Returning to Flanders

A war never ends. This is one of the arguments against any war: a war never ends. Even when peace is declared, even when the armies have left and the generals are counting their decorations, a war continues to hang, like a menacing scythe, over the local population. Not only here, but in any battlefield, anywhere in the world.

Luc Dehaene, Mayor of Ypres, 2010

Lille Gate, Flanders, 1919

Yes, there was no doubt about it. It is the big pasture at R33 on the map. How often he came back there, he cannot think, but it is the place he remembers best, in all those wanderings from camp to billet. It is what he has been looking for, the reason of his detour by out-of-the-way Hondebecq, instead of following the usual route of tourists, visiting the Front.

The thing they call the Front, preeminently a place where men have died, soon saddened and sickened him, but at R33 perhaps one might catch a glimpse of the place where men had lived. Better here than anywhere else. The biggest and best known camp was only a war-time affair, inhabited by soldiers, cleared away since the Armistice. But the low two-storied old house, there at the back of the pasture, under the elms and round its cobble-edged manure heap, is a place that had kept its civilian character all through the War, and has survived, more or less intact, now that War is gone. He looks and looks and slowly he understands why it seems so strange. The pasture is empty. Not a soul stirs. Not even a pig is in sight. Leaning on the gate, he closes his eyes, to recall how it used to look.

Slowly the picture comes back. The quagmire about the gate, the “road” built of faggots and brick-ends from bombarded buildings that led to the house, the tents to the left, the transport parked to the right. He can feel the rough surface under his feet, can hear the lugubrious jollity of men doing odd jobs, the squawking and fidgeting of the mules, being as awkward as possible. At the corner of the barn, to the left, the cookers blacken everything, but on some of the hard ground just by the entry, the lip of the old dry moat it may have been, a party of men are falling in, to go up to the line for some special duty. He passes in front of them, watching the N.C.O. checking their equipment . . .

Unidentified Site in Postwar Flanders

He opens his eyes, and the sound, the sight, the odor vanish. Nothing! There is nothing there. Some birds are chattering in the elms, the greyish spring day is waning. It is no good standing there waiting for something to come back, which will never come back. At least one hopes not. He has still some time to put away before his train, he will follow the lane down to the pave, have a last glance from the high land there, and so back to the village and the station. That will be a good wind-up, for he feels that he will not come that way again.

From: The Spanish Farm Trilogy, R.H. Mottram