Notes on journey
You have not come on this journey to Yogi or read Virgil - these things are possible on DobX - so - look through the windows!
Out of Belgium into French Flanders - Pas de Calais Department. In the towns it is coal and cotton and cobbles - cruel during Tour de France - home from home - Vive les little-piecers francais! Breakfast in Arras, prefecture, county-town, as you might say, of Pas de Calais - Robespierre - French Revolution - dreadful man for his guillotine, born here - maybe soured by miserable northern climate - rolling plains - wheat, sugar beet, flax, hops, bovines and wars! they've been at it pretty well without stopping since Agincourt - (1415), quite near Arras - and before. You've heard of Dunkirk (1940).
All over Artois, next south of Flanders, and Picardy (or Somme) next south again - we're crossing the river Somme now - there was terrible fighting in both World Wars. At Mons is the Canadian War Memorial Vimy Ridge - and a British one at Soissons. Remember "Greengage Summer"? Interesting women took children to see these battlefields because they were slipping, as they grew up, into taking their peaceful lives for granted - 1916 -
"I stood on the firestep to watch the sky whitening. Sad and stricken the country emerged. I could see the ruined village below the hill and the leafless trees that waited like sentries. Down in the craters the dead water took a dull gleam from the sky. I stared at the tangles of wire and the leaning posts, and there seemed no sort of comfort left in life".
Well - just give it a thought.
Next river is Oise - this is an important agricultural region - sugar-beet, wheat, market gardening - then Soissons on the Aisne - its speciality is barley sugar - all that beet, I suppose -Well - er - no; it's at least as sticky as gum. Next we're over the Margeand into Champagne - sorry - no fizz in this part - I suppose that's why the French call it "Lousy Champagne" - fact! but there's a first-class cheese called Brie - rich country - huge farms.
Now into the Aube department, still in Champagne, on the Seine - sort of French Nottingham - birth-place of famous 12th Century poet Chretien de Troyes - wrote fascinating yarns about Lancelot and Yvain and that lot. Next land, well-wooded, rising into northern Burgundy to Dijon on the Cote d'Or department. Now we ought to see some vineyards, though Dijon's more famous for its mustard and museums - palace of the Dukes of Burgundy - and they do make a black-currant liqueur here called "cassis" - lovely stuff - now to Beaune in the heart of the Burgundy vineyards, famous for its hospital founded in the 15th Century - they have a 15th Century hospital ward preserved intact.