NOT NOW
BUT IN THE COMING
YEARS
AND THEN
SOME TIME, WE’LL
UNDERSTAND.
On one of my last stops in my last tour of the season, this
inscription on a grave at the Ypres Reservoir Cemetery stopped me in my tracks.
The first line was all raw emotion – the hand raised in front of the face –
“Not now…” Then there was the hope – “in the coming years”, and the power of
that last word – “understand”.
After my first season as a full time guide, can I claim to “understand” any more
than I did 12 months ago? More importantly, do the various people I’ve met
along the way feel as though they “understand” any more than they did as a
result of my work?
People feel moved to
visit these cemeteries in ever increasing numbers. Do people visit hundred year
old churchyard graves in the UK in similar numbers? Of course not. It is this war, above all
others, that we all seek to
“understand”. Those left behind after WW1 struggled to do so, as the
inscription suggests. The grieving mother of Ronald Leighton said that she and
her peers were suffering from what she described as “heart hunger”. A golden
Edwardian summer had been blown away by a four year winter spent scouring the
casualty lists and listening for the steady footfall of the postman.
A century later, we realise that to “understand” this war is
no easy matter. To comprehend some of the facts that a battlefield guide deals
with is in itself a struggle. 684 Newfoundlanders out of 752 dead or wounded in
a matter of minutes on July 1st 1916. 225,000 shells fired in half
an hour before the Somme offensive. The
12,000 graves at Tyne Cot. 73,000 names
on the Thiepval Memorial is just those missing
in that campaign. The scale of the conflict, the enormity of some of these
facts, partly explains the interest in the war, but it is also part of the
challenge facing the guide. How to move towards understanding, how not to alienate. Always remembering
that to “understand” is not necessarily to accept.
This war changed more than the landscape. The shells
reshaped European society. It is no exaggeration to say that to “understand”
this war is to go some way towards understanding the way we are today. The
author of the inscription would be pleased to some extent that we have not
given up trying to do so. There will be a raft of programmes on BBC, we were
told earlier in the week, and book publishers will be busy too.
And at the Menin Gate, a few minutes’ walk from the Ypres
Reservoir Cemetery, tourists will gather in ever increasing numbers to listen
to the Last Post being played. To call these good people “tourists” seems a
trifle harsh. I have had the privilege of leading some people this summer who
would wish to be classified as “pilgrims”, perhaps. Families who travelled from
thousands of miles away, like so many of the troops, to come to this corner of
Europe. And my school groups would say they were not on holiday, rather they
were in a series of different outdoor classrooms. I hope they feel that they
were effective learning spaces, each and every one.
So I hope all these people feel as though they were more
than “tourists”. I also hope that they began (at least) to “understand”.
