The City Beneath
It's been a few years since I've written about the First World War battlefields, but in 2008 a new attraction opened at Arras, which deserves a mention. Le Carriere Wellington was the reason for our visit to the Somme Battlefields that year. There's a vast network of chalk quarries beneath Arras and its environs.
For many years it's been possible to visit the Souterrain under the Grand Place, accessed from the tourist information office, and learn a little about its use as a field hospital and communications centre during the First World War (still recommended). These were the earliest quarries and were closed down because of the danger of people falling down the extraction shafts whilst buying their fish and vegetables in the market. New quarries were opened up much later, towards the edge of town. Le Carriere Wellington is in one of these.
It was so new that it wasn't marked on the town maps, so our method of finding it was to decide to visit on day two, aim for the Douai road out of town, miss the turning, see the signs for the Carriere Wellington and think 'okay, that's fate'. This method takes twenty-five minutes of driving, but in fact the place is an easy walk from the Gare SNCF, if you know which way to walk. Your first sight is an impressive stone wall which is, amongst other things, a memorial to the New Zealanders who turned the quarries into a set of tunnels from which a massive attack could be launched in 1917.
In terms of using technology to make a museum come alive, this is state of the art and gives 'In Flanders Fields' at Ieper a run for its money. The tour begins by going down twenty metres in a glass-sided lift, with a guide who sets the pace and tells you where to stand (this kind of setting is inherently slightly dangerous and could never really be done as a self-guided tour). However, the commentary is from a headset that supports many languages: each segment is triggered from a switch when the long-suffering guide has extracted everyone from the previous spot and pointed them at the next screen. This allows the commentary in each language to synchronise with the projection of stills and video onto screens hanging from the ceiling. Some of the commentary is a little negative, but the final AV presentation is well-balanced and very, very well done.
The New Zealanders linked the quarry tunnels together to make a total of twenty kilometres of tunnel in two sections, running out to the German lines, about four kilometres out of town. The area was so big that different sections had their own names: British sectors were called 'Crewe', 'Manchester' and so on. 'Wellington' is part of the New Zealand complex. For the first week in April 1917, some twenty-five thousand allied troops waited in these tunnels, roughly the population of Arras at the start of the war. As well as an extensive railway system used for extracting spoil and later for transporting materiel, there were cook-houses, latrines, some bunks (though far from enough for everyone), command posts and communications centres: truly, as the description goes, 'city beneath a city'. Conditions were pretty bleak but not as bad as in the trenches.
The story of the 'battle' of Arras is well-documented elsewhere, and if you visit the area you'll hear many different takes on it. The first attack (intended as a diversion for the French attack on Chemin des Dames to the south-east) was originally scheduled for the morning of the eighth of April, but there was a snowstorm so bad that it was delayed by one day. By the morning of the ninth, some snow had melted to make going in the trenches treacherous and slow, wading through mud and slush, with the temperature just above freezing. Nonetheless, some bright spark well away from the fighting gave the order for troops to leave their great-coats behind to speed up the advance. With decision-making of this calibre, the rest of the story is pretty much inevitable.
It was after visiting another attraction that Sue remembered a comment made by the guide at Carriere Wellington that if the troops had continued to advance the war would have worked out very differently. She asked me whether I thought it was true, and I replied that the original opinion was that of Ludendorff, the opposing German general, and that certainly most modern-day historians agree with him. This of course begs the question why, on the night of the twelfth, the attack was halted to allow the troops to rest for a day. All this achieved was that the Germans had just enough time to move up reinforcements in the form of several battalions of fresh troops, whilst the allies 'rested' out in the open in near-freezing temperatures with no hope of reinforcements for several days. The fighting ground to a halt after the lines had advanced about three kilometres.
Why? It was at this point that I made a classic mistake for someone abroad. The whole afternoon had been spent speaking French, so my comment in English was blunt, assuming that only Sue would understand. "Because the commander was an idiot. Not quite as bad as the French guy but still a complete berk." There was a snort of laughter from the couple in front of us, who turned out to be from Ireland, and from behind, the unmistakable voice of our guide, telling a colleague in rapid-fire French that I suspect I wasn't supposed to understand "I wish I was allowed to say that.". Enough said.