Looking for a sandwich in Caudry

I don’t know whether I have told you this before, but The Viking and I can be very absent-minded. It often happens that we find ourselves on the road and after a couple of hours we realize that we haven’t brought anything with us to drink or eat. Which is very stupid given the fact that we spent a lot of money on an electric cool box about 3 months ago. And finding an open supermarket in a French village on a Sunday afternoon seems to be impossible.

What a pity … Otherwise we would have spent more time in Caudry:

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On this website I discovered what Caudry had to undergo during World War I:

On 27 August 1914, after a day of heavy shelling which destroyed hundreds of houses, the German Army entered the town of Caudry and occupied it until 10 October 1918. Almost immediately after taking the town the Germans stripped the local factories of their equipment, mostly lacemaking machines, and sent the scrap steel and copper to Germany. The Kommandatur (German Command) set up its headquarters in the Town Hall and imposed its will on the people of Caudry: men were requisitioned to build a military hospital and, to quell any unrest, hostages were taken and prominent townspeople were deported, including the mayor Ernest Plet.

Four years of occupation

On September 1918 the Kommandatur, under pressure from the advancing Allies, gave the order to evacuate Caudry. Ten thousand people, mostly women, children and the elderly, were forced out of the town. After a long and desperate trudge, in which some 200 people died, the refugees finally reached Binche in Belgium. When they liberated Caudry on 10 October 1918, the illustrious 37th Division of the British Army (conquerors of Monchy-le-Preux during the battle of Arras in April 1917) were welcomed by a mere 2,500 people of a once populous town.

There is a war memorial in the center of Caudry, which we missed somehow (maybe because we were too hungry). But we did find the war graves of hundreds of German and British soldiers. Very strange… A couple of hundreds of meters away we saw and heard families and friends drinking wine and having a fine meal, while we were at this place where all these too young men were buried.

Check out the other pictures on Flickr!

Note: we found a sandwich bar on the way back home. It took me less than 3 minutes to eat a big tuna sandwich.

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