This is how it all started…
As an officer belonging to the elite Household Division, it was something of an unreasonable joke amongst other regiments comfortably settled in West Germany that the Guards saw themselves rather distinctly as the ‘British Army of the Thames’ and would rather be haunting the bars and clubs of London’s Chelsea and Kensington than say Paderborn or Münster.
Perhaps pandering to the stereotype, instead of embracing my surroundings, as I should have done, I, like so many others in similar circumstances, sat in our Officers’ Mess grumbling about our lot. Instead of deep forays into a neighbourhood rich in history, I often found myself taking a direct flight from Hamburg or Hanover back home to the watering holes of Fulham where I had a house or braving the long drive across the north German Plain, across the Netherlands, Belgium and France to Calais before catching the ferry “back to Blighty”.
To be fair, our barracks were in the old concentration camp of Belsen and our Officers’ Mess the same mess used by the camp’s officers before, and generations of BAOR regiments since 1945. The point of departure to explore our surroundings was thus never a particularly joyful one.
I thus have grounds for atonement if I was ever asked to describe one. That would be the regret that I have that I wasted the opportunity during my time in West Germany not to discover my surroundings that, despite the relatively healthy passage of years, in the early 1990s remained untouched by the ravages of time.
You can imagine that when I returned to Brussels as a diplomat years after leaving the Army, I sought to make up for lost time. Despite BREXIT, Europe was again on my doorstep, and the opportunity existed both to make up for missed opportunities and to satisfy a subliminal itch to learn more about my surroundings. I wanted to stand where history had ‘happened’.
My wife and my five now grown-up children have all had to endure this obsession over the years. However, I tell myself they have each developed their own curiosity in their surroundings as a result and even, dare I say it, an interest in history and for that, I am grateful. The word ‘proud’ does not fully convey how I feel about my daughter’s First Class honors degree in history that she received when she graduated from Oxford University this summer. I hope to have inspired in them the same appreciation that, as my Father used to tell me, “history is just a series of great stories with dates”.
Over the years, I have had the privilege – or misfortune depending on your perspective – to visit places where history has been made. On occasion, I have even be caught up in events myself that may one day become a side note in someone’s recollections.
Although I may declare myself a ‘War Tourist’, I see myself as being inspired nevertheless by the desire to undertake historical study rather than someone motivated by wanting a front-row seat to misery. I am certainly not a voyeur nor am I needing an adrenalin rush as some ‘Dark Adventurers’ do.
Most of my trips to sites have taken place long after the fact. Even though I by no means qualify for the illustrious ‘Frontline Club’, every so often though, the Fates have chosen to spin my destiny so that I land plump in the middle of something ‘happening’ and this has usually come about because of my particular line of work, not through the act of globetrotting.
I certainly did not choose to be in a devastated Mosul in northern Iraq one week after it was finally liberated in 2017 or in the shattered Allai Valley of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake that killed more than 100,000 people on 8th October, 2005. It was also by tragic coincidence that I happened to be in the small North Ossetian town of Beslan on the 3rd September 2004 when 186 children were killed as Russian security forces stormed the buildings of School Number One in an effort to free over 1,000 hostages held by Chechen separatists.
Nor can I say it was high on my list in 2015 when I was sent to examine the honeycombed tunnel complexes dug by ISIS beneath the ravaged Yezidi city of Sinjar. Here, those subterranean recesses where only days before Da’esh fighters had performed systematic acts of indescribable horror and depravation upon their victims only reeked of death and the stench of stale sweat.
There the hypocrisy of ISIS was evidenced by empty bottles of Jack Daniels and plastic syringes used to inject methamphetamine that littered the floor. Rather incongruously, the desiccated contents of hundreds of discarded Pot Noodle pots lay scattered across the dirt. The sights, the sounds and the smells remain seared in my mind.
Still, the Moirai have on occasion provided me the opportunity over the years – combined with more than a modicum of curiosity – to visit places where something happened more at my leisure. I would rank – next to visiting Auschwitz and Belsen – spending a night deep in a Polish forest at the Wolfsschanze – which served as Adolf Hitler’s Eastern Front HQ in World War II – as possibly one of the most affecting.
As I stood in the darkness amongst the twisted metal and fractured concrete of that foreboding complex, my mind went off on a mental frolic for here, across the gentle but restricting terrain surrounding this extraordinary edifice to Fascism, Polish, Russian, Prussian, German and Lithuanian landowners, farmers and rural dwellers across the ages have trod. Armies have swung back and forth through here over the centuries. Napoleon’s Grande Armée headed this way in 1812…and back again the following year. So too the Knights of the Teutonic Order some 600 years before.
More significantly, a shattering understanding dawned upon me. It was not that I was walking amongst the ghosts haunting these woods. Instead, it was the awful realization that, right where I was standing, most of the decisions made during those terrible years that influenced so much of the destruction and tragedy wrought across Europe decades before had emanated from here.
Here in these deep, dark forests so central to Teutonic culture and identity as well as symbolic in Nazi ideology and comparable to their “blood and soil” slogan, the long consequential tentacles of decision-making by a few madmen in this remote hideaway in the Masurian woods near the East Prussian town of Rastenburg (now Ketryzyn) sealed the fate of millions of lives across the world.
After years spent visiting World War II sites of interest across Europe and North Africa, this was a lightbulb moment. Now suddenly the pieces fell into place as to why those events had occurred. This was the sombre glade where a butterfly had first flapped its wings and, elsewhere, a hurricane followed. This was the true heart of darkness. A place that spawned human tragedy that will thankfully, before too long, be lost to Mother Nature.
It was here too on 20th July 1944 that Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg failed in what historians believe to have been the forty-second attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler.
It has never been lost on me that I went to the same school as one of Stauffenberg’s descendants who, although a couple of years above me, must have born the weight of a family legacy upon his shoulders while representing the direct human link to the man who so nearly had succeeded in changing the course of history.
I could not fail to take notice of this connection as I stood alone looking at an upright doorframe, the original entrance to the conference room that was being temporarily used by Hitler and his key advisors for the day’s briefing on 20th July 1944. Other than the doorway through which the target and others had walked that fateful morning, the site of the conference room itself was levelled to its concrete foundations.
With the outline of the room still discernible, the location of furniture and the exact spot where the protagonists had stood when the blast ripped through the room can be easily determined. Here on this spot, something happened.
Like so many of my generation, there is perhaps an exaggerated appreciation of the two world wars that spanned the first half of the twentieth century not least perhaps because, growing up, the veterans of both were amongst us.
However, today, it is not even the eleventh hour for the survivors of World War II. It is nearly midnight. Within a year or two, silence will soon descend as the remaining veterans pass and the direct human link to the largest and most violent military conflict in human history that resulted in around 75 million deaths will be lost.
I do not recall ever really asking very much of the veterans I have met, or living around me about their experiences and I regret that. As time passed, and the milestones of anniversaries were reached, it became clearer that an effort was being made to archive the stories of individuals. These make fascinating reading, but I realized I sought something different. I yearned for a deeper appreciation of how human agency had made history and of how historical narratives are constructed. My search was for a fuller understanding of the anatomy of battle as well as its rhythm amongst the proverbial fog and friction of warfare.
It was not enough just to read, or hear those stories. What I realized was that my burning desire was to develop an historical imagination, to actually go and stand where something notable had happened and try to visualize in my mind’s eye the circumstances surrounding that event, as well as the human story behind it.
To stand on the spot itself and think deeply about why good – or bad – leadership or planning had contributed to the outcome or, more often than as not, how blind luck and good fortune carried the day inspires an almost intuitive feel for the place. One can read books, articles or reports to learn about history but it is not until you have actually been to where something of magnitude happened and really allow yourself to indulge your imagination that your limbic system goes into hyper drive. It becomes addictive.
This blog then is my hope then that readers will be inspired to become curious about not only the events that I shall describe but perhaps, if the opportunity presents itself, to go and stand on the spot where those events described happened and indulge yourselves with a frolic down history lane.
Thank you for reading.
