After 100 years of official remembrance, the First World War may be fading from memory, but LUKE BOWLEY and ISABEL CALDER discover battlefields that still throw up poignant reminders of ‘the war to end all wars’.
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n this landscape of pain and death, over The leather from soldiers’ boots survives time many scars have been unveiled. remarkably well, although the boots are Local people live with knowledge of the often torn apart. Dull, grey marbles of ‘iron harvest’, tonnes of shells, shrapnel hide among the bombs and bullets uncovered dirt. After rain they shine. Their stories are now every year by farmers and told by what they have Bursting from shells in the construction workers. But it left behind, reminding sky and scattering wildly in is the smaller items that are all directions, this deadly us perhaps of a most haunting. hail would claim the lives of freezing and terrified scores of men in an average, young man who held a pocket watch with Pocket watches are not uneventful day on the numb fingers. unusual. After 100 years in Western Front. Even fragile the earth the metal glimmers medicine bottles can be in the mud, a trickle of chain still attached. found, their tinted dark glass cracked from Mint-green verdigris fogs up the cracked head to toe. The bent remains of rifles are glass like a shield from further trauma. Their pulled to the surface by ploughing. Often, fragile hands are stopped in time. their damp and rotten wood is still intact. They look like fallen branches. It is hard not to wonder about the secrets they hold. Were they parting gifts from wives On the battlefields of Northern France and and girlfriends, mothers and fathers? Were Flanders, agriculture is still a dominant way they passed down through the generations? of life. Ploughing and the building of new Did their owners make it home? roads, homes and supermarkets will bring them once more into the daylight. Looking at the empty farming fields today, it’s hard to understand the blood, sweat and In these places brave men risked all. Some tears they’ve witnessed. Birds scatter from were rewarded with their lives, while others the trees when mud squelches under tractor weren’t so lucky. The sad truth is that not one tyres. Otherwise there is stillness and quiet man who fought here is still alive today. And in these foggy acres. Yet the earth guards a so their stories are now told by what they story. Shells smeared with blood-red rust have left behind, reminding us perhaps of a slowly rot away; many are still deadly a freezing and terrified young man who held century on. Smothered in clay, battered and a pocket watch with numb fingers while he heavily punctured steel helmets decay. served his country and thought of home.
Mind’s Eye Kent | January 2020
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