THE TUG OF WAR
A pilgrimage of remembrance to the battlefields of the First World War a century on is an international affair
Alan Cochrane takes a pilgrimage of remembrance to France
Far be it for me to suggest that the memory of Jerome K Jerome’s famous Three Men in a Boat is under any threat in this epistle but I would dare suggest that the title Four Men on a Battlefield Tour does have a certain ring to it.
For well over a year, some friends had been on at me to organise a trip to sample the battlefields of Flanders, which they knew I’d been to a couple of times. And probably because the TV and newspapers are full of the terrible events of exactly 100 years ago, their non-stop badgering eventually succeeded.
We’re not long back f rom a three-day weekend in which we stayed in Ypres and Arras. We concentrated on the battles of Passchendaele and the Somme, and on seeing as much as we could of these horrific conflicts.
It is easy to speculate about the effect such sights have on the visitor. Suffice it to say that for four middle-aged men, well versed in the ways of the world, the memory of those acres of white headstones around what seems like every corner of Belgium and Northern France will always linger, even if the recollection of our one-and-a-quarter star French hotels does not.
It’s a simple process nowadays to get some measure of the horrors of the First World War thanks in the main to the sterling work of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, who preserve and maintain to an incredibly high standard the last resting places of those who died.
We couldn’t see everything but without undue haste, we did manage to see a lot. This included the Memorial Museum at Passchendaele, which contained amazingly accurate insights into that massacre in the mud; the nearby, hugely moving Tyne Cot cemetery; and the Menin Gate in Ypres, where Belgian firemen sound the Last Post every evening in honour of the 60,000 ‘fallen’, whose names are all around them on the walls. A world of remembrance Incredibly, on the cold Friday evening we were there, thousands of people of every nationality turned up to watch. Best of all, the crowd contained several school parties – Scottish, English, and Belgian.
On to the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge, then to Beaumont-Hamel, where one year before Vimy, the Newfoundlanders were slaughtered along with 19,000 others on 1 July 1916. The kilted statue paying homage to the 51st Highland Division who captured the infamous Y Ravine after five months of bloodshed across a piece of ground no bigger than a few football pitches, was particularly moving.
We also visited the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing and the thought occurred, as it had at Vimy, ‘does the world really need such massive stone reminders of what happened all those years ago?’
I think our small party believed that it does. Thiepval’s walls contain the names of 70,000 with ‘no known grave’ who deserve our lasting remembrance and as regards Vimy, many Canadians believe their sacrifice there and elsewhere earned their country the right to take its place as a major player on the world stage.
And on the subject of our Commonwealth cousins, watching the match in an Arras pub, we were outraged, like many Scots, when we reckoned we’d been done out of a victory against the All Blacks in November by a ‘cheating Kiwi’.
But after a bit of reflection, that last description can only be deemed as outrageously inappropriate when you think about how many New Zealanders travelled halfway across the world 100 years ago to join in what was, after all, ‘our’ fight.
Their names are now to be found on those plain white headstones in the cemeteries of Flanders. What’s a game of rugby when set against that?
‘It’s a simple process nowadays to get some measure of the horrors of the First World War’