Lest I Forget

The Last Post in Ypres

Lest I Forget

It’s getting to that time of year again; the winter jacket has been retrieved from the back of the wardrobe, the paths in the park are covered in a thick blanket of leafy mush and everyone is alternately excited or depressed that Christmas has almost descended.

It’s no wonder that Christmas takes over. It’s a huge event which affects millions of people all over the world. It’s a way marker in our lives which encapsulates hundreds of different memories and often spans the spectrum of our emotions. Your first guitar, sneaking kisses under the mistletoe at the school disco, that last Christmas with grandad.

But ever so slightly before the festival of twinkly lights and too much pudding, there’s a quiet day. Well, half a quiet day. Well, two quiet minutes of a day really, when millions of people around the world pause. They pause for a war which affected the world as we know it, and every other war since. Wars which for some evoke a hundred different memories captured in their souls, and come with emotions that they struggle to contain.

World War I at school was a two-dimensional experience. It was a plan drawn on a map, where giant arrows chased each other leaving a trail of little pickelhaubes or union jacks in their wake. A few weeks into the obligatory block of high school history, I could draw the Schlieffen plan from memory. I could tell you why it didn’t work, how Von Moltke ruined the ‘right hook’ and where Sir John French strangled the German momentum. I could tell you which machines where invented, where the first tanks where deployed, how many metres of ground changed sides during Passchendaele and how many men (to the nearest thousand) never left that field.

I was a regular little eleven year old Wikipedia. Yes, I knew it was sad; I had to rub my eyes dry when reading Wilfred Owen, like most kids in the class. But it was always going to be some distant thing that happened a long time ago, locked in the blurry grey annals of history, and there’s only so much feeling you can manage for facts and distant memories that aren’t your own.

Ten years later, I found myself stood in a the cemetery just outside Ypres in Belgium. I stood with one of my fellow airmen, struggling to read a visitors notebook with faded pages. The book was chained in place and deep in its pages was a message which said, “I am just so happy that I found you at last dad.”

We had been in Ypres for only a few hours. Before that we had been home for a few months, time enough to want to be together again after swearing off the stench of each other’s sweaty boot leather forever.

We had decided that we would be our own tour guides on this our family battlefield tour. Each of us would learn a little piece about each monument or landmark to share quietly with everyone else. We visited the brooding Canadian standing at reverse arms in Saint Julien. We breathed in the ice-flecked winter air and imagined the rolling clouds of poison tumbling mercilessly down the slopes of the salient. We imagined the burning, sour, tightening of our chests, each of us noting
the absence of the square pouch resting on the left hip that held our own black masks and canisters.

We walked up the sure-footed steps at Messines Ridge, now made of concrete. Once at the top, we discussed the tactical and physical exertions of fighting uphill. We recognised the numbing sensation in the legs, the fatigue of placing one foot in front of the other, only for it to sink back into line, millimetres from where it began. We listened to a memoir read aloud with a soothing Antipodean lilt, the same name, the same strained voice echoing hundreds of years apart.

The smallest place we visited was an unmarked pillbox in the corner of a disused field. The Flemish woman in shirt sleeves who we stopped for directions pointed the way in broken German and French. She wasn’t surprised or perturbed at our ragtag group with precision haircuts
marching past her washing line. She waved us off and got back to her work; we were unremarkable. When we arrived at the crumbling concrete box, we heard the story of a small battle where the height of the fallen lying prostate on top of each other reached the long thin opening of the gun port.

We visited the German memorial. It is singular in its entirety. Unlike the neat rows of allied white stone, there is one mechanical slab which (we were told) gets opened fairly regularly. Whenever a long forgotten Teuton is turned up by an enterprising farmer, they slide it open and softly drop him in with his brethren. If they can identify him, his name is carved in the wooden wall. Although the names carved in stone will survive longer, the name in the warm wood feels as though it lives again for another short while.

What struck me about the visit was the lack of protestation and fanfare, something so often associated with these events. The experience was simply a quiet acceptance of the stories that still linger in these environments like ghosts, waiting to be told. They are not glorified or vilified, but are left to stand on their own for us to interpret as we wish. There are no gaudy signs pointing the way, there are simply trenches here and craters there. They are not left to silence and ruin, and neither
are they packaged or preserved under spotlights. In Ypres, the last post is played every single evening, in summer and winter, the whole year through. For them, remembering and honouring those who gave their lives for their countries’ freedom is like kissing their sweetheart goodnight when they get into bed at the end of the day. Not an onerous task but a comforting habit, a recognition that the air we breathe is not simply our own, but that we share it with those we loved and still love, and owe them a debt of gratitude.