June 30: Somme

I am sitting on the 5.15pm Channel ferry, departing the English port of Dover and heading for the French port of Calais. I am travelling with my father, we are going to Belgium for the weekend. It is rough weather outside. The ferry lurches from one side to another, swaying like a good drunk on a Friday night. The sea is black and looks cold. Waves rise up and swallow the horizon. Then we hear the sound of these waves slamming into the side of the giant ferry. Hard, solid thumps. Like thunder. Like bodyblows. Everything shakes. This weekend we are retracing the steps of my great-grandfather, Joby Culverhouse, who made this crossing as a promising boxer in 1914 to take part in a war that was supposed to be over by Christmas. He was a part of what became known as The Old Contemptibles - a voluntary brigade of soldiers who had enlisted. We think my great-grandfather was 18 at the time, but we also know that he had lied about his age. He was probably 17.

The first thing that catches your attention in this part of the world, is how flat the land is. The low countries. Clouds are pulled and stretched as they pass freely from one low horizon to another. Underneath lay large, coloured fields harvesting potatoes and corn whose leaves move in the breeze. Great shadows from the clouds pass quickly over this land that was once a stalemate in a war of attrition for many years. There is still a concussion that hangs in the air now. There are still terrible scars trying to heal in this land - giant craters from mines, rows of trenches carved parallel to each other, sobering clusters of woods still standing in treeless land. But it is healing, and where there was once mud, nature grows again in green. Where there was once despair and tears now rememberance and prayers are given here.

Each night at 8pm in the town of Ypres, which was reduced to rubble during the conflict, acknowledgement to those who gave their lives is expressed with buglers sounding the Last Post at the Menin Gate. This ceremony has been uninterrupted since July 1928. A street in Peronne bears a name sign that reads, "Roo de Kanga - Australia, We Will Never Forget". Countless memorials, cemeteries, museums, monuments help preserve the memory of those people who did suffer, not just during four years of conflict, but in their own lives too. Many places are deeply moving. Newfoundland Memorial in Beaumont-Hamel is a series of preserved trenches, pockmarked and some parts still out of bounds due to undiscovered mines. Lochnagar Crater - a mine crater 100metres in diameter and 30metres deep is filled with poppies in its annual Somme ceremony to remember men of all sides who died here.
On July 1, 1916 at 7.30am - two minutes after the mine of Lochnagar was detonated - British and French troops advanced from their trenches in The Battle of the Somme. 'Over the top.' Twenty-thousand men were killed. Whatever the arguements are for conflict, the reality is always a loss of life. Statistical numbers of casualities never seem to mean much as they are only ever numbers. Each life lost was once born to a family who would have shared in a deep and binding love during that lifetime. And for each life lost those who loved it would have mourned with tears. Such considerations will help each of us remember how precious life is, how we should treasure it, why we should enjoy it, give thanks for it and encourage others to make the most of the opportunities in their lives - a special gift to be enjoyed now. The perfect present in so many ways.