De Lork, Kemmel, 22nd February 1995
A day on the move and of moving impressions
To Ypres in bright sun. Museum in the rebuilt Cloth Hall; old fashioned and uncritical.
The Menin gate. A veil of 54,000 names of those who fell in the Ypres Salient before 16th August 1917 and who have no known grave. Mysteries lie behind the differences between recorded names and enlisted names.
Sanctuary Wood – Hill 62 Museum and café. Doubt that the café has had any money spent on it since the 1960s. Decorated with faded photos, souvenirs made from shell cases, a clock made from a helmet, a grandfather clock case built from shells. Rigid dummies in ill-fitting uniforms surrounded by rusty rifles and battlefield detritus.
Hill 60 Museum. Tatty and dusty, peeling wallpaper and crumbling plaster. A show of curling browned photos with barely legible captions and ancient guns behind wire netting. What is Hill 60? No explanation.
Langemark German cemetery for 10,000 war dead. A Wreath of Remembrance marks the Kameraden Grab (Comrades Grave) for the thousands of unidentified dead discovered in the fields and isolated burial sites during the clearance of the battlefields. Oak trees, national tree of Germany, dominate the sombre atmosphere. Four brooding figures by Emil Krieger watch over it all.
Eight o’clock. Last Post at the Menin Gate, a bitterly cold starry night, great-coated figures stand under the litany of death – one so young he’s separated from the conflict by three generations. Haunting notes fly up into the void.