Clermont en Argonne

250000 dead! In four years in an area 15K by 4K (9 X 2.5miles). That’s well over 100 a day. How do you handle that? How do you keep doing your job? What do you do with the bodies? In trying to fact check that figure which came from a notice board the only one I could find was 350000 casualties in 6 weeks in the final battle (wiki). Please don’t send this blog to “more or less”. Even if the numbers are wrong, it was a massive loss of life here in the Ravin de Genie which is just up the road. It feels like every village, every corner even has a massive war cemetery with manicured lawns and neat rows of crosses. This was the front line in WWI. Ravin de Genie has what they call an open air museum, where you can wander around the old shelters and dug outs that were just behind the front line, where people lived, or more precisely died. The worst thing to my mind is that we haven’t learnt from this massive loss of life, peoples sons, husbands, brothers. France is just voting in a fascist government, war is raging in Europe in Ukraine, and many other parts of the world, Britain thinks it’s better standing by itself and voted out of the EU. I have little hope for the future of the world.

So let’s leave that thought and live for the day. But while I’m being negative lets be negative on day to day stuff. We’ve seem to have had summer, all one week of it, the van is littered with washing which we can’t put outside in the constant rain showers. We also have lots of waterproof clothes drying from the bike ride today.

Next moan – French supermarkets, OK this was a particularly bad one, but not unusual. Why do french supermarkets have such a limited selection of food and only sell rotting vegetables? In this supermarket if you didn’t want pizza or cooked pig then you left empty handed, (actually we left with rotting vegetables).

Moving onto more pleasant stuff and the reason why I do this travelling lark, the aire is super. We are on the edge of a forest, the nearest village is an hour’s walk away. It costs 8 euros including electricity, toilets and showers. The bike ride we did was stunning, up and down forest roads, passing a total of 3 cars. It was also very thought provoking as we stopped and looked at various WWI stuff. Shame about the rain.