It never occurred to us that taking the back roads home would lead us directly along the Western Front of the First World War. Neither of us had seen any of the cemeteries before, so it was a surprise to find ourselves driving alongside fields full of white crosses that stretched up the hill as far as the eye could see.

We had stumbled across the site of the Battles of Champagne, the last of which marked the start of a relentless Allied advance that culminated in a peace deal. I have since tried to calculate the number of casualties at this site. I got to 800,000 before realising that it's impossible to count the rest, as many of the statistics are unknown. That's the population of an entire city, wiped out in this one lonely place.

I don't think I have been moved on any of my travels as much as I was here, as I read name after name of young men from both sides; some having lost their lives within a single day of the Armistice.

We didn't travel much further; spending the night in Signy l'Abbaye, which was the perfect town in which to witness ordinary life as it is in the Ardenne today, almost 100 years on from the horrors that occurred here. This is vast farming land, and those farms supplied the ingredients for the best meal of our trip, in a restaurant frequented by locals, far away from any other tourists.

Posted on 23rd October 2015.

Photograph by Julian Nitzsche (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons