A drive through hundreds of years of battlefields

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  Charleroi, Belgium
Saturday, February 9, 2008

Yesterday I left the hotel by about 9:00 and drove about three and a half hours to Saint Avold. I was struck again as I drove, by how many wars have been fought over the parts of France through which I was driving and how many important historical events have occurred here.  The drive roughly parallels the Western Front of WW I.  I drove through the area of Château Thierry where Belleau Wood is located. That was a battlefield where American Marines distinguished themselves in June 1918 during WW I, taking heavy casualties but pushing the Germans soldiers back out of this sector. There is a beautiful American military cemetery located in Belleau Wood now.
 
Shortly afterward I drove through Reims. The Cathedral there was the traditional site for the coronation of French kings including most famously Charles VII in the presence of Joan of Arc.  This is the Champagne region and Reims is the center of production for the famous bubbly.
 
Not long after than we entered the region of Verdun, that terrible WWI battlefield where some estimates say 1,000,000 men died, counting French and German soldiers, during the war. One can still visit trenches there and see traces of the destruction left by years of artillery bombardment.
 
Just to my north was Sedan, the final battlefield of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, and scene of the crushing French defeat that ended the war. This area is the start of the Ardennes, the great forested region through which the Germans attacked in WW II and in which the Battle of the Bulge took place farther north in Belgium.
 
I drove through Metz where I used to be pastor of a congregation. General Patton took this area in 1944, fighting several battles in the area. He was in Metz with his 3rd army when news came of the German breakthrough at the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge around Christmas 1944. He wheeled his tanks north to relieve the Americans surrounded at Bastogne in Belgium.
 
Turning off the highway at St. Avold to drive toward the homes of the people I would visit, I drove past the US American Military cemetery in that city. 10,489 soldiers are buried there; it is the largest US military cemetery in Europe. We had a congregation here in this city for a while as well, and I visited the cemetery several times when I lived in Alsace.
 
Battlefields from at least thee wars, accounting for more than a million casualties, and all in the space of a three and half hour drive.
 
I had a 2 hour visit with some members for whom I served as pastor for 5 years in the 1980s and 90s. We had lost touch and it was very good to see them again and revisit old times and get caught up on events of the last 15 years or so. We talked about the hard days of 1993-4 when our church was going through so much upheaval. Our children are now grown; time flies.
 
After that very positive visit, I turned back to Metz, and then drove north toward the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. I drove around the outskirts of the city of Luxemburg, where General Patton is buried in yet another US military cemetery. Then a few minutes later entered Belgium, still in the Ardennes region. I made my way up to Charleroi, where Napoleon camped on the eve of the battle of Waterloo, the battlefield of which is just a few miles north of here.  I stopped to see Rees and Fanny Carion, friends from Ambassador College days. Rees serves a congregation of the Church of God in Charleroi, and I had received an invitation to speak to the brethren here on the Sabbath, which after consulting with our Church president, Clyde Kilough, I was happy to accept.  We chatted for a while in there home, and then Rees showed me the way into town to the hotel where I would spend the night.
 
I felt I had made a trip through hundreds of years of history in one day. Sadly most of that history involved war.

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