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Picardy, Artois and Flanders are littered with the monuments, battlefields and cemeteries of the two world wars, but nowhere as intensely as the region northeast of Amiens, between Albert and Arras . It was here, among the fields and villages of the Somme, that the main battle lines of World War I were drawn. They can be visited most spectacularly at Vimy Ridge , just off the A26 north of Arras, where the trenches have been left in situ . Lesser sites, often more poignant, are dotted over the countryside around Albert and along the Circuit de Souvenir . A more enduring and more domestic presence in the life of northern France has been that of the coalfields and all their related heavy industrial works. At their peak of production they formed a continuous stretch from Bethune in the west to Valenciennes in the east, though the industry is now in terminal decline. At Lewarde you can visit one of the pits, while at the big industrial city of Lille , or the pleasant town of Douai , you can see what the masters did with takings from the muck.
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