My pilgrimage brought home the true power of empathy
AT TyNe Cot Cemetery, near ypres, a rosy-cheeked young woman sits shivering in a bitter wind on the steps of the great Cross of Sacrifice. Chania is 22, a graduate from exeter University and a Commonwealth War Graves Commission intern.
Like many other young volunteers in this centenary year, she’s spending four months in the wind and rain of Flanders, simply to answer questions from visitors to the 11,965 (8,369 of them unnamed) graves in this, the biggest Commonwealth cemetery in the world.
She’s doing it because she loves reading the soldier-poets of World War I and knows how much remembrance matters.
Chania says she and all her friends were furious about the recent Cambridge student union decision not to honour remembrance Sunday: ‘I know people at Cambridge who say they don’t represent them.’
In a ringing voice she adds: ‘I’m the same age as many buried here. There’s a connection between the youth of today and these men — and always will be.’
How I wish those callow Cambridge students, and all those who say the scarlet poppy of remembrance ‘glorifies war’, could walk with me among the pale headstones that stand like soldiers on parade. They would not then so readily diminish the memory of the dead.
This was the fourth pilgrimage my husband and I have made to Flanders, joining a special study tour organised by the War Poets Association, led by battlefield historian Andy Thomson. The experience is overwhelming. We learn history, listen to poetry read aloud and share camaraderie and tears.
But why travel to stand in that bleak cold landscape to feel heartbroken?
As an advice columnist for many years I recognise the importance of sharing personal grief.
Many letters about bereavement come to my page, and yet no individual grief comes close to the worldwide mourning for the brave souls of World War I. Many people find it very hard to talk about loss, and so a visit to those vast cemeteries becomes the ultimate lesson in empathy.
By ACCIDeNT, I come across a row of headstones to unknown soldiers from the Lancashire Fusiliers; just four of the 250,000 men who perished horribly defending an insignificant little Belgian town called ypres. ‘I died in hell; they called it Passchendaele,’ wrote the poet Siegfried Sassoon.
My beloved grandfather William Mooney was there, too — a teenage private from Liverpool who had already survived the 1916 carnage of the Somme. Now, at Tyne Cot, I gaze at these anonymous graves. Men from his regiment. Were they Grandad’s mates?
I picture him lighting a Woodbine with them, visualise them sitting in a squalid trench writing to their sweethearts, hear in my heart their soldiers’ banter and despair.
Those imaginings are a sudden body-blow. The four Fusiliers may have no names, yet my tears fall for them.
My grandfather survived the bloodshed (though he was later wounded at Dunkirk) and lived to hold both my children. These other men had all their promise, all their hopes consigned to the shattered earth, with no identity. Blinded, I bow my head.
And, thus, grief becomes universal. All around these rows of graves are marble panels bearing 34,887 names of men from the United Kingdom and New Zealand Forces with no known grave at all, nearly all of whom died between August 1917 and November 1918.
What sense can we make of such numbers? When you visit the battlefields of Flanders, that question quickly numbs your brain as it devastates the heart.
Was that war futile? Did they die for nothing, as some argue?
Such debates fade when you walk in solemn disbelief among the headstones.
That’s why I rejoiced when Chancellor Philip Hammond announced in his Budget he will hand out £1 million to pay for battlefield visits for school pupils. A further £1.7 million will be provided for educational projects in schools to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Misguided people argue that World War I remembrance is overdone, for we should mark and mourn all wars and all genocides. But — as ignorant of history as of symbolism — they miss the point.
To reMeMBer the dead of World War I doesn’t mean you ignore the losses of World War II or forget Vietnam. To make a pilgrimage to Auschwitz doesn’t mean you are indifferent to Armenians. But some horrors are so great, they become imprinted on human consciousness — permanent symbols of evil.
And the more anger and grief are concentrated, the more intense they are. This is what the young need to learn, and why I have made four pilgrimages to the battlefields. I call it ‘pilgrimage’ because we tread on sacred ground.
The oldest person in our group (of 51 people) is the distinguished poet from Belfast, Michael Longley, CBe, who was born 35 days before the start of WWII and whose father was a hero of WWI.
Demonstrating the involvement of the young are Mira and engaged couple Sophia and edward, all 26.
In between — representing every decade — we are Christians, Jews, doubters and unbelievers, from many backgrounds, those who choose the white flower of the Peace Pledge Union and those who wear the red poppy of remembrance. No niggling confrontation here.
over three days, in cold clear sunlight and bitter, driving rain, we read aloud the words of poets such as Wilfred owen, edward Thomas, Isaac rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, and edmund Blunden. At 15 and passionately anti-war, I fell in love with the work of Wilfred owen, whose words have never been bettered: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.’
Pity, indeed. owen was awarded the Military Cross in october 1918, then killed in machine gun fire on November 4 — already a great poet at only 25. In Shrewsbury the Armistice bells were ringing when his parents’ doorbell chimed with the dreaded news.
Beside his grave (in ors Communal Cemetery, Northern France) I find it hard to control my emotions — yet it’s even more intense to stand in the small, brick cellar of Forester’s House where he took shelter not long before his death.
There, he wrote his last letter to his ‘Dearest Mother’, jostled by 50 men in a small, smoky space.
‘I hope you are as warm as I am, as serene in your room as I am here ,’ he wrote. ‘of this I am certain, you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here.’
With our own new band of friends we drive along the Western Front, knowing that for every 3cm of ground, a British soldier died trying to capture it or a German soldier died trying to defend it.
MANy were fighting from duty rather than inclination. For example, edward Thomas (widely known for his haunting poem, Adlestrop) was a sensitive man who kept a detailed nature diary at the Front.
He found consolation in observing field mice and wondered: ‘Does a mole ever get hit by a shell?’
This brilliant writer was himself killed (aged 39) by a shell blast at the Battle of Arras.
Many men — some famous, most not —found moments of relief on the battlefield by noticing odd moments of beauty. In one of his poems, Isaac rosenberg hears the song of ‘unseen larks’.
rosenberg — a brilliant artist and poet whose poverty-stricken parents emigrated from russia to england — was a lowly private, killed in action in April 1918, aged 27. So the litany goes on. The loss. The waste.
Between 1914 and 1918 the world lost the flower of its youth.
More than 2,000 German undergraduates went over the top, arm in arm, singing patriotic songs, only to be mown down in minutes by British guns.
All their names are carved beautifully in oak at the German cemetery at Langemark, where a large flat area of grass marks the mass ‘comrades’ grave’. It is the last, unfathomable resting place of 25,000 more souls, their names recorded on massive black blocks of stone.
After the Commonwealth cemeteries, the German ones are sombre, overshadowed by trees. But how important to visit; to remember the sorrow of the mothers of Wolfgang, otto and Fritz as well. That is what I mean by empathy.
This last pilgrimage has left me changed by the profound, permanent importance of what we have seen. And by the immeasurable power of all those silent warnings from the unforgotten dead, who for ever cry for peace.