Treading the ground on which my grand parents stood.
I do NOT remember my paternal grandfather. When we spent a week with my grandmother, I was then old enough to remember her, I decided I did not like her. She never smiled and was a strong disciplinarian. One morning, I spotted a huge spider lounging on the wall right above the bed we slept on. Alerted by the screams of horror, she came in the room with a dark forboding look on her face and told us to shut up and live with it. I still remember my concluding she did not like us. She was in no way like the grandmother I wished I had had. When I recently re-assembled the family photo album, my first impressions were confirmed by the depressed look she has on all the pictures in my possession. She had some good reasons to be in a blue funk, one of them was that their house had been destroyed three times by Germans canons. During the Great War, they were relocated away from the front, which conveniently happened to be right in their backyard. She liked the place where they had moved very much. After the war ended she did not want to move back home. My grand father prevailed and they returned to their village to their ruined abode.
I remember spending hours looking at magazines which had documented World War One. Thousand of small photographs illustrated the conflict. I often fantasized having learnt how to read while looking at these magazines
I remember seeing what was left of the trenches, where men waited for their death, like nasty scars on the landscape, still visible. Years later, one of my cousins found a German machine gunner still sitting behind his machine of dispensing death, burried alive.
I do NOT remember visiting the many cemetaries where concrete crosses bloomed like poppies.
I remember visiting the cathedral in Rheims.
The roads which connect three of the most stunning cathedrals in France, Soissons [*], Laon [*] and Rheims [*] form a nearly perfect triangle. The village my father was born in, Vendresse [*][*], is located within this triangle. I remember my father talking about the village of his birth as being located in the heart of the Chemin des Dames. In 1917, this region saw one of the deadliest battles of the war.
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A site by Jean-Claude