Ypres Salient 5

11 June late afternoon

I'm hungry.  So many of the little pubs and corner road houses are closed on Mondays, I learn.  Still, I navigate the highway that's under construction and am reminded of a favorite childhood game:  Milles Borne.  Lots of road hazard and speed limit signs, just like the game.  Also, no gas stations, either.  But, I know I can find this place.

On Christmas Day, 1914, the Germans started singing Christmas songs in a trench near the tiny town of Ploegsteert.  The French and Scots in their trenches joined them in singing "Silent Night," and the famous Christmas Truce began.  Soldiers left their weapons behind and wandered over the barbed wire into No Man's Land, exchanging cigarettes and champagne.  Later, they played soccer.  Here's the famous picture that got many men into trouble for fraternizing with the enemy.

I love the movie Joyeux Noel, which dramatizes this little piece of history, and I have to find the exact spot. Past Berks Cemetery and Berks Cemetery Extension, past the Ploegsteert Experience to an “unmarked pasture road” where I’ll find the temporary cross on the exact field where Germans, Scots, and French soldiers played.  Never mind the signs that read “local traffic only” in Flemish.  I can’t read Flemish.  Cows look up, dust raises from the crushed gravel road, and I’m rewarded by stumbling on several tiny cemeteries near Mud Corner Cemetery.  It is clear to me that the boys playing soccer probably ended up here, or nearby, in 2015.  Toronto Avenue Cemetery contains some Canadians, Ploegsteert Wood Military Cemetery some Belgians and French, and Rifle House Cemetery contains Commonwealth soldiers.  It is likely some Scots are in Mud Corner Cemetery, and as I turn the tight bend, nearly colliding with a cyclist, I see a larger monument at the top of a hill. Up there, I find a French Cemetery, and a new UEFA monument to the Christmas Truce.  In 2014, the international soccer leaders dedicated this area, built a German-style trench and a British-styled trench, with barbed wire in between. People from all over the world have left soccer balls and little Christmas trees at the base of an old shell casing with a soldered ball on top. If you look out past the shell monument to two trees with a white path between them, you may be able to see the white cross of Mud Corner. The trenches are the overgrown areas on each side.  I love what UEFA inscribed in their floor marker:  To all those who experienced the “Small Peace” in the Great War.  But this is not the real field.  

Across from a pond with an old "Winston Churchill was here" plaque is the wooden cross.  It was placed there in 1999 by the “Khaki Chums” with a carved slogan, “Lest we forget.”  I was so excited to see it, so pleased to see the healthy, waving wheat.  

So thrilled that it was on a flat field, located where it was described in cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather's journal.

I have to find one more piece of memorabilia from this wonderful Christmas today. This has been such an emotional journey, but I found the one cross I was truly seeking, and it wasn't made of marble.