DAY 257 - ST MENEHOULD TO SUIPPES: 18.7 MILES (37,400 STEPS)

18.7 miles (Total: 2420.9 miles)– 37,400 steps (Total: 5,186,201 steps)

A special request from a friend who pointed out that all my pics were of my face on Flikr, but that he wanted to see how my feet were holding up (pic).

I rose a little later on account of the excesses of the previous day and evening, but I rose which in the present phase of the walk, was no small thing. I shuffled to the bathroom aching at every joint in my body.  I thought that if the bathroom was a struggle then prospects for walking another twenty miles were not looking to bright, but you just put one foot in front of another and if you do it long enough—eight hours in my case–then you can get to your destination.

Following the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ the previous day, I figured that the light would return with a new day, but the dark clouds of the soul were as dogged and bursting with rain as the clouds over the Marne. I needed some inspiration and had I had my Blackberry, then I would have had Gary Streeter and Rob Parsons on speed-dial, but I did have wi-fi and so I downloaded some talks by Rob and Paul Francis at Glenwood Church, Cardiff which have inspired me in the past so much.

As I set out, I went to select latest downloads on my iPod to listen to the talks, but they hadn’t synced. It seemed as if God was saying, ‘don’t think you’re going to get out of this ditch that easy.’ Out of St Menehould, I picked up a footpath which ran along the side of the railway line towards Valmy and would save me a few miles. The path was muddy on account of the incessant rain, but that seemed a price worth paying for the privilege of a short-cut.

The ground in this part of France is clayey and it makes walking off road difficult. As I passed more military cemeteries, I reflected how if it was difficult for me to walk on this terrain what must it be to have to dig in and fight in it. It had always puzzled me why soldiers would willingly participate in such a wholesale slaughter as happened in the Battle of Marne and at Verdun in the First World War. I have experienced the winter on these ‘killing fields’ for just a couple of weeks and have the advantage of returning to a warm bed and having hot food without being pounded with shells and machine gun bullets and I wondered what was in the mind of the soldier in the trench.

It hadn’t been too difficult to understand how soldiers would answer the call to serve their nation and defend their way of life. They would rightly secure instant hero status and be the source of immense pride for family and friends as they marched off to battle. Their photographs, looking bold and fearless in pristine uniforms, would adorn the mantelpieces of parents and the dressing tables of sweethearts. But when they got there and climbed into the trench for the first time, how did they feel? I sensed as I walked across those same fields that they were trapped in Hell, gripped with fear and hopelessness, with no way out other than to ‘die with dignity’ with their brothers in arms.

I recall hearing Harold Macmillan’s grandson, the Earl of Stockton talk about his grandfather’s deep admiration for the soldiers under his command from County Durham who, “lay into the bullets of German machine guns like beaters laying into the rain on a grouse moor.“ Harold Macmillan was a war hero, the story of him being shot in the hip in the Battle of the Somme and lying in a slit trench reading a classical Greek play in the original language before he was rescued, became folklore because it feeds into the kind of vision of the indefatigable British spirit captured by Hugh Laurie’s character, Lieutenant George in “Blackadder Goes Forth.” But probably more like Captain Blackadder  himself, I was left thinking “its one thing getting wet, but quite another getting shot.”

I might have this wrong, but I wonder whether the utterly appalling conditions played their part in the mass slaughter of the trenches of WW1. How many nights would I be able to live in a trench here with the constant incoming shells shaking the ground beneath my feet, not knowing whether you were in for a direct hit. How long could you live with the uncertainty, the death and destruction? The shortage of food, the cold, the mud, the rats, the disease, standing up to your knees in freezing water before you would look upon the Officer’s whistle to go over the top to face the barbed wire and machine guns of the enemy as something of a blessed relief?

Perhaps we remember our war heroes too often in neat and tidy parades, neat and tidy uniforms, in neat and tidy picture frames, or coffins draped in neat and tidy flags, buried in neat and tidy cemeteries and in doing so we inadvertently forget that war is an ugly, brutish, chaotic living hell for those caught up in it. We honour their memory and show our gratitude more, not less, when we tell the truth of how that ‘ultimate sacrifice’ was made.

It is easy to judge with the benefit of hindsight or to fall into the ‘lions led by donkeys’ class prejudice, but perhaps we should just leave it that such tactics were never used again on the battlefield – with man’s ingenuity, they were able to come up with tanks and air power which made the trenches seem like bows and arrows against machine guns. As I pondered these mysteries, my rather trivial problems seemed to return into perspective.