They are starting to cut the corn. But apart from combine harvesters and tractors, the roads up here on the Somme ridges are empty, the villages more or less deserted. It’s been just me and my bike, the wind, the skylarks, the familiar English sky, the chalk ground, the strange flints, the green and famous woods, and the thousands of British dead lying under Portland headstones in these beautifully kept military cemeteries, the grander ones designed by Sir Herbert Baker. They dot the hillsides all around like defensive outposts of a lost civilisation of warrior gardeners.
Airport bookshops a few years ago were selling a paperback called Is it Just Me or is Everything Shit? Cycling the Somme battlefield this past week, I was convinced that if there is one thing in this stale and overcrowded world that has been saved, it is surely the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and their loving diligence towards our first world war dead.
The lawns and flower beds are flawless and the minute these century-old headstones show signs of weather erosion they are immediately replaced with a new one.
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