The Baird's Tale

<div class="page traditional" style=" background-color: #fff; "> <article> <header> <h1 style=" font-family: 'Open Sans'; color: #000;">Pilgrim's Progress</h1> James Rimmer </header> <div class="main"> <img src="/uploads/548ca61e2c56a.jpg" class="title-pic" alt=""/> An Essay The hit song of the summer 100 years after the last summer of innocence, a poppy dance mix pumped out:They tell me I'm too young to understand They say I'm caught up in a dream Well life will pass me by if I don't open up my eyes Well that's fine by fineSo wake me up when it's all over When I'm wiser and I'm older All this time I was finding myself And I didn't know I was lost. Staring at the grave of some soldier 'unknown unto god' the plea to be woken 'when it's all over' struck a cord I must say. These men were certainly too young to understand. 100 years later I wander the pastoral world of their hell, visiting the only rocky formations in these parts - the arch and the obelisk. At first these outcrops sneak up on you. A flash as you drive by - passing a tractor your eye catches a flash of white, a smear of a low wall, a burst of botanical colour. Or a French flag contrasting with the green trees and the low beige crosses at its feet a flurry of stone.  Exiting the highway and entering the land, they outcrops start to jump out. Martinpuich lies in wait at a gap in the bedges, half way up a hill, its rows leaping into your slight lines as you strain your neck to see around the corner looking for trucks. As you clench in surprise Martinpuich calmly welcomes with A Solider of the Great War. Unknown unto God. Everyone has their paths through these fields. Australians visit Pozieres, a collection of red houses and the only restaurant in this part of the Somme Valley. (The ghoulisth Tommy's, decorated with the lists of Australia's war dead) They stop by their Obelisk, they visit the Old Windmill and look across the three yards of open field to Moo-Cow farm, the Australian 'objective'. 'Objective' strikes as the wrong word, seeing it in person. More like an unreachable star. Objective implies sense, logic. It does not capture the clear insanity staring back across you from those open farmers' fields. South Africans drive past Pozieres to Longueval. There at Delville Wood, they were trapped for seven days and seven nights fending off counter attacks in July 1916. (Again the jargon of the military implies an unrealized order. The Battle of Delville Wood was a hell of cornered beasts locked together. There was no plan, no strategy, just men unleashing unimaginable violence upon each other. Of the 3,153 South African men who entered the wood, only 780 made roll call after their relief.)The dead now lie across the road, and the sweeping South African National Memorial embraces all in its stony wings, pulling you deep into the wood. It is the dark forest of Hansel and Gretal, it is the Hundred Acre Wood of Winnie the Poh, and at its center lies a castle, protecting South Africa's pain, it's grief, in all its complexities, in all its languages. Unlike other Commonwealth memorials which are make you look up, or are to be stood upon, South Africa takes you inside the heart of her pain. The British have the most rigerous Somme piligramage. Their's is a trek as they work up from Albert, their bus tours of seniors and students leaving poppies at each site they visit. They tack up and down the road visiting the some 15,000 buried in more than 10 sites. Turning left at Pozieres they reach their peak - Theipval. Like most of the samll towns between Albert and Bapaume Theipval is dead. It is nothing but a cluster of red brick houses, and a rebuilt church. There is no life, no cafes, no community. Just houses and barns and warehousing for the French agro-industrial complex. Theipval is the largest British memorial in the world. A pile of arches it lists the 72,000 who went missing at the Somme and subsequent battles. 72,000.Theipval pushes the limits of the human capacity to comprehend. Taller than the Menin Gate you strain your neck looking up to the top of the panels. Its arches are over bearing, its lists tumbling down from the grey sky it seems. It is too much, its all too much. The pilgrimages have aged. Theipval had to be rebuilt after the original pink brick was worn down by the bitter Somme rain. Canada's sites in particular have grown old, very old. Their standard design of a garden protected by a series of low hedges, with a low alter in the center and benches nestled among the bushes is for a different generation. Without the updated plaques like those the Australian's have added it is not for the modern pilgrim with their cameras and thirst for knowledge. Canada built Courcellette, Hill 62, Le Quensel and others for people who knew why they were there. Who needed space to sit, to cry. 100 years past, the distant cousins of the dead need knowledge not tears. New Zealand did not carve a pilgrim's path in France. Her dead lie all over the western front where they fell, with their comrades from Liverpool, Vancouver, Cape Town and Delhi. Their national column is outside Longeuval, down a farmer's road, past the pavement on a quiet hill. The obelisk reads "In Honour of the Men of the First New Zealand Division" Alone. New Zealand knew the dead were too far, the land too distant, for there to be pilgrims. So her monuments sit alone, existing for the birds, the sky, the fields, the rain, for God himself. Wet stone declaring simply “they died here.”Despite the closeness of the sites, the Pilgrims’ routes rarely intersect. Vimy Ridge, the Canadian National World War One Memorial, and one of the largest single Commonwealth Memorials, is but minutes from the largest German cemetery in France, and from part of the park you can see Notre-Dame de Lorette, the French National Military Cemetery. Yet no Canadian material, no Canadian tour takes you across the highway to Lorette or down the road to Neuville St-Vaast. 100,000 foes and friends lie minutes from Canada’s holiest site yet are ignored. Pilgrim routes are tunnels, the walls made of hedgerows, burrowing through the land, the society, and the world around them. They follow the pilgrim’s nation, the unit, the company, their specific relative, avoiding branching out. There is a certain irony that the visitors of some of the most powerfully collective monuments in western canon de-contextualize them, individualize them. Part of it must be a function of geography. A Canadian or an Australian who finds themselves on the Albert-Bapaume road has made a substantial trip, across oceans and continents and off the traditional tourist trail. Often part of their larger pan-European tour, their day in the Somme or at Ypres leaves them little time see anything but the greatest hits.The backpacking student doesn’t have the time or money to find Martinpuich’s 107 guests. The only people who are able to regularly break out of the tunnels are British school groups, of all people. Running into them at many sites it is clear that a combination of curriculum requirements and ease of access means they do much more in-depth pilgrimages. Their teachers make them wander Langemark reading the walls of the massacred German students. You can find them at Tynn Cot’s alcove to missing New Zealanders, filling out activity sheets. They fill up South Africa’s curved wings and make the quiet wood nosy. They are leaving as you arrive at Vimy, harried teachers ordering them back on the bus and their names fill the guest book at Neuville St-Vaast. Paper poppies left by British schoolchildren have become an added design element to all the sites, a regular response to "Their name liveth for evermore"Despite the different designs, narratives, and symbols of each nation’s site, all have a guest book. Generally tucked into a proactive alcove the cheap binder has slips of paper asking for date, name, nationality and any comments. The lists of guests show the pilgrim’s paths. At Ypres, it is a cross section of the Entente - Americans, French, Dutch, Belgians and Commonwealth. The deeper into rural France the more the pilgrims’ sort, with the French, American and Commonwealth forces peeling off to their own sites. Only Germans seem not to visit their dead. The guest books of their sites are English, their visitors overwhelmingly Anglophones from across the world. As much of the English speaking world avoided direct 20th century German rule, Germans have avoided the emotional tag of ‘oppressor’. Instead they are the more abstract and difficult to process ‘foe’. We visit their dead because we struggle to understand who we killed.Because we are too old to understand. </div> </article> </div>

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Issue 4