Stage 11 Tuesday 30 Sept: Bruay-la-Buissiere to Ablain-Saint-Nazaire (24.6km/15.3m )

After a hike similar to previous days, albeit more woods than fields, we ended the day at Notre Dame de Lorette located within the largest French military cemetery. The numbers killed in this region during WW1 are staggering, and the memorials to them were very sobering. Over 40,000 are buried in this cemetery alone.

Heading off from Bruay-la-Bussiere this chilly morning

Coprinus comatus, commonly known as the shaggy ink cap, lawyer’s wig, or shaggy mane, is a species of fungus.

The white pony is the mother of the five month old brown one

On up to Parc d’Olhain, a private outdoors adventure park

Note the zip-line to the left of the tower

Louise Marie Jeanne Henriette de Bettignies (15 July 1880 – 27 September 1918) was a French secret agents who spied on the Germans for the British during WW1 using the pseudonym of Alice Dubois.

An amazing woman, De Bettignies , “the Queen of spies”, smuggled men to England, provided valuable information to the Intelligence Service, and prepared for her superiors in London a grid map of the region around Lille.

She was arrested in October 1915 and imprisoned, dying shortly before the end of the war in captivity.

She was posthumously awarded the Cross of the Legion of Honour, the Croux de Guerrero 1914 -18 with palm, and the British Military Medal and she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. (Thanks Wiki)

Lantern tower of Notre Dame de Lorette, is an ossuary. The lantern is 52 metres high on a 12 metre square base. At night the 3,000 candle power lamp revolves every 12 seconds and can be seen up to 70 kilometres away.

One of four mass graves of unnamed soldiers on the site. Each holds 10,000 bodies including Australians and others

Plaque acknowledging the unnamed soldiers in the mass graves

The beautiful and heartbreaking *Anneau de la Memoire* (Ring of Memory) is 345m in diameter, engraved with the names of 580,000 soldiers killed in the region between 1914 and 1918. The names are listed in alphabetical order, without any distinction made between rank or nationality, former enemies and friends side by side.

The List includes:

294,000 soldiers from the British Empire buried or commemorated including English, Scots, Welsh, Irish, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans and Indians.
174,000 Germans buried in the area, in individual or shared graves; it does not include the names of missing soldiers, which number several tens of thousands.
105,000 French soldiers among which are several hundreds of soldiers who fought for the Foreign Legion.
2,300 Belgian soldiers
2300 Portuguese
the list also includes Russian and Romanian soldiers (prisoners of war taken by the German army).

This Memorial was erected in a peaceful Europe in memory of a terrible tragedy which devastated a generation of young men. (Info provided on-site)