Not an Easy Day. Tuesday 18th September - Ypres

Late in the day, in “No Man’s Land”, we explored a temporary art piece which gave some sort of scale to the disaster.  Comprising 600,000 tiny cowering or perhaps unborn figurines, one for each person killed in Belgium in those four years it covered three hectares. Like the landscape on which is stands, it is slowly being covered by vegetation, but beneath the new green beard the scars remain.

If there is anything more futile than killing one another for the sport of rulers, then it has to be spending years digging tunnels in order to blow up hills that the other mob is standing on just to gain a few hundred metres of territory, while they are attempting to do the same thing to you.  That is how war was fought here for four years without gain.  The craters have been here for a century to prove it, except for one which turned up in in a thunderstorm fifty years ago.  There is still one which has not yet formed too, it’s charges lost in their mine for a century, quite possibly ready to startle hapless bystanders at a time of its own making.

We toured the sadness today in comfort thanks to David and Belinda’s generosity in providing both the meals and the wheels, visiting graves and cemeteries and places where remarkable people had stood and remarkable things had happened until our brains were full of questions and our emotions drained as they tend to become when one stands on a quarter-acre plot which contains the remains of what once were 40,000 human beings.