Leaving the Vosges Mountains behind, the walk from Badonviller to Luneville (42 km) was a totally different experience. The landscape dips gently away from Badonviller with predominantly arable land, interspersed with small forestry blocks and dissected by rutted and muddy farm tracks and ditches (into which it is very easy to slip and land upside-down, flailing around like an upturned turtle-isn’t that right Jonathan?!) The WFW winds its way through this countryside and despite the lack of physical evidence, it is easy to see how the fighting here would have varied from that to the south. In The Vosges the trenches were, in the main, built up from shallow scrapings, existing sunken roads or ditches using stones, logs or in the German trenches concrete. In contrast as we headed north it is not hard to imagine soldiers digging down through the heavy clay soil, creating a network of damp, often waterlogged trenches facing a wide, open and rolling no man’s land.
Having threatened rain all day, at about 1pm in howling winds, the heavens opened giving us a little experience of what it must have been like in those forward trenches. Stopping to don our ponchos, we squelched our way across the floodplain of the La Vezouze River. When it rains this area effectively becomes a bog, so French soldiers living and fighting in trenches here would have experienced similar conditions to their British counterparts further north in Flanders.
Bedraggled, we finally finished the long trudge through yet more deserted streets into Luneville at about 5.30pm, 30 minutes later than planned as Jonathan had managed to drop his phone after a navigation check. Thankfully we realised before too long, and so retraced our steps to where we had last stopped, finding the phone in the mud. This added an unwelcome extra 2 km to the day’s walk, and reminded us not to switch off in the last few kilometres of the day. Shocker avoided, and now time for a hot shower, and our usual routine of stretching and application of various ointments and potions to weary body parts-more of that another time.
I empathise with your video. I had an identical pitstop in a bus shelter in Marchepelot (south of Peronne) in Oct, 2021. Cold and miserable but the sun came out later...
I'm worried about the weather on a bike - we can't carry much but if we get hit by headwinds, extreme cold and wet weather it will be interesting (nothing compared to what they had to endure in the trenches I keep telling myself) I've cycled to work for the last 8 days and every day has been.....wet and windy. Good practice!