Di Mackey's Blog: Father and Son ...

Father and Son ...

This last week has been a week of sweet privilege and good company (excluding the train trip from Antwerpen), as the people of the Westhoek have graciously allowed me to photograph them for the February 2010 exhibition.

I don’t want to publish any of the portraits without permissions but I would also like to hold the exhibition images close until the opening and so, until then, I’ll publish the extra images ... the hands, the bombs, the other things that appear at the edge of my focus.

My final photography session, before Lut and I began the mad dash for home, was with Marino and his father ... both Belgian diggers. The Belgian digger is perhaps best described as a battlefield excavation expert. They are the people who dig up the bombs and remnants from the war fought all over their landscape and yesterday we heard some of the stories associated with the fragments, handling the old spoons and forks left behind in the war, the buttons, the bullet shells. Holding them in our hands, wondering who they belonged to, more than 90 years earlier.

In this photograph, Marino and his father had lifted the concrete cover on an incredibly deep German listening-post shaft used to monitor, and attempt to halt, the progress of the Allied soldiers tunneling under them as they created the huge explosion that marked the opening of the Battle of Messines (Mesen in Dutch).

But as interesting as that was, their hands interested me more.
Father and son ...

A shot note on the Battle of Messines: It involved the laying of 22 mine shafts underneath German lines all along the ridge, and a plan to detonate all 22 (600 tons of explosive) at zero hour at 03:10 on 7 June 1917. This was to be followed by infantry attacks so as to secure the ridge from the presumably dazed German defenders, the infantry heavily supported by the use of artillery bombardments, tanks and the use of gas. Work on laying the mines began some 18 months before zero hour. One mine, at Petite Douve Farm, was discovered by German counter miners on 24 August 1916 and destroyed. A further two mines close to Ploegsteert Wood were not exploded as they were outside the planned attack area.

In the face of active German counter-mining, 8,000 metres of tunnel were constructed under German lines. Occasionally the tunnellers would encounter German counterparts engaged in the same task: underground hand to hand fighting would ensure.