Lille; Monday, 01 May, 2017

Another late lie-in and breakfast, after which I packed my bag and checked out of the hotel. Leaving my luggage in the store room I wandered over to the Lille Flandres station to pick up the train out to the small city of Arras.

The city was on the edge of the front line for much of the First World War, and was comprehensively destroyed in the battles. The whole of the city centre was restored during the latter part of the 20th century to how it would have looked during it’s heyday in the 18th century and it makes for a very pleasant place to walk around.

As it was the May Day holiday there wasn’t much open, but thankfully there was information on one museum that was open – the Wellington quarries – on the outskirts of town so I headed over there.

The quarries were one of a number of underground quarries from which the limestone used to build the city was mined from. Over the years the quarries were worked clean and forgotten about. However, at the start of the First World War their importance was realised by the defending allied soldiers, and with the aid of New Zealand and Welsh soldiers the quarries were all linked up with a complex of tunnels and passageways, including tunnels under the city centre that created a network of some 20KM.

The network enabled the soldiers to creep up right to the very edge of the German front lines, and on the first day of the battle of Arras the allied soldiers blew out the last parts of the tunnel to open up access ways straight onto the German lines, making significant land gains in just 24 hours.

However, the whole battle slowed from then on and the casualty numbers became quite horrific, with around 4,000 casualties every day for the near 40 days of the battle. The quarries and tunnels have been turned into a museum and a memorial to the soldiers who dug the tunnels and those who spent their last few nights waiting down in the tunnels before dying on the battlefield.

I had a very interesting tour of the tunnels which lasted just over an hour, taking me up to the point where I needed to head back to the station and start my journey home.

Back at Arras I caught the train back to Lille and quickly headed across town to pick up my luggage from the hotel and then headed back to Lille Europe to checkin and wait for my Eurostar home.