Flanders Fields

Soften your tread. Methinks the Earth’s surface is but bodies of the dead,  Walk slowly in the air, so you do not trample on the remains of God’s servants.

Abu al-Alaa al-Maarri

 

It has a romantic ring to it: Flanders Fields. The Fields make up a beautiful, peaceful, rolling landscape. There are long lines of trees, church steeples pointing upwards from every town and village. I had never planned to go there. The First World War was never anything I felt an affinity with, and I certainly was never expecting to be affected by the place.

The trip to Flanders was a work one, to meet one of our partners Talbot House in Poperinge. We put together an exhibition based on Philip “Tubby” Clayton who ran the Everyman’s Club in Talbot House during the First World War. We arrived, looked at the town, were entertained and talked business. The next day we had a brilliant tour of the house. Our guide, GJ, was knowledgeable, intelligent, and passionate about European 20^th century history. He talked about how the Every Man’s Club worked and how Tubby helped the soldiers who visited. Suddenly, I was hooked.

My way into this story wasn’t though the politics, the battles, conditions of the trenches or the horror. I knew about that in a generic sense, a left over from O levels (I failed history). My way in was through Talbot House, “An oasis of calm and compassion”, and through the life of the generous, big-hearted Tubby Clayton. He was an army chaplain and a prolific writer, which is one reason we can get close to him. He worked tirelessly for the soldiers whether they were in the Everyman’s Club or on the front line. The individual stories he told of men looking for their brothers and friends, the musical shows and the lost souls. He was a man of his time and when you read his work you’ll see he was pro-war, but in that he gave meaning and reason to the soldiers’ lives and their cause.

In Poperinge, the First World War came alive for me. Beyond the walls of Talbot House, I could see the town filled with military personnel, equipment, trucks, trains, the Chinese construction workers, the locals, their children and of course lines of troops making their way to Ypres. We set off to follow that route to Ypres and the “Front”.

The landscape has the First World War all over it. It’s not blatantly visible. There are no trenches, craters or decimated buildings, but look beyond the farms and lines of trees and you’ll see it. As we sped through the landscape along the fast post war dual-carriage way, I saw a single track road following the same line, adjacent to the railway line. It was the road built by the British to supply Ypres and the front. It was straight and utilitarian. The railway too was built by the British and there are photogrpahs of British railway trucks with members of the Chinese Labour Coprs looking upon the Kiwi soldiers arriving in Poperinge. I had never considered the enormity of the task to supply a front line and maintain a war. Along the sides of the roads, the fields, farmers leave the unexploded bombs they come upon whilst ploughing their fields, which are picked up by the authorities.

The hills to the east are always present wherever you are in the landscape. This is where the German army held their lines. Occasionally you will pass a war cemetery, with the regimented white head stones contrasting to the landscape. 

All these separate elements of the jigsaw started fitting together, building a picture of the war and the anticipation of the actual battlefield. We were heading towards Tyne Cote, one of the larger cemeteries and a marker of the frontlines. We pulled up, parked, went through the museum and into the cemetery itself. There was a bunker in-situ made of a battered, crude concrete. It suddenly struck me: We were on the frontline.

I’m an archaeologist. That’s my background and that is what I default to when faced with problems. At that moment, I didn’t see the ghosts or hear their echoes. I saw the land and the soil. From my archaeological studies, I know what soil is. I was standing on the remains of the war – the soil that held up the trenches, the wooden boards, bullets, bombs, cordite, tines, badges, uniforms and the men themselves. Millions of men, and boys, were beneath my feet. Those very men who left the shores of Britain, passed through Poperinge, stopped in the Everyman’s Club for a cup of tea, a sing-song, the chance to write a letter home. Those men whose last words were spoken on these fields. 

The scale of the disaster dawned on me. In our modern eyes, it seems a far cry from where we are now, although 100 years is a blink of an eye. How did we get there? I don’t question the politics, or the simplicity of the chain of events that was fed to us at school, but the mind-set I do not understand. How did we find ourselves producing this hell that was the war and then repeated 20 years later?

Today, I can’t imagine putting on a tin hat now and travelling to Belgium to fight in a war.  Today being anti-war is a right and not a privilege. Then, there was no choice. I’d like to think that we, Britain and Europe have progressed and moved on and many countries invovled in the two Wars have. But history has a nasty way of circling back, without us even realising. 

 

References

Clayton, P. B., MC, FSA, 1919, Tales of Talbot House, Everyman’s Club in Poperinghe & Ypres 1915-1918, by, Chatto & Windus, London.

Talbot House still exists in Poperinge and is a hotel and museum. It’s worth a visit. http://www.talbothouse.be/en/museum/home

Whilst there visit the Meningate in Ypres. It lists soldiers killed in action and includes men from around the British Empire, for example, the 9^th Bhopal Infantry, Burma Military Police, the 36^th and 47^th Sikhs, the 45^th Rattray’s Sikhs and the Assam Military Police.

Abu al-Alaa al-Maarri was a philosopher, poet, and writer, born in modern-day Maarrat al-Nuʿman, Syria, around 973. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-35745962