Archive: November, 2011
WWI: A Wrap-Up
What a wonderful time we had in France. Here is what we learned: Northeastern France is a really muddy place. Having GPS makes a world of difference. Whoever rides shotgun gets to look out the window and enjoy the ride instead of staring at a map and turns are announced to the driver decently in…
WW1: 11-11-11
The Museum of the Great War officially opened on 11 November 2011, the 93rd anniversary of the Armistice. The ceremony was intended to take place at 11:00, apparently, but was pushed down to 3:00; speeches aired at 4:00 suggesting that there were further delays. Doors opened to the public at 6:00. My Dear One and…
WWI: Prolegomena to 11-11-11
We learned of the imminent opening of a museum dedicated to World War One from a cashier at a Carréfour market somewhere on the outskirts of Meaux as we headed into our final week in France. Her English was superb, but then, she said, she was half-English. Once settled into our gîte Milleroses, we tried…
WWI: The Valley of the Painters of the Grand Morin
Neither I nor my Dear One thought Crécy-la-Chapelle would have much to recommend it beyond access to the Champagne battlefields and a relatively short drive to Charles de Gaulle for our flight home. There were some charming pictures of the town center in spring and summer but nothing we could see through Google’s satellite-eye inspired…
WWI: Nice Digs
We have only a few days left before we must find our way to Aéroport Charles de Gaulle. The penultimate day of our travels, Friday, carries the magical numbers 11-11-11. At 11 o’clock I hope to be focused on that moment 93 years ago when the War to End All Wars ended. Today, however, I…
WWI: I have so many questions…
So much of this trip has been about discovering a grandfather who was never a part of my memory. David Sanford Cutler died suddenly from what may have been a staph infection in 1926. His sons Calvin (my father) and David were only two and four years old respectively. His widow Hazel, my Granny, remarried…
WWI: Back to the Île de France
The change in terrain is almost overwhelming. Gone are those rolling hills of Lorraine and the flat expanse of the Pas-de-Calais. Here the Grand Morin winds through a deep valley, a location appreciated by neolithic tribes in the millennia BCE, centuries of farmers and tanners, and paysagistes like Camille Corot in the 19th century. Our hilltop…
WWI: O Canada
In 1917, Canadian troops, with extraordinary valor and grotesque losses, took ground held by Germans since 1914. Vimy is now an enormous park; the terrain, grassy and green, retains the topography created by shellfire and the craters left my mines exploded in tunnels under German trenches. Visitors are kept to walkways by electric fences and scarlet…
WWI: City of Nature in the City of Arras
What do you do with an old concrete building and barren land in the industrial outskirts of a gracious grande-dame of a city like Arras? Turn it into a giant and sneakily educational playground, of course! And what a playground Cité Nature is! The conversion was designed by renowned French architect Jean Nouvel; the aesthetic is…
WWI: Memory Becomes Legacy
The skies wept over Ypres and Passchendaele. This was the place that my Dear One felt most drawn to. On the drive up, he read me key passages from Leon Wolff’s In Flanders Fields. I had spent little time studying that corner of the Front. I had read The Danger Tree and The First Day on…
