Journey of remembrance to a place thousands never left

Living in Brussels one is irresistibly drawn eventually to the killing fields of Flanders. Two hours' drive to a different world.

Anyway, I owed it to great-great granduncle Reggie, who never left. So last week we set off for two days, partly a personal mission to find his grave, partly to get a personal sense of that slaughter. Ypres and Messines were just names.

My great-great grandmother lost Reggie, her brother, and her son, Billy, within months. The former, in October 1914 in Flanders, like many of his countrymen a professional soldier in an English regiment. The latter, an officer in the Dublin Fusiliers, died of his wounds after they had taken a hill at bayonet point in Gallipoli in August 1915.

It was all far easier that I had expected. The War Graves Commission computer had the site pinpointed within 30 seconds: Festubert, Plot 5, Row A, Grave 9. South of Ypres and Armentieres, a couple of miles from Bethune.

But first to Ypres - Ieper, as it is now called - and the first of the memorials to the many thousands of Irish in the 750,000 Commonwealth dead of the Western Front. Just off the attractive main square, under the shadow of both St Martin's Cathedral and the huge Cloth Hall, Belgium's finest Gothic building, is a Celtic cross "in memory of the men of Munster who died fighting for freedom". North of the town are the graves of the poet Francis Ledwidge and the Nationalist MP, William Redmond.

At the awesome Menim Gate the names of 55,000 men are simply recorded, the missing in battle from the fields around the Ypres salient. Here are Inniskillings, Connaught Rangers, men of the Ulster Brigade and Irish Rifles. . .

One gets the overpowering sense of "world war". Australians, Canadians - Irish names among them in their hundreds too - New Zealanders, South Africans, Indians, in their thousands. How many of these missing men literally drowned in the sort of mud they had never seen before?

As at all of the immaculately maintained graveyards, perhaps the most moving testimonies to the tragedy are the visitors' books, signed in shaky, but determined hands, and a few words, often just "thanks".

At Wijtshate, still in Belgium, a few miles to the south, the memorial to the 16th Irish Division was erected to the "glory of God and the honour of Ireland". Between here and Messines (Mesen), two kilometres away, the nationalists of the division had fought side by side with the unionists of the 36th Ulster Division at terrible cost in August 1917.

The strategically important ridge that links the towns is deceptively steep. In parts the exposed trenches were only 60 to 70 metres apart, but between them lay a bloody, mud-soaked killing zone.

On a bend in the road just south of the village of Messines (population 960), a two-acre site in a field is being developed as an Irish peace park, a tribute to the common endeavours of the men who died here.

In the valley below the site is still a small farm that served as HQ to the Ulster Division. And, further down the ridge, the memorial to the New Zealanders who fell here in such numbers too, the remnants of two German bunkers, and the preserved crater of one of a series of giant mines whose simultaneous explosion, it is said, was heard in London.

From here you can see the woods where on Christmas Day 1914 a Scotsman, Major Brannigan-Dunlop, moved by a letter from his son, started to sing carols. When they were echoed from the German trenches, he left cover to appeal for the brief ceasefire that became famous, and which the army, to this day, has yet to acknowledge to his family was not desertion.

Groups of young people from both communities in the North and the South will start work here in April on a tower and garden which should be formally opened in November.

The project, "A Journey of Reconciliation", is being organised by a group involving Paddy Harte and Glenn Barr, with the help of both governments and the enthusiastic support of the local town council.

The small town museum is to expand to reflect the growing Irish interest in the area. On its wall is a copy of a rather indifferent painting of the town church by a soldier whose wounds were nursed in its crypt - A. Hitler.

Its belfry was once home to a fine clarion of bells, melted down for guns by French revolutionaries. Now Albert Gherkiere is trying to replace them with a set of "peace bells" contributed by countries or groups with first World War connections to the town.

He has German, French and English bells, among others, and one will be paid for by Newtownards District Council, but none from the South. Feelers put out to the Government and the International Fund for Ireland have failed to produce the £11,000 he needs. He would like to unveil a Southern bell with the Northern one in July, but time is running out.

Then on across the French border, through a flat countryside dotted with memorials and cemeteries, to Festubert. One thousand men lie here in the graveyard of this tiny village, the scene of two major battles, the neat rows of evenly spaced white slabs eloquent testimony to the factory-like efficiency of the war machine.

Major Reggie Roper died here aged 42, early in the war, the day after the village had been taken, before the lines locked solid, before the trenches and the mud. His gravestone says simply: "Quit you like men, be strong. I Cor. 16:13".

The War Graves Commission can be contacted at 00-44-1628-634221.