A visit to Flanders’ Fields

Remembrance Day has just passed but I understood its significance much better after a visit to Ypres in 2003, when my 1980 baby, before we had joined the EU, was working in the office of a woman Italian MEP who offered her the job after my young one had been teaching her English. When I was talking to one of my sisters just before my first visit to Brussels,  she insisted:  ‘If you’re going to Brussels you must go to Ypres. It is unforgettable.’ A couple of friends called me:  ‘You’re a sadist. It all happened such a long time ago!

’ I took my sister’s advice for we share similar tastes except in politics. And I’m a great believer in something I had read and noted when in my 20s “Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror.” You don’t let them happen of course. They just do. If you’re luck beauty as well as terror. I had been lucky on this score. It is essential to push our emotions to the limit if we are to remain truly alive.  I had, years before, visited the cemetries of Alexandria on my first visit to Egypt and of course, I was very impressed.

But Ypres was to be a different experience.   So my 1980 baby and myself, one Saturday morning, took the train to Ypres, which is about 1hr 40 minutes away from Brussels. The 1914-18 War, the Great War, was one of the darkest periods, “the war to end all wars.” And the farmland around Ypres was the setting for some of the most horrifying battles in human history. More than 30 nationalities fought there during the Great War. Most of the traces of war have vanished over the years, but there are still countless cemeteries, museums and memorials. And of course in spring the fields are covered in poppies, hence Poppy Day. 

You look at the statistics and they’re frightening. Some 42,000 Belgian soldiers died during the entire campaign. This is considered a very high casualty rate in proportion to the size of the Belgian army. Some 50,000 French soldiers died or were fatally wounded. But Britain had the biggest number of all – between 220,000 to 240,000 were British – in fact one third of at least 550,000 who lost their lives. Since the British Empire did not allow the repatriation of the dead there are in this area some 140,000 Commonwealth war graves. 

Some 47,700 of the graves are unnamed while 54,000 were never even given a grave. I couldn’t find the statistics for German casualties on internet though there certainly are German cemetries. There is also an American cemetery some 40 km from Ypres for at the end of the war American troops played an important role in the final offensive. In 1927, only 9 days after his transatlantic flight, Charles Lindbergh in the Spirit of Saint-Louis flew over the cemetery and strewed poppies on it in honour of his dead countrymen.  

In Ypres, we wondered round the cobbled streets and the square, posed in front of a war monument, went inside the beautiful cathedral and into the the Cloth Hall book shop of the In Flanders’ Fields Museum to which  a visit had been recommended.  It closed at 5pm we noted, deciding to return at 4pm after lunch. In the Museum there are audio-visual evocations “of the hell of No Man’s Land or a field hospital which let you experience the horror and the misery, the anxiety and the hope, almost personally.” But we were not to visit the Museum for it turned out that after all, winter hours had already been introduced and it closed at 4pm and not 5pm.   We tried to get a Flanders Battlefield Tour and have the four Battles of Ypres explained.

Cemeteries, memorials and museums are visited on one of these tours; “and anecdotes are provided to bring alive a world filled with mud, tanks, gas.” There are small mementoes, such as the poems by Edmund Blunden engraved on tablets all over the countryside and monuments for the Indian soldiers and a number of poets. The provincial government of West Flanders is convinced that it is crucial to preserve the many important traces, both visible and invisible, which remain of the World War, and to cooperate with others in giving these a meaning for the future so there are things to see and experience. But there wasn’t a tour to be had. Not this, not any others. They are booked well ahead we were told.   So we were on our own.  I wanted to visit a cemetery and the Menin Gate. Map in hand we tracked down the nearest cemetery but cemeteries close at sunset so my daughter helped me over a low wall and we paid homage to some of those who had died, many of them the age of my young one, some of them brothers, others ‘Known only to God.’

We had a good cry and after a while, jumped over the wall once more in search of the Menin Gate. This is the most famous Commonwealth war memorial in Flanders. It was designed in classical style by Sir Reginald Blomfield on the site of one of the old town gates. Opened in 1927, the gate bears the names of 54,896 soldiers of the Salient who were reported missing between the outbreak of the War in 1914 and 15 August 1917. We asked two Flemish women to direct us. They told us that they went there for the Last Post every evening to pay homage to the dead. We could not stay for the Last Post but we were deeply touched.  Australians, New Zealanders, Indians could be singled out. Names of the dead written close to each other. So many dead. A whole generation. There were crosses with poppies on them and wreaths of plastic poppies, left there by visitors, some schoolchildren.

The card on one wreath said it all: ‘He left his wife and five small children to fight for us, never to return. Let us remember him.’  The message in the little I saw and read is clear to everybody: in a war, no matter where or when, everybody loses out. In the words of King George V in Flanders in 1922: ‘We can truly say that the whole circuit of the earth is girdled with the graves of our dead... and, in the course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come, than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war.’ We picked up several items and books from the bookshop of the Museum. 

One pamphlet announced that on the eve of Remembrance Day, 11 November which marks the anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War One, the local community was going to organise a ‘Remembrance Event’ to commemorate all victims of war, civilian as well as military but especially to the victims of World War I. The idea was to come closer to the soldiers and the dead of the Great War through their songs, poetry and prose and to pray and meditate together on the theme of peace.

“With this event, we hope to start a new tradition, which fits in with the motto: “Ieper – city of peace.” Ieper, Ypres or as the British soldiers called it Wipers – ‘Far, far from Wipers I long to be,’ they sang –  yes, maybe, where it is, there, Ypres, in the heart of Europe may, after so much bloodshed become a centre of peace. We cannot allow ourselves to forget.

The Spiro Mizzi Foundation and Maurice’s CD

In the course of conversation with the dapper Maurice Mizzi, at a reception recently, he told me of a CD he was planning, of songs, the sale of which would go to the Foundation he has set up in the name of his father, Spiro. He promised to send me a copy and I have been listening to one of them in particular, almost every day since them. 

Maurice set up the Spiro Mizzi Foundation a few years ago and donated €150,000 towards it.  The dividends and interests of these funds are all given to improve the life of the children of the Three Cities i.e. Cospicua, Senglea and Vittoriosa.  Even now the Foundation is providing computers and, more importantly, teachers so that in the future the children will be able to find good jobs in the IT sector.  

The Three Cities have been chosen, apart from the fact that the origins of the Mizzi family lie there, because Maurice feels that that is where help for children is needed most.  The trustees of this Foundation are Dr John C. Grech and Fr Hilary Tagliaferro.   Mr Mizzi asked me to thank in particular Fr Joe Mifsud, the Cospicua archpriest, and the archpriests of the other two cities who are helping with the organisation of the Spiro Mizzi Foundation. Fr Hilary too, understands the challenges of these three cities and together with John C. Grech is making a great contribution towards the improvement of the lives of these children. I have heard Maurice sing before and he is an able crooner.

It is his hobby and the production of this CD was started a year and a half ago and he hopes that it will be completed by Christmas this year. It has taken so long as Mr Mizzi has a great many committments. Not for him the twilight zone of retirement. He continues to live life to the full and contribute to the betterment of society.  I’ve listened to two CD’s. The first where Maurice is singing Charles Aznavour’s The Old Fashioned Way is polished and most enjoyable and expertly sung.

The other CD he sent me consists of five songs for lovers. These still need to be polished but I enjoyed listening to them too. The final CD will consist of ten popular songs, one of them an Italian song, and the rest are English ones. So please keep it in mind as every copy sold will go to the children of the ‘south’ of Malta who need all the help they can get.  Maestro Dominic Galea has been instrumental in arranging the backing, direction and production of this CD. 

If the other 9 songs will reach the standard of The Old Fashioned Way, which I have not stopped playing, then Maurice has a winner. Do look out for it. You too, will enjoy it.