Category Archives: Remembrance

Fragments from the Battlefields 2018

Our most recent visit to the Battlefields of the Western Front WW1 is recalled here in a few fragments between 20th and 25th October 2018

As the sun went down at Ypres :

Trees like monuments,
Silhouettes against the sky,
Or reflections in still water.

Figures for memories,
Silhouettes sharing space
Silent alongside the living.

You who are there but not there,
Here but not here,
Gone but not forgotten.

Ode to a banana; at breakfast one morning my banana went missing

Woe to the memory
Of my lost banana,
Smiling crescent of the morning
Snatched from my plate
By one I called friend.

Wind at Thiepval:

When the wind blows the cradle will fall,
The sepulchre too.
When the bough breaks the leaves will fall,
The young men come tumbling after,
Down will come wreaths and memories
One by one by one by one.

Homage to mangelwurzels: mangelwurzels are always a feature of our Battlefields tours
Now bow your head
As mangelwurzels are moved
And we are too:
Heaped high, a harvest
Of huge roots
Of hidden sweetness.

Moon rise: a Hunter’s moon rose on the last evening of our tour

The mangelwurzel moon
Looks down with orange glow,
As home from the front we go.
Benevolent, gentle it’s blessing to bring,
As on the coach the students sing,
With joy in heart at end of day
And praise of moon and everything:
The moon emoji communicates it all.

Some Beatitudes

Blessed are the bagtakers
They will leave a smaller footprint on the earth

Blessed are the sandwich makers
They will share what they have with thousands.

Ploegestreet memorial: one of our Silcoatians is remembered here

Looking skywards
Into the blue,
Searching for you
Amongst the names

In our life and our believing
The love of God

JAL 25.10.2018

Born in the Elsie Inglis

The thirst for faith may take you far away
Or call you to serve the sick, the poor each day,
To make your mark and seeing all this say
You were born in the Elsie Inglis

Your heart of hope may open every door,
Open to every stranger and clothe more,
Ready to aid all others at you core:
You were born in the Elsie Inglis.

The way of love be ever in your sight,
As hand in hand we work in great delight
Ready to build the kindom of the light
We were born in the Elsie Inglis

JAL 25.11.2017

In memory of Elsie Inglis (1864-1917), doctor of medicine, Served in WW1, her 100th anniversary is this week. A maternity hospital is named after her in Edinburgh. Her memorial in St Giles cathedral includes the figures of Faith, Hope and Love.

The last day

Potatoes at the roundabout,
Herons by the canal,
Pointing the way
On the last day.
We make our way to Tyne Cot,
Last and biggest,
An endless wall of names
Row upon row of stones,
The dead held here forever.
This fought over land
That emerged from mud
Now a perpetual piece of Empire:
A never to be forgotten field.

25.10.2017 Tyne Cot

Grace

For everything there is seasoning ;
There’s a time to eat and a time to fast;
A time to fill your plate and a time to empty it;
A time for the first supper and a time for the last.

25.10.2017, Poperinge

At the name

We find them every time:
Those with names the same
As ours, the same age
As a brother or fellow student.

If this was your local regiment
Would you have volunteered?

“Not me I’m a coward.”
You’re no coward if you understand
That peace is a better way than war,
And you live as if that matters most.

24.10.2017 Fricourt

Air

A white butterfly flew into the crater,
Vast expanse of air lined with grass,
Held up by molecules, supported by atoms,
Summonsed by the mist, called to by birds.

24.10.2017 Lochnagar crater

The ridge

When you stand at the top of Thiepval ridge,
And see the way they came, weighed down,
And look across the landscape still bearing signs,
One hundred years later you are still speechless.

JAL 24.10.2017 Thiepval

The son

The sun shone on Langermaark today
Which I don’t remember it doing before.
The acorns crunched under our feet,
As the canopy of heroes oaks wept for their sons.
Here they lie; students, artists,
others too numerous to imagine,
With three crosses to recall
the promise made by the Son:
‘Today you will be with me in paradise’.

JAL 23.10.2017

A blessing a Hospital Farm cemetery

The blessing of the Creator, watching like the deer;
The blessing of the Son, running like the Hare;
The blessing of the Holy Spirit, hovering like the buzzard;
Bless those who tread this holy ground
And those waiting for the final trumpet sound.

JAL 23.10.2017

He descended into hell

Down, down, down
Into the dark earth,
Through the white limestone,
Along the barely lit tunnel,
Past the latrines,
The command post,
The altar and the well,
To eight days of dripping darkness
Of boards for beds and meals from cans,
Of icy water for washing and damp boots,
Before standing ready at the steps
In the cold light of predawn,
When your name’s called and the signal given,
The stone is moved
And like the tomb quitting gardener,
you emerge as a newborn lamb,
To the barrage and the bomb:
A shell bursts overhead
And it’s ‘killed in action’ on the telegram,
And ‘greater love has no one than this’
On the neatly cut stone.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

JAL 22.10.2017
Wellington Quarry, Arras, 1917.

Changing the world at Passchendaele

As together we remember the 100th Anniversary of the one of the bloodiest muddiest battles of WW1 I would like to share some glimpses of the ripples that spread out from Passchendaele and that we can still appreciate today. This way of using personal memoir to inform mass mourning and remembering has become something of a mark of our commemoration of the 100th anniversary of what, in the Register of Silcoates School, is interestingly referred to as The Great European War.

A father and a son
Abraham takes Isaac up a mountain and prepares to slaughter him. Wilfred Owen uses the same image in on of his war poems ‘The Old Man and the Young‘. There must have been many fathers and sons died in WW1, and I know one pair.
Harry and Ronald Moorhouse, father and son, both formerly of Silcoates School, died on the same day, at the Battle of Passchendaele: it is said less than thirty minutes separated their dying. They were professional soldiers. Harry had first served in South Africa, and was a contemporary of John Yonge the war-time Headmaster of Silcoates. The story goes that on 9th October 1917, Ronald was brought in wounded. Harry lept up to find medical help for his son and was killed in the process. Even though this story is recorded their names were never reunited with their bodies: they are listed with thousands of others on the walls that surrounded Tyne Cot Cemetery. We visit them every year with our students.

Two women
Nellie Spindler was killed on 21st August 1917. She was a Staff Nurse from Wakefield, serving with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, and is one of only a very few British nurses who were killed in action on the Western Front to be buried with full military honours. Brought up a Roman Catholic, she was the daughter of a police sargeant in Wakefield. She trained as a nurse in Leeds and eventually found her way to the Western Front under the command of a Matron from Batley. She was killed, aged 26, when a shell fell on the tent in which she was sleeping and is burried in Lijssenthoek Military Cenemtery. We visit her every year too.
Constance Coltman is a different matter. She was a pacifist. On the 17th September 1917, at the height of the Battle of Passchendaele, she was ordained to the Christian Ministry in the Congregational Union of England and Wales by four other pacifist ministers, one of the first women to be ordained in Britain. Many men had gone to war, and quite a few women, and that had changed Britian quite a bit. Women did war work, and some campaigned for peace: Constance was one of them. We will remember her ordination in September this year.

The story of war is always the story of the lives of ordinary people, both women and men. Wars also often mark a change, geographical maybe but also social. Many things change with war, some of which are forgotten and some remembered a long time later. We are still learning lessons from WW1. ‘Those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it’: best we keep learning then.

In our coming and our going
The peace of God

30.07.2017, being the 100th Anniversary of GS Golding, remembered at Thiepval.

Making a quilt

The quilt top that I began earlier in the week is progressing. Like any quilt it tells stories at many levels; in the colours, the patterns, the motivation behind the quilt and in the actual piecing.
This quilt began with the idea of remembering my recent visit to the Battlefields of WW1 with the students, but that idea of using a quilt fir this kind if remembering is not new. Whilst on the trip we saw some quilts made by Canadian women at Vimy and Beaumont-Hammell. We started some fabric work at school last summer, which we may yet complete before 2018.
I had thought to reflect some of the colours that recalled the visit as well using up some fabric from my stash of course. The layout based on different sized squares came from a recent quilting magazine and I’ve adapted it, as most of us probably do.
So that’s something about the background.
In the foreground are some of the traditions of remembering like the poppy and the cornflower with the maple leaf another motif seen on our visit.
As I piece the top together each section currently looks like a small section of the journey; a street, a walk, a crater, a cemetery, a field or wood. Later they will be joined together in one piece. At the moment they continue to occupy a space on the dining room floor.

Coming back

Coming back is always difficult. We had stood at Tyne Cot in a circle by the names of Harry and Ronald Moorhouse, killed in action on 7th October 1917, and I had called out every 7th person round the circle. This was to represent the one in seven who, having served in WW1 didn’t return at the wars end.
I reminded them of what Mr Yonge said when the war memorial was dedicated in 1920 heard not say much, burnt out as he was from the emotional draining of the war years but he reminded those present of the vision of peace and justice they had struggled to uphold.
There are many things that separate us from the generation of 100 years ago, just as there were many ways in which they differed from each other: volunteers and conscripts, combatants and noncombattants, pacifists and conscientious objectors.
We are a digital generation: blogs replacing letters from the front line. Even so human emotions link us together. The group had reflected on the lives of some of those ‘shot at dawn’ earlier in the day in Poperinge. We were tired and still a long way from home when we boarded our ferry at Zebrugge to Hull.
So what will we remember about our journey together? Some cited the visits to trenches still visible a hundred years after the conflict. There was the misty morning at La Boiselle crater and later at the Thiepval Memorial: the mist itself making its contribution to the emotions of the day. As the landscape emerged from the fog so the cemeteries if the old front line of The Somme Battlefield began to be seen more clearly, each one marking the sacrifice of another hundred or thousand young men.
There was the rebuilt city of Ypres and the tunnels dug under the city of Arras. There were the small personal items in a display case: a bible, a letter, a photograph. There were the old rusting remains of ordinance piled up alongside manglewurzels at the edges of fields. There was name after name on gravestones and on walls and sprinkled amongst the hundreds of thousands that tiny few, the 42 we looked for and acknowledge as our own.
I never knew them in life, the Silcoates Pals, not like John Yonge did who taught 39 of them, but their photographs and stories have been a big part of our remembering in these centenary years. We will return to remember again next year with another group of students.
For those who think we have spent too long on such remembering, I have said before that it is a serious and challenging task. We hold it in common with so many other people. Daily other human beings join the ranks of those remembering others killed in war. We cannot shirk the task. Just as the Psalmist recalls the trees clapping their hand and the valleys singing, so we too know that cities can wail and fields can weep.
Meanwhile, the sun rises on another day.

In our life and our believing
The love of God

Views of the Somme

A kestrel’s eye view of the Somme,
Hovering above the front line,
The brown fields with their tell-tale chalk marks,
a hundred years of burial and reburial,
Of neat white stones in lines
Known only unto God.

A squirrel’s eye view of the Somme,
Climbing trees at Beaumont -Hammel
Pines at different heroic angles
Craters to hide in,
Trenches that snake to a line ahead
A break in the wire and a dead tree.

A human eye view of the Somme:
Can there be such a thing?
When inconceivable numbers
don’t add up
And incompressible plans are carved
Into the landscape.
A crater like a pit
a monument so huge,
A list of names so long,
Acts of unbelievable courage.
What is human about any of this?

The human view only really strikes you
When a boy takes a football shirt or scarf,
Precious emblem of allegiance,
And in a group of trees,
At the end of a track
Uses it to remember another never met.

On our school and on our working
The help of God

(today we took part in a ceremony to remember 100 years since the Battle of the Somme at the Thiepval Memorial)

Notes from Chapel

a blog from Silcoates Chapel