Day Three

Drying time

To Calais

It may as well have tipped down overnight such was the dew. As we were headed home we didn’t have time to mop our flysheets inch by inch – a shake would have to do. We belted along the north bank of the Canche on the D939 to pick up the D940 to Boulogne. The latter had a good safe cycle path running adjacent, for most part, to what was a busy road. The scenery was not up to much but we did pass one final cemetery at Etaples. It is surprisingly enormous being well away from the front line. Etaples had been a focal point of preparation for the front - and the hospitals that supplied its 10,200 graves. The channel ports that had their demise with the advent of the tunnel must have originally evolved during the war with the construction of the infrastructure required for moving such a vast amount of troops and gear. 
Etaples, home to a camp of 100,000 soldiers in WW1, has a sinister war history and more. The town is near the upmarket La Touquet but the ordinary soldiers were prevented from visiting this fancy dan resort as it was ring-fenced for the exclusive use of officers. Furthermore, there was a mutiny in 1917 that ended in a firing squad execution. It is also rumoured or speculated that Etaples has one further place in history. A description of Etaples by Lady Baden Powell, a volunteer nurse there during WW1,  as "a dirty, loathsome, smelly little town", was well short of the horrific truth. Investigations since have suggested that the town and the vast troop camps and movements was the source of the  global Spanish flu pandemic of late 1918 that killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide - as of now the most lethal natural disaster in the history. 

Leaving the seemingly ineffectual Etaples behind, we trundled on to Boulogne to catch a train to Calais Ville and the quick fifteen-minute dash around to the ferry port.

€8.90 each for the train.

Calais.

This is a pitiful place at the moment with many people from beyond the EU trying to get to the UK – and often risking their lives to do so. Calais is a bleak place at the best of times and this seemed to be the worst of times as several of the stateless were doing their laundry in the river beside the port complex.

And back on to the ferry loaded with the battlefield bus tours on their way home – and with many of the pilgrims taking reassuring photos of the, by now, welcoming sight of the White Cliffs of Dover.