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

DAY 275 - RANCOURT TO ARRAS (VIA VIS EN ARTOIS): 29.8 MILES (57,600 STEPS)

Sunday 22 January, 2012

29.8 miles (Total: 2698.3 miles) – 57,600 steps (Total: 6,061,601 steps)

I arrived at my hotel, Le Prieuré, in Rancourt just before 10pm with red and swollen feet from having walked 100 miles in five days from Paris; I may have learnt the technique of avoiding blisters, but if I don’t have a day of rest every 3-4 days, then my feet seem red raw and very painful. I should have taken a day of rest at Rancourt, but I was up against the clock to be in Lille by Tuesday and so decided to press on to Arras – it was a mistake.

My route took me directly through the Arras battlefields of the First World War – during my journey I must have past at least a dozen military cemeteries, mostly British & Commonwealth names like: Ecoust St Mein, Deslaux Farm, Bancourt, Bullecourt, Cherisy and Vis en Artois. I decided to go to Arras via Artois as my Great Uncle was buried there and my Great Grandmother Walton, whom I knew very well and only died when I was in my twenties, always spoke with quiet pride of her husband’s service in WW1. He was killed in 1917 in the Battle of Arras, as were her two brothers, although I never heard her speak of their deaths. Grandma Walton was a widow for nearly seventy years and raised her twin sons, my Grandfather Eric and my Great Uncle Herbert, both of who are still fit and well in their late nineties.

It is a living connection to the events of this area and, though I was in considerable pain, I felt that it was in some way honouring their memory to walk this route.

The Battle of Arras was a major Spring offensive launched by British forces that lasted for 39 days, between April and May 1917, in an effort to breakthrough German lines. The British and Commonwealth forces had already taken massive casualties at the Somme and Battle of Gallipoli, as had the French at the Verdun, without achieving a breakthrough. However, in December 1916 Herbert Asquith had resigned as Prime Minister and was succeeded by David Lloyd George, who wanted a quick and decisive victory to maintain morale at home and on the battlefield.

The opportunity came on April 6 1917 when, after suffering major losses of civilian merchant shipping in the Atlantic at the hands of the German U-boats, the United States declared war on Germany. Three days later the Battle of Arras commenced, although it would of course be many more long months before American forces arrived. Nevertheless, there was a feeling that the balance of power had shifted and it was now time to push. There might have been new momentum, but there were no new tactics with the charge at the machine guns of the Germans by men armed with bayonets. The result was 150,000 dead British and Commonwealth forces in 39 days and about 120,000 German dead. The Western Front remained virtually exactly where it was in May as it had been in April.

The madness of the battle was memorably captured by Siegried Sassoon in his short but pugnacious poem The General:

“Good-morning; Good-morning!” the General Said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead,
And we’re cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Sassoon was to survive the war and be awarded the Military Cross for his gallantry in charging the German trenches.

The experience of walking through these fields weighed down by my rucksack and in pain from my shoulder to my feet seemed to, in a very small way, allow me to empathise with the conditions in which these heroes were assembled to be wasted on a vanity project for politicians and generals. The fact that, even a century later, farmers pile munitions by the side of the road (pic) for collection seemed to bring it home.

I say ‘vanity’ project with great care and humble acknowledgement that I may have it wrong, but it just seems that the Germans weren’t going anywhere on the Western Front; the Americans had just joined the war, so why on earth wouldn’t you wait for Uncle Sam to arrive and secure a victory through overwhelming force? Or at least wait for the Germans to take the initiative. I am out of my depth, but I want to understand what happened here because I think it has a bearing on how we conduct international relations today. I wanted to hear the voices of my ancestors to tell me what was really going on, but I suspect their answer may have come in the form of another wartime poet, Lord Tennyson:

“Ours is not to reason why. Ours it but to do and die.”

This line was of course from Charge of the Light Brigade during the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War in 1854. The difference is that in the pointless effort of 1854 650 people died, but in Arras over 250,000 lost their lives. Warfare had come into the industrial age, but their leaders were still putting their faith in medieval chivalry.

One final note, having witnessed so many cemeteries in one day, I think we have four truly great institutions in the UK: The Monarchy, The National Trust, The National Health Service, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The message from all the cemeteries is, ‘Their Name Liveth for Evermore’. That is true; it is not a euphemism, but a fact brought into reality by the painstaking and meticulous work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission who care for the graves and memorials of 1.7 million servicemen and women on 23,000 sites in 150 countries around the world. As a family member of three of those remembered, I simply wish to say ‘Thank You’.

DAY 274 - ROYE TO RANCOURT: 27.6 MILES (55,200 STEPS)

Saturday 21 January, 2012

27.6 miles (Total: 2668.5 miles) – 55,200 steps (Total: 6,004,001 steps)

Having once raised a slight question over the hospitality I received in one small French village, Spicheren, I now want to re-balance that with possibly the most friendly and hospitable village I have yet encountered on my travels, Chaulnes. In fact, it was not so much one village as one street, Rue Ernest Boitel, and two neighbouring properties, numbers 24 and 26.

I had taken a succession of small country roads, which ran up the side of the A1. In the same way that hills are not immediately apparent on a map, I have learnt that country roads can be similarly deceptive in having many twists and turns that cumulatively add to the journey length. For this reason it took me nearly five hours to cover what looked on the map to be 17 km but it reality was nearer 23km before I arrived in Chaulnes.

On arrival I stopped at a pizza restaurant, Restaurant La Marotte. The staff were very friendly and sat me down, following which I ordered a three-cheese pizza and a bottle of water. A fellow diner who didn’t speak English engaged me in one of those stunted conversations – stunted because of my French. He was well dressed and about sixty. He asked me where I was going and I said Rancourt and showed him on the map where I had walked so far that day. He indicated that he was impressed, but thought Rancourt was too far to be reached today. He sketched a map showing a shorter route on the paper table cloth and left. When I came to pay my bill I was told that it had already been paid. Amazing. I couldn’t remember an example of having a meal paid for by someone who was unaware of the purpose of my walk. As far as this man was concerned, I was simply an Englishman walking from Roye to Rancourt and he paid my bill. I was quite amazed and walked on …

Next door was a hairdressers ‘L’Atellier de Tiff Anne’, which looked as if it was a ladies hairdresser.  However, it was desperately needed as the last time I had been under the scissors was in Berne back in early November and I had some important meetings over the next week. I took a chance and stuck my head around the door and said ‘Hommes?’ There were smiles and I was invited in and told to take a seat by the sink to have my hair washed. The hairdressers, Anne (pic), and her daughter Gale spoke good English and we sparked up a conversation and it wasn’t long before I mentioned my walk. They seemed genuinely fascinated by the walk and that a politician would do such a thing. We spoke about my route and I mentioned that I had walked through the entire Champagne region without having had a single glass of the local brew. Immediately Gale disappeared and came back with a perfectly chilled half-bottle of Champagne and two glasses. I remember once being offered a cup of coffee in a hairdressers in Durham, but never Champagne. However, this was turning out to be a very special place and Anne and her daughter were very special people.

Time was rushing on – it was nearly 4pm and I still had an estimated 20km to go to reach Rancourt where I had booked a hotel. Anne offered to drive me as it was too far and I explained that as kind an offer as it was, I could not accept. However, then came an offer from Anne to drive my rucksack to the hotel with her partner, which was just fantastic. I offered to pay for taking the bag and of course for cutting my hair, but both were firmly rejected on account that Anne wanted to support the Olympic Truce. What is it about the charm of Chaulnes? I don’t know, but I am so grateful I experienced it.

It turned out that I had miscalculated again on account of failing to find a short-cut through Peronne and I ended up doing a gruelling 25km and arrived at the hotel in Rancourt just before 10pm. It had been a long day, but the chance encounters on Rue Ernest Boitel made it a day I would never forget.