Amiens Cathedral—You must visit the churches

The main west doors, Amiens Cathedral, Amiens, France, June 1919. [AWM E05406]

Whatever memories the men of the AIF took away with them of Amiens, the best remembered would have been that of the great cathedral itself with its spire and towers visible from all over the surrounding countryside. In 1919, Lieutenant Leo McCartin’s family received his few belongings back from the AIF. Among them was a 'devotional book' and a 'religious emblem', and one wonders if Leo, a Catholic, ever walked through the great west door of Notre-Dame d'Amiens, past the main statue of the central portal, the 'Beau Dieu', Christ with his feet on a snake representing his triumph over evil and his hand raised in a blessing.

Then on into the vast space of the central nave of the cathedral, the largest in France, built between 1220 and 1269. Here the eye, coaxed by the mighty pillars, ascends upwards towards the heavens. Leo McCartin, and other Australian servicemen, might have had a sense of just what this building meant to their faith but, according to English war correspondent Philip Gibbs, some Australians walked around with a less reverential attitude:

I watched the faces of the men who entered here. Some of them, like the Australians and New-Zealanders, unfamiliar with cathedrals, and not religious by instinct or training, wandered round in a wondering way, with a touch of scorn, even of hostility, now and then, for these mysteries—the chanting of the Office, the tinkling of the bells at the high mass—which were beyond their understanding, and which they could not link up with any logic of life, as they knew it now, away up by Bapaume or Bullecourt, where God had nothing to do, seemingly, with a night raid into Boche lines, when they blew a party of Germans to bits by dropping Stokes bombs down their dugout, or with the shrieks of German boys, mad with fear, when the Australians jumped on them in the darkness and made haste with their killing.

Philip Gibbs, Now It Can Be Told, Part Five, ‘The Heart of a City-Amiens in Time of War’, London, 1920, internet edition, Project Gutenberg

Plaque in Amiens Cathedral commemorating the war dead of the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland who died in France and Belgium (ie on the Western Front) between 1914 and 1918. This was the prototype plaque for those which the Imperial War Graves Commission (now Commonwealth War Graves Commission) placed in cathedrals throughout France and Belgium where British and British Empire troops had been quartered in World War I. Plaques in other cathedrals referred to the one million war dead of the British Empire and Dominions. This one in Amiens Cathedral was unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 1923 and has a specific dedication to those who died in this region of France: In this diocese lie their dead of The Battle of the Somme 1916, The Defence of Amiens 1918 & The March to Victory 1918.

Gibbs recognised the men of the AIF as tough soldiers who had little need to appreciate the niceties of the high Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages. But he conceded that as they reached out with battle-worn hands to touch tombs dated 1155, 1250, 1415 and so on, they were impressed by the antiquity of the place.

Wherever they went in the cathedral soldiers from all lands would have been confronted by the impact of war on France. Captain Frank Coen, 18th Battalion, of Yass, New South Wales, who was killed at Pozières on 28 July 1916, went to mass in Paris and in a congregation of 600 saw only three men. He concluded:

It is not on the Boulevardes or in the Cafes that one sees the grief of La Belle France, if you wish to look into the heart of this unfortunate country you must visit the churches. There you can arrive at some estimate of the grief and suffering caused by this hateful struggle.

Captain Frank Coen, letter, 18 April 1916, AWM 1DRL/0203

The modern Australian visitor to Notre-Dame d'Amiens can view the Australian plaque unveiled by the Bishop in 1920 and the Australian flag in one of the side chapels to the rear of the main altar. (An Australian flag was given to the cathedral in 1920 by the AIF but the original has since been replaced.) Perhaps, whatever one's faith or beliefs, a candle could be lit in these magnificent surroundings to the memory of all those Australians who came from so far away and died on the battlefields of the Somme between 1916 and 1918.