Day 14
Saturday May 31st
Armentières to Nieuwpoort 80km
Saturday. Our final morning.
The end of the road.
Sam finds me bent double, sobbing on the landing outside my hotel room. I can’t even speak. But I’m not crying with grief or rage – this time it’s tears of laughter. Because, as we have established…
I am a bad person.
It all started three minutes earlier when I stepped out of my room and let the door swing shut behind me. From the neighbouring chamber erupted a screech - a shrill, full-bodied, high-octane, incandescent screech. Of course, given my schoolboy French, I didn’t get all the subtleties and nuances of what he was calling me, but…
I got the gist.
Halfway down the stairs I realised I’d forgotten my phone, and this time it was the sound of my military boots on the stairs that brought forth a howl of unfettered Gallic fury. On reflection, it is conceivable I may have deliberately stomped my way past his room, but what is incontestable is that I Jeremy Hyde, did wilfully and intentionally slam my door with all the force I could muster on the way back out, thus rendering me incapable of speech and in the condition in which Sam found me.
Screechy boy was easy to spot in the dining room a few minutes later, he was the one with the red face and neck veins like a cracked vase, gesticulating wildly to his boyfriend over a bowl of grapefruit segments. Sam translated, and although I forget the minutiae of what he said, it went something like ‘rude, inconsiderate, noisy English motherfucker’.
Our eyes met across the crowded room. I flashed him a cheesy grin. He developed a sudden interest in the tiles on the floor. But every time he looked up, there I was, smiling like a psychopath.
Who’s just won the lottery.
It’s hot outside, a proper scorcher in the making, I sense a tension within the group - it’s not just me that’s feeling the edge. At coffee break there’s a little spat between Ed and Richard over the route, and then as we ride Alvaro starts moaning like a beast in pain, not high pitched like screechy boy, more of an anguished howl of despair that rises slowly and gathers momentum, so I stop the group and we gather close by a mine crater named, appropriately or not, the Pool of Peace.
There’s no great mystery to unpack; it’s all the hurt and pain that collectively we now carry. Ed apologises graciously, and Alvaro explains that it’s just all too much, one graveyard over the line sweet Jesus, and with the end in sight, it’s all coming on top.
Over the top.
The end is in sight, and we’re beginning to fray.
Sometime this morning we crossed into in Belgium, I didn’t notice, there was no great fanfare to announce our entry into this fiefdom, and I realise that in all my sixty years this is actually he first time I’ve been here, other than to get my bottom searched on the way through from Amsterdam. Maybe as a confirmed dyslexic I’ve unconsciously avoided a country that has placenames like Voormezele, Wijtschate and Kruisstraathoek that no one can say, let alone spell.
What I do know is that after eighteen months of planning and preparation and injuries and anxieties, we will, in a few short hours, arrive at the sea, the place where all the killing ceased, and although there has been not one moment that I’ve wished this ride away – indeed, there’s a part of me that feels I could keep going forever – I desperately want to see the sand, the deep blue water and my loved ones who are already on their way to meet us there, Mai from Paris, Noor from London.
Earlier we stopped at the site of the infamous 1914 Christmas truce, a bronze football marking the spot where kids from both sides spontaneously put down their guns and had a kick around in no man’s land.
There’s a different vibe in Flanders, not easy to describe, like when you walk into a room that doesn’t want you there, a damp heaviness that in France has mostly been ploughed back into the soil or covered in concrete, the land more naked and honest.
Chasing trucks up the hill to the site of the battle of Messines Ridge we reach the Island of Ireland Peace Park, yet another scene of terrific carnage, the exposed, rolling fields with their still impregnable pillboxes showing what little chance these sons of Ireland had against machine guns and wire.
We park our bikes and escape the heat into the foliage that covers Hill 60, a manmade spoil heap, on the edge of the Ypres Salient, a centre of underground warfare during the war. In June 1917 the British detonated nineteen simultaneously, one beneath Hill 60, killing ten thousand German defenders in an explosion heard in London and Dublin.
Ypres and the Menin Gate I found underwhelming, hay fever, heat and a last lunch of leftovers eaten by the ramparts, impossible not to watch the clock at this stage of the game, forty miles to go, something between excitement and grief gathering momentum.
The problem with our e bikes throughout the trip has been that they’re speed limited at about 26 kph, great on slopes but not so good on the flat when the real bike boys speed off at around 30 kph and there’s absolutely nothing we can do to keep up. As I watch the main pack disappear into the distance, I notice a feeling of distress and frustration building, and for the first time since we set off from Kilometre Zero I fear a meltdown is brewing, one of those hurt, tantrummy freakouts where no one can console me as I desperately try to curate the finale.
Because a vision, an expectation has been growing in me over these days - I saw us riding as one, wheel-to-wheel, triumphant to the sea. And right now, that dream is disappearing out of sight along the canal towpath, moving away from me at about 30kph.
And not looking back.
The rubber gods smile on me for once and beside a site named the ‘Trench of Death’ (weren’t they all?) Robin gets yet another puncture. This permits me to ask Richard to slow the fuck down, and I share how I’m feeling left behind, the kid excluded from the gang, unchosen for the football team, and the pressure diminishes.
Sometime that’s all it takes.
We make one last pause at the impossibly named Diksmuide-Stuivekenskerke, beside an old Belgian observation post built into a ruined church. Here we plan a final closing circle before Mai and Noor join us at Nieuwpoort. Unfortunately, a Belgian family and their friends have a similar idea and make themselves comfortable on the grass beside us.
With a flurry of you had the whole of fucking Belgium and you choose to sit down here vibrations, we move to the farthest spot on the mown grass and sit in a passive aggressive circle.
Endings – rarely done well, they’re an art in themselves. Each of us in our own faltering way attempts, and fails, to put into words the last fourteen days. Both Chris and Robin cry, whilst I just fall apart, I can’t even talk, the heat, the grief, the anger, the exhaustion, everything, pure emotion running down my face, soaking the shoulders of these men who gather around me and hold me in their arms as I sob uncontrollably.
The last few miles into Nieuwpoort seem to last a lifetime.
Finally we roll into town and along the seafront, and even then no sign of the girls, but then we hear them before we see them - Mai’s unfiltered laughter bouncing across the concrete, Noor more characteristically reserved but beaming nonetheless, and as I fall into their arms, full and empty at the same time, I don’t even notice that the statue marking the end of the trench lines is fenced off. Due to essential maintenance work.
And so, in the end, we fail to complete the Western Front Way.
By about fifteen feet.
Later, in bed, Mai’s soft rise and fall beside me, I can’t sleep, my mind drifting back to my breakfast encounter with my screeching French neighbour. Why the sudden appearance of my inner bully at this stage of the game? Was it as simple all the pent-up emotion looking for a fight, for a justified release?
But no, that’s too neat – there was something in his scream of outrage that evoked a deep and primal contempt, a come out and fucking face me then you cunt response, a scream that was high pitched and… feminine. Shit, was it because he was gay? After all my pro queer ramblings, was I ambushed by some kind of latent homophobia at the last hurdle?
But when it all kicked off I didn’t have any idea who he was or what he looked like, even now I don’t know if the man he breakfasted with was his lover or just a travelling companion. For all I know he’d seen Steve and I retiring to our suite and assumed we were a couple. Maybe he was shouting at us because he hates gays?
But… I don’t think that was it.
I had no idea who this man was, he didn’t even have a face. It wasn’t about him. It never is. It was the scent of weakness - he was breaking the rules with all his unrepressed, high-pitched emotion, and I wanted to destroy it, to dominate, crush, and torment him for that scream.
A scream that, even after all these bloody miles…
I still could not find.
Fuck you, fuck you, FUCK YOU – don’t you dare scream at me you fucking asshole, come out and let’s see what you’re really made of, here’s another slammed door for you, and another, and another - you really want to make something of it? ‘Cos I’m a fucking timebomb ready to go off in your face.
And so, surely – is this not all there really is to war?
Base, silverback dominance?
The politicians and the generals may orchestrate the whole thing, but once we’re down and dirty in the trenches, I’m fighting for my own survival man. It’s never about just following orders. You can’t command millions of men to kill - unless they’re up for it. Fuck king and country, I’m fighting for my life and the lives of my mates - you come in here getting all pumped up and angsty over the tinned fruit? Me and my boys are gonna tear you a new one.
It's probably…
That simple right?
And probably that stupid.
Which is why it is so appealing to conjure up high brough socio-political explanations, or to blame the donkeys who led the poor, valiant lions to their deaths.
But in the end - maybe we’re just violent morons.
Survival of the fittest in a world where the strong are the hunters and the weak will always be hunted, perpetrators versus victims, the odds always the same and where the greatest lie of all is to pretend that we don’t so enjoy killing each other.
*
Gosh.
This was not the conclusion I was looking for.
I was expecting a happy ending, soft focus in the soft embrace of my loved ones on a beach somewhere barely pronounceable in Belgium. I thought there might be poetry, complexity – redemption even.
But there isn’t.
Because in the end…
Are we not just apes?
Fighting to the death.
Over dirt.
*
From I Shall Not Hate by Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish (1955)
And I shall not hate because, if I want to hate everyone in my life who did bad things to me, and if every one of us is going to hate everyone who did bad things to him or her, the list will be endless, and this world will be drowning in an ocean of hate.
And who to hate?
To hate myself?
The one whom I want to hate, is he thinking of me at all?
He’s not thinking. But I want to challenge him, and on a daily basis, to send him messages telling him, you used bullets to kill my daughters, to destroy my life. I am not going to use the same weapon you used, and I am not collapsed or destroyed. I am standing steadfast, stronger, more determined, more persistent and focused of not giving up, knowing what do I want. Hate is a disease. Hate is a poison. Build a shield around yourself of not allowing hate to invade your body.
It’s a fire which eats the one who carries it.
If I Must Die by Refaat Alareer (1979-2023)
If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze -
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself -
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale
A ‘like’ seems an ocean of weakness for appreciating your eloquence. The poems were a fine last note and your honesty seared through. Congratulations! 🥂 in every sense