Every evening at the Menin Gate in Ypres, at the going down of the sun, a large crowd gathers. Every evening, without fail, buglers march out, people fall silent as the proud and mournful Last Post is sounded.
But
pride can slip easily into bitterness among the fields of Flanders and
the valleys of the Somme. For here the inhumanity of war is uncovered,
just as farmers’ ploughs today churn up a chip of backbone, a stick of
rib and a curved piece of skull. One hundred years on, shells and
bullets, many still live, are also a perpetual harvest. I toured the
Western Front to try to understand our nation’s degradation of its
youth, but could only scratch the surface. I could only
stand and stare.
Their
names are listed row upon row on the Menin Gate, utterly shocking in
their thousands but actually a drop in the ocean among the endless
cemeteries and battle grounds. The Tommies gave their theatre of war a
human and humorous edge, naming places Hellfire Corner, Suicide Road and
Blood Alley. They called their tanks Fritz Flatteners. They laughed, of
course, or else they died. (After all, it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.)
Stand
on the Messines Ridge with binoculars and you can see almost the whole
of the Line, stretching from Loos in the south to Passchendaele in the
north. And in this benign landscape, force yourself to imagine the filth
and the noise of war: the firestorm at Hooge where burning oil was
jettisoned over trenches, the poisonous quagmire of Ploegsteert, the
violent slaughter in the wire at Beaumont Hammel. In Sanctuary Wood, you
can still touch bullet holes in the blasted, ragged trees. Watch the
river Somme make its peaceful wide sweep through rolling countryside
further south and learn of the revolting carnage at Serre where the
mowing down of a generation occurred in approximately ten minutes.
The
enormity of the numbers of the dead is beyond belief; the staggering
amount who were simply “lost” and unaccounted for driven home by the
single word on missing French soldiers' headstones: Inconnu.
The monument at Thiepval will leave you gaping and speechless. All
these placenames, notorious, stagnant and cold in our collective psyche,
should be carved onto every school curriculum.
As
the sun goes down over the Western Front, the wind picks up and the
grasses rustle but the earth remains silent. And, in the morning, people
rebuild their lives. With nonchalant shrugs, farmers erect barns over
mine chambers still packed with explosives, they use former dug-outs as
wine cellars, they plough up the white bones of century-old youth while
birds continue to sing from the hedgerows. Life goes on here because
that is what they ceased living for. And they remain in the cemeteries,
legions of them, lying perfectly still, perfectly regimented, under
pristine headstones.
All seems peaceful on the Western Front. All quiet... apart from, of course, the bird song.
