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Posts Tagged ‘panorama’
Commemorative Service to be held at Memorial Wall, Wellington Quarry, Arras at 6.30 am, 9 April 2011
Calling all Western Front visitors!
With so much emphasis on the 1 July commemorations on the Somme and the mass pilgrimage that takes place every year, this buy ambien sleeping tablets year please spare a thought for the men who fought in the 1917 Battle of Arras. It was the most savage infantry offensive of the war with the highest daily rate of casualties – over 4,000 men per day. The campaign started with enormous success on Easter Monday, 9 April 1917 with the greatest advance of the war to date but ended in disillusionment and utter exhaustion 39 days later in the fields around Oppy, Roeux, Monchy-le-Preux and Cherisy. Arras is by far my favourite place to visit – there is something about it that I just can’t get enough of and even when driving down to the Somme for a tour, recce or meeting I feel a slight wistfulness as I pass the Vimy Memorial, the grain silos at Roeux, so close to the site of the dreaded Chemical Works and the spire of Monchy church with Monchy British Cemetery in the foreground.
I have just received details of the annual commemorative service to be held at the Wellington Quarry, Arras on Saturday 9 April 2011 at 0630hrs (local time). This service, held on the 94th anniversary of the start of battle is held at the Memorial Wall – if you come into the car park from the Beaurains road then you won’t miss it. The ceremony is open to all.
Sadly, owing to work and family commitments I will not be able to make it this year but have passed my apologies on to Isabelle Pilarowski and her colleagues. I know that the organisers like to use extracts from soldiers who actually took place in the battle and, having given Isabelle a copy of the 1000 page memoir of Percy Clare, 7th East Surrey Regiment, she has promised that she will be using his superb descriptions of battle during the service. Percy’s memoirs were used extensively in the Arras panorama book – from his descriptions of pre-battle training, through the 9 April attack and subsequent days spent between Arras and the fields below Monchy ending with the fateful 3 May attacks – a very black day for the Third Army.
As a way of thanking the copyright holders we gave them a highly personalised tour of the Arras battlefield (following the 7th East Surreys) when they came over in November 2010 to listen to our lecture in French. More details can be found by reading the blog post here: Arras – battlefield tour & lecture: 12 November 2010
A two-sided pdf file with more details on April’s events is available on request – please contact me here and I will email you a copy.
These events include guided walks & tours (French speaking only) in Neuville-St-Vaast, Roeux and Arras itself and seem very good value at just €3.00 per person.
I will certainly have the men of the Third Army in my memories on the morning of 9 April and would urge anyone over on a battlefield tour at that time to attend and pay their respects.
I subscribe to monthly emails from the National Archives with their latest news. Quite why, I don’t really know as I almost never read them but I am now glad that I did subscribe. For some reason I opened this month’s offering earlier today and was heartened to see that our new Somme panorama book was advertised. When I went on the website I discovered it was their ‘Book of the Month’!
Just a pity that despite the email using the new cover, the website below shows the old cover.
National Archives Bookshop ‘Book of the Month’
It would save much confusion if the new cover (with revised subtitle) was shown rather than that from the 2006 out of print version. Still, mustn’t complain as all publicity is good publicity….
I would welcome any other mentions of the book in any local newspapers, websites, bookshops etc.
N.B. Edit: 14 March – I was at Kew last week for a day’s research and spoke to the man in the bookshop, asking him who chose the ‘Book of the Month’. He replied that it was his choice and when I explained my involvement with the book we had a good chat. He was very complimentary about it and it was gratifying to hear his comments on content and quality.
Over the past few months I have been in touch with people at the Bristol Evening Post (whose stories also feature in the Western Daily Press and Bath Chronicle) after they ran the story about Alfred Flux’s graffiti in the Bouzincourt Caves on Armistice Day 2010. I had mentioned that the revised version of the Somme panorama volume was out in February and had arranged for a copy to be sent to them for review.
I have order tramadol visa just spent weekend away but was texted yesterday by a neighbour who congratulated me on the book being ‘Bristol Book of the Week’. Luckily she had saved me a copy of the review which is attached below. My thanks to Suzanne Savill for organsing this.
The Somme book review from the AllRight! section of the Bristol Evening Post dated 26 February 2011