Ploegsteert; a spot of remembrance

Inside the white, Greek styled monument that is the Ploegsteert Memorial to the Missing, I reach out and touch one of the names chiseled into the stone, just one of 11,447 British soldiers who sacrificed their lives during the First World War.

Sorrow, as cold as the stone I touch, runs through me as I see name upon name. My tour guide, Claude Verhaeghe tells me a story, and I struggle to hold back teary eyes.

“There was a school party who visited the memorial,” he says. “I was walking in the memorial after them and I found a letter. It was placed under a little piece of stone. I looked at it. I couldn’t say the exact words, but it was something like, ‘Hello Grandad, I’m the granddaughter of your daughter and she is now 97. This is the first time I’m coming here and I’m very moved.’”

As the fog quietly sleeps on the horizon, we walk down the muddy dirt road through the wiry woods of Ploegsteert. The wind chills me through my jacket as we stop at another cemetery and Claude tells me of an encounter he had with a bagpiper one morning.

“I stopped at the entrance of the cemetery and was waiting until the piper finished his tune,” Claude said. “I went to talk with that gentleman and asked him why he was playing bagpipes here in Ploegsteert wood. He told me he came to play the Lament for his great grandfather who was buried here.”

While Claude never asked the name of the man who came back every year to pay his respects, he was able to share a few beers with the guy. But one year, the man didn't show, and has not been seen since.

“He was from Scotland and took tears out of your eyes with his bagpipes,” Claude said. “I will never forget that unknown person.”

While many of the names I saw in the cemeteries were unknown to me, for the school girl and the bagpiper, they were family. Ploegsteert, a small farming community on the French/Belgian border is easily passed, but it holds a piece of the hearts of many. For them, it is a spot of pilgrimage; a spot of remembrance.