On the Tour de France, it was a first day of slag heaps

After the hill of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and its necropolis of the dead of the Great War, the horizon opened like a fan and it was a memorial landscape. The entire expanse of the land of the North, speckled with black slag heaps and rising up like soot-colored mountains; the mining villages that form the backbone of all the towns; the headframes as much as the belfries; even Bollaert, the Lens stadium, where it is proclaimed that this "land was coal."

Shortly before, it was afternoon and yet, the platoon passed the church of Saint-Amé de Liévin and its paralyzed clock, still at 6:17 a.m., the time of the catastrophe commemorated a few months ago , the fiftieth anniversary of the death of 42 workers on December 27, 1974. On a red brick wall, in front of a Point.P, next to the old pit 3-3bis of which only the metal trestle remains, a long moan in gold letters on a marble plaque: "Passer-by, I beg you for a moment, stop. I saw the long march of the miners, parading along my side, whatever the time, towards their work walking at the pace of people in a hurry,