Perhaps a bespoke trip to the battlefields would help you to make sense of it all?

Casting long shadows



The debate over who was responsible for WW1 has been re ignited by the centenary programming.
Max Hastings - that old war horse - trotted out his case earlier in the week, with the smooth tones of Niall Ferguson following on tomorrow. He'll be out to persuade us that GB's entry into the continental war was a mistake from the outset.

Under the Somme

The La Boisselle Project  involved in a fascinating BBC programme in the next few days, taking a relative down into the tunnels, the last resting place of a Wrexham miner.

 

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 1^st 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”.

 

 

Somme Dawn

Q - how best to see the Somme?
A - like this. Quietly. Reflectively. At your own pace!

Dawn breaks over the Thiepval Ridge

Another good week's weather on the Western Front, with the blue skies and bucolic calm making it difficult to conceive of this place as the setting for a tragedy of epic proportions.
My guests this week stayed in Ypres for one night, having followed the story of their great uncle to Passchendaele, and to the Menin Gate memorial. Nights two and three were on the Somme. Hoping they can all answer the usual question - why pay more for a "bespoke" or "customised" trip.

 

In a War noted for its sense of tragedy and waste, the story of James Crozier still has the power to stop us in our tracks. He was a teenager, quite possibly underage when he signed up in the early days of the war, and had to be carried out to his execution because he was so drunk. The commanding officers feared that there would be a rebellion amongst the troops because of his youth, and the perceived cruelty of the judgement. To some extent they were right - the firing squad to a man fired wide of the mark, and Crozier's young life was ended by a single shot to the head by the junior officer in charge. Bizarrely, the commanding officer of the 9th Irish Royal Rifles was also a Crozier. Although unrelated to the hapless youngster, Lt-Col Frank Crozier had been present at James' enlistment, and had been able to promise his tearful mother that he would keep an eye on the boy. Sixteen months later, Frank Crozier, as his commanding officer, recommended that the death sentence be carried out. Later he attempted to cover up the whole story by including James in the list of those killed on active duty. He may have done this to ensure that Mrs Crozier should not be deprived of her son's army pension. When the story leaked out, as it was sure to do in such circumstances, Mrs Crozier had lost her son, and the money.

James Crozier lies in the Sucerie cemetery, near the village of Colincamps, close behind the original Allied lines. On a blue sky day on the Somme, with the butterflies playing around the headstone, there should have been a sense of peace here, but the young Ulsterman's story is a difficult one to forget. 

Somme Fine day...

The indifferent 2013 "summer" continues to play havoc with our plans, but a party from the Tennis Club in Milford-On-Sea, Hampshire managed to avoid too many Wimbledon-style rain breaks on our overnight trip to the Somme on the 11th-12th June.