DAY 278 - MESSINES, MESEN, BELGIUM

Wednesday 25 January, 2012

2698.3 miles/ 6,061,601 steps

There may be many days which stand out from this journey across Europe for different reasons, but in terms of my quest – the implementation of the Olympic Truce – this would be the most poignant. I had been invited by Don Mullen, the charismatic International Ambassador for the Flanders Peace Field, to take part in a ceremony to commerce work on the ‘Flanders Peace Field’ which would add to a network of sites, namely the Messines Peace Village, the Island of Ireland Peace Park & Tower and the Christmas truce memorial. The latter highlights not the mass slaughter of young lives, but rather the temporary peace (truce) that broke out between German and British forces at this point in Christmas 1915.

The federal, regional, and community governments of Belgium do a tremendous job of keeping the memory of what happened on those ‘killing fields’ in the First World War alive. This is particularly through the educational opportunities they offer to students for whom this seems like a distant piece of history, when it is an event that continues to hold out profound lessons for how we live today and for understanding the political, economic, and security structures of Europe that remain in place a century later. If you want to understand Europe in 2012, you need to understand Flanders in 1915.

After pounding the 300 miles from Verdun to Reims to Paris and then to Arras, I arrived in Arras at the Memorial on which my Great Grandfather’s name is listed in a thoughtful and reflective mood. I had hoped to have reached Lille or even Mesen on my walk by the 25^th January, but that turned out to physically impossible, for me anyway. So I arrived into Lille Flanders station by train and was met by Hanne Dezegher, the Head of Media for the Messines Peace Village, and her mum, Marie Paule, who were able to give me a great briefing on the history of the Village and on the people whom I would meet during the ceremony.

I arrived at the rendezvous point, the Island of Ireland Peace Park and the Peace Tower which had been opened in 1998 by Queen Elizabeth II, President Mary McAleese and King Albert II of Belgium and in itself is a wonderful story of reconciliation and remembrance between Britain and Ireland. It is easy to forget that The Government of Ireland Act was passed in 1914 granting Irish ‘Home Rule’, although it was then immediately suspended at the outbreak of war. This in turn led to the Easter Rising of 1916 in which 200 people were killed at a time when Nationalist and Unionist soldiers from Ireland were serving and dying together on the Western Front. It is a mark of progress that the spirit of the Easter Rising would eventually give way to the spirit of the Good Friday Agreement.

Local political leaders were present alongside representatives from sport and the Peace Village. The Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, Wilfried Lemke (a former football manager in Germany with Bremen), the German Ambassador, Dr Eckart Cuntz, the British Ambassador, Jonathan Brenton, the Deputy Ambassador for Ireland and representatives of the press and media were also in attendance.

I was invited to speak about the Olympic truce to the group in the Island of Ireland Peace Park. Considering that it was both cold and wet, I simply invited all present to imagine for a moment how different the world might look if the Christmas truce of 1915 had spread and held. There would have been no Verdun, Ypres or Arras; there would have been no Russian Revolution, no great economic depressions caused by the economic catastrophe of the First World War, no rise of the Nazi Party, no Second World War, no Korean War, and none of Hitler’s Concentration Camps or Stalin’s Gulags. Although in retrospect, the courage of the British and German soldiers that Christmas on the Western Front may have looked like a naive and idealistic gesture based upon sentimental notions of the Christmas spirit, yet if the opportunity had been grasped then untold millions may have been spared unspeakable evil. The notions of a truce during the Olympic Games may today look naive and idealistic based upon sentimental notions of the Olympic spirit, but if the opportunity is grasped who knows …

We moved onto ‘The Flanders Peace Field’, which was to be the site of a new educational centre to mark the centenary of the First World War. After we had broken the ground, we stood around in a circle and remembered the events on that very field nearly a hundred years ago. Don Mullen, sensing the remarkable mood which had descended upon the gathering, invited his fellow Irishmen with a gloriously mellow tenor voice to sing ‘A Silent Night Christmas 1915’, which was based on the well known carol, Silent Night. The lyrics were so powerful and would have moved a heart of stone to tears:

Nineteen-fifteen on Christmas Day
On western front the guns all died away
And lying in the mud on bags of sand
We heard a German sing from no man’s land
 
He had a tenor voice so pure and true
The words were strange but every note we knew
Soaring ore the living dead and dammed
A German sang of peace from no man’s land
 
They left their trenches and we left ours
Beneath tin hats the smiles bloomed like wild flowers
With photos cigarettes and bottles of wine
We built a soldier’s truce on the front line
 
Their singer was a lad of twenty-one
We begged another song before the dawn
And sitting in the mud and blood and fear
He sang again the song all longed to hear
 
Chorus:
 
Silent night, no cannons roar
A king is born of peace for ever more
All’s calm, all’s bright
All brothers hand in hand
In nineteen and fifteen in no man’s land
 
And in the morning all the guns boomed in the rain
And we killed them and they killed us again
At night they charged we fought them hand in hand
And I killed the boy that sang in no man’s land
 
Silent night no cannons roar
A king is born of peace for evermore
All’s calm, all’s bright
All brothers hand in hand

Jerry finished singing and we stood quietly, no-one wanting to break the moment. The German Ambassador asked if we might all hold hands and sing the carol in our own language, as German and British forces had in 1915. It captured the mood perfectly as well as the hope of the project. Hand in hand with the German Ambassador and the British Ambassador, we sang a carol written by an Austrian in German and in that place and at that time, it became for us all a prayer and a hope:

Silent night, holy night
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child
Holy Infant so tender and mild
Sleep in heavenly peace
Sleep in heavenly peace