|
from The
Observer Sunday 7 November 1999
Day trip to hell gives young a
lesson in war's folly
Tours to the fields of
Flanders are giving us a lesson in the price of war, reports John Sweeney
A bitter wind but a dry day. Leaves
are dying on the trees and the clouds scurry over the zig-zag trenches
that scar Sanctuary Wood, where men fought, joked and died 85 years ago.
The water-table in Flanders is
astonishingly high so, even though it is not raining, the bottom of the
trench, sided by ancient rusting sheets of corrugated iron, is a mire. The
clay is dark and greasy, treacherous underfoot, and the water collecting
in the trench is oil-black and gives off a poisonous stink.
The trees were wrong, of course.
They would have been blasted and shredded by the constant whine and clump
of 'incoming' shells.
Out of a low concrete bunker comes
a gaggle of schoolchidren from Croesy ceiliog Comprehensive, in Cwmbran,
South Wales. 'Can't see anything in there,' says 15-year-old Joshua Brand,
incredulous that anyone, ever, would have put up with living in such a
hole.
'It's the smell that takes you
back. It makes it real,' says his schoolmate, Melanie Baribeault. And the
stink does that strange trick, the way scent can conjure up a lover long
gone, or the smell of cleaning wax can evoke school. But the trench stink
is really foul, and the image it creates of what life must have been like
for the Poor Bloody Infantry of the First World War utterly bleak.
'Remember,' says Nick Simpson, 19,
and another English visitor to the open-air trench system, 'there would
have been hundreds of men in these trenches and no toilets. There would
have been shit and piss everywhere. And rats. They crawled over your face
when you were asleep.'
Joshua and Melanie looked at him,
unbelieving. Then they looked back at the muck and the corrugated iron and
the foul sump, and some of it - all but unimaginable for any child of
Blair's Britain - began to sink in. Inside the warmth of the Sanctuary
Wood museum is the usual clutter of what you would expect to see - guns,
uniforms, cap badges - badly displayed in dusty cases. While schoolkids
from Britain, the Netherlands, France and Belgium squeeze past, you can
inspect a gallery of German pointy helmets, hand grenades of various
degrees of ingenuity, body armour, a knife belonging to a long-dead Gurkha,
an armoury of rifles and revolvers and dozens of black and white
photographs. They are plastered on the wall, artlessly...
Here's a rifleman in a trench in
winter, the hard whiteness of snow a backdrop to the tangle of wire above
his head. An armless Christ on a shell-pitted crucifix.
The ruins of a tank, lying on its
side, as un-modern as a slaughtered brontosaurus.
Last and most horrible, a
photograph of what was left of a man's face. His hair, brow and eyes were
untouched, pale but immaculate. The rest - where nose, mouth, lips and
jawbones might have been - was a dark mess.
As an icon of the obscenity of war,
the photograph of the man with a hole for a face is almost perfect. Martin
Bell MP once condemned his beloved BBC for airbrushing out the violence
from his reports from Bosnia. One can understand why editors do this, but
every now and then it is right and proper to tell, as Wilfred Owen wrote,
'the truth untold, the pity of war'.
The schoolchildren stared at the
photograph, and walked away, in silence.
During the First World War, an
average of 5,000 British soldiers were killed every month in this area of
north-west Europe. Tyne Cot cemetery is an utterly beautiful evocation of
a lost generation. Rows and rows of white gravestones - 11,871 in all -
progress towards a high cross that can be seen, they say, by ships in the
Channel. The stones carry simple legends, name, age, regiment. Many have
no name, only the inscription: 'Known unto God.'
On the ridge behind the cross
stands a long wall, bearing the names of 35,000 soldiers whose bodies were
never found, lost in no man's land. At the bottom of the hill, a brand new
tourist coach pulls up and out trickle pupils from Cotham Grammar School,
Bristol. They file out - some spotty, some out for a bit of flirting - and
then walk through the gravestones. You could watch their body language
change. By the time they had passed the first 10 rows they were no longer
moving like jittery adolescents. They were grown-ups, coming to terms with
the smudging out of a generation.
Afterwards they exchanged
impressions. Kylie Cusack, 14, said: 'What really gets to me is the ones
with no names.' Another girl said: 'You read about so many dead but it
doesn't affect you. To see with your own eyes all these graves, it's
different.'
In the two far corners of the
cemetery, named by the Northumberland Fusiliers because two German
pillboxes looked like Tyneside cottages, are 'books' which list the 35,000
dead. Andrew Sheddon, 17, from the Bristol school, looked up his own name
and found a namesake, killed serving in the Scottish Rifle Regiment. 'It's
unbelievable,' he said. 'My surname isn't common.'
I followed his example. Sure
enough: 'Private John Sweeney, 1st Battalion, Irish Guards, killed 9
October 1917. Panel 10 to 11.' There are about 60 panels. I walked along
them. Bleak sunlight broke through the clouds and lit up my namesake.
Near the cross, which lies on top
of the old German bunker, are two graves of German soldiers killed. At its
foot were poppy wreaths, including one from Heaton Manor School,
Newcastle. A big bald Englishman with a ring in his ear came up and left a
wooden cross with a poppy attached to it next to their wreath. Not far
behind him was a seven-year-old girl in a red coat who ran through the
gravestones then slowed down and stopped. Sophie Walter was with her elder
brother and sister and her grandfather, Tack Walter, 65, a retired
engineer, all locals from Antwerp. Through her granddad, she said: 'This
place fills you with sorrow.'
Visits to the battlefields and
graveyards of the First World War are becoming increasingly popular, and
not just with the elderly. Peter Simpson, of the curiously titled Major
and Mrs Holt's Battlefield Tours of Sandwich, Kent, showed us around
Flanders.
He said: 'You cannot go to the
trenches and see the cemeteries and come away untouched. Something very
terrible happened here, and very moving too. It's right that everybody,
but especially the young, should come and see, and pay their respects.'
Every night since the early
Twenties a bugler has played the Last Post underneath the Menin Gate in
the nearby town of Ypres - 'Wipers' to Tommy Atkins, the legendary British
soldier. Last Friday gaggles of schoolkids and holidaymakers and locals,
sheltering from the rain that had started to fall, gathered together.
Two policeman got out of a van and
stopped the traffic. The headlights of the cars glistened on the
pavestones as two buglers from the Ypres fire brigade stepped out and
played the music which echoed out from there, more haunting than it is
possible to say.
Every schoolchild in Britain should
come to Flanders, and listen to that tune, and learn something of the
price of peace.
Back
to News Clips Contents
|
Recent Additions
