OFFENSIVE 13. Anger

Apocalypse Now & Then

Day 13

Friday May 30th

Arras to Armentières 83km

This thirteenth, penultimate day had always loomed large - Vimy Ridge, Notre Dame de Lorette, the Ring of Remembrance…

We begin at Neuville-St Vaast - the largest German cemetery in the world. Sombre, austere, forty-four thousand, eight hundred and thirty-three graves, row on row on row of black crosses, not a flower to be seen, land given begrudgingly by the French to the dead of the vanquished.

Vimy I knew, with its weeping statues and pockmarked slopes. It never fails to move me – the Canadians have a dignity in grief that so many of the other nations fail to capture or simply avoid.

Notre Dame de Lorette I’d never visited before. So too the Ring of Remembrance, with the names of 579,606 soldiers etched into five hundred plaques, each three metres tall. It hit me hard, right in the solar plexus, leaving me breathless and shaken. The sheer magnitude of it – at first I thought it listed everyone killed in the war. But no. Just those who died in Nord-Pas de Calais.

Local boys.

Engraved in alphabetical order, regardless of nationality or religion, the first, a Nepalese sailor in the merchant navy serving Great Britain, the last, a German soldier. John Kipling, the son of poet Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Standing Buffalo, grandson of Indian leader Sitting Bull, and fourteen-year-old Paul Mauk, the youngest German soldier in the conflict, are among those listed here.

And yet, for all the grandeur of these memorials, what moved us most that day lay elsewhere, in a quiet, almost forgotten cemetery about five kilometres south of Bethune. Alongside two hundred and twenty-four others (including two ‘shot at dawn’) is the grave of 5831 Gunner T. Dowd, Royal Garrison Artillery, 25th October 1916, Age 38.

Ed’s great grandfather.

Ed’s grief stricken.

Grief stricken that his great-grandfather lies buried here, unvisited by family for nearly a century until we first came, twenty years ago.

Back then Ed wasn’t grief stricken; he was angry.

Angry at the war.

At the graves.

The memorials.

Angry at the emotions that he buried almost as deeply, and neatly, as the soldiers who lay here.

If Ed hadn’t done all the work he’s done since then it would be a different story on this ride – the lack of privacy and personal space, Chris’s obsessive faffing, Steve’s repetitive banter, Sam’s snoring, all that would have been cause for rage. And me, he’d have been furious at me for organising this whole thing in the first place, shit – he’d have been angry at anything, you name it, the trees, the gravel, the grass, the ants, the sun, the clouds, the wind the rain, the sky, the birds.

The fucking, cunting birds.

Anger - grief’s bodyguard.

But Ed’s not like that anymore. He’s just sad. And weird as it may sound – that’s progress.

I’ve known and loved Ed almost a quarter of a century now.

I know how deep he is. I know about the bullying, the sibling rivalry, the divorces - his and his parents’. I know about the bereavements. The professional struggles. I’ve lain next to him on fetid mattresses as we’ve plumbed our own labyrinthine depths of hell.

I know a thing or two about Ed.

But do I really know? Or am I just seeing myself in his cracked mirror? I’ve carried my own anger too.

At this open, festering wound through which we ride. At these monuments, the polished altars to imperialism and hollow glory, built by the very same elitist hypocrites that cranked the cogs of the grinder.

Angry because I was taught that anger, and anger alone, amongst all the emotions, was acceptable, sadness and vulnerability were never to be displayed.

Leave that for the girls and the gays.

Of course, this wasn’t just Ed and me. It was every man raised to clench his jaw and soldier on. Every king, kaiser, and general trained to swallow shame and regurgitate orders. A continent of stiff upper-lipped boys, trained in resentment.

But now, at sixty-one, I’ve done some work. Learned to give voice to my anger. Transmute it. Sometimes, even, to love it.

Anger - the tamahagane sword - samurai steel. Forged hot, folded deep. If you can wield it with mastery, it’s beautiful.

If you can’t, it’s ugly.

*

I break it in two: clean anger, dirty anger.

Dirty anger abuses. It controls. It dominates. It punishes. It’s rooted in fear and righteousness. It’s the kind that starts wars.

You know you’re in it when you want to win, to wound, to humiliate. When you’re no longer speaking to someone, but at them.

Clean anger is different. It educates. It sets boundaries. It says: here’s who I am, and what I need. It’s not about winning.

It’s about connection.

Clean anger teaches. Dirty anger preaches.

Clean anger connects. Dirty anger conquers.

Dirty anger sounds like: “Really? How many fucking times do I have to tell you to stack the knives point down?”

Clean anger says: “Darling, I know this sounds irrational, but when you stack the knives pointing up, I feel unsafe. I grew up in chaos - little things like that spin me out.”

And let’s be crystal clear – I’m not talking about excuses. I’m not suggesting it’s because of your ADHD. It’s about giving a context that helps your loved one understand who they’re dealing with.

Remember – love is the willingness to educate your partner as to who you are.

Yes, it may feel vulnerable. But in taking the risk, you transform resentment into generosity.

Resentment is always dirty. It’s what happens when clean anger is swallowed.

And it’s resentment - quiet, sour, building over time – that is the true opposite of love, not hate.

It’s just resentment is too long to tattoo on your knuckles.

Hate is too visible. Too obvious, too naked. Resentment is a spy, it festers. It goes unseen. It doesn’t scream like hate. It whispers. Then it stays - quiet, sly, a confidant you never intended to keep - until it’s eaten through trust, desire, joy.

And then one day it explodes.

*

As Eric Berne wrote in Games People Play, we act out our unresolved emotions through manipulative patterns.

His names are deceptively playful:

• “Why Don’t You… Yes But” - a game where advice is invited then rejected.

• “Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch” - a trap, sprung by moral outrage.

• “Wooden Leg” - playing helpless to dodge responsibility.

• “See How Hard I’ve Tried” - failure dressed up as martyrdom.

I once had a client - classy gentleman - old school, ex-headmaster, had taught at Eton, all tweed and tea.

He told me he was afraid to enter the kitchen while his wife was in there.

“I’m terrified I’ll stab her with the bread knife,” he said.

She’d played ‘Wooden Leg’ for decades, guilt tripping him, criticising him. He did everything. He never said no. Until the day he nearly snapped.

He didn’t, thank God. He came to therapy. It helped.

Strange thing was, she actually did have a wooden leg.

Sometimes you can’t make this shit up.

*

This thirteenth, penultimate day, had always loomed large, and it hadn’t finished with us yet.

After the grave of Gunner T. Dowd comes Dud Corner Cemetery. Of the two thousand British and Commonwealth graves, only six hundred and eighty-seven are identified. The rest, as ever, ‘known unto god’, whilst on the walls, the names of over 20,000 more officers and men who have no known grave.

Le Touret Military Cemetery with its ornate Indian architecture could have been transported here straight from Rajasthan. As ever, I find these memorials to those from overseas who came all this way to fight a white man’s war deeply moving.

And then, to add a final pinch of salt into today’s wounds, we finish at Pheasant Wood Military Cemetery at Fromelles, which has the distinction of being the first new war cemetery to be built by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in fifty years. Containing two hundred and fifty bodies found in a mass grave in the nearby wood in 2009, they had originally been buried by the Germans after the disastrous attack by newly arrived Australians in July 1916.

Something about this story impacted us all. These farm boys, country kids from the outback, full of enthusiasm and vigour who came all the way from Australia, straight off the boat into certain death, a daylight attack against a resolute and expectant enemy entrenched in a notorious German strongpoint. Seven thousand dead, wounded and missing. Six weeks to arrive, ten minutes to die, in an attack that served no purpose other than to act as a diversion of enemy resources from the battle of the Somme, no tactical advantage resulting from what remains the worst day in Australian military history.

*

The emotional charge grows bigger with every turn of the wheel, and with the coast almost in sight, I sense this isn’t the end of something - it’s the beginning.

There will be much to unpack.

*

But this trip was never meant as a holiday.

A pilgrimage yes, a pilgrimage that messed Ed up. Probably messed us all up. And that’s why we do these things, to crack open the shell. When I first met Ed, he was all armour and muted pain. Now that pain is sharp and clear as crystal.

That’s his reward.

The discomfort of this ride, the impositions, the breaking of familiar rituals and routines, the simple inscription of a long dead relative on a piece of Portland stone – that can break a man. More potent than any sacred plant, a bitter medicine that makes us feel again. And sometimes it can feel too much, when the dam finally breaks. Because it is too much, and in truth I question if it’s even ours, we carry it for those who came before, for those who lay buried in this gangrenous soil.

But we keep going, because if we don’t, our kids get it next.

And Ed’s never going to give up.

A letter by Private Frederick Charles Thomas, Died on the Somme, 1916.

Written in pencil, smudged with rain and mud, found on his body and returned to his fiancée.

My dear May,

Just a few lines to say goodbye, my own darling girl. I have not the slightest fear, only a great wish to do my duty.

I hope you will not grieve too much. I send you my deepest love. I shall think of you in the firing line and know you are with me in spirit.

Your ever-loving Fred.

A Private by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

This ploughman dead in battle slept out of doors

Many a frosty night, and merrily

Answered staid drinkers, good bedmen, and all bores:

'At Mrs Greenland's Hawthorn Bush,' said he,

'I slept.' None knew which bush. Above the town,

Beyond 'The Drover', a hundred spot the down

In Wiltshire. And where now at last he sleeps

More sound in France - that, too, he secret keeps.