Sunday, February 22, 2015

Last Days

Highlights of our last few weeks in Dublin - December 2013
Ella's First Penance at Our Lady of Mercy, Booterstown
 

School Christmas Carols  




Ice skating
 
Time with Bernie

A walk on Christmas Day along the harbour at Dun Laoghaire
  Christmas pudding with Joan and the Peter Boyle



Last farewells to our street and house
Goodbye Ireland - It was grand!

James turns 40 in Paris







































Tour of the battlefields



The impressive Amiens cathedral: it contains several memorial plaques commemorating the service and sacrifice of soldiers from Australia, the UK, Canada and New Zealand during the battles of the First World War. At night time during our stay, the facade of the cathedral (which has the highest nave in France) was transformed with a sound and light show, giving us a sense of the cathedral's colour in its hey day.
 
The girls walk amongst the graves of Australian soldiers at Villers Bretonneux: the site of the Australian national memorial in France.

Bernie and James at Villers-Bretonneux. The memorial was built in the late 1920s but suffered damage during World War Two. It is now the site of the annual Anzac day service on the Western Front.


The Ecole Victoria in the town of Villers-Bretonneux. Built with funds from the Victorian Dept of Education, it contains this solemn reminder to schoolchildren in the central playground (above) and below in the school hall.



The small village of Le Hamel
The memorial at Le Hamel
Trenches can still be clearly seen

Monument to the AIF 3rd Division: Bernie pays his respects
The westerm front is now full of formal, and informal marks of respect to those who lost their lives
Bernie and James at Thiepval, the main British memorial to the missing of the Somme: it contains something like 80 000 names of British soldiers with no known grave

The grave of a French unknown, or 'inconnu'

The German cemetery at Fricourt: a very different ambience to the Commonwealth War Graves

The Australian memorial at Peronne. Once a digger bayonetting a German eagle, it was destroyed by German troops during World War Two and replaced with this digger.


During a Christmas fair at Amiens