Thank you to all who attuned with us during our trip to the World War Battlefields. We certainly felt your deep, abiding presence as we stood at the Menin Gate,
This amazing ceremony has been held in honour of those millions who fell, in particular during the First World War, on both sides, every night since the Armistice. On the Gate thousands of names are inscribed of those who fell during the First Battle for
As a group we had travelled from the UK into France and then up to Belgium where we first visited Brandhoek cemetery and heard the valiant story of medical officer, Captain Noel Chavasse, the only man to be awarded two Victoria Crosses (highest award for gallantry) during the First World War and only one of three people to be award a VC twice. A renowned athlete, the distinction was for his selfless, life-saving work, speedily carrying injured en over his shoulder off the battlefield to a nearby military hospital while under intense enemy fire. Sadly he finally died of his wounds while rescuing fellow men and is buried at Brandhoek. You can read more about this amazing man and his high achieving family at Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Godfrey_Chavasse
We then drove into
Discussion at the start of the journey was of
For many of us the World War stories of huge and seemingly callous loss of life, when war was uncontrolled and many needlessly killed, seemed at odds with the pristine purity of the Commonwealth War Cemeteries where not one blade of grass dare be out of place or a weed show its head. It is as though the authorities’ lack of control in war could be pardoned by the system’s ability to control the dead soldiers’ final resting place. The contrasts were disturbing: the blood and gore and mud and dirt and noise of war was smoothed over by tranquil walled gardens, with their beautiful verdant precisely mown grass, purest white Portland Stone shipped especially from Dorset, England as grave-heads and exquisite nodding red roses.
The annual cost of maintaining war cemeteries around the world in this almost obsessive state is £50million and we tackled the controversial debate on whether this was now the right way to proceed and what should happen now many of the next generation of those killed are also dying away. One hundred years on – what do we do? However no-one can deny the love and dedication that is poured into these resting places by families and interested parties still arriving in their millions from all over the world every year.
New millions coming to pay homage to the millions that were killed. And the figures are disturbing. Twenty thousand men dying on just one day at the start of the war on the Somme in
From a healing point of view we found on Day One that we were absorbing and reflecting, taking in and discovering what emotions arose individually for us while standing on battlefields, cemeteries and visiting villages and towns, sensing what the earth had stored in its years of pain.
At Tyne Cot, on the Passchendaele battlefield and the largest Commonwealth War cemetery anywhere in the world with almost 12,000 burials of whom 8367 are unknown, much started to crystallise for the group members. 'Tyne Cot' or 'Tyne Cottage' was the name given by the Northumberland Fusiliers to a barn which stood near the level crossing on the Passchendaele-Broodseinde road. The barn, which had become the centre of five or six German blockhouses, or pill-boxes, was captured by the 3rd Australian Division on 4 October 1917, in the advance on Passchendaele.
For several of us who had visited
Each Commonwealth war cemetery features as its main monuments a large Portland stone altar at one end and the White Cross with a
sword inlaid, blade down, known as the Cross of Sacrifice. As in Auschwitz we pondered on the notion of sacrifice as
part of man’s covenant with God, taking in the echo of the Jewish First Covenant of sacrifice between Abraham and his son Isaac, in the distant Abram and
Owen’s Parable of the Old Men and the Young which tackles the same theme.
The rest of the day was spent walking the grim Messines Ridge, including Hill 60 (often a scene of bitter fighting earlier in the war),
where huge explosions on June 7 1917 had killed instantl y a whole German entrenchment. It had taken the Allies 18 months to dig eight kilometres of 19 mines which were then packed with explosives and detonated. Apparently the force could be felt in
Deep in thought and a sense of loss which several of us found at the lonely spot of Hill 60 we returned to the bustle of nearby
Returning to Lille for the night we kicked off Day Two in France at the new cemetery of Fromelles, opened just last year, near Argentieres to commemorate a band of more than 5000 soldiers, predominantly from the 5th Australian Regiment who were killed in a skirmish ordered by the notorious British General Haig as a diversionary tactic to events further south on the Somme. Their bodies were finally exhumed from mass pits in 2009; those identified by DNA testing were then buried at the new site at Fromelles last year, January 30, 2010. Forensic DNA work carries on today.
And here we let the drum beat out – thanks to Evelyn MacDonald from the UK Shamanic Council who joined us on the trip. As the drum
throbbed we stood in circle and shared what we had fo und, what we felt and in particular honoured the General Haig in all of us, the shadows that we all carry in our hearts and souls. Collectively we attuned to the Eight Heart Chakra and put our intent of love and healing into the freshly nurtured earth here. As the Sunday church bell sounded out, followed by an ironic volley of gun fire from distant sporting guns, we held this space and bore witness.
Moved, we went back into Flanders (
Through now new woods, so reminiscent of England, we visited small l onely cemeteries, allowing the drum to beat out our love and intent; one gravestone held us – a young Jewish boy just 15 years old who’d probably lied about his age to enlist nearly 100 years ago.
The area had been the scene of the famous 1914 Christmas truce when soldiers from both sides, already fed up with fighting, dared to
challenge generals like Haig, by calling a truce, singing songs and allegedly playing football together. They were eventually threatened with execution if they did not take up their arms again to kill each other. Filled with this growing sense of peace we finally came to Talbot House in Poperinghe – the designated site of our final global attunement. ‘Pop’ as it was known by the British soldier was just outside the reach of German guns and became a thriving centre, heart of the British war machine where men could get drunk and ‘laid’. Talbot House or Toc-H as it is fondly called by its Signal code, was one chaplain’s answer to that.
http://www.talbothouse.be/en/index.php
Chaplain Philip Clayton felt battle-weary men needed something else, a spiritual centre where they could rest, read and find something deeper, other than alcohol and women. The house today is still an amazing testament to this man’s beautiful vision, where all were welcome regardless of rank. The gardens are still tranquil, the library and piano room must have been havens of calm, and the upstairs concert room, reminiscent of army style vaudeville music-halls, captured by the BBC’s It Ain’t Half Hot comedy series, a scene of relaxed camaraderie.
However, as we climbed the steep old wooden attic stairs to the tiny chapel at the top of the main house its true beauty hit us. We walked into a wall of emotion left by half a million men who had visited this room before us, and millions of visitors since. In simple respect we sat on the pews in our own contemplation. The Bible was opened at Old Testament, Job 26 and we all reflected on the notion of suffering and righteousness, as well as the
notion of sacrifice, as in the Second Covenant with God, symbolised by the Christ consciousness and honoured by the Eucharistic sharing of bread and wine at the chapel’s altar.
And then, some in tears, we joined hands, and absorbing the many levels of consciousness both present and over the centuries, we attuned into a deeper sense of peace and love, a new collective force, new covenant of non-sacrifice and allowed the beauty of that intent to settle, feeling that
something exquisite had been processed.
We would like to thank everyone who joined us on the trip, either physically or in attunement from around the world, especially Jude and
Tony Currivan who ‘tuned’ in from a workshop in
