French Roadtrip

We drove slowly down the grandiose Champs Élysées in a hired van- one big enough to fit the whole family, Granny, Grandad, an Aunt, an Uncle, my father, and my brother. Relatives that seemed distant amongst the chaos of Paris. The scene under L’arc De Triomphe was barely comparable to the state inside the van. Noise, confusion, adjustment to foreign roads, I had to remind myself we came here for a reason.

We headed towards the border of France and Belgium, and passed through gently rolling pastoral land. After quite some time, we descended through a hill into the little northern village of Arneke. A light layer of condensation warped my view through the window. It was a magical and unseasonably warm late winters afternoon, a virtually cloudless blue sky, but the air damp.

On the main street, pointed a sign to the ‘Cimitre.’ We arrived to find it was the local village cemetery. As an elderly French couple were coming out, they directed us, in French, to the whereabouts of the British War Cemetery. Less than two kilometres out of the village of Arneke, heading towards Bourbourg, a turnoff to the right, down the first narrow track, immediately before a large farm building we found what we were looking for.

It took but 3 minutes to find Sergeant Harry Gilchrist’s gravestone, my brother’s namesake, my father’s great uncle, and a father figure to my grandfather. It was the only time I have seen him cry. He stood leaning on the dew-dotted stone, partially in awe, partially keeping him from collapse. The more recent stone, no doubt replaced the original wooden cross, and sits probably in the same position as the original once did. The symmetrical rows of them, characterless, stuck upright between impeccably kept grass, it was impossible not to sense the vast numbers of our ancestors who lost their lives there.

A man I never knew, yet we shared blood. I felt an immense and spontaneous peacefulness that ‘we’ have been here before. My father turns and says, “well, Harry, after your gallant efforts and the deprival of the life you had, we Gilchrist’s are still alive and kicking,” some comic relief from the shared intensity of our experience. There he rested in an admirable place, very peaceful rural simplicity. We felt a shared comfort in the knowledge of his final resting place. My grandfather takes a deep breath and with a smile says, “pull the bugger up and have a chat”- I wanted to.