Out of Bruges

Sacrifice.....

I am not a big fan of war.  I have not taken part in one, and I don't think I would be very good at it..... And now I have reached an age when should there be one in the vicinity I am more likely to be a civilian casualty than an active participant.

However, the history of mankind is written in blood, and it seems as though there has been more war than peace since homo 'sapiens' first hit his neanderthal cousin on the head.  

I grew up in the shadow of war.  Both my grandfathers were soldiers in the First World War.  I knew men who had been gassed in the trenches. Both my parents were in the RAF/WAAF in the Second World War.  I played in air raid shelters and on bomb sites.  I read story books and comics and watched films about war actions and heroes.  My school room had bound copies of magazines full of photographs of bombing raids and battles....  And later the whole school was marched to the Rex Cinema to watch Lawrence of Arabia when it came out (for more on this, please see https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2012/12/colonel-t-e-lawrence.html)

I have visited many scenes of battle and War Grave Commission cemeteries, but I had never seen the Menin Gate  and so, when I came across the possibility of visiting Ieper (Ypres) and Passchendaele and Tyne Cot with Riviera Travel, as an option on their Bruges for Solo Travellers trip, I thought I would go for it.....

But not (partly because of the timing) before I had made a quick sortie to Ghent, where I wanted to see the complete and recently restored van Eyck altarpiece in St Bavo's Cathedral.  

As Daniel Boffey explained in The Guardian in 2021, the Ghent Altarpiece (also known as the Polyptych of the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb) has, during its near 600-year history, been nearly burned by rioting Calvinists, stolen by Napoleon for the Louvre in Paris, cut in half after falling into the hands of the King of Prussia, coveted by Hermann Göring and taken by Adolf Hitler before being rescued by a team of commando double-agents from an Austrian salt mine where it was destined to be blown apart with dynamite.

This work, completed in 1432 and one of the first ever oil paintings, is one of the great masterpieces of European art.  The central panel is dominated by the Lamb which represents Christ, and he is surrounded by angels and the faithful.

Blood flows from the Lamb into a chalice as a reference to the foundation of the Christian faith - the Messiah gives his life to save humankind.

But then, continuing my trip, to Passchendaele, where, from July to November 1917, almost 600,000 men shed their blood for the world to live in peace.....

The trouble is, at least this is what I felt, nothing can really convey the appalling discomfort of the trenches, let alone the noise, the filth, the agony of wounds or the pain of death. In the Passchendaele Museum, in a dark but completely dry and odourless reconstruction of a dugout, a man, who could have been my grandfather, sits on a toilet seat above a bucket. I am sorry, but this just doesn't begin to show the sacrifice each soldier made - even the ones who survived.

In a room upstairs in the chateau, students are told about the weapons used in the war to end all wars. These young people, even the teacher, are too young now to have known relations who took part in this slaughter. There is now a whole industry, an educational industry yes, but one that now profits from the exploitation of a ghastly memory. Are we better for it? Has the memory of the war to end all wars done anything to stop further wars?

New in 2024 is an Immersive Experience, where visitors are supposed to find themselves, according to the brochure, 'right in the middle of the landscape of 1917.'  To be honest, I think the final five minutes of Blackadder goes forth is more effective.....

Don't misunderstand me. Please. I don't think it wrong to remember the dead. I don't think it wrong to have museums that collect memorabilia of bygone times. But I find myself strangely unemotional as I pass through these chambers.

 

It is fittingly grey and wet in Ieper (Ypres).  The Menin Gate is under wraps, itself the victim of time and the weather.  The glorious Cloth Hall and Belfry have been miraculously reconstructed after the almost total destruction of this town in the war (to end all wars).  Inside the 'In Flanders Fields Museum' (Now more than ever, the brochure tells us) 'you can explore the Great War through authentic artefacts, videos,, projections, and personal stories.  You'll journey into the memories of the First World War.  The past has never been so close.....'

I wonder. It is a more effective museum (in my opinion) than that at Passchendaele, and some of the technology (for example videos of actors dressed as soldiers explaining such things as the use of gas, with subtitles in four languages) is impressive. 

But in nearby St Martin's Cathedral (also a complete reconstruction) I find this picture which tells an earlier story of death and destruction, and which also brings the past nearer:

The Siege of Ypres in 1383. Joris Liebaert, 1657. 

Poor old Ypres. Attacked by the Bishop of Norwich and his men in 1383, it managed to resist the siege, but, according to Wikipedia, Ypres never really recovered. The entire hinterland of the city had been destroyed and trade with England was seriously compromised.  Over the centuries the place was conquered by the French and later given to the Hapsburgs.  Then, in 1914, it stood in the way of the Germans and the Schlieffen Plan, so it got razed to the ground.

As I said, the history of man is written in blood, and perhaps the worst thing is that it is usually the blood of the poor that is sacrificed so that the rich get richer.... Think Alfred Nobel. Think Lord Armstrong (of Cragside). Think British Aerospace (the largest defence contractor in Europe).

Tyne Cot Cemetery
(the largest Commonwealth war cemetery in the world in terms of burials)

Please don't misunderstand me. I mean no disrespect. The commemoration of war and its dead probably is a good thing, even though the human race still seems intent on destroying itself. Perhaps Putin and Trump et al should spend some time at Tyne Cot and Ypres (though I suspect they would shrug and dismiss the experience on some pretext or other)?

However desensitised we have become it is still inevitably moving to stand amongst the graves, and to hear the recital of names and ages in the visitor centre. 

I think of my grandfathers, and think of their suffering, their sacrifice. My father's father was about thirty when he, a schoolmaster, joined up. My mother's father would have been about the same age but had previously served in the Boer War. The Great War (to end all wars) didn't kill either of them, but it marked them, and they sacrificed a part of their lives, their peace, for all of us.

And there is no escape. On our return to Brugge I pass a plaque on the wall near our hotel

Here in this crypt

rest the ashes of

political prisoners

from the Dachau concentration camp

When will we ever learn?

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

John McCrae

*   *    *    *    *

This piece is dedicated to all those everywhere who were sacrificed in war for others.

If you found this at all interesting, the following link will take you to a memoir I wrote in remembrance of my paternal grandfather who was wounded in the First World War but who died at the age of 86 with a piece of shrapnel still embedded in his arm:

https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2012/11/remembrance.html

I also recommend the following:

Edmund Blunden: Undertones of War

Robert Graves: Goodbye to All That

Siegfried Sassoon: Selected Poems 

R C Sherriff: Journey's End

And 

King and Country, a film directed by Joseph Losey, with Dirk Bogarde and Tom Courtenay 

Brussels 2017 - Bonbons

Je vous ai apporté des bonbons
Parce que les fleurs c'est périssable

In 1842, Charlotte Brontë, unhappily infatuated with her teacher, Constantin Héger, took refuge in the Cathedral of Brussels (the Cathédrale Saint-Michel et Sainte-Gudule), 

and, despite being a protestant vicar's daughter, took confession there.  

Though I am neither a daughter, nor a catholic, nor was my father a protestant parish priest, I sympathise.  

Just as complicated is to find a number of books in the gutter one morning.  One of them about Riyadh.  Another by Oriana Fallaci, once the darling of Italian journalists, though by her death in 2006, reviled by such as the dying Christopher Hitchens for her conservatism and reactionary views on the moslem world.  

When I repassed a few hours later, the only book left on the road was the picture book about Riyadh.

In the meantime, not unlike Charlotte B and her sister Mel (sorry, Emily, Ed.), my maternal grandmother found herself in Brussels at an early stage of her life....  Being one of many children of a man born in the same year as Queen Victoria, I doubt not that my grandmother had little idea of where she was, but that's another story.  Whatever the similarities with the sisters Brontë, Marjorie Cecil Napier Ford tripped downstairs in her 'finishing school' in Brussels and fell into a coma.

Cross-written letters tell the story, but don't blame Brussels.  Despite the panic, and her mother's frantic race to look after her daughter, granny did recover, was shipped out to India, introduced and married to Major Robert James McMullin in Colombo on the twenty second day of July, 1920, gave birth to four children on a tea plantation in Kerala, and lived at least to distinguish me in my infancy from her spaniels.

Ah!  I remember my grandmother, all Bakelite telephone, pine splinters on the stairs, the game of halma, attics and dogs.  She was beautiful, she was gentle, kind, ghostly and smelled of Brussels.  I was very small when she curled up with cancer, but I know her grave well.

Ah! Les Bonbons! (Because flowers are perishable!)  

Belgium attracts.  Belgium fascinates.  Even if we don't know where it is, have never been, wouldn't know a Walloon from a Flamande, we have Waterloo in our Abba collection, Bruges in our dvds, and Ypres in our sub-conscious, with the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing on our bucket list.

This is what Belgium may have looked like when my paternal grandfather, L/Cpl Thomas Henry Gibbs, fell with a jagged fragment of white-hot metal in his arm on November 25th 1916.  Churned mud and bare trees.  Grainy mist and a sky like suet pudding (not something you find every day....)

That's how it recurs in my imagination, whatever I do.

But we do not remember things as they are.  We recreate everything to suit our prejudice, our taught experience.  

My mother's mother didn't live in Victorian times; she lived in her here and now in three dimensions and full colour.  My father's father was blown up in Dolby sound and came down in Technicolor.

Writing as William Crimsworth, the narrator of The Professor, Charlotte Brontë had this to say.  This is Belgium, reader - look!  Don't call the picture a flat or a dull one - it was neither flat nor dull when I first beheld it.  When I left Ostend on a mild February Morning and found myself on the road to Brussels, nothing could look vapid to me....  Well! and what did I see?  I will tell you faithfully.  Green, reedy swamps, fields fertile but flat, cultivated in patches that made them look like magnified kitchen-gardens; belts of cut trees, formal as pollard willows, skirting the horizon; narrow canals, gliding slow by the roadside, painted Flemish farm-houses, some very dirty hovels, a grey, dead sky, wet road, wet fields, wet house-tops, not a beautiful, scarcely a picturesque object met my eye along the whole route, yet to me, all was beautiful, all was more than picturesque....

Ah, Charlotte!  How prescient!  How to see a wasteland as productive of milk and honey?  How to sense the underlying wonder of travel, the pulsing delight in moving away from the mundane to thrill to the excitement of watching others in their sloughs.  

But this is the conundrum of nationalism, the wasting disease of conservatism.  We want to have our homes, untouched, to come back to.  But we soo want to travel and taste the delights that others take for granted.

You can have my parsley....

This petty provincialism denies our shared pasts.  A little trick I used to play on my classes was to ask whether anyone had heard of Ox-tail?  Ox-tail soup?  Perhaps ox tongue (not many takers there) or ox heart, or, maybe, an ox-cart?  But then who had ever tasted an ox steak?  Filet mignon de ox?  Ox sirloin?  

And so, when we had agreed that steaks came from boeuf, we wondered where the boeuf tails, tongue, heart, liver, kidneys and other unspeakable bits ended up.

And, surprise, surprise, we made a discovery.  The French-speaking Norman invaders, who made up and gave us the ruling class, ate the best bits, the beef.  The working classes, who were more likely to speak a bit of Saxon or Old English, and who couldn't afford the good things in life, had the offal, the bits of ox, that never got near to veal or beef....

[And that's what gave us Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson! born New York, 19/06/64]

But I digress.....

When I was a child, I spake as a child, and had a school friend who spoke French.  He lived in Belgium, which was quite extraordinary as we had picture books of the war and Belgium had been destroyed.  But, he told us, from under his very suspicious blond crew cut, that in Belgium people spoke not only French but another language, which I thought he told us was Walloon, though no one ever corrected me on this...

He also told us that there was a thing there called The Atomium which was a giant Iron Molecule you could get inside.

Do you really wonder why we think Europe is dangerous?

This is the molecule.  I couldn't get inside it because every Belgian that ever there was was trying to get in, today, because, today was the day they remembered their dead.  (Or rather, it was a public holiday for All Saints and All Souls and there didn't seem to be anywhere else to take the kids.....)

But I digress....

I like fish....

But I also like rabbit.

Though for a moment I thought the cherries might have been part of the animal.

In general I prefer my road kill to be more artistically presented:

And I like to see my food participating in the rituals:

You could be mistaken in thinking that Belgians tend to be grey, and very passive,

But it's not at all true.  They are very colourful:

And they love to drink, sociably:

I'll say that again.

They love to drink.  Sociably:

No, really.  They are very sociable.  It's a real cafe society,

Where one always feels welcome:

And there would never be even the slightest hint of Russian interference.

After all, this is the home of the European Parliament (Nigel Farage et al.....ndr)

Sorry.  Wrong picture.


This is the home of the European Parliament:

And this is what Belgians do at night.....

That is, when they are not lighting up the Town Hall......

Or rather not lighting it up because the Politie are preserving us from harm,

I wonder what my Grandmother thought of all this, when she recovered from her fall?  

I wonder what Charlotte and Emily Brontë thought of it all when they wandered the streets as Flaneuses?

I'll ask someone.....Excusez-moi?

Nah, not interested.  I'll try someone else.....

Mademoiselle?  Excusez-moi?

Occupied.... One more try......  

Monsieur.  Excusez-moi, mais connaisez-vous Charlotte Brontë?

Oriana Fallaci?  Bien sur. Elle est morte depuis quelques ans....

Ah well!  Sad, really, as I had brought her some sweets, as flowers are perishable....

Puis les bonbons c'est tellement bon

Bien que les fleurs soient plus présentables

Jacques Brel (again....)

Les Bonbons (1964)

Bien.  I'll to confession. To join Charlotte in the great Cathedral of Ste Gudule where vespers are taking place.....

An odd whim came into my head.  In a solitary part of the Cathedral six or seven people still remained kneeling by the confessionals.  In two confessionals I saw a priest..... I took a fancy to change myself into a Catholic and go and make a real confession to see what it was like.....a little wooden door inside the grating opened, and I saw a priest leaning his ear towards me. I was obliged to begin, and yet I did not know a word of the formula with which they always commence their confessions.  It was a funny position..... I commenced with saying I was a foreigner and had been brought up a Protestant.  The priest asked if I was a Protestant then.  I could not tell a lie, and said 'yes'.  He replied that in that case I could not 'jouir du bonheur de la confesse'; but I was determined to confess, and at last he said he would allow me because it might be the first step towards returning to the true church.  I actually did confess -  a real confession....

So sad. 

So like Theresa May and David Davis....  

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

So like all of us, singing for alms under concrete forms while the world walks by.