I have just finished reading Robert Macfarlane’s ‘The Old Ways’. It is a captivating book that weaves brilliant insight about our environment into fantastic stories. It is about many things but a lot about how paths and the landscape form individual and collective imaginations. It is about how they evidence historic and pre-historic patterns of existence. ‘Paths are the habits of the landscape’, Macfarlane writes. Humans, just as rivers or glaciers, incrementally construct these pathways through repetition. It is a charming and beguiling way to read humanity’s interaction with its environment.
But there are countless instances of less gentle and gradual interactions with the land. For two days I have walked along a Roman road that cut into the horizon without a hint of natural meander. It paid no mind to gradient or terrain. It shot, martially, towards the vanishing point. It felt like treading along a two millennia old scar. The difference, I think, is in the contravention of natural pattern.
To the side of this old road the plough has forced forgetting of older times. Each year the land is made new and what had been is churned into compost matter for the next crop. The chaff becomes the ground becomes the ground. And this ground does a good job of telling the viewer that all is well. There is a peace to fields of farmland. On the roadside, at the edges of fields, the occasional red poppy blooms.
Walking the Francigena from just before Arras to Reims is to walk along portions of the Western Front of 1914-18. The two lines converge for roughly two hundred kilometres. The landscape is dominated by farmland. The ground is ploughed. The names of the Somme, the Marne, the Aisne are not names of battles but addresses, fourth lines on envelopes.
Every day I walked this stretch I would see perhaps one or two military cemeteries. Some were small, with perhaps less than a hundred gravestones and some were enormous. They were in my guidebook as points of orientation. They are landscape scar tissue: in contravention of a natural meander. Everything about them exists to endure and to do so quietly but noticeably.
They exist as sort of clones of each other. Anyone who has seen one will know that every gravestone is near identical. If the site has more than 40 graves, it will have the ‘Cross of Sacrifice’ designed by Reginald Bloomfield. If it has more that 1,000, it will also have Lutyen’s ‘Stone of Remembrance’.
The need to commemorate thousands of dead resulted in these matching fields, eerie in their similitude. One evening, when camping in the village of Seraucourt-le-Grand, I walked up to visit the cemetery around the corner. It has 1,361 graves. At its entrance some purple heather had been planted. It is not something I had seen before or since in France. A purpose of the cemeteries is transplantation. To transform a corner of a foreign field, forever, into England.
The memorial abounded with text.
Engraved on the entrance:
The land on which this cemetery stands is the free gift of the French people for the perpetual resting place of those of the Allied armies who fell in the War of 1914-1918 and are honoured here.
Engraved on the Stone of Remembrance:
Their Name Liveth For Evermore
Engraved on the tombstone of J Wood of the Royal Engineers:
Gone But Not Forgotten
There is an insistence against forgetting. An insistence that continues: our yearly engagement with the First World War is a ceremonial act of remembrance.
My generation is, however, the generation that will forget. This year is the centenary of the armistice. 100 years is a point where memory becomes history. The last veteran of the war died in 2012. There is no living memory. There is only what we have already been given. And the land and what it can proffer.
This tipping point makes the First World War a difficult period to discuss. It simultaneously feels like the territory of the schoolroom and great-grandparents. Of school trips and deceased relatives. The inclusion of First World War poetry on nearly every GCSE syllabus means it feels trodden and overworked.
Walking through Champagne I sat under a blossom tree for my lunch along that Roman road. I took out my phone and looked up some poems that I hadn’t read before. I found one by Alan Seeger that hit me like a bullet. The whole poem can be found here and is worth reading but I’ll quote the first two stanzas:
In the glad revels, in the happy fêtes,
When cheeks are flushed, and glasses gilt and pearled
With the sweet wine of France that concentrates
The sunshine and the beauty of the world,
Drink sometimes, you whose footsteps yet may tread
The undisturbed, delightful paths of Earth,
To those whose blood, in pious duty shed,
Hallows the soil where that same wine had birth.
It is a poem that exists in the pivot between joyful beauty and painful bloodshed. Even the mildly irritating abab rhyme establishes this balance beam. It seemed to speak to a discomforting wrench of destination from memory. The peaceful easy vineyards could not be further from blood spilt in the trenches. Now, two stanzas from the middle:
I love to think that if my blood should be
So privileged to sink where his [an unnamed soldier] has sunk,
I shall not pass from Earth entirely,
But when the banquet rings, when healths are drunk,
And faces that the joys of living fill
Glow radiant with laughter and good cheer,
In beaming cups some spark of me shall still
Brim toward the lips that once I held so dear.
In this stanza, Seeger’s imagined blood becomes the land, indeed, becomes the wine. It’s transubstantive in a way that is both disgusting and perfect. It speaks to the difficulty of remembering. Of reconciling blood with Champagne.
In Reims I took a tour of the Taittinger cellars which had been used as bunkers in the First World War. Soldiers had made inscriptions on the walls. I asked the tour guide if they had stopped production during the war, expecting the obvious answer. “No, they kept going. 1914 was the best vintage of the twentieth century.”
The First World War seems to bear a unique association with the ground. More precisely, with mud. This is probably best cemented in my mind by a classic Blackadder/Baldrick exchange:
Blackadder: Now Baldrick, fix me some coffee, and make it taste slightly less like mud this time.
Baldrick: Not easy I’m afraid, Sir
Blackadder: And why is this?
Baldrick: ’cause it is mud. We ran out of coffee 13 months ago
The residing image of the war is that of the trenches. Of living inside the ground and being surrounded by it. Mary Borden, a poet and director of French field hospitals, wrote a poem called ‘The Song of the Mud’. Here is some of it:
This is the song of the mud,
The beautiful glistening golden mud that covers the hills like satin;
The mysterious gleaming silvery mud that is spread like enamel over the valleys.
[…]
Into its darkness, its thickness, its silence.
Slowly, irresistibly, it drew them down, sucked them down,
And they were drowned in thick, bitter, heaving mud.
Now it hides them, Oh, so many of them!
Under its smooth glistening surface it is hiding them blandly.
There is not a trace of them.
There is no mark where they went down.
The mute enormous mouth of the mud has closed over them.
The mud is obscuring and amorphous. It prevents memory. It is forbidding and it is dangerous. And yet, Borden rhapsodizes it. Why is this? Perhaps it is a gesture of marking the grave of the unknown soldier; of singing to the land where we think someone might have died. And so, the relationship of memory runs, perhaps unwillingly, in both directions. The land remembers and we remember the land.
