Paris

Trainers will do. The ground at Beaumont Hamel is grass over old shell holes and it holds water after rain, so take something you do not mind soaking, but there is no walking to speak of. My knees managed it and they manage very little now. Five hours is three stops if you are firm about the clock. Thiepval and the Newfoundland park are the two that hold attention. Add the Lochnagar crater at La Boisselle if there is room. That is the one my nephew was still talking about a year later. Albert has two or three places on the main square and the museum under the basilica takes an hour if the weather turns on you.

My father in law marched us round Thiepval years ago. The thing that landed with the teenagers in our car was the register of names in the visitor centre. You can look a surname up. The monument itself they walked straight past. Give each of them a family surname before you leave and it stops being a school trip with worse catering. On your timing, two and a half hours assumes you are off the périphérique before eight. We were not. The A1 took forty minutes off us and nobody spoke for the last half hour of it.

This answers none of your four questions and I apologise for that. Is it strange to put a battlefield inside a holiday? There is a war cemetery about twenty minutes from me here in Nairobi and I have talked myself out of going for something like three years, because it feels like the wrong reason to be somewhere. I have never known who I am allowed to ask.