Looking at Boadicea’s poppies and thinking of Remembrance Day tomorrow made me realise that our hasty trip to France last month took us past many a signpost with names from both the First and Second World Wars.
Sliding down the eastern side of France, so we could easily reach a frontier if the fuel situation got too bad because of all the strikes, we saw both the Angel of Vimy and the basilica of Notre Dame de Loretto, the largest French war cemetery, from the motorway. Our route then took us across the rivers and departments forever associated with dreadful loss of life, the Somme and the Marne.
The return journey started with a view of Mont Agel overlooking the Mediterranean, the last French fortress in the Maginot Line. The big guns there managed to take out the station at Ventimiglia, slightly holding up the Italian invasion of the south of France in the Second World War. A motorway sign to Vesoul in the Franche-Comte reminded me it was one of the first French towns to be bombarded by the Germans in 1940, driving thousands of refugees on to the roads. Past Nancy and Metz into Luxembourg, where fuel was not only plentiful but cheap. Then into the Belgian Ardennes, with the beautiful forests,too good at concealing Panzer divisions. Signposts to Bastogne. Farther north came the signs for Ypres/Ieper, back to memorials of the First War.
Tomorrow is a public holiday in France and wreaths will be laid at countless war cemeteries and at war memorials in every town and village.
We shall remember them.
Boadicea's Chariot 
Yes, I recall driving across Flanders on biz many years ago and noticing so many towns with dreadful names. The trees had all grown again of course but it was easy to recognise how the ladscape had been scarred by war.