In Flanders fields...

As I mentioned in my last post, I have just had the opportunity to spend a week in Belgium seeing the battlefields of Flanders - once wasted lands full of death, now green fields full of life.

Our base for the week was Talbot House in Poperinge; a house that was a place of relaxation, refreshment for both body and soul away from the front line during the first world war. It was run by Rev Philip 'Tubby' Clayton, a British Army Padre who was determined to provide a haven from the hell of the trenches. A house where everyone was welcome, rank and class did not matter. And almost 100 years on that is what the house still offers - a warm welcome, a place of refuge, a place to rest - though it is a museum with the public walking through it daily.

I have been left with many memories and reflections from my week - how conflict can scar a landscape and a people; how so many gave there lives for a vision of a future that the world has not yet realised; how even in the time of deepest despair there can be a glimmer of hope.

In the landscape of Flanders today it is sometimes difficult to see the devastation there was, but then all of sudden in the corner of a farmer's field would be a small cemetary of a dozen or so graves, or on the horizon a cemetary with hundreds of graves and wall after wall of names. Buildings may have been rebuilt, the land may again be farmland, but there are constant reminders of the devastation caused.

One of the images that will stay with me is the number of graves for unknown soldiers, soldiers who had no way of being identifed. On every grave of a soldier from one of the allied forces is the inscription 'known unto God', however on the German graves there is nothing, and in many German graves there is more than one soldier. I don't think I will ever forget reading the words 'Zwanzig Unbekannte Deutsche Soldaten' on numerous graves. But though there is no recognition on these graves that though they were not known to the people who buried them, they were known by God, they were. For though it is hard to see how God could have allowed so much death and destruction, God was on each battlefield with every soldier whether living or dying.

God was there and God is still there.