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Most of the times I have passed this road by night. But a few times (mostly on the way back east) I drove during the day. The landscape is dominated by soft rolling hills with almost no trees and large fields. It is a boring and somehow depressing landscape. The villages that you pass following the D929 didnīt make things better. They somehow felt wrong. It took me a while to realize that it was the lack of historic buildings (besides the odd church) which was disturbing. None of them was older than 70 or 80 years.
On the section between Albert and Bapaume you rush by numerous signs along the road. Most of the times I didnīt pay attention for these signs as I was busy overtaking slow lorries. But some day I got a better picture. On a stretch of about 5 kilometres there are a couple of signs marking “ligne de front” and dates within a period of about one year from summer 1916 to summer 1917. Other smaller signs showed the way to cemeteries, that turned out to be war cemeteries. And then there was the odd sign with funny looking soldiers obviously trying to attract commonwealth members to certain inns. And then there were a few monuments along the D929 that on a closer look turned out as war monuments.
It took me a few trips to get it: this obviously was a hefty fought area during world war one aka “The Great War”. The route D929 passed one of the major fighting areas of this war, the battle fields of the Somme valley. I had read about the Somme battles and I remembered that they were some of the most gruelling slaughtering during WW I. The before mentioned front line signs started to give me a deeper impression about what was going on here back in 1916.
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