World Cup Rugby duty brought the Diary to the Northern French town of Lens, which is a sort of cross between Lurgan and a run-down Welsh mining town, though without the spicy flamboyance that combination conjures up. With time to spare, what could a fellow do but pay his respects to the Irish who have resided her in very large numbers for the past four score years and more?
The battlefields of Loos, of Neuve Chapelle, of Auburs Ridge, are not as famous as their counterparts on the Somme or the brutal incline below Passchedaele; but thousands of Irishmen perished here in the battles of 1915 and 1916 - and if I did not visit them, what other news would they hear from home this year?
North of Lens
The countryside north of Lens consists of those colours which the official members of the spectrum do not talk about, rather as Irish families in the old days never spoke of Muriel, the maiden aunt who in her late thirties once complained of stomach ache after evening devotions and then promptly gave birth to a black baby.
When indigo and violet gather in the rainbow, the range of colours which covers the Northern French landscape is not even given a passing mention - perhaps because in the chromatic vocabulary, there is no name for them.
There certainly is none in English: mix drab, clay, grim, mud, glue, grey and glum together and you have merely the faintest inkling of what this landscape is like. Glud, clim, dray, clab - these are the hues of the slagheap-covered plain north of Lens, across which tractors tow trailers of mountainous sugar beet with the patient slowness of their oxen forebears. It was here that the first genetically-modified sugar beet were created. So much sugar beet had been committing suicide that a special melacholy-proof strain had to be devised.
No such modifications have been made to the genes of the inhabitants. One learns to drive with care here, trying to avoid the numerous peasants who try to end it all by hurling themselves under the wheels of your car. They linger in clusters at crossroads, rather like beggers in other places; take your eye off them for a second and before you can say "Despair", you'll have to disentangle half-a-dozen from your drive shaft.
The Ireland I left was sunny and autumnal; the Northern France I arrived in was direst February. A wind you could perform open-heart surgery with roamed over the old battlefields and hissed past the slagheaps, incising with icy skill. In a field - I swear this is true - I saw four peasants kneeling in the icy mud, gathering some minute crop with their hands. It was truly Asian in its awfulness; though nowhere in Asia, not even funfilled North Korea, is nearly so desolate.
Signposting
I have always thought that Irish signposting the worst in Europe; but no, Irish signposters have their masters here. When Irish signposters find themselves slipping, when they find that habitual signposting means that they are becoming more efficient and are actually getting things right and helping travellers, they are sent on refresher courses to a special college near Lens, to perfect their incompetence and hone their skills to mislead.
For hours I tried to find the little village of Hulluch, where 500 Irishmen with the 16th Irish Division were killed in gas attacks even as at home the Easter Rising was taking place.
Every tiny crossroads had a signpost which pointed one way to Lievin, the other to Lens, when I wanted, more than anything else in my entire life, to get away from both. Finally, I found the name Hulluch on a sign; and was led inexorably and inevitably to my muddy doom: cul-de-sac in the clay.
So it was that I spiralled and spiralled downwards and downwards to the true abyss which no Mediterranean culture can conceive or describe. Dante never spoke of the bottom-most circle of hell, because Italian has no words like grim, or muck, or drab or glum.
But the lowest circle of hell is in the beetfields south of Armentieres, where weeping, frostbitten serfs sift with their fingertips through icecold porridge searching for tiny vegetables beneath sea-grey skies, where signposts always, always mislead, and where thousands of Irishmen perished in 19151916. Their voices echo in the wind: Not Here, God, Anybloodywhere But Here, God.
Rebuilt
Lens was destroyed in the war; and very properly, most people would conclude. But in one of those bureaucratic oversights which can occur in even the best-run societies, it was rebuilt afterwards. It and the beastly plain it adorns should it have been cordoned off, like Chernobyl, and closed to human habitation for all time.
That this has not yet happened - as it soon should do, by EU directive - did at least enable me to find one cemetary called Bois-Carre. Most of the inhabitants are Irish. One gravestone commemorates M. Morrisroe, of the Leinsters: "In loving memory, from your wife and family in Ballyhaunis". Another marks the last resting place of P. Lawless of the Dublin Fusiliers: "He died for freedom and honour." Yet another Dublin Fusilier, A.W. Wilson: "Non sibi, sed Patriae" ("Not for himself but his country.")
The rarely-signed visitors' book notes no Irish signatures in its two-year history. And quite right too.