Week 20.08

                             Tendring Topics – on Line

 

Europe without Frontiers

 

            Last weekend  (9^th to 12^th May) my elder son and daughter-in-law drove me to Brussels to celebrate my shortly forthcoming 87^th birthday.  My younger grandson had recently taken up an appointment there with the European Travel Commission and I was keen to see his new apartment and to hear how he was getting on.  He would show us round the town.

 

            I enjoyed every minute of my visit.  One thing that struck me very forcibly throughout the weekend was the number of reminders of the two World Wars, and of earlier conflicts, that there were in the corner of Europe through which we drove.

 

            We crossed the Channel by Norfolk Line Ferry from Dover to Dunkirk.  It is impossible to see that harbour mole, those beaches and the sand dunes behind them without thinking of the defeated British army that was heroically evacuated from there in the spring of 1940 – and lived to fight, and win, another day.  I was lucky.  My Regiment had had its embarkation leave and was all set to join the British Expeditionary Force when it became clear that on this occasion the panzers had triumphed.   We stayed in England.

 

            Brussels was twice occupied by the German army during the twentieth century.  We went on an excursion in an ancient tram-car dating from 1910, through the suburbs into untouched woodland.  The tram-car had survived both World Wars.  Who can say who might have used it?  Certainly, lots of ordinary squaddies (German and later French and British) on leave from the front. Possibly Edith Cavell, the Norfolk nursing sister who was executed by firing squad in 1915 for helping British POWs to escape from captivity, could have used it to get to the hospital in which she had been nursing the wounded of all the combatant countries.  

           

Signposts in Brussels pointed to Quatre Bras and Waterloo, sites of the final two battles of the Napoleonic Wars.   It was in Brussels that, on the night before the battle of Waterloo, the British High Command had invited the local belles and their escorts to meet the troops (only selected 'officers and gentlemen' of course!) at a grand ball – an event immortalised in Byron's poem 'Eve of Waterloo' .

 

             On the Sunday we drove from Brussels through to Luxemburg.  We visited the capital city and made an excursion into the thickly wooded and mountainous countryside, making a brief detour through a corner of Germany so that we wouldn't return by exactly the same route as that through which we had come.

 

            It was along tracks through the thickly wooded Ardennes mountains on the borders of Luxemburg and Belgium, that the German armoured columns had made their final desperate attack just before Christmas 1944, driving a wedge between the British and American forces and proudly proclaiming that they were on their way 'back to Paris!'

 

            Some of the most desperate and bloody fighting of the war's western front ensued.  For the only time on that front, so I believe, massacres of prisoners of war took place – first by Hitler's elite SS troops but later, in retaliation, by allied forces too.

 

            What particularly struck all four of us, my son and daughter-in-law, my grandson and myself, during that weekend was the fact that those national frontiers  over which so much blood had been spilt in two world wars and in earlier conflicts, had now disappeared!   Even the previous year when we had visited Germany, there had been some national boundaries and frontier check points.  Now there were none.

 

            The boundaries between English Counties are today more conspicuously marked than the once fiercely defended national frontiers between Europe's warring nations!  Even non-EU Norway has removed its frontier posts.  I am assured that throughout the whole of western and central Europe the only frontier check-points that exist are between Switzerland and its neighbours, and the UK and its neighbours and EU partners.

 

            We're still a long way from Lord Tennyson's 19th century vision of a future in which

 

The war-drums throb no more, and the battle-flags are furled

In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.

 

            However, a start towards that dream has been made in Europe – a Europe of which we British are a part and from which, in my opinion, we should not be hanging back!

 

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Brussels and Luxemburg

 

            Sorry, I have gone on a bit about those frontiers, but their virtual abolition does seem important to me – and it's what is important to me that I write about in this blog!

 

            What did I think of Brussels itself – and of Luxemburg?   Well, as to Brussels, I have to confess that my view may be coloured by the fact that I was the guest of my son and daughter-in-law in the Raddison Hotel, near the European Parliament and one of the best in Brussels.   For three nights I certainly discovered 'how the other half lives!'   My luxuriously carpeted room had a double bed, easy chair, writing desk with upholstered chair in front of it, a tv set offering every tv station I had ever heard of and many that I hadn't, a well-stocked fridge, a cupboard with an electric kettle and tea and coffee making facilities and several power points – plus a roomy en suite bathroom with sit-in bath and shower and a walk-in shower in a shower cabinet plus, of course, wash basin and wc. My bed was made for me and my room tidied up every day – what a treat for an old widower living alone! – and a telephone offered instant fulfilment of my slightest wish!

 

            Perhaps it's just as well that I was nearly 87!

 

            My grandson has a very nice flat with comfortable bedroom, roomy kitchen and sitting room into which he has introduced a small 'office area' with his computer, technical library and other necessities.   He is not, by the way, one of those 'overpaid Brussels bureaucrats' that you read about in the Sun and the Daily Mail. The European Travel Commission (you can look it up on the web) isn't part of the EU but exists to promote tourism throughout Europe (yes, I have put in a word for Clacton-on-Sea, Frinton and historic Harwich!) and is funded quite separately by European governments, including those, like Norway and Switzerland, that aren't yet members of the EU

 

            I had been to Brussels once before but only for a few hours so I certainly hadn't realized its full potential.  On this visit I was particularly taken by its splendid parks with their green open spaces, woodland and ornamental lakes.  All very lovingly and painstakingly cared for, by I imagine, fulltime staff who take a pride in their task; certainly not by contractors who have just one objective – to claim every penny they can, while doing as little as they can get away with!

 

            Not only is there spacious parkland within the city boundaries but outside, less than ten minutes drive away is thick virgin forest, evocative of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding-Hood and the sinister gingerbread house stumbled upon by Hansel and Gretel!

 

I hadn't realized quite how very many excellent 'pavement cafés' there were in Brussels, or what excellent meals they served.  We patronised them on a number of occasions.  I was surprised too, to see large numbers of people sitting outside these cafés, chatting, sipping their (very strong!) Belgian beer, and clearly enjoying themselves up to, and probably beyond, midnight.   In England I fear, a similar group would have been legless – and probably violent with it – long before that!   I am sure that Brussels has its drunks – but I didn't see one.

 

On the Sunday we were in Luxemburg.  We lunched (more than adequately!) at a pavement café in a tiny village in a deep valley in the mountains.  Also lunching there was a large, presumably Luxemburg, family.  There was a father, mother and a number of children of different sexes and ages.  All were clearly enjoying themselves and the children were conversing with their parents and behaving impeccably. 

 

            Perhaps the children had been disciplined and indoctrinated in a way that would have been unacceptable in Britain.  I don't know.  I do know that it was a pleasure to share the café with them – and that I would have been dismayed and apprehensive if a British family of similar size had walked in!

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Natural Disasters – and Man-made Tragedies

 

            Tens of thousands of our fellow human beings were killed and hundreds of thousands rendered homeless by the typhoon that struck Burma. Further tens of thousands were killed and hundreds of thousands rendered homeless by an earthquake in China.

 

            No-one who has watched on tv news bulletins the agonised faces of mothers or fathers seeking their missing children, or men and women who have lost their spouses, will ever again comfort themselves with the thought that, 'Well, of course, they're used to that kind of thing.  They don't feel about it quite as we would'.  But they do feel the pain of loss exactly as we would.  Many of the survivors probably suffer agonies of guilt and doubt as well.

           

It might have been thought that with so much plainly visible misery – the result of natural disasters – in the world, mankind would think again about its capacity to inflict even more death, pain and misery on our fellow humans.

 

            Those of us who pray daily – even if only mechanically – 'Our Father, which art in Heaven……..', are proclaiming that all men and women are their brothers and sisters.   Those who believe, as I do, that the light of Christ shines in the heart of every man, woman and child in the world must know that whatsoever we do, or fail to do, to our fellow men and women we are doing to Christ.   'Inasmuch as ye have done these things unto the very least of these my brethren, ye have done them unto me!'

 

            Yet do the horrors that we have seen unleashed in Burma and China make us have second thoughts about our own activities?  Not a bit of it. In Christ's own homeland Palestinians protest in the only way they know at those who have made their land a vast concentration camp.  The Israelis respond, in the only way they know, by indiscriminately killing ten Palestinians for every Israeli death.

 

            Killing goes on in Iraq, in Afghanistan.  Bomb outrages are experienced all round the world and it seems that, even in our own country, there are those who plot to destroy us.   Meanwhile 'the west' spends millions on nuclear defence including, of course, the further development of the very 'weapons of mass destruction' that we are so eager to make sure shouldn't fall into 'the wrong hands' – any hands but ours, in fact.

 

            I sometimes have the distinctly un-Quakerly and un-Christian thought that what we all need is a warning from nature - a widespread but non-lethal earthquake for instance – to 'give us a good shake' and bring us to our senses.  In an earlier age it would have been called a demonstration that 'God is not mocked!'

 

            Come to think of it – perhaps that is exactly what is happening with progressive and accelerating Global Warming.

 

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