Europe @ 2.4 km/h (20 page)

And what was the basis of this superiority? That a Christian God ordained it? Some thought so — though not the founder of their religion. That they had the guns? Some said might was right, but in that case we ought to applaud massacres and terrorists everywhere. Two world wars should have put paid to the myth of European moral superiority for all time. But this belief in the comparative insignificance of other people’s lives — the Eurocentric conceit — continues to blight our vision much closer to home. When the Government of Australia, in 2008, proposed to apologise to the Stolen Generations, certain newspaper columnists focused on the legal precedent and the issue of compensation. One would have thought an apology was the least that those wrenched from their mothers’ arms deserved. But among us still are those of European descent who selectively activate their cerebral powers to argue that there must have been good reason behind such actions. Perhaps they cannot bear the thought that, under the veneer of rational power, Europeans and their descendants, which means most of us, could be just as savage, just as brutal, as any ‘primitive’ tribesman in the jungles of Africa — or the Simpson Desert.

580-582 km

Today I will be confronted by a farmer with a rifle, and cop my own souvenir of war — not a bullet, as a tour guide gave me at Gallipoli, but a rusty English water bottle. ‘Thank you’ hardly seems adequate.

Within the space of a few days I shall visit three battlefields — Ypres, Waterloo and the Ardennes — not because I have a particular interest in military history but because you cannot hope to understand Europe without sensing how it has been shaped by war. Still, it seems wise to follow the dictum of Spanish historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto,
¹⁶
‘Where received information conflicts with experience, the latter is the more reliable guide’.

For eighteen years Sharon Uyttenhove-Evans, a Queenslander now in her early 40s, has conducted tours to the Ypres battlefields. Her father was in the air force; a great-grandfather in the Queen’s 16th Lancers fought in the Boer War and on the Western Front in World War I. So hers is a family drawn to history like a magnet.

They were living in Germany in the
annus mirabilis
of 1989 when Sharon, travelling around Europe, fell in love with Bruges (as she prefers to call it). ‘It just had everything I like. Small, safe, cosy, drop-dead gorgeous.’ So, I ask, why is there a Belgium?
If
anyone knows, Sharon will
. Yet her answer, too, is historical. ‘The idea was to make a buffer zone originally, between the Dutch and the defeated French after the Napoleonic wars.’ ‘Yes I know,’ I reply, ‘That’s why there
was
a Belgium, but surely keeping the Dutch and French apart isn’t reason enough any more?’ Sharon concedes the point — but before we can explore the matter further it’s time to be off.

As she drives us out the 60 or so kilometres to the killing fields of the first Europe-wide war for 100 years — the first since the conflict that led to the creation of the Belgian buffer — our guide gives us a thumbnail sketch of why a war triggered by an assassination on the other side of Europe should have erupted in Belgium first.

‘The Germans could have invaded France by the Swiss Alps. But the border had medieval fortresses. Instead they gave the Belgian king, Albert I, an ultimatum, “Let us through or we invade.” Belgium was allied by treaty to Britain …’ And Belgium’s geography master was just as cruel as its history master, for it lay on the direct route between the two principal foes, Britain and Germany.

The four battles of Ypres have been exhaustively documented, nowhere more vividly than by Les Carlyon in
The Great War
. Suffice it for a visitor to know that the Germans’ overriding ambition was to break through to the Channel ports, which would have left them poised to strike at England. And that the Allies’ grim resolve was to prevent them.

In the Battle of Passchendaele — now Sharon has parked the minivan on a slight rise in the ribbon of asphalt so we can see for ourselves — on those gentle indentations in the landscape that you would be exaggerating to call valleys, ‘for every metre of ground 35 British soldiers died’. Directing our gaze to Passchendaele Ridge off to our right, she points out that the Germans occupied ‘the
high
ground
’. They could see, and fire down on, Allied troops; they controlled the water sources, and could stem their flow.

Late in the morning we arrive at Tyne Cot just as the sun has won its own battle against intermittent rain. We alight from the van and spend twenty minutes contemplating mass slaughter and individual dissolution where they come together in a sight that can always reduce me to tears — a war cemetery. Under these bright green lawns lie 7000 unidentified remains, ‘known unto God’. The uniformity of many inscriptions can leave you unmoved, and then an individual utterance asserting faith in the face of experience — ‘Some day we’ll understand’ — breaks you up. How strange, I reflect, that we cannot hope to take in the statistical enormity of war: 65 million under arms; ten million battle deaths; twenty million irretrievably wounded; two million Belgians fleeing their country in panic. But the impact on the individual — and on their eternally serried ranks — we can.

Sharon’s words have the power to make you see beyond the graves. ‘For the first ten or twelve years after the war, the Belgians lived like cattle. Nothing grew in these fields. The churches you see in Belgium — apart from the great cathedrals — are 80 years old, maximum.’ When she mentions the gas attacks at Second Ypres in 1915 I ask whether it is true the Germans were not the first to use poison gas and she confirms this. ‘The French were using gas in February of ’15. African lives’ — those of Zouaves, Moroccans and Senegalese — ‘were the first to be snuffed out by mustard gas, phosgene and “yperite”’ — gases outlawed by Europeans as contrary to civilised (European) norms.

At this point Sharon could see some light relief was needed. She recalled the time when King Albert’s son Prince Philippe went on national TV and announced, in all seriousness and bad Flemish, ‘My wife is pregnant — and it is from me’.

World War I is still full of danger, still taking lives 90 years after the Armistice. ‘Every year there are still three or four casualties from World War I shells,’ says Sharon. With half a billion still lying around, not all of them ‘live’, it will take 60 to 100 years to render the battlefields safe.

Sharon is a regular visitor to the farm we’ve parked opposite now. With permission I photograph pig-and-vegetable farmer Roger Vanderginste who is holding an 18-pounder cordite shell. And now he’s confronting me with a rifle. Sharon says not to worry. ‘Last week he tried to throw a hand grenade at me.’

In mid-afternoon we stop a few metres from a roundabout that looks identical to any suburban intersection in your own hometown. Sharon invites us to look along the gutter about 10 metres from the crossroads. ‘Seven years ago the remains of six Germans were found right there, in a dugout. Blue clay preserves bodies. The Diggers called this “the hottest spot on earth”. Hellfire Corner. At the height of battle there was an explosion there every five seconds.’ Not far from here we turn in to a roadside restaurant for afternoon tea — and another break from the gloom of unremitting war. More humorous relief we certainly need, but the last thing I am expecting is a belly laugh.

Sharon and her husband live not far from West Vlieter, the Trappist monastery that brews Leffe, ‘the world’s best beer’. It must be handy to have the monastery so near, I remark. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘every two weeks I ring up the monks to place an order.’ Mindful of the famous Trappist vow of silence, I’m intrigued how she handles this. Sharon, who can tell what I’m thinking from my furrowed brow, wastes no time in putting me out of my misery. ‘They have a telephone answering service.’

Oh? ‘Yes, they got a special dispensation from the Vatican.’ When I can stop laughing long enough, I ask, ‘And what does it say? “I’m sorry, we can’t speak at the moment.”?’ ‘No. It gives delivery hours and asks you to leave a message. When there’s no beer left, the voice says, “All our beer is sold out. Please wait for further information. And, if you have empties, here’s where you drop the bottles off …”’

Hill 60. It was one of the few patches of turf fought over in both world wars and, with three shells landing per square metre, one of the most fiercely contested on the Western Front. Its labyrinth of tunnels was so extensive that much of the fighting was underground. In two days the British gained three-and-a-half miles for the loss of 60,000 troops. But again it is the individual gesture that means more. I see where the ashes of John Olliff, who fought in World War II and died in 1987, are interred with his father’s from the First War.

And so to Ypres itself. Founded in the ninth century, its prosperity was built on cloth production. At no point did the Germans capture it (not for want of trying: total battle deaths in West Flanders alone for 1914-18 were 450,000) but everything built up over eleven centuries was destroyed. ‘By the end of the war,’ says Sharon, ‘it was said that a man on horseback could see everything in the town.’

And Menin Gate. Just under 55,000 names. Every Armistice Day 55,000 poppy petals descend through the skylights. The highest number of VCs won by any unit were awarded to members of the Royal Australian Military Corps. Sharon wastes no words in summing them up, ‘Very brave men’.

The danger posed even now by World War I is still visible a metre under Flanders fields. Late in the afternoon we meet ‘The Diggers’ (De Diggers). Not Australians, but men and boys of Vlaanderen, volunteers who have given up their leisure time to excavate small patches of farmland with the owners’ permission. Sharon speaks with barely controlled emotion. ‘They’re really concerned with finding men and giving them a decent burial. I don’t think it’s asking too much — considering that they gave their lives for the freedom of this country — that they get a decent burial instead of being bulldozed.’ As of three weeks before my visit, De Diggers had unearthed 214 bodies. The demands of the living — even prospects of wealth — frequently take precedence over respect for the dead. Construction companies are generally unco-operative towards the Diggers, says Sharon. ‘Often the companies will say, “We don’t care about that. We will just pour concrete over it.”’

Eight to ten of them dig in all weathers. I photograph three of the Diggers with a 40 kg German howitzer shell they found earlier in the day. While one of them, Pol Lefèvre, is talking to me, an exclamation issues from a new trench about 10 metres away. Thibaut Milleville — who turns eighteen today — has found a rusty water bottle. Older heads identify it as English, 1916. It looks worthless. Perhaps that is why he says I can have it. ‘No, it’s Pol’s pot,’ I quip, wishing it away. Clearly no museum would want something in this condition but it is still with a sense of jettisoning a historical relic that I quietly dispose of it back at the hostel this evening.

In Ypres Sharon told me the story of an expat in a Bruges boutique looking at a tapestry, who said to the shopkeeper, ‘Is this made in Belgium?’ whereupon the shopkeeper drew herself up to her full height and retorted, ‘No, they are not made in Belgium, they are made in Vlaanderen’.

586 km

This Sunday finds me on a platform at Brugge Station, in the care of two stout Flemish yeomen and station assistants, Jan and Ivan, who wait with the crucial ramp for the arrival of the train that will bear me off to Brussels. A statuesque woman — in her mid-70s, I would judge — approaches Jan, her ticket extended. At first I pay little attention.

‘Monsieur,’ she asks him in French, ‘could you tell me what platform I must wait for my train on?’

Jan’s lips actually curl. ‘I do not speak French,’ he says in English.

Finding this highly unlikely, I ask him, ‘Not even a little?’

‘No,’ he glares at me, diverting his wrath from the francophone woman he has left standing there, amid rising anger all round.

I think she’s getting a rough deal but don’t want to upset Jan on whom, after all, I depend to get me out of here. So I open conversation with the
grande dame
, explaining that I can speak a little French and asking if I may translate into English for her. She obliges, Jan dismissively indicates the correct platform, and Madame stands transfixed between thanking and reproaching her reluctant informant.