Sunday, 5 October 2008
Our dreary region
Lately I've been rereading John Keegan's excellent history The First World War, since so much of the action on the Western Front took place around where I live, and now that I know the area pretty well I'm trying to connect what happened then with the places I know now.
As the front solidified in 1914 in the "race to the sea", things came to the point that things had stagnated all along the line from the Swiss border up to just below where I live. So the only open areas left were "Flanders' fields"—one of which lies about 300 yards from my front door. Keegan accordingly takes a moment to describe the area to the reader:
There is one of the dreariest landscapes in Western Europe, a sodden plain of wide, unfenced fields, pasture and plough intermixed, overlying a water table that floods on excavation more than a few spadefuls deep. There are patches of woodland scattered between the villages and isolated farmsteads and a few points of high ground that loom in the distance behind the ancient walled city of Ypres. The prevading impression, however, is of long unimpeded fields of view, too mournful to be called vistas, interrupted only by the occasional church steeple and leading in all directions to distant, hazy horizons which promise nothing but the region's copious and frequent rainfall.
That just about sums it up, I'm afraid.
