War graves and battlefields

In May 2011 I went on a tour of the World War I war graves and battlefields of Northern France and Belgium. I had always wanted to visit these sites again after driving through northern France with my parents as a boy, on camping holidays and noticing the incongruity of the many cemeteries in an otherwise sparsely populated rural landscape. I remember thinking there were more graves than people.

My aim was to sketch and paint my way through the tour, taking photos, recording thoughts and emotions and then bring it all back home to see what I felt. The sketch book has become a sort of travelogue which is an interesting visual record but the emotional impact on me has a caused deep reflection that I'm not sure how to respond to with my art, but respond I will.

I won't record every detail of the tour but I will record two snippets. When I get my sketchbook back from my tutor I will also upload some of the sketches I did so that you can see how they relate to my subsequent work.

On the first full day we toured the battlefields of the Somme, Thiepval, Delville Wood and most movingly Newfoundland Park. Newfoundland park covers 84 acres of original trenches so you can imagine what it must have been like on 1st July 1916 when the first Battalion of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment advanced forward down the falling ground of no mans land towards the German trenches (still there) less than 100 meters away. 10 minutes before the advance the huge Hawthorn Mine with 40,000 lbs of ammonal explosive had been blown about 1 km away (read Birdsong by Sebastian Faulkes for details of the mines) . The commander of this sector thought that blowing the mine 10 minutes before the plan would be a good idea but in fact it merely alerted the Germans to the attack and of the 801 Newfoundlanders who went into attack only 68 were not killed or wounded.

This single action is seared into the Newfoundland consciousness, the park is maintained by the Canadian government for whom it is a national monument and the canadian students who act as guides consider it a great honour to be selected for the job. The impact on the small community of Newfoundland which is basically a bit of rock near Canada where there were more moose than people would have been devastating. God knows why they were even fighting in a war half a world away.

I hadn't realised how much this experience had affected me until later that evening when I was chatting over a beer with a guide from another tour. As the evening wore on he began to open up about his experiences with the Paratroop Regiment during the Falklands War and I mentioned that one of my school friends had been killed with the Marines at Goose Green. When I told him what I knew about Lawrence's death he said he had known him and started telling me details such as who his commanding officer was and what it was like. I hadn't thought about Lawrence for several years and this chance evocation of the past caused the floodgates to open and I was overcome by suppressed emotion to the point where I had to make hurried apologies and retire suddenly to my room. Luckily I didn't meet the ex soldier at breakfast the next morning.

The second 'snippet' was our visit to Langemarck which is the cemetery for the German soldiers who fought in that area. It affected me because of the very different style to the allied cemeteries in the area.

The cemetery is surrounded by walls and a moat with pollarded willows that punch the air in defiance or stand like mutilated limbs which ever takes your fancy. It is in two parts. In the first part are the graves of 10,143 men of which 3,836 are unknown and then immediately through the entrance is the mass grave or Kameradengrab of 24,917 men with 86 bronze pillars bearing their names. On the far side of the cemetery stand four brooding statues, the figures of their mourning comrades, small isolated clusters of crosses break the surface of the ground beneath the loft of oak trees like mushrooms on the forest floor.

In the second part of the cemetery, beyond the oak trees and three large concrete bunkers are the graves of a further 9,475 men. The total number of bodies, in this thoughtful representation of the life cycle of the forest is 44,292 and I found the imagery of 44,292 leaves falling to the ground to mould and give new life poignant and dark and in stark contrast to the antiseptically neat rows of white headstones in the allied cemeteries.

So a lot to think about all in all.