This weekend whilst spending some time in Europe I decided that I should make the pilgrimage to the battlefields of the Somme to try and join the dots to two great uncles of the dragon that were killed in WW1. We tried once before when staying in Paris a few years ago, but with a dodgy wifi connection not allowing us to thread the needle of information vs. misinformation it didn't happen. As it turns out we had been within 1km of one of them as I found out Saturday.
For followers of my previous vehicular follies in Europe, I had tyre dramas again which is another funny story, but not appropriate for this posting. Needless to say, any vehicle in future that I ever drive in Europe will have wooden wheels and a horse attached. A Saturday afternoon in rural France is somewhere you never want to be with a flat tyre and discovering you dont even have a space saver spare, only a clunky compressor and a bottle of unpressurised finelec stuff, a plastic gadget to remove the valve ( that didn't work)and a little booklet written and illustrated by the same Chinaman that does the assembly drawings and text for IKEA. Basically useless. Add to the fact that Rural and City France closes at midday on Saturday and doesn't open again until 08.00hrs Monday. Nothing went to plan, but that is a metaphor for my life anyway and in some perverse counter statement, prefer it that way.
The original intention was to drive to the town of Albert then the few kilometres to Mericourt L'Abbe and search out the Heilly grave site, locate the first of the brothers and then drive the 100 odd kilometres to Englefontaine to the other. It didn't happen that way as the compulsion to pay respects to the fallen of both world wars is too great. It is not morbid curiosity, it becomes a genuine need to do this, however there must be hundreds of these sites along the sides of the road, in farmers fields, down tracks and as I was to find out with Englefontaine, was a passageway between two houses, down a lane and was land bordered on all sides by other peoples back gardens. You couldn't possibly visit them all and you have to mentally switch off the emotion as you sail past yet another direction sign to yet another site. You only hope that someone at sometime will go and visit each of these places. Perhaps other families on similar pilgrimages will linger longer than to take an obligatory photograph and truly reflect on what they see before them of what politicians have done and senseless alliances that made the outcome a foregone conclusion before the first shot was even fired.
After losing 4 hours with the unplanned tyre issue I managed to get to the second site. It is amazing to find that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission organise things really well and these places are immaculately kept. Lawns neatly mowed and edged, gravesite plants neatly tended. Magnificent places if you didn't know the horrible circumstances of their being there in the first place and it seems entirely perverse to have a small piece of Australia/ NZ/UK/US etc. so far from home and as well tended as the most fastidiously maintained garden anywhere.
Reading the grave sites and recounting the amounts of young kids barely able to shave amongst their number, is stomach churning even after all this time has passed. The endless headstones marked with " an Unknown Soldier of X country known only to God". Being a confirmed Agnostic of some standing I can't help but think God bless all of the souls lying there if such a supreme being exists, if it does not, then God help us all. For to see row upon row of neat gravesites of a wiped out generation, it would shake the faith of the Pope. Who could not agree, on witnessing these sights, that any supreme being that purportedly sees all and has the power to change circumstances was having a day off when all this happened. Would rather have had the miracle of war not happening than having that God fella choosing instead to let that good looking chap with the beard and the nice white dress, feed some large mythical crowd of people cod fillet sandwiches and a glass of tipple of their choice to demonstrate might and power. For me nothing adds up with religion.
Sunday, I drove to Fromelles, some 50km in the other direction. It was cold, it was wet and it seemed strangely apt. There is a sense of foreboding at the place however. A wrong has been righted,but I think someone had forgotten the "Lest We Forget " statement, as forgotten they all were for best part of 90 years.
Then moved on to Villers Brettoneux, Pozieres, Thiepval and a whole host of other places that I had read about, even seen before, but was now seeing in a new light knowing that I had made a connection that had been an ambition since first hearing 35 years ago, of two Lincolnshire teenage idealists eager for adventure they couldn't get on the farm , that took the kings shilling and never came home. I heard it from the lips of their sister(the dragon's long dead grandmother) who never forgot her brothers.
So to make a long story longer, my familial mission has been accomplished. Crosses carefully placed on both gravesites, tears shamelessly shed for people I never knew, or knew of me, and a broken circle of hearts, minds, years and miles completed. As good a bad day as I have had to date in my life thus far.
