle of Messines, as well as

• Hellfire Corner – one of the most dangerous sites on the battlefield
• Hyde Park corner, the Berkshire round cemetery with lions guarding
• Ploegstreet Wood cemetery –scene of heavy Australian fighting

We will also make a brief stop at one of the scenes of the famous 1914 Christmas Truce in which Allies and Germans exchanged gifts with their enemy and sang songs together on Christmas Day.
After arriving in Ieper (or its French name, Ypres), in Belgium, which the Australian troops called “Wipers”, you are given free time to explore the village and we finish the day with a visit to the medieval Cloth Hall "In Flanders Fields" museum in Ypres - a pictorial comment on the futility of the Great War. Ypres was the scene of three fierce battles and was the only town in Belgium never to fall to the Germans during World War One. Walk to Ypres canal, see the Tour de Vauban, the church and walk round the Menin Gate Memorial. While in Ypres, you will attend the moving Menin Gate ceremony at 8 pm each night - in which 8 buglers play The Last Post - and wander round this delightful town admiring the totally restored architecture that was decimated during WW1. If you would like to lay a wreath for a family member or friend at the Menin Gate ceremony please talk to Kate before the tour to arrange this.
Overnight in Ypres/Ieper (B/L)

Today we will meet several locals of Ieper who have devoted their lives to the battlefields in their own special way; as exhumation experts, figurine makers, map makers, historians and museum curators. Each of these visits and meetings is a richly rewarding, interesting and moving experience. This morning we go to nearby Hooge Crater cemetery, which is on the Menin road towards Passchendaele.

On to the Passchendaele museum at Zonnebeke in the grounds of the Chateau - 2 miles from Tyne Cot cemetery. This new museum is a passionate labour of love by local historians – and is one of the best on WW1.

Lunch is at Anzac’s Rest before an emotional visit to Buttes New British and Polygon Wood cemeteries nearby.

It is a short drive from this to the extraordinary Tyne Cot cemetery at Passchendaele. The largest British War cemetery in the world, its dimensions are stunning. It is of special significance to Australians as they took the German Bunker on which this cemetery was built, and their graves are the most prominent and the most moving – you will see why when you get there. We shall also stop at the massive Langemark Cemetery - one of the few German cemeteries allowed to exist in the Ypres Salient. See the Students and the Comrades cemeteries, German bunkers, Pilkem Ridge and the mourning sculptures. From here we go to see the intact concrete Essex Farm "dressing station", scene of the famous poem "In Flanders Fields Where Poppies Grow" by John McCrae, written whilst tending to battlefield victims. See the grave of 15 year old Valentine Strudwick - too young to enlist but one of thousands who went for the "adventure".

Dine at one of our favourite local restaurants as a group or on your own if you’d prefer in the pretty central market square of Ieper.

Menin Gate ceremony 8pm. Optional walking tour of the ramparts and the canal after the ceremony for those who feel like it. Overnight in Ieper/Ypres (B/L)

We will visit the town of Poperinghe home of the famous Talbot House Everyman’s Club where Aussie soldiers took their R ‘n R and prayed in the tiny hand-made attic chapel with the popular Reverend Tubby Clayton. You will be amazed at how little Poperinghe has changed since WW1 – we’ll also visit the firing squad post and cells where AWOL’s and prisoners were held before trial and execution.

Lunch at Vlamertinge – another well-known town with the Aussies behind the front lines.

Back in France now, we travel to Fromelles, where we visit the VC Corner cemetery and Australian memorial park and see the famous Cobbers statue and battlefield at Fromelles. The VC Corner cemetery is unique because it has no gravestones and contains only Australians. On the wall at the rear are the names of 1,299 Australians who died in the battle and have no known grave. This was the first scene of Australian involvement on the Western Front and you will learn just why it was such a disastrous one.

We will visit Notre Dame de Villette, an evocative and vast French cemetery high on the hills near Arras, which holds 23,000 crosses on graves, designed in burial so that from wherever you look you cannot see the corners or end of the graves. We will meet “les hommes en beret”, who will escort us into the ossuary which contains the same amount again of French soldiers “known only unto God”.

We also visit Vimy Ridge, the stunningly beautiful Canadian memorial. It looks over the rolling fields of the lowland coalfields of the North. The breathtaking central statue of a woman represents Canada - a young nation mourning her dead. We visit the remarkable underground tunnels used by the Canadians during their highly successful battle of Arras and will lunch in a typically rural café with the locals in the nearby town of Givenchy.

Our destination for the night is the ancient Artois town of Arras. Having been laid waste in WWI, Arras does not attempt to mislead its visitors, rather the 2,000 year-old city celebrates its restoration which was so faithful that the faux gothic belfry that sits atop the town hall has been afforded Unesco World Heritage status.

With its ancient squares and Flemish baroque style facades Arras was the scene of much fighting and much entertainment for the allied troops during WW1.

Free time to wander this city’s two beautiful squares this afternoon. Overnight in Arras (B/L)

Beneath the city of Arras lie impressive chalk quarries dug in the 10thC and used by 24,000 soldiers as launching points for their battles. Over two months in 1916, more than 400 Maoris working for the New Zealand Quarrying Company, tunnelled over 7km to join up medieval chalk mines to form a 24km network of tunnels that extended east of Arras and beyond the no-man’s-land that separated the German and Allied lines. We will have a morning tour of this fascinating illuminated vast Wellington quarry which honeycombs Arras.

Next we visit the town of Bullecourt – see the "Digger" statue commemorating the 10,000 Australian casualties during these two 1917 battles which were part of the lesser known but very traumatic Battle of Arras. We then move to the Somme ridge of Pozieres. 23,000 Australian men became casualties in 2 months here. We visit the Windmill Monument to Australian soldiers with the inscription: "… captured on 4th August by Australian troops, who fell more thickly on this ridge than any other."

We will spend the next two nights in the famous Somme village of Albert – a town taken and recaptured many times by both sides in WW1. You will be given time to visit the town, the famous Madonna Basilica and the Musee (Museum) des Abris if you’d like to. Overnight Albert (B/L)

Today is a full day discovering the Somme valley and walking in the steps of the Anzacs and other soldiers who fought and died here.This morning we visit the massive Lochnager Crater where 74,000 lbs of ammonal was detonated prior to an attack undertaken on 1st July 1916. This is the largest crater on the Western Front and one of the best preserved.

Next, the Newfoundland Park Memorial, which commemorates the men of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, who fought here on 1st July 1916. Almost the entire regiment was wiped out in 40 minutes. After the war the ground was purchased by the mothers and widows of the men who had died here that day, and has remained unchanged until the present. This morning we visit this 80 acre park to show the design of a battle, complete with trenches, craters and ravines and witness almost first hand the actual choreography of two battles fought here.

From here round to the Hawthorn Ridge Crater and Sunken Lane is a fascinating study of the famous and disastrous battle of July 1st 1916: during this one day, allied forces suffered 60,000 casualties. We will do a small walking tour into the very front line trenches of the disastrous 1st day of the battle of the Somme in which 20,000 men died. Lunch is provided at Teddy’s Ulster memorial café. We also visit “Ocean Villas” café at Auchonvillers (mentioned in Sebastian Faulkes’s famous book, Birdsong). We will have a small tour of Avril’s cellars here - still with soldiers’ wall graffiti as this was right on the front line during 1916.

We then visit the immense Thiepval Memorial to the Missing. This huge and simply stunning memorial is the world’s largest and has excellent views across towards Mouquet Farm. From Thiepval it is possible to understand the reasons why the ANZAC troops were so heavily engaged at the Somme against the Germans. The new visitor’s centre is an absolute highlight. Overnight in Albert (B/L)

We will leave Albert and visit Dernancourt (a little known battle in which 4,000 Australians fought off 25,000 Germans in 1918) and Fricourt German cemeteries on our way down to the famous little “Aussie” town of Villers Bretonneux - scene of spectacular fighting in 1918 by our own Australian troops.

We visit Adelaide cemetery and the VB museum and visit the school children if school is in. Then we will picnic lunch at Australian National Memorial in VB where the 90th ANZAC DAY anniversary Dawn Service was held in April 2008.

We then travel back to Paris where we celebrate our extraordinary pilgrimage with a group farewell dinner at a local restaurant near our hotel Overnight in Paris (B/L/D)

Tour ends after breakfast

To anyone who has any special requests to visit graves of relatives or visits for friends’ relatives on the WW1 battlefields we will willingly do our very best to accommodate you if it is at all possible. This is always a rewarding experience for everyone.

• 7 nights accommodation in three/four star hotels
• Breakfast each day
• 2 dinners, 6 lunches during the tour
• Transfers to and from Paris (including 1st class train travel)
• Day tours in air conditioned private bus
• Entries to all museums and monuments
• The full time services of your tour director Kate Stedman, including extensive historic information and pictorial material.