The Somme battlefields | The Chemin des Dames | The Armistice Clearing

The surrender at Compiègne (Oise)

Compiègne is such a beautiful and gracious city that it's difficult to believe that just a few miles away, in a clearing in the heart of its forest, the German surrender was signed in 1918 and in turn France's surrender to Hitler was signed, 22 years later, in 1940.

The original railway carriage in which both documents were signed was eventually destroyed by Hitler. However, a sister carriage dating from precisely the same period of manufacture as the original stands today in a little museum on the very same spot in the clearing. Look through the carriage windows, and you can see precisely who sat where for this momentous event.

But the great surprise is the huge and fascinating collection of slides. Visitors view them through 'what-the-butler-saw' slot machines. These are sepia photos, unretouched, of the Great War and of the extraordinary devastation of the countryside afterwards. People are known to have managed to trace photos of the regiments in which a relative or the whole of their native village fought and were subsequently annihilated.