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Mont-Huon is at the edge of the world, the place where your drive across continents from the far side of Asia ends
in the white cliffs sliced by a giant's sword from the Normandy chalk. It is as stone-still as it has been for
centuries, unless there's a farmer trawling his tiny growling tractor across the huge fields which curl over the
horizon.
Stand at the gate. Look. To your left, the rough ridge of the chalky lumps of cliffs and a sea-traced line
dissecting the eggshell blue into sky and ocean at the horizon. To your right, a sculptural water-tower and a stumpy
copse of bristling trees concealing a smallholding. Ahead of you, through the iron gate, two thousand men and a few
women from the three hospitals at le Tréport, people who made it thus far towards England and no further.
You can hear a lark beading the sky with liquid crystal notes. You can hear the shushing and pulling of the waves
tearing the pebble beach to shingle. You can hear the pained gulls wailing overhead.
The only movement is the cemetery gardener scratching at the daffodil clumps with his hoe.
He greets you quietly. Bonjour, m'sieur'dame.
And returns to his gentle scraping hoeing.
Walk along the lawn path which takes you to the Cross of Sacrifice and carry on past it for three plots. Private
Wrench lies on the left as the iron gate swings closed behind you, beyond the Stone of Remembrance on his right, and
his dead feet point at the solid classical building at the far end. He is foot to foot across a thin lawn with a
row of German soldiers and he directly faces August Nowatzki (8.10.16), Erich Kossow (12.10.16) and Georg Golz
(16.10.16).
See. Here is a grave is alone from the rest. Gertrude Chambers, one of the few civilian women buried in a military
cemetery. Feel the desolation in her epitaph, so different from the dutiful, restrained phrases chosen by the young
soldiers' devastated families.
Had He asked us
We would say
God, we love her,
Let her stay.
The CWGC says stiffly that she died on 1st December 1918, while visiting her husband who was in Le Tréport military
hospital. Imagine. He must have been severely ill for her to have undertaken such a journey from Hackney and crossed
the Channel on a heaving boat in the winds of winter to travel through a torn-apart country. She died. Probably from
flu. Did he die? I don't think so. She was 27.
The Cemetery Registers tell you that by July 1916, there were three military hospitals in the tiny town of le
Tréport. As the torn-up casualties were hauled or crawled to the dressing stations at the Front, the hospital trains
and trucks swayed and crawled and grumbled over the corpses, mud and dead fields of Normandy and Picardy to the
breezy villages of billowing white hospital tents on the cliffs overlooking the Channel. Then they returned for
more. more, more.
As the main military cemetery rapidly filled up, a new burial place at Mont-Huon was selected. It is just over the
fields from a hospital site where you can feel the ghosts among the ruins, hear them cry. You can stand on the cliff
top above le Tréport and look across at the original cemetery: row on precise row of perfect white teeth among the
chaotic jumble of the darkly ornate French cemetery which seems to be sliding and tumbling down the hillside
threatening to engulf the careful rows of British soldiers.
You can turn away from the buzz of the town going about its daily seaside life in the seafood restaurants and the
fishing harbour and look out at the timeless changing sea in the wafting breeze and try to think the thoughts of the
men who painfully knew that these cliffs were their last stop before the boat to Britain.
So close.
Gwyneth Roberts
March 2003
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