148 'Je Suis En Australie': a Personal Memoir of Villers-Bretonneux
148 ‘JE SUIS EN AUSTRALIE’: A PERSONAL MEMOIR OF VILLERS-BRETONNEUX ANNE BRASSART 1 ‘I am in Australia!’ Those were the words we screamed as children when stepping with delight on the thick lawn of the Australian cemetery in Villers- Bretonneux. Under the vast sky, blue or grey, here was ‘Australia’, here was immensity, here was freedom. On the soft green turf, we could run and run, first to the centre of the lawn where the tall stone cross stood, supporting an impressively big sword, point down. We would climb the very high steps leading to the foot of the cross and then we would go on as far as the majestic tower dominating the Memorial. It was a race to see who would reach it first. But we never went inside. It had been damaged during the last war (1939– 1945), and was unsafe. Behind the tower, at the far end of what was for us ‘Australia’, there were no tombs but big bushes which were ideal for playing hide and seek or other games that did not require anything but running and sometimes singing. Lots of delighted children’s laughter rose to the sky! We knew that the Mémorial was a burial place for the Australian soldiers, and also some from Canada and New Zealand, but because it looked more like a park, and was not at all a sad place, we did not think of it as a cemetery. The vastness of it, especially for small children, and the open fields all around it, sloping gently down to the valley of the Somme, gave us an exciting feeling of liberty.
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